Cr Meta - Tumblr Posts

We are all aware that whatever happens, whatever crisis of morality the Prime Deities have or don't have, Aeor will fall by the end of the next episode.

I personally believe that the Prime Deities will actively make the choice to destroy the city, as much as it might hurt them to do so. Why, exactly, do I think that?

The very thing that broke this family of gods apart was that Primes got attached to the mortals that the Betrayers wanted to destroy, enough for the Primes to fight for the mortals and lock the Betrayers away so tightly that they could not even grant their worshippers magic. The way the Betrayers see it, the Primes chose these paper dolls, these bad first drafts, over their own siblings.

Maybe the majority of Aeor wants all of them dead. But Archmage Previn and some other mages, according to her, do not want to kill the Primes. Only the Betrayers and the Primordials.

I'm certain the fear that mortals would turn such a weapon on them and use it as soon as they do something that mortals dislike is there.

But what better opportunity for the Primes to show the Betrayers that as much as they fight, as much as they disagree, as much as they hurt each other, they will not let anyone turn their siblings into nothing?

What better opportunity for the Primes, just this once, to choose their siblings over mortals?

Honestly the fact that the other Assembly members are helping Ludinus is a surprise. But it also is kinda expected. He thrives in the viper’s nest, he always has. Even the Vanguard has tenuous relations and I doubt he has any misgivings about how that is. He’s been the head of the Cerberus Assembly for centuries, he knows backstabbing and undermining like the back of his hand. And Ludinus probably loves that shit.

Because truly he can’t handle genuine relationships. Sincere care or compliments. It’s why Jester throws him off so much. Because her smiles are real. Because her compliments are genuine and not backhanded.

The fake smiles and promises, the underhanded slights and backstabs is the world Ludinus moves like water through. He plays the political game so very well. Delilah, the charismatic witch, herself said it. Everyone knows Ludinus is a snake but they all fall for his traps anyway. But people like Jester throw him off because it breaks his world view. It breaks the idea that the world is dog eat dog all the time and you have to play this game to get yours. He rejects these genuine connections, romantic and platonic because “it’s beneath him”, but truly also because he can’t fathom the idea of those things meaning something real, having worth in a world in which those are all tools to manipulate and gain something from you, distractions from a larger goal.

The conversation he had with Essek is reframed in this light. It is not just that he thinks Essek gaining friendship is a distraction, makes him weak. It’s that he cannot see how a wizard similar to him can believe in such things. “Maybe you should try friends” was a sick burn but also there is this notion that Ludinus doesn’t get that. He doesn’t believe that is possible. True friendship isn’t something good or meaningful, it’s supposed to be a tool. In his mind Essek should have used the M9 to get further ahead.

Oh yes I do believe he does care for Liliana in some way. But it is also in the way that he needs her for his plans. Everything he does is framed around his goals, his needs. Because he cannot see relationships as anything but transactional. Subconsciously perhaps he desires deeper connections, but he will consciously bar himself from committing to such a thing because he has no faith in such a thing.

So yeah he is going to surround himself with people that hate him, people that he knows will backstab him at some point. Because he gets that. That’s familiar to him. He can deal with hatred and jealousy, but he can’t deal with genuineness.

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)

we've all talked about how the kids in liam's story were clearly caleb astrid and eodwulf, but the one detail i keep coming back to that i haven't seen anyone mention yet is that bit about loyalty and sacrifice?

like... the witch wanted one whole kid, not pieces of three of them, but she took the pieces because they refused to offer up any one of them as a sacrifice, the three kids were too close to betray each other like that. every one of them would rather have something vital taken from them than lose one of their friends.

but the blumentrio very much did lose a member, that's caleb's entire backstory

and i can't help but think about what this story means, all that considered, in terms of how caleb sees his old friends, and sees himself?

