#taz hernandez

[poisonder]

Why do I only draw at 2am

[sturdy-denim-blue]

Whenever Travis mentions Hernandez I just picture the centaur from a very potter musical

[needsmorewlw]

travis: ...-a beautiful centaur man

me:

[clydegnightsknightnightschool]

Alright so I listened back to the episode and I put all the NPCs in the order theyre introduced. There are 23 NPCs and I put down where we met these characters just so y’all can try to visualize and remember. I tried to do my best with spelling and voice descriptions!

Annex Dorms

Void Cat

-Basically the WTNV cat

-hard to perceive

Gary the Gargoyle

-A gargoyle

-Little

-Brooklyn accent

Groundsy the Groundskeeper

-large man

-big beard

-big hair

-Looks like a big bear

-Gruff/basically Hagrid voice

Stables

Hernandez

-Beautiful centaur man

-Animal Handling professor

-Soft/kind/nurturing voice

Battleground

(No Name)

-Remarkably tall

-Goliath

-Kite shield

Jimson

-Dark skinned man

-cloth armor

-staff

-Battlegrounds trainer for sidekicks

-World famous arena champion in featherweight division

-Strong/Calm voice

Crush

-silver Dragonborn

-two sickles

-Extremely gruff voice

Rolandus Fondane

-is a shit

-had a hangover

-Hero

-Student

-Wearing long cape

-Son of deposed king

-Deep/Gravel-y voice

Zayna

-Terrifying Sorcerer

-Evil

-Student

Rhodes

-Ranger

-Hero

-Student

Buckminster Eden

-Son of the Iron Lord

-Hero

-Rogue

-Student

-Fanciful/Strong/Classically heroic voice

Rainer

-Smiling

-Shining

-Young woman

-Long blonde hair

-Sitting in ornate chair

-Disgustingly upbeat

-Necromancer

-Chronic illness that makes it difficult for her to walk/stand

-Chair floats

-Rainbow shifting ground lights under chair

-Secret compartments all over chair

-Student

-Evil

-Higher pitched/Quirky/Excitable voice

Leon

-Tall

-Beefer

-Bald

-Older (28)

-Fighter

-Sidekick

-Soft spoken/Extremely polite voice

Mess Hall

Heironymous Wiggenstaff

-Shining blue armor/gold accents

-500 years old

-Confident

-Headmaster

-Elf

-Strong/Slightly growly voice

Tomas

-Human

-Kind eyes

-Guidance councilor

-Similar to Hernandez/Even tone voice

Higglemas Wiggenstaff

-Old elf

-Younger brother

-Robes ill fitting

-Scowling

-Magic user

-liKE FUCKING DUMBLEDORE FROM POTTER PUPPET PALS voice

Stewart Labeouf

-Brawny

-Chef

-Similar to Bud’s/Extremely gruff voice

Hero/Sidekick Classes Tour

Jackle

-Kenku

-Sneakery Professor

Bartholemus

-Possible actual owl

-Accounting Professor

Mulligan

-Potions Professor

Dungeon

Jermaine/Victoria/Rattles

-Skeleton Crew

-Jermaine has the gruff slightly Brooklyn accent voice

-Victoria has the higher pitched voice

-Rattles...rattles.

Wiggenstaff’s Office

Hero/Hiro(?)

-Higglemas Wiggenstaffs dog

-Healthy

-Collie

-Seemingly well trained

Unknown Forest

(No name)

-Mysterious glowing red eyes

-Doesn’t want people to get hurt anymore

-Resides in Unknown Forest

-Deep/Echoing voice

Today I’m gonna make a description list for the NPCs in Taz Grad please hold

[wiggenstaff-anonymous]

Hernandez is the best teacher he lets me just be in the stables we stan a kind and caring horse man

[astro-biologist]

Sat down and did some character sketches for Graduation! Really excited about this arc, so here's my take on Argo, Fitzroy, and Bud (?). Also some tiny bonus doodles of Rainer and Hernandez because I couldn't help myself!

