The Year Is 2056. Critical Role Is On It’s 11th Campaign. Samuel Reigel Drinks Out Of An 8 Foot Tall

fantasy costco is a front for garfield's true passion: illegal cloning

i love him let him eat

/first/2/

I am forever grateful for the balanced way Harrow’s psychosis is displayed. She is a rational person. She is able to evaluate data as sharply as anyone else. Maybe even more sharply than anyone else. She just isn’t sure if the data she is evaluating is all accurate. She reads as someone who has long since adjusted to this self-doubt about reality, and possibly as someone who’s intelligence was honed specifically by the process of needing to run every observation through rationality checks. It makes her weird, socially, but it also makes her very good at processing and deduction.

Some people have been making the joke about the characters of Dracula being stuck in a time loop but honestly it got me thinking about how epistolary novels feel like a potent manifestation of the concept of being doomed by the narrative

Because when I read a non-epistolary book, I’m not left with this sense that it’s all going to reset because the events of the book aren’t happening according to a very specific timeline. Like, sure, maybe specific dates get mentioned in the book, but it’s not as rigid as having a diary or letters with exact dates laid out over the course of six months.

Because Dracula has a definitive start date and end date, the characters are fixed in time and being (sometimes literally) railroaded. Your sense of the passage time is very concrete and there’s not a ton of wiggle room. Like, a book such as…idk, The Great Gatsby that doesn’t have any dates in it (IIRC) feels timeless. Sure, maybe it takes place in spring and summer, but you can kind of lose track of that because there isn’t a calendar keeping you aware of the date. Gatsby has to die within a certain window of time in the year but you’re free to imagine that as being whenever you want.

Not so in Dracula. Jonathan HAS to be on his way to Castle Dracula on May 3 and 4, he HAS to be there until at least late June. He cannot be already at the castle on May 2, and he can’t leave until after a particular date has come and gone. Every event in the book has to happen on or about the date it’s written about, there’s no room for deviation. We are free to imagine what might happen between specific dates (especially in the long stretches with no updates) but ultimately it all has to conclude in a specific event happening on a specific date.

That really lends the book the sense of being a time loop because we can pin down a pretty much exact timeline of the book. We know that these characters are locked in, and on the dates of the novel they cannot meaningfully deviate from the text. And because of that, they’re doomed to live those events out on the same exact date every single year for all time.

It adds the same layer of dread/grief/futility that you might feel when playing a game and reading in-universe diaries/news stories/etc from the early days of the game’s apocalypse. You can’t change the events of the past no matter how much hindsight you have, and none of us can change the canon events of Dracula no matter how much foresight we have. Jonathan is always going to be on his way to Dracula on May 3, and he’s always going to be completely unaware of what’s waiting for him.

So I rewatched the entire dinner scene instead of sleeping, and here’s my hot take: I don’t care about Trent. He’s an asshole abuser, so I will eat up others’ probably far more insightful meta on THAT topic.

No, I want to talk about Astrid, Eodwulf, and Caleb.

That scene didn’t go at all like I expected it to. I think I, and everyone else, were expecting the mind games, the subtle threats, the manipulation…

But I wasn’t expecting half of it to be directed towards Astrid and Eodwulf.

In those previous encounters, we kind of got what we thought the two of them would be – confident, duty bound, convicted, a certain sense that they were where they wanted to be, that they knew their environment and had some control. Astrid came from a place of slightly patronising pity for Caleb. Eodwulf didn’t bother talking to the Nein overly.

So we all sat here and made jokes about Caleb’s evil ex-friends, donning their scariest wizard robes and staring stonily down the table for the evening. That’s what we expected. People who didn’t hesitate. People who, though abused and brainwashed, were committed to the cause, were perpetuating the cycle.

That is not what we got.

They start that way. Annoyed at the Nein’s antics. Stern. Supposedly full of conviction. But there was no righteousness, and they got more and more nervous as the night went on.

Astrid and Eodwulf were afraid. Astrid was not one step away from coldly offing Trent and taking his place. She was leaning away from him, begging Caleb to stop provoking Trent, stop calling attention to her. Eodwulf was reluctant to talk, was worried about how Caleb would react, froze up as soon as things started getting confrontational.

Every moment of their interactions at that table screamed ABUSE. 

I’m sure our previous assumptions are true. I’m sure they kill, torture, and do worse for the Empire. I’m sure they defend it at every point, have parroted lines they refuse to let go of. It’s possible that they mean it.

But those weren’t powerful mages who’d grown up to shoulder the horrors of their youth as just and right without another thought. Those were beaten dogs.