like he sets himself above (or at the very least aside from) all this when trent is around with snide comments about how he "wouldn't presume to know" anything about his former friends, but that's between him and trent, who he definitely sees as a bad person now

but when it comes to the blumentrio, i think about how tight knit they must have been? like to a certain degree we knew this, they were all from the same town, they trained together, they were very close. but despite the abuse and the conditioning and literally being trained to detach themselves from anyone they loved, to see themselves above others, and definitely in a culture where the ability to crush others for the sake of your ambition is seen as a virtue, they valued their friendship more than their strength

does caleb still feel like he betrayed them? he doesn't feel like he betrayed trent, not anymore, but his friends? the friends who were at his side through literally everything, who would have helped him with anything, who did help him when they shouldn't have, who he turned on, when he broke, who he hurt, and then abandoned, when they never would have betrayed him

(whether or not you believe astrid on who caused her burn scars is a different debate but i personally don't think she needed to lie there, and i think caleb definitely believed her, which is what matters)

he's trying to save them at least to a certain extent out of the empathy he holds for all the scourgers, and trying to prevent the endless onslaught of children sacrificed for this country, but under that, there's definitely a layer of guilt fueling his actions, the same way he still feels like a failure, that doesn't disappear that quickly

i'm also interested in what else you can extrapolate from that about their academy time, like... all three became a sacrifice because they stayed together. is that what happened? we don't know much about their lives then, but, was there a point one of them tried to leave and the others convinced them not to? was it one person's idea to enroll in the solstryce in the first place, and the other two followed?

whose idea was it to lead the kids into the woods, to accidentally stray so far from the light? and once they were there, what even was the right choice?

it's three broken children as opposed to one dead one. and when it comes down to it, who can truly say which is worse?

I’m marking down Essek’s absolutely buckwild slow-mo bewildered reaction to “you’re gonna have to make a lot of babies” down as ace!essek evidence tbh

partially cuz it’s funny

partially because I can

mostly because it is tHE 20-something former catholic ace mood.

I feel like I’m having a slightly different interpretation of the Caleb and Frumpkin scene than most people, so I’m going to try and explain it.

What hit me so hard about it wasn’t that it’s a sign that Caleb is finally “moving on” from his past. I’m thinking of it instead as him finally facing his past.

Caleb has spent most of the campaign (and, indeed, the 5 years we know he spent alone prior to meeting Nott in jail) not allowing himself to grieve. It’s not just that he wasn’t “moving on” from what happened – he also wasn’t allowing himself to process it. By framing any remembrance of his family not as “I need to process that they are gone,” but instead “I have to fix this,” Caleb shut down any ability to fully face his trauma and allow himself to feel sadness untempered by blame and self-loathing.

Being able to say to Frumpkin “hey, you have been a great and appreciated coping mechanism, but I need to face that my cat is dead,” Caleb is opening the door for himself to think “my parents are dead, and I am sad about that.” It sounds simplistic, but that’s literally what he’s not been allowing himself to do. It’s less “moving on” from his past, and more “finally acknowledging it in a healthy way.”

Delayed and compound grief, as well as survivor guilt, have always been a central part of Caleb’s narrative, and I think they are themes Liam has been tackling deliberately. Caleb appreciates Frumpkin, and Frumpkin (along with his friends) helped him get to a point where he could think about his family without framing it through self-loathing. But acknowledging that directly and deciding to face his past is a sign that Frumpkin the coping mechanism worked. Which also means it’s time to acknowledge the new support system, and start to think about how best to engage with and face his grief.

I just like to think about Caleb, in the future, living in a little townhouse in Rexentrum. Full of arcane trinkets, and spell components and the jacket Beau forgot when she came round for dinner. Walls plastered with Jester and Luc’s drawings, cat beds everywhere, traditional heavy Zemnian blankets from Astrid and spiralling crochet throws clearly from Xhorhas and cushions Kingsley found amusing in various markets on a squidgy leather sofa and mismatched armchairs. An extension into the garden with a little classroom in it, papers never quite contained to a study full of books and a coat rack in the hallway that’s constantly in use. A hundred different teas in the cupboard and recipes scribbled in different hands on the backs of all different stained pages. The little garden with planters of veg and pots of herbs and a sun-bleached wooden bench and forget-me-nots growing along the fence. A spare room that’s never vacant long enough to gather dust. Marks in the floor from Fjord repeatedly forgetting he wasn’t on a ship and the vase Yasha is always refilling. Thank you cards and gifts from students - carved cat figurines and mugs and silly little jokes. A feather of Kiri’s on a beaded chain she made. Books and books and books, bought by himself and others on every topic under the sun.