[Image description: Drawings of several characters from TAZ: Graduation. Argo Keene is blue-skinned with yellow finned ears and a dark blue ponytail and handlebar mustache. He has lighter blue scaling on his face and wears a rogueish outfit. Bud has mottled grey-blue skin with a pink nose and lips. He has messy brown-grey hair with autumn leaves tangled in it and wears a shirt of leaves. Sir Fitzroy Maplecourt has a tan complexion, freckles, and bleached blonde hair with visible brown roots. He has pointed ears and wears a red cape. Rainer is a pale blonde girl wearing a purple dress. She sits in a floating gold chair with a red cushion that has rainbow light along the bottom. Her right hand is up and she is levitating a dead squirrel next to her chair. Hernandez is a centaur with an extremely muscular torso. He has long black hair and stubble. His lower half is that of a dark brown horse.]

[broskiblogs]

Finally getting around to the new TAZ season and Oh How I Missed D&D Podcasts

[mangomcdango]

Oh hello centaur zoology professor. So you know everything about Firbolgs prof? You don't even have to ask what the Firbolg's skills and proficiencies are you already know because he's a firbolg, Hernandez? Interesting attitude

[mothmanisrealandgay]

Guess who has latched onto an npc already? It's me!! I love Hernandez!!!

[splickedylit]

I just caught up with TAZ Graduation and y’all I’m really enjoying the adventures of the Thundermen (LLC all rights reserved TM TM TM)

[neurodivergent-loverboy]

On my first TAZ Grad relisten, my first thought is that it would be really funny/adorable if Firbolg initially had a small crush on Hernandez, the beautiful centaur man who teaches animal handling. And like, he never DID anything about it, he just had it. He just hung out in the barn a lot, approximately 70% to see the animals and 30% to see Hernandez. "I am here to see Breeze-Through-the-Willows," he says, completely normally except for the fact that he's blushing slightly

[poisonder]

[jerseydeanne]

Florida rapper, 32, dies when window falls on his neck in freak accident as he was trying to break into a home

Florida rapper, 32, dies when window falls on his neck in freak accident as he was trying to break into a home

Jonathan Hernandez, 32, died while trying to burglarize home, investigators say  Hernandez ‘climbed into window of home’ in Lehigh Acres, Florida, on Saturday  But window collapsed on his neck, killing him, Lee County Sheriff’s Office said Hernandez leaves behind a fiancee, Patricia Duarte, and their five children  Duarte said her fiance was a rapper and performer who went by name ‘Taz UFO’  She…

[kd-is-sus]

45 minutes in to the first ep of TAZ: Graduation and my thoughts are as follows:

Rolandus: Douchebag McGee, gonna be the popular kid bully

Idk much about Buckminster but perhaps slightly less of an ass

Tell me more about this floating lady Rainier (Ranier?)

I’ve only had Bud the Firbolg for 45 minutes but if anything ever happened to him I would kill everyone in this room and then myself

THAT BABY PEGASUS

Sir Fitzgerald Applejacks

My previous exposure to Genasi has been Senokir and The Gentleman from Critical Role, so... But I like Argo Keen and his mustache

I can’t remember his name but the guy who was training at the training place with the silver dragonborn and the goliath seems cool

PROFESSOR HERNANDEZ

Travis, You’re doing amazing sweetie

[daisy--sorbet]

heyyy, hope you’re having a good night!! if you have the energy and feel okay answering, what’s up w taz graduation? i haven’t checked it out yet but i was thinking ab it. just asking bc you’re the first person i saw talk ab the show having serious issues, but also feel free to not answer this!! hope you have a good week!

i took a nice hot bath, had a strawberry kiwi capri-sun, and did a nice face mask and i’m feeling pretty good - so, y’know what anon? let’s talk about it. 

