the mighty nein - critical role

this is a place where i don't feel alone. this is a place where i feel at home.

Ten episodes into Critical Role (starting with the second season, and NO SPOILERS PLEASE), and okay yeah, I get why people like the show.

There’s a lot to talk about and I’m sure most of it’s been said before, but I’m just in love with how nuanced and contradictory these characters are.  And contradictory is exactly the right word, not just because of how they oppose each other (though goddamn that is fun), but how they oppose themselves, how every single character is this mess of characteristics that don’t match up on first glance, except they actually fit together to create such rich characters.

Like Fjord, okay, start with him--he’s not the leader because this group is too much of a disaster to have a leader, but he’s the most consistently calm, solid, reliable, and generally sensible person in the whole group.  Which is not usually how you’d expect your party’s half-orc to behave, but that’s fine, that’s just messing with race expectations, that’s easy.  What’s interesting about Fjord is that he’s so clearly the group’s token decent guy, the honest man.  He has an eldritch nightmare and actually tells the others about it, which nobody else in that fucking crew except maybe Jester would.  He’s a straightforward guy who seems like he was maybe actually normal once, again unique in this group, who also happens to be a warlock with very clearly eldritch powers he doesn’t understand.  And he has no problem whatsoever with using and expanding those powers, or with killing, or with stealing and conning and enjoying any ill-gotten gains the group may collect.  His objections to the team’s plans are almost always practical and logistical (the ‘this seems very complicated and also is likely to end in this very obvious disaster when this logical hole gives way under us’ sort), not moral.  It consistently feels like, if he hadn’t had whatever disaster shipwreck eldritch sea-beast warlock pact experience set him off on this path, he out of the whole group would be obeying laws and being generally decent to the people around him and working a simple, honest job with some hard labor involved, and he’d be happy with it--but he’s on this boat now and he’s in completely, and he’s just as forthright with that loyalty as he is with everything else.

And Jester is flighty and silly and fun and describes a childhood that horrifies the entire rest of the group in blithe, carefree tones, and I love it so much because it makes so much sense.  Sure, she was isolated, secluded, and hidden from the world for years--but it was important for her mom’s business, and her mom loved her, and it was normal, and it was fine.  Because that’s normal to her.  And she’s completely carefree about her childhood, just like she makes a carefree game out of slaughtering gnolls and being entirely willing to kill guards or other sentient people, with the same level of fun as she gets pulling minor pranks.  She would happily and generously give away pastries or money or healing to anyone, and then turn right around and fuck up their entire day just because it’s funny, and not even see a conflict there.  Except that every once in a while we get a glimpse of just how desperately lonely she’s been for so fucking long--and it only comes out when she’s talking to or about the Traveler.  It’s never when she’s talking about home, or the brothel, or the room when she was locked in, because those things were normal and fine.  What’s not fine is the idea that she might lose contact with the Traveler, or maybe her mother.  And of course that’s it.  Because everything that was normal and fine and happy and funny had to be okay, because it was life, and that’s just how it was, but the Traveler and maybe her mother were the things that made it all okay, and if she loses them, she loses everything.

And I haven’t even begun to figure out Nott yet, Nott who seems in many aspects like the most straightforward member of the whole crew--not in the Fjord way of directness and honesty, but in the easy, tropey, simple-to-classify way.  The goblin rogue who loves picking pockets and collecting shiny things, quick and sly and easily intimidated, with quick fingers and a bit of a background in alchemy, it all makes sense.  Nott makes sense.  Except that if you take a step back and look around at context, Nott makes no fucking sense at all.  I have no idea why she’s out here, adventuring with these losers, instead of back home with the other goblins.  We have seen zero other goblins out and around populated places so far.  Even her partnership with Caleb straddles the line between ‘oh, of course’--a couple of criminals who met in prison and helped each other escape and decided it was more practical to stick together? sure! makes sense for a goblin!--and ‘wait, what the fuck?’.  Why was Nott in any sort of prison that Caleb would ever be in to begin with?  If she was arrested by humans, why didn’t they just kill her outright, given the attitudes most humans we’ve seen seem to have to goblins?  She is so friendly and ready to hang with the rest of the group, is so delighted to play with Jester, she’s such a social creature, so how did she ever end up playing sidekick with this socially awkward human disaster to begin with?

And right, speaking of Caleb, the man is a goddamn mess, even putting aside all of his stubbornness and his mysteries and the actual literal mess of him.  He’s shy and awkward and anxious and scared around people, except for when he decides to very intensely threaten somebody with murder and disembowelment, just as a matter of course.  He’s anxious about everything, but he’s okay with monster-hunting.  And he’s fine with murder, so long as it isn’t done with fire, he’s one of the first to go in for robbing corpses, he straight up does not give a shit about the people he and Nott rob, he doesn’t trust or even particularly like the rest of the Nein, he doesn’t (appear to) care about other people at all--except that he would do anything for Nott, full stop.  And he has strong feelings about parents and kids and families, and he gave Jester the money he swiped from the spider lair because he got angry at her for being an apparent spoiled rich girl and wanted to apologize, and because it seemed important to her an he cared.  And all of these truths hang together around the central figure of this one guy with a fucked-up past he doesn’t have words for, who prefers books to people and doesn’t really know what he’s doing, in the world, in general, even at the fairly low level he thinks he does.