A house where he can finally be surrounded by and reminded of all the lives Caleb touched.

One reason why Calamity is a fucking masterpiece: Zerxus taking his oath of redemption so seriously that he tries to atone the literal lord of the hells AND STILL PITIES HIM WHEN HE IS BETRAYED BY ASMODEUS. Brennan was wild for that whole monologue in E4 and "to reach a hand down to somebody they need to be BENEATH YOU" still lives rent free in my brain.

We get many different representations of hubris in this campaign. But I love how for Zerxus it's not the almost arrogant behaviour we see in Laerryn for example. She selfishly and recklessly does everything for her goal no matter the consequences (good for her tho, confident queen, I love her in this narrative just as much).

Zerxus' downfall is his deep belief in humanity even with godly beings like Asmodeus. His beliefs are ignorant of the fact that the gods (most of them at least) were never ordinary people. Humanity doesn't extend to them. The people of Exandria make the gods more person-like in their minds to understand an approximation of what they truly are. And Zerxus got blinded by that through his oath. Yes, his actions are following a goal no matter the consequences too, but it's not selfish in the same sense like a wizard achieving her goal. He selflessly tries so hard to 'help' Asmodeus, he believes he can save even the Devil from his own corruption. The only thing selfish is the wish to fulfill his oath to a level he cannot achieve.

His hubris is believing in the inherent goodness of anyone who just wants to overcome what is keeping them from living it. In Asmodeus' case: being a devil, a fiend, being evil. And Zerxus gets corrupted in trying. It's so beautifully tragic.

i don't think you understand (i'm pretty sure you do but please, allow me) how important it is to me to see caleb getting more and more angry, almost shouting, swearing when talking about trent.

for the person who's emotions usually make him shut down, either from overstimulation or being overwhelmed with trauma; for the person who run away from those who wronged him for a long time; for the person who always allowed the others to make of him and do with him what they wanted quite rarely making his true feelings about certain actions be known.

for this person to go yes, i want him dead. and then he ruined my life. and then, visibly worked up he took my life away. to then yell in genuine anger and i fucking helped.

it means so fucking much to me, so much — caleb confronting his past that affects the position he is in right now and does so audibly, in front of everyone. but the thing is, he now trusts these people, more than he ever trusted anyone ever since he acted upon trent's siccing. he is comfortable with these people enough that after an incredibly emotional meeting with astrid he was loud in his distress.

he was loud enough about the fact that he killed his parents. that he wanted to kill them. that he despises the very fact that he had been stupid enough in his teenage susceptibility that be acted upon his very will and that will never leave him.

because caduceus can talk about destiny and the great destinations of the paths that they all are on. beau could have told him, at the very beginning of their journey together, that he should fix it so that it won't happen for others, and caduceus later on would have repeated the sentiment in a much gentler way.

but fjord tried much gingerly before but finally asked upfront if trent was tied to a chair powerless what would you do?

but veth said i don't care about other people, i care about you and i want to do what you want to do for youself, not for her [astrid] or any other.

caleb caved in and talked about himself.

and the thing is, it's not that caduceus and beau are wrong and fjord with veth were right. it's not about good or bad and this or that.

it's about the fact that caleb is a victim, too. because trent ruined him too. and coming in terms with being a victim is a hard process and he is still on his very way about it but he is better at it.

and that is why it's so important to me.

Caleb destroying the time travel circle is probably the thing that makes him genuinely like... one of the highest grade wizards we've seen in the setting. It is well established that the deepest, most innate folly of powerful wizards is their inability to stop when something is within their grasp. Yussa and Essek, Halas and the entirety of Aeor, to different extents, simply don't know how to stop digging and advancing. And yet he does.

And they do a damn good job of making that struggle come through, because, like... his plan could have worked, maybe even should have. There is a very plausible world where this man cheats time itself and gets away with it. Essek is sitting there, offering to help, and still. No.

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)