for anyone who likes taz grad who sees this post: it’ll be tagged with “taz grad hate” (although i feel hate is definitely a very strong word - it’s for the simplicity of tagging it) - so please block the tag if you don’t want to see this post (especially because i put a readmore on a post before and it didn’t show up on mobile and instead gave the full post). mobile tumblr has a tag blocking system, so please feel free to use it! i don’t mind haha

anyway, so this is... probably going to be a lost post, and i wanna go ahead and preface it: this absolutely isn’t any hate on the mcelroys themselves. i love the brothers and their dad a lot, and while i doubt any of them would ever see this (or have it sent to them, or shown to them, because im pretty sure they try to distance themselves from this sort of thing), i just want to make it clear that criticizing a product is different than bashing a person. which brings me to the point of if i do end up sounding as if im bashing someone - please call me out on it! it’s not my intention to target anyone.

with that said, let’s talk about this campaign.

so my problems are as thus: the railroading, the shipping (a fandom problem, but it’s present in the podcast), the NPCs, and some misc problems others have addressed better than i have.

which. i know. that’s basically the entire podcast. (i promise i’ll bring up some positive points to balance it all out). keep in mind i’ve only personally listened to... what, six episodes? and it was enough for me to drop it. some people dropped it first ep, some dropped it ep four, and others are still forcing themselves to listen.

the railroading

there was a time i could handle travis and his railroading [making sure the story goes exactly the way he has planned], because it was the very beginning of the podcast and that’s what you can kind of expect from a plot-heavy podcast. hell, i wouldn’t mind it if the interactions and goofs weren’t a huge part of why i listen to TAZ in particular (which, by the way, is why amnesty still stuck out to me - even if there was a direction griffin wanted to push them towards, the interactions between the players (or players and npcs) made up for any railroading). it’s kind of hard to not railroad a little when it’s story-heavy and you’re trying to built up a world that you’ve put a lot of thought into. however, a huge part of d&d is the spontaneity. 

it’s kind of why i think balance was so popular. while there was railroading towards the end, there was the presence of improv that made it all good. most mcelroy content is enjoyed because of the goofs. the magic brian moment is memorable. the jenkin’s fight still stands out because it was funny (albeit a result of some bad rolls). the boys teasing angus sticks out because the four would play well off of each other. even without that - griffin had talked about how he had to roll with things (the fact he had planned for a fight atop the train, but ditched the idea for what his family members came up with instead). even in amnesty, a couple moments that stick out to me still are ned with the jetpack taking out a pizza hut sign, and the scene with the water where jake was trapped inside. they aren’t as fun, but they still stand out as “things i didnt expect to really end the way they did.”

with grad, it’s just. one after another. the thundermen want to subpoena a xorn? cool, let’s run with that until actually the xorn gets fed rocks and goes home and who cares about the subpoena now. fitzroy wants to keep his cloak? lets talk about it for a while and you also get no rolls to even try to keep it. fitzroy goes to meet higglemas in his office? oh, why are you here fitzroy? im going to keep asking you until you answer fitzroy? you arent getting out of this scene until you answer me, fitzroy, so just tell me why you’re here already, alright, fitzroy? 

and even later in a episode i read a transcript of: hey argo, remember how you have this whole secret motivation? fuck you, im gonna talk about it here in your dream and reveal it to listeners and remove any tension you had building up, and you dont get a choice to talk about it because this all-knowing villain knows all about it :)

and even NOW in the latest episode, there’s a comment that “we should cap argo’s skills here” instead of just... making the checks higher. rogues are good at certain things and usually arent the best in battles. better hope argo never makes it to level 11, because who knows how people are gonna handle the fact that he gets a skill that’ll make it so certain skills can’t have a roll below 10 (reliable talent). 

(griffin, thankfully, calls travis out for that, but still - travis, why would you even imply that, considering you should be aware of how rogues work considering magnus multiclassed into rogue and you played one on tiny heist?)

and in the newest episode, their Big Bad chaos (which, god, i personally hate that name) straight-out says “dont do this” to the thundermen. travis tries to say, on twitter, “a character saying “dont do this” is different than me saying it” but i need to point out that it’s one thing if you’ve said “no” in character but worked with the PCs doing otherwise, but the railroading says differently.

the shipping

ill try to make this quick, because it’s nothing to do with the fandom (ship however you want, man) - but i really feel the need to draw attention to this.

