I spend way too much time thinking about timelines in Critical Role, how fast everything happens (and even the cast doesn’t always realize). And then looking at date counts on Critrole Stats and just…thinking about it.
There are less than four months between the night Vox Machina sits down for dinner in Emon with Lord and Lady Briarwood, and the morning Vex’ahlia returns Castle Whitestone with the severed hand of a Gray Render and the whole world fades to montage for a year. One hundred and seven days, for the Briarwoods, and the dragons, and the Feywild and the City of Brass and the Plane of Fire and the Plane of Water and the Nine Hells, and all of it, every vestige, every battle, every death. The entire Chroma Conclave arc kicks off six days after Winter’s Crest, and 47 days later Vox Machina staggers home with Scanlan’s body, Raishan slain and the whole world saved.
Seven weeks of dragons. That’s it. Half of Tal’dorei is razed and then freed again in less time than it takes to get some things off of Amazon backorder. It’s not even officially spring yet, when Thordak and Raishan die. Westruun is taken by Umbrasyl, and then a herd of goliaths, and then freed again in all of about fifteen days. It will take the city decades to recover, but the whole Chroma Conclave has been destroyed before it’s even time for most places to begin the spring planting.
And also: Vex dies in an underwater tomb, and Kraven Edge kills Grog six days later. Three weeks after that, they bury Tiberius; it has been eight weeks since they last saw him alive, and four and a half weeks since the Conclave descended, which means he lived less than a month after leaving them on the road to Whitestone. They get four weeks between Grog’s death and Percy’s. Nine days between Percy’s resurrection and the Thordak battle. (Percy signs a contract with a devil a whole four weeks after he wakes up from Orthax’s private hell.) Vex dies twice in the space of six and a half weeks, and Percy dies twice in the space of a week and a half, and Scanlan dies twice in two days. It’s a whole ten days after that when Vax dies in the pit of a kraken’s stomach, and it’s all so fast. It’s so fast.
Pike’s family swings through Whitestone while Keyleth and Vax are having a quick weekend trip to bother family and help out at the bakery, and sixteen days later–that’s it. Vecna is bound. Vax is dead. Two weeks, and the whole first week of it is just dealing with the Trickfoots and jumping off of cliffs out of sheer boredom.
Or: the Mighty Nein arrive in Hupperdook and throw themselves into a drinking competition party together on the one-month anniversary of meeting each other, to the day. They have known each other for three weeks when Caleb tells Beau and Nott about the worst thing he’s ever done in his life; for two weeks when they watch the Zauber Spire come crashing down and the world change; for a week, when they’re proclaimed the heroes of Allfield and give themselves a nonsense name and decide that maybe there’s something to this mercenary business after all. They have been together for five weeks exactly when Fjord and Jester and Yasha are kidnapped. It takes a week to rescue them again.
Mollymauk Tealeaf, two years old, meets a ragtag bunch of nobodies in a bar the morning before the only life he’s ever known falls apart. 39 days later he dies for them in the snow. Just barely two months after meeting in Trostenwald, the Nein return to Zedash exhausted and grieving, and two weeks after that they find each other again and aim for Nicodranas together, because they can no longer quite imagine their lives apart.
They are pirates for 51 days, including the entire week they spend in a few hours inside the Happy Fun Ball, and later, they’ll call it months. It feels like months. It is fully a third of the time they spend together between meeting in Trostenwald and standing before the Bright Queen, 149 days, five months, from total strangers to the bizarre band of compatriots they are now. They’d die for each other. They’ve upended the landscape of a continent together. They still barely know each other.
(Five months to get from Level 2 to Level 9. Five months for Vox Machina to get from Level 9 to Level 17. It’s so fast. It’s so fast.)
Everything happens so much, and I just have a lot of feelings about all of it. I have a lot of feelings about Vox Machina going through hell in Thordak’s lair and then hell times two fighting Raishan, and waking up the next morning–and they haven’t had a day without dragons in 47 days. Last night they brought Scanlan back from the dead by the skin of their teeth and he’s still unconscious now, but they can’t stop. The dragons are all dead and half of them have died at least once in the past forty-eight hours and they can’t stop. They can’t even wait for Scanlan to wake up. They have a to-do list and they have to keep going. They have to go to Vasselheim. There are things they still have to do and they have to go to Vessra and they have to go to hell and they have to bury these ashes, and they haven’t had a day off in 47 days, and they fall apart trying to do something as simple as bury a box because of course they do, because it’s been dragons for 47 days, and before that it was vampires, and they’re so, so, so tired, and they don’t remember how to rest.
I have a lot of feelings about the two weeks the Mighty Nein spend after they get back from Shady Creek Run, when Beau and Caleb bury themselves in books and training, and Nott and Jester conspire and cling to each other and destroy things, and Fjord runs halfway home all by himself before running all the way back to these people he’s only known for a couple of months. Two months is such a short time. Two months is so long.
And I have a great many emotions about that.