#this gifset is long cause i wanted to have beau in it

[avengerdaisy]

Beau Arlen & Jenny Hoyt in Big Sky [120/∞]

[pomp-and-circumstance]

I have some grocery shopping I need to do and it’s far later in the day than I want it to be, but I can’t not talk about the letter poem exchange before I do. Let’s do this.

First off, one of my favorite things about Critical Role is how they just enjoy themselves, and not in the sense of playing the game, but in that they’re aware they run a show, but they’re not afraid to have fun and be a little unorthodox and feel like they need to fit themselves into some kind of category. That said, everything that happens does so while the cast looks like this:

There’s no escaping this. No video editing, no gifset, no nothing can take this away from us. I love these people.

Anyway, the Nein have advanced to Eislecross and are currently in Balenpost waiting for Vess to do her shit and progress and hunt Mollymauk. While waiting for her to show, Beau goes and checks in on Yasha, and BOY, do we get some stuff that’s almost hard to hear. I’ll get to that in a second.

(Yasha kicks this off with “Hey, friend,” and I think there’s something so innocent and adorable about this. “Hello person who I insinuated I’d fuck below a kink mirror but am totally willing to back off on that a little for the sake of your comfort even though it really is something that I’d like to do and maybe you’d like to do it, too, one day, maybe if we were girlf--how’d you sleep? Oh yes, the little training gym you have, burn off some... steam... yeah...”) 

There’s this tiny moment where Yasha gets to praise Beau’s intellect and how she connected the dots between Vess DeRogna and the Eyes of Nine, and her choice of words is so simple, but so heavy. “It’s amazing how your mind works and I’m really proud of how you did all that and connected a lot of things.” I think one of the most powerful compliments any person can pay to another is how proud they are of them. This is clever on Yasha’s part, because after seeing how Thoreau treated Beau in Kamordah, she’s able to put it together - whether immediately or with some time - that Beau isn’t used to hearing a lot of compliments about her mind. Being able to research all these things and put them together is no accident, but people tend to focus on Beau’s physicality or her brashness or loud behavior long before they give her credit for how damn intelligent she is. (It might not be on par with Caleb, but there’s a reason they do research together.) 

Beau reveals this to us with immediate deflection. “Yeah, you know, broken clock. Right a couple times, you know?” Yasha seems to be slightly bothered by this, or is at least satisfied that a seed has been planted, even if Beau’s knee jerk reaction was to brush it off. A lifetime of neglect does not one compliment heal. Regardless, she does it again when Beau states she feels like she’s found her calling. “It really suits you very well to do what you’re doing.” Beau deflects again, not as much in self deprecation, but in a chance to change the subject. Put a pin in this, we’re gonna come back to it in a second.

The change in subject goes to Beau noticing Yasha react to Tent Ikithon being in their heads momentarily, and man... Yasha is able to reflect that it’s like you’re not alone, but not in a good way. “I hope it doesn’t happen again, but yeah, it’s not fun.” This is why I feel like it’s so important, with recent events, that Beau goes and talks about her newfound ability with Yasha in-game, but we’ll get to that when we get there. She also confides that it was like that with Obann, but she was still present in her own mind, even if she wasn’t in charge of it. What a revelation for Beau, even if she’d already come to some kind of conclusion that Yasha wasn’t herself - a pivotal battle in the chantry, stabbed through the chest with Skingorger, and, now interwoven through it all, “I don’t know what I would have done if anything happened to you because of me.” 

It’s a singular moment Yasha is able to focus on above all others, and in a way, is her own self deprecation. Her wisdom saves are almost always failures, and there’s a vulnerability to be able to admit that you’ve got so much power, and how it can scare you to be so susceptible to someone else’s influence. How nightmarish, to be sitting at a table with friends and hear someone in your mind, and panic for a split second that it maybe happened again. Yasha hasn’t really spoken to anyone about this outside of Beau, and Beau is the one who very nearly died from all this. 

Beau, however, is able to turn everything around with a simple truth. “I knew it wasn’t you.” Maybe it doesn’t change how Yasha feels about it altogether, but there’s got to be some kind of comfort in knowing that, were it to happen again, Beau would know it wasn’t because Yasha herself wanted her dead. What she’s giving Yasha is the gift of trust, even if not explicitly stated, and that’s pretty damn significant for a conversation this heavy. So significant to Yasha, in fact, that she makes the decision here and now to give Beau the poem.

(Bonus Laura, who reacted exactly the way I did watching this for the first time.)

My absolute favorite thing about this is the draft of the poem happened two episodes ago, which you kinda could smush into happening in the previous episode if, yanno, we didn’t have a T-Rex on a boat and stuff. (Thanks, Liam!) This means that whatever confidence Yasha said she got from talking to Jester wasn’t just legit, but the key to everything was knowing that Beau trusts her. “I don’t know what I would have done if anything happened to you because of me” is more than just words to Beau, it’s also an admission, I think, that Yasha needed trust, beyond being a companion in an adventuring party, to really put this thing in motion. Once that’s in place, it’s all systems go; vulnerability comes out in full swing, but it at least comes out when Yasha simply states, “I actually wrote a poem for you.”

Okay, remember the pin from earlier? Let’s go back to that. We were talking about Beau deflecting from compliments and being a bit self deprecating, ‘cause trauma is a thing and healing from that is a thing. Now that trust, the very key component, is in place, Yasha wastes no time getting the ball rolling on this thing. It’s adorable, and man does Ashley help remind us all that this shit is very, very new for Yasha, when she gets so nervous just handing off the poem and “no no no, don’t look at it now, you can look at it later.” 

(Laura is all of us in this moment.)

Making this kind of jump is so nerve wracking anyway, but handing off a poem is kind of a big fucking deal for Yasha, assuming Zuala never got these kinds of things, which I think is a safe bet. But Beau? Beau is a mess from the get go. She has no idea what do to with herself. “You wrote me a poem,” she says, stammering over her words, laughing nervously, and finally shares what she hopes is a compliment, and maybe a bit of awe too, when she finishes with, “Nobody’s ever written me a poem before.”

And Ashley, in a brilliant bit of acting, goes back to the place this whole conversation started with and compliments Beau in a way she can’t deflect nor escape from: “Well, they should have.” There’s just a bit of bite in this that I love so much. Yasha aches for her. This brilliant mind, this force of a human being that doesn’t take shit from anybody, hasn’t gotten something like this? Beau, you’re worthy of poems, you’re worthy of compliments, you’re worthy of praise and adoration and all of this stuff, and maybe this poem will show you that I want to give that to you. You didn’t get it before. If you let me, I’ll give it to you now.

Another thing I love about this is the only idea we have of the poem is that it’s still the cringe worthy sonnet-like “oh Beau Beau Beau” and we can feel this sort of anxiety for the future when Beau pulls it out and sees things like “shorn” and “envelop” and all that kinda stuff. 

Little did we know.