fitzroy, as confirmed by griffin in a ttazz episode, is asexual. not aroace, but ace nonetheless. and i find it... troublesome that the idea of rainer and fitzroy having a relationship is still pushed nonetheless, despite the fact that fitzroy (to my knowledge) was never once shown to reciprocate any feelings. not to be that person, but i really hope that grad doesnt have any sort of romantic relationships in it (at least - not between NPCs and PCs unless they’re actually like... warranted?). 

i dont know, man. one of my closest friends is ace, and i know she wants a relationship, but i think it would reassure her a lot to see an ace character who isn’t pushed into one in case she ever changes her mind. someone once mentioned that they hope fi/tz/ra/in doesnt happen because theres relationships that have that “oh, you can just date” and it goes upwards there to “oh, you can have sex just to please them <3″  (which, to be honest, is kind of a gross mindset - if someone isnt interested, they arent interested).

also, uh, the TTAZZ where griffin states this, there’s kind of the mention tht the whole sexuality question was posed in relation to the episode “creative thinking” (the dream one i mentioned earlier) - which. uh. i don’t know if anyone caught this, but... rainer straight-up wrote fitzroy a letter in the dream like “are you going to accept my proposal? a girl doesn’t like to be left waiting” which. leaves me with some gross feelings because uh.

if... if the whole thing about fitzroys sexual orientation was addressed here, then why would you push your ship anyway? feels kinda iffy, man.

to which i want to say: fitzroy can date. he’s allowed to date. griffins allowed to do whatever he wants with his character. but when a lot of the flirting is met with nothing, i’m not gonna see the chemistry there. just because travis ships it doesn’t mean it’s canon.

the npcs

ah yes. lets talk about the npcs.

there’s... a lot. a lot a lot. i think travis trimmed down how many were present in a scene, but uh. there’s still a lot. and... uh... i kinda wish there wasn’t?

look, i know im going back to balance/amnesty, but just. hang in there for a moment. chill with me. vibe. 

balance didnt have too many NPCs present at all times in each mini-arc. gerblins had some big names like barry, klarg, gundren, killian, yeemick, and magic brian. rockport limited had angus, jess, graham the juicy wizard jenkins, and all of the tom bodetts mentioned. 

amnestys first arc had mama, barclay, jake, dani, pigeon, kirby, minerva, and that was about it for like. big names? and not all of them were present in each scene. 

in the first episode of grad alone: gary, hernandez, jimson, rolandus, zana, rhodes, buckminster eden, rainer, leon, tomas, hieronymous, higglemas, stuart, jackle, bartholomeus, mulligan, groundsy, germaine/victoria/rattles (the skeleton crew). and those are the ones i wrote down (minus groundsy, who i just. ignores. idk him).

like holy shit, my english prof got onto me for having too many characters in my first chapter and i didnt even have half the amount listed there! 

it’s just a huge cast. does this take place in a school? yes! theres bound to be a lot of students present - but you don’t have to name every single one of them, at least not in the first episode!

the miscellaneous

i don’t know if travis ever actually addressed it, but wheelchair users have actually like... said that rainer’s introduction bothered them, because she was like “please ask me abt my wheelchair :)” when travis saying she was in an ornate chair would have sufficed. 

uh. the colonization vibes people have discussed within the centaur arc. mentioned here, the replies here, and this post (and its replies) here as well.

the overall lack of d&d when the campaign was kind of advertised as a return to d&d if i remember correctly

also no one seems to be taking literally any criticism at all which like. ignoring the petty shit, sure, but people have stopped donating to taz and their listener-ship must have dropped some during this entire time - you’d think that maybe someone could say “we need to find out why people dont like the thing and fix the thing” consider this is. yknow. their livelihood.

anyway uhhh 

tl;dr: travis railroads way too much (even now), the shipping in-game has become pushy and gross (especially bc its shoving a relationship onto an asexual character), theres too many npcs that dont stand out well enough, and no ones taking any criticism about the major issues with grad. 

[wiggenstaff-anonymous]

Professor Hernandez is sexy. There, I said it. He’s very tall and well built has a beautiful coat of horse hair. I need to know I’m not the only one.