so grey is the face of every mortal

Can I just say, I really appreciate how Critical Role plays the Devil trope straight. There's been this phenomena in a lot of modern media (I'm not going to mention specifics but I'm sure a few examples pop up in people's minds) where Hell and the Devil aren't scary or malevolent forces. Hell is portrayed as being basically the same as our world just "edgier", and the Devil is a pretty decent guy actually. Heaven are secretly the real bad guys!

But Critical Role doesn't do that. In Exandria, Asmodeus *feels* like the Devil. He's malevolent and manipulative and terrifyingly powerful and he hates you, personally. We never see that type of portrayal anymore! And it's amazing! And he still manages to be sympathetic and tragic without losing his edge!

And the "Good Gods" are portrayed as flawed without being secretly evil or something! Like, actual nuance? In my Heaven/Hell dichotomy? What!?

It's just such a breath of fresh air after so many "The Devil was right, actually" stories. So props to Matt and Brennan and the cast.

CR3 Quick Reacts - Calamity Downfall

biting and gnashing my teeth over the vampiric sterility of the gods in Downfall. they are flash-frozen at the moment they came into this world, the moment all their infinity congealed into singularity. asmodeus is always enraged and burning, obsessed with family. sarenae cannot be anything but a soothing comfort, pelor a guiding light. melora is the yearning, hungry wild, forever eating itself, forever innovating. erathis is the laws of physics that keep her limited, and the laws of reciprocity that keep the scales equal. corellon is the beauty and kord is the storm and torog is the weeping flesh. they can’t be anything else! imagine being stuck forever in the moment of your greatest grief—no wonder pelor believes their brother wanted to die. death was all he could think about for thousands of years.

it captures so perfectly my favorite implicit horror of godhood; the nightmare of being two dimensional. gods are born a perfect epitome of their domain and they die the same way. they can be people too but it’s a flat kind of personhood, the personhood of clowns, of archetypes, of monsters.

Because there has been a lot of arguing in the tags (what else is new?) From Cooldown Matt answers the question of whether Ludinus has seen the Downfall footage already.

Seriously if you don't have Beacon, it is SO worth it.

The parallels. THE PARALLELS.

As soon as they announced six new PCs for Downfall I planned to do this with my first paintings of each 🌈 Its so satisfying to see them all side by side!

Brennan: You know, Nick said something along the lines of, like, the gods had to stop. They were going to kill the gods. And I was like, correction: they were going to have the power to kill gods. And there's every reason to believe they would use it. There's every reason to believe they would have it. But I would say I want to be-- the thing I said is for my-- whatever the moral calculus is, it's important to understand that mortals are not even allowed to have the potential to harm the gods. And I was like, that matters to me.

(Except for the Raven Queen.)

What cannot be seen is not gone forever.

Hey, Noshir? What the fuck man

I love when we get the version of Brennan who is a scholar of ethics and a professor of the craft of storytelling. I could listen to him talk shop for hours.

NICK IS IN THE RULES LAWYER FIRM! THE PETITION HAS WORKED!!

Taliesin as Asha in Downfall so far

Now that's super cool

the fact that the everlight was beginning to question whether she should even continue in this role after so many of her followers were slaughtered, and the other gods knew it, and then she finally meets someone who is so devout and brilliant, but ultimately that person ends up being lost to her as well and this time it wasn't because of a third party betrayal or a massacred city. it was a voluntary choice. cassida chose to renounce her goddess. truly so so much harder to stomach

The leaders of Aeor were already aware of the Society of Primes! They were compromised before the gods arrived, so the plan was to kill the society members when the project was over.

Cassida was dead from the beginning.