And of course Caleb keeps clashing with Beau, because Beau is simultaneously so self-invested and yet also somehow more interrogative of the whole world around her than anyone else in the group.  Beau wants to know all of Caleb’s secrets.  She wants to know everybody’s secrets, but she wants Caleb most of all, because he’s spent the most effort trying to keep them that way.  And she’s so curious about her party members, so curious about things going on in the world--she asks more questions about random shit than anyone, she’s currently spearheading both the investigation into the Gentleman and, with Fjord, the Zadash revolutionary’s club, because she wants to know.  Except Beau never gives off the impression of actually liking anybody or anything she discovers.  (Fjord trying to give her lessons on complimenting somebody without making it sound like a backhanded insult was amazing.)  She has ‘chip on my shoulder’ writ so large across her it might as well be in neon.  She is Out For Herself; she hates the system but she’s not going to go looking for ways to take it down, not when she can drink and fight shit to get cash that she can spend to drink with.  But she can’t stop asking questions.  She Doesn’t Care, but she can’t stop trying to learn more.  And right, the constant back and forth of ‘yes she cares’-’no she’s a self-interested bitch’ could feel wishy-washy, but instead it just feels right, because Beau is very young and very angry and very impulsive, and she is very bad at effectively caring for the things and people she cares about, and it is so clear that she’s been treated so badly and had so little power to fight back.  And now she’s got the power to fight back so she lashes out and she hits things and she’s constantly mean, and she chokes out the little girl she got arrested to protect two days earlier because nobody ever taught Beau how people actually take care of other people, did they.  She needs to know Caleb’s secrets because Caleb having stuff going on that he won’t talk about means that there are factors at play that can affect Beau’s life that she can’t control, can’t even know about.  All I know about her parents so far is that they had enough money to pay a temple to take her away when she caused too much trouble for them.  Which actually appears to say pretty much everything that needs to be said.

And fucking Mollymauk Tealeaf, the one goddamn spoiler I had for this show before I started it and I am simultaneously gutted over him from day one and grateful to be prepared because I do not think I would take losing him well as a surprise.  Molly is so fucking good.  He’s a good character, and he’s such a good person, except he would cheerfully deny it with a grin if anyone ever accused him of it.  He is such a tremendous cynic.  He has been all over and he believes that people in groups of any size are stupid, dangerous, probably corrupt, generally bigoted, probably lazy, and out for themselves at every turn.  No horror anyone does can surprise him, and yet he’s blithe and easy about it all.  Of course people are terrible, that’s just how people are, no sense getting depressed over it.  He’ll just slide his way in with a smile and a deck of tarot cards and a bit of flash and dazzle, use people’s vices against them, maybe run just a bit of a con if it looks to be profitable, and slide right back out again.  Except that by god, Molly cares every bit as much as Beau does and unlike her, he actually knows it.  He was ready to go to the mat for any- and everyone in that circus, called it a family and held on to it as hard as he possibly could even as everyone in it bickered and hated each other and were ready to jump town and leave each other behind.  He is so kind to people with less than he has.  And he’s never forceful about it, he never pushes his care forward, he just makes a few gentle comments to Jester about expectations and disappointment that might help ease the crushing blow he so clearly sees coming her way, without actually calling her out or starting an argument.  He just suggests to Nott that there exist people in the world that shouldn’t be robbed, not because they’ve no money worth stealing but because those people can’t afford to lose what little they have.  At some point he took it upon himself to be the person who keeps an eye on everyone else in the party, whether to try to defuse an argument or pick someone up when they’re down or corner them and take them to task, quietly, out of earshot of all the others.  It’s impossible not to get the sense that Molly is already more invested in this group working and staying together than anyone else here, and he takes that fact as a given, and he’s ready to put in the quiet background work to keep it in one piece.  He’s already brushed off or buried whatever mourning he did for the broken circus family he so clearly loved so well, and it should be a contradiction, but mostly it just feels like Molly is too used to being ready for things to go south and people to leave, because life is just shit like that and you take what you can get.  He treats love exactly the same way he treats money: a thing that’s hard to come by and well worth collecting if you possibly can, to be enjoyed and played with to the very fullest while you have it, because soon enough it’ll be gone again either way.

At any rate, I’m really enamoured of this show that has characters so nuanced by ten episodes in.  (Granted, ten episodes clocks close to 40 hours, but shhhh.  D&D time is different.)  I chalk a ton of it up to, ‘oh, shit, this is why voice actors are the perfect people to put on D&D as a massive serial fiction adventure’.  Every single person at the table makes a living out of putting nuance into characters with just their voice, so of course they know what they’re doing, and they’ve all played zillions of characters (their IMDB pages are so long, jfc) with plenty of nuance to begin with.  They know how to do this shit.

The other thing, I think, is that everybody at the table feels safe with the idea that they’ll have enough time to draw these characters out all the way to the end.  Everybody in this group has so many secrets, so many of the linking pieces that lay out and explain the layers and contradictions, and nobody is rushing to pull any of them out on the table right up at the start, because everybody there is totally secure in the idea that they’ll get 500-odd hours to tell this story and it doesn’t all have to happen yet.  Character death is always a risk, but the only healer isn’t going to up and move to another state, and nobody is going to get married and have no time any more, and the DM’s manager at work isn’t going to suddenly start assigning Thursday night shifts and all of the sudden scheduling is a disaster for so long it never gets fixed.  Nobody is going to decide they don’t care any more and just stop showing up.  They’ve been at this together a long, long time, and also they’re making an actual show about it that they actually get paid for, and they can take as long to tell the story, and make it whatever story, that they want.  It’s a really different kind of energy than any D&D game I ever managed to play, and even different from most shows that never know when the ‘cancel’ hammer might come down from the network.

It’s pretty cool.  I like it a lot.