Hello, new friends! Welcome to my blog. I’m updating this because I used to have a very eclectic blog filled with many interests, but it has slowly morphed over the months to heavily feature Critical Role. Anyway here is a guide to my content!

…if you like Critical Role
you are in the right place! I also post about CR over at Bluesky at @kaeda. The content I post here tends to be my fics, occasional meta posts, and I reblog a LOT of other fan content for a variety of fandoms. I also love to reblog original art. My Bluesky account contains more stream-of-consciousness nonsense, talking about writing, and lots of tweets about shadowgast/Essek, so it has more original content. Feel free to hang out with me in both places!

…if you’re a new fan of The Mighty Nein
you should be careful of spoilers as you navigate my blog, but I’m trying to make my tagging system more friendly for new fans. If you want to avoid spoilers from campaign 2 of Critical Role while still enjoying animated show content, I’ll be tagging posts with major spoilers with “c2 spoilers”. Please note any posts earlier than the animated series won’t be tagged with warnings! You can also block “campaign 2” to avoid all campaign content.

…if you’re making your way (🎶making your way🎶) through Campaigns 2 or 3
my tagging system is organized by episode, although I don’t consistently have a lot of posts for episodes until I started watching live at episode 100 of campaign 2. If you want to find old posts for the episode you’re on, simply use the tag format “c2e##” or “c3e##” to find what I’ve curated through my 5+ years in this fandom. I also have a few of these tagged for campaign 1, but not very many. I’m not watching campaign 4 (yet), so at the moment I don’t have anything from that.

…navigation
I recently went through and reorganized my original content, although I will admit some of these are not sorted as well as I’d like. Here is a handy tag guide if you’re looking for stuff that I’ve posted:

• my fics: the fics I’ve written on AO3 and tumblr
• my wips: sneak peeks, works in progress, and wip wednesdays
• my meta: all of my meta posts in one handy place!
• my writing: writing process posts and information about my wips
• my shitposts: occasionally I have been known to shitpost
• my memes: I also sometimes make silly memes
• my liveblogs: sometimes I post while watching/reading stuff

Thanks for checking out my blog and have a wonderful day. ☀️

Fascinating that Lythir VaSuun can cast Resonant Echo, especially since Matt has said it’s a unique spell to Essek and that’s why it wasn’t included in EGTW. I would give a lot to know if Essek was teaching it to dunamancers or if he knew Lythir from somewhere, used it as a bribe, etc, or if it was just that Matt decided it was unique to Essek after episode 51

One of the best bait and switches that Matt pulls in Campaign 2 is the way he completely sets the Nein up to believe that the Dynasty is this brutish, scary place using nothing but propaganda and effects that the characters will find ominous (for example, drow wanting to live in darkness makes sense, but as humans it can feel foreign and threatening).

He purposefully puts them in contact with people from the Empire who are biased narrators and doesn’t tell the party that they’re biased. He lets them do research in the Empire but that research is all slanted to make the Dynasty seem as foreign and alien as possible. It’s such a perfect illustration of how propaganda can dehumanize its targets, and because this is a fantasy world, the players and the characters don’t have enough knowledge of Xhorhas to be able to tease apart the lies and spin to find the truth.

So Matt sets them up to explore the Dynasty with their only information about the area from the Empire, and in the beginning, the Nein see what they expect. On rewatch, WE as watchers know that this is just another culture of people, that the Dynasty is in some ways kinder than the Empire but still a colonizing force in Eastern Wynandir, and that the Kryn are just as much a mix of good people and bad people and ordinary people trying to live their lives, like anywhere else.

We get to watch in real time as the characters discover this for themselves, and it’s such a fascinating study in the way that personal experience and connections to people who have been dehumanized can effectively help in deprogramming biases. The Nein’s attitude starts to shift in Asarius, but we don’t truly see them accept that the Dynasty is like anywhere else until they start living in Rosohna.

I doubt this bait and switch was planned in this form back when Beau and Caleb first researched Xhorhas, but it’s really brilliant the way Matt runs with it once the party decides to go to Xhorhas to rescue Yeza. Rewatching these episodes, I’m always fascinated to watch the Nein’s slowly-changing attitudes to the Kryn while knowing that this is going to become one of the places that they eventually call home. It’s just so well done.