On top of that, those were beaten dogs who know they’re not allowed to think for themselves. Every time Caleb asked Astrid a difficult question – every single time – she would look over at Ikithon nervously, steel herself, and then mimic him almost exactly.

I didn’t realise until rewatching the scene, but her speech pattern varies GREATLY between speaking in a manner I believe to be honest, and speaking about dicey topics like the Empire, her duty, their actions, and so on. When addressing more vulnerable topics, Astrid spoke softly and looked like this:

Whenever she had to speak about something that she clearly felt she was on thin ice with? She lowered her voice, evened it out, and changed her cadence to match Ikithon’s perfectly, the only difference being that her voice is slightly higher pitched. It’s so close I sometimes had trouble telling if Caleb was talking to Ikithon or to her.

Astrid straight up told Caleb that whoever is her superior is right, and she and Eodwulf will do as that superior says. Nothing more. No moral judgements of her own. Eodwulf, for his part, never directly defended his actions or their jobs. Whenever he was pressed, he looked to Astrid. Who, in turn, would look to Trent.

That’s a pretty obvious sign of what’s going on, here.

The only times Eodwulf is startled into genuine reactions are when Trent drops the first real bombshell on Caleb, at which point he makes these faces:

And afterwards, when Caduceus parted with a scathing last word to Trent, wherein both he and Astrid looked like this:

Astrid tried to share her hair techniques with Jester. She smiled when the Nein joked about kidnapping her. Eodwulf liked the moniker they gave him. Eodwulf decided he liked Caduceus right after he’d told Trent no one would mourn him.

As soon as that dinner was over, Eodwulf pulled out alcohol, took a swig, passed it to Caleb, who took a swig, and then to Astrid, who took a swig. That quick and unhesitating exchange speaks of long experience. Long experience leaving Trent’s presence and immediately trying to get drunk.

It said a lot about the three of them, I think. That little moment, the ease of it, how normal it seemed, displays a genuine (at least at one point, and maybe still) camaraderie between them, and also a genuine unease in Trent’s presence, even after a decade and a half.

And that leads to the other thing I wasn’t expecting, but maybe should have. Caleb.

He’d hesitated from condemning Trent. This was the man he had spent most of the campaign running from, the man who had groomed him into killing his family, and yet he was reluctant to speak about violence, even though his friends half begged him to give the okay on it.

I think we were expecting Caleb to hunch his shoulders, to look away, to be eaten up by anxiety. And maybe he would have been shrinkingly cautious through the whole affair. Y’know, if Trent hadn’t said Caleb’s parents would have been okay with him burning them alive. If Astrid and Eodwulf hadn’t desperately tried to blend in with the furniture at every opportunity.

Caleb starts the dinner making these kind of faces:

But slowly, that changes. He stops doing his usual habit of avoiding eye contact and rubbing at his arms. He starts glowering when Trent tries to insist that Caleb’s parents’ deaths were a good thing, were what they wanted, would bring honour to the family he had eradicated, somehow. He likes it less when Trent claims credit for his escape. He really looks pissed when Astrid tries unconvincingly to argue that what they did was okay, obviously signalling her discomfort with the situation.

By the end of the night, Caleb looked Trent in the eye and said he dreamed of murdering him, brutally, with his bare hands. By the end of the night, Caleb had THIS look on his face as he stared at the man who’s haunted his every moment for as long as he’s been a lucid adult:

This Caleb? This is the Caleb who isn’t paralysed by his own guilt and fear. This is a Caleb who is very, very angry.

So regarding the dynamic between Astrid, Eodwulf, and Caleb? The script was, in the end, rather flipped. We went in expecting three wizards trying to manipulate an overwhelmed Caleb. Instead, we got one wizard crushing the souls of two others under his heel, with the only one currently outside his direct influence growing more and more furiously bold as the situation became evident.

The fact that Trent was his abuser was never going to bring Caleb to violence on its own. But Caleb called Astrid and Eodwulf “friends,” present tense, the day before he watched them sit, afraid of saying the wrong thing, through a dinner with their abuser. I don’t think he’s going to be so hesitant about violence towards Trent in the future.

They may have learned very little about Trent and his true intentions. It’s even possible that everything we saw of Eodwulf and Astrid is some elaborate fiction, though I don’t think so. But whatever else, it did one thing I’m not sure Trent wanted; it solidified a path forward for Caleb that he wouldn’t commit to before, and I don’t think it involves Trent surviving.

Oh no, he got hot!

The harrowing and heartfelt part 2 to this. Congratulations to the century-old sweethearts. 💖