Would Die For Every Single Member of the Mighty Nein

“I expect, hopefully, the same trust in return.”

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I really liked the middle panel of page 5 of idotm so here it is without the comic text/speech bubble/grainy texture :D

[comic start]

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someone who makes gifs please make a set paralleling caleb asking essek to kill the scourger and veth going “I guess???” to ask essek to kill the screaming cognouza flesh monster

Gravity Sinkhole.

Gravity Crush.

Essek killing the Scourger in episode 77.

Him letting Caleb decide is such a good scene and it takes on a whole different connotation with what we know of Essek now.

Do not alter or repost my art anywhere. Reblogs are love.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this 

Caduceus' "Trick question I don't have handwritting" in response to Dairon saying she could fake their handwrittings is the single most powerful sentence ever said by any low intelligence character EVER.

i just think them wizards are neat 🥺

I think I saw some meta about this already but I can't find it and,, I have a LOT of feelings about how Caleb didn't even fucking flinch when he got stabbed in the neck for, what was it, 26 damage?? He immediately hit right back, no hesitation, no utterance of pain??

This is Caleb, who in previous episodes has straight up passed out from pain despite being above 0 hp, who throws up when he's very stressed, who always voices his pain and is not afraid to show physical vulnerability.

Reeeeally makes you think about his training. And how quickly just talking to someone who went through the same training put him back in that mindset

i still can’t stop wondering what the fuck was the deal with Adeen?  Because Essek very specifically said that he didn’t want anyone “undeserving” hurt, and he is not, generally, a person who cares much about what people “deserve,” so he’s clearly got something against this guy in particular.  What is it???  What did you do that made Essek “Neutral Evil” Thelyss decide you deserved to be screwed, man?  Who the fuck was this guy?????

my kind of sort of suspicion is that he might have been the one who gave the Scourger, maybe? I vaguely remember when Beau brought that up to Dairon, they said that someone must have given it to her, but for some reason my brain also came to the conclusion that she had transmuted it out of her chains, so I could be wrong.

that was my suspicion too and additionally, if Adeen gave the scourger that weapon, it seems less likely that he intended for Caleb to be attacked and more likely that it was an attempt on Essek’s life. It seems unlikely that Adeen would’ve known that essek was letting Caleb talk to her, but it would’ve been normal for the shadowhand. Given we know that essek feels guilty for putting the nein in danger with his scheming, essek then has two motives - Adeen tried to kill him, and he accidentally put in danger one of the only people essek has ever cared about.

I think there’s evidence for Adeen actually being in the cult too, considering he recognised Vence - essek probably would never have met Vence and couldn’t have altered adeen’s memory accordingly. So when you put those two conclusions together, essek would consider him a very appealing scapegoat, both for personal vengeance and in the interest of not being uncovered

I agree. Granted my memory is horrid, but I don’t remember Essek ever learning about Vence or that he existed, so I do think Adeen was involved with the cult. And I’ll admit I don’t know why Adeen might try to have Essek killed, or at the very least attacked. Den politics? Or to make him look bad? There’s still so much we just don’t know.

#also… wonder if that attack flipped some kind of switch for essek #like yanno when you see someone you were pretending you didn’t care about get hurt?#yeah #just curious if that was roughly the moment when essek was like ‘oh fuck i gotta protect these idiots’ #cue whiskey drunk essek with the puppies

i’m pretty sure that incident was what happened immediately before essek decided to teach caleb how to cast “resonant echo,” and that was also the first time caleb ever called him a friend

like, the timeline of that day went:

Essek talks to the M9, asks them to maybe look into getting the other beacon, but he can’t give them any real help or leads or even contacts, so sorry, you’re on your own! ==> Caleb gets stabbed in the throat ==> Essek decides to teach him a probably-forbidden piece of magic to keep him safe ==> “we are friends, now, yes?” “friends. i like that.”

so, yeah, i’d say that’s a reasonable thing to wonder!!!

god this hole can just keep getting deeper huh

like i sorta had a half written meta for episode 77, based on my other one back when 77 came out, now that we knew essek was the traitor

and since i’d speculated even back then that the one to give her the knife and the one selling them out to the empire were the same person, i was looking into if it was essek

which like... caleb obviously wasn’t the target for whoever gave her the weapon but caleb was never the target caleb was an excuse

(though i stand by that the scourger didn’t have a good reason to kill caleb just for being caleb meaning she was acting on new orders, and someone who’s done a lot of dealings with trent ikithon and can cast both disguise self and modify memory is in a pretty good spot to be giving scourgers new orders)

(honestly, essek’s probably the only person who has the means to facilitate every thing that went down between the scourger and caleb)

so that brought me to why

and like... if it was essek, not because he wanted caleb dead, the m9 run completely contrary to all of his plans, yeah, but he’s put himself on the line too many times for caleb at this point, there’s a million different ways he could have gotten caleb killed if he wanted to by now

i also talked back then about it being a plan to kill the scourger

but that’s where i got stuck

because like... sure, essek might have reasons to want the scourger dead. it’s very possible she has information that would destroy everything he’s done and get him executed along with her. but here’s the thing - her dying won’t actually keep that information from coming out. because standard procedure after execution is speak with dead, where the dead have to answer. and if you cast zone of truth at the same time, they have to answer truthfully

which is where i made the mistake of assuming essek was competent because i was gonna talk about how he had no reason to put himself on the line to delay her execution at the m9′s request, when he actually had a very good reason to do so, because right now, she’s not talking. right now, he’s in charge of interrogating her. if she dies, the interrogation gets handed over to the clerics and who the fuck knows what comes out. that’s a situation out of essek’s control, which, when you’re double crossing the two highest powers on the continent, is a pretty bad situation to be in. and he probably realised that. and all of his talking to the m9 about “i can’t keep delaying this” i feel like were subtle “please give me an excuse to keep delaying this so i can work out an actual plan”

so if he wasn’t involved in the murder attempt at all, and it was actually an attempt on essek’s life, that’s interesting, because it’s a two way fuck you. if adeen had, say, realised what essek was doing, and the two probably ended up subtly threatening each other like high government officials do, then orchestrating that means a) essek dies, b) the scourger dies, and c) whatever she may have known about the empire’s plans (including, potentially, whatever essek was up to) gets told to everyone

(my only potential caveat then is, what did he say to the scourger? if she was trying to escape, she wouldn’t have attacked caleb, she would have waited until there were fewer people around. if he could convince the scourger to kill essek, why would she go after caleb instead? (refer to my first post as to why the answer isn’t just “bc bren”, though it could still be the suicide attempt option, provided she didn’t know that she’d be interrogated after death, though i don’t know what she would have been told in that situation))

(but yeah either way i still feel like we’re all holding about 8 pieces between us of at least a 10 piece puzzle)

I feel asleep before I could air my thoughts on Essek in episode 77, with the hindsight of the traitor-reveal, and here’s where I’m at:

Essek asks them to look for the last stolen Beacon “on behalf of the Bright Queen” but I think he’s lying there. First, because I don’t think the BQ would trust the M9 with such a thing, not so soon after the Bazzoxan failure, and second because Essek seems kind of cagey about it. Marisha tried and failed to have Beau do an insight check on if he was genuine about wanting to end the war, but I think he was - it’s just that it was also an afterthought, or a side-benefit. His larger goal seems more likely to be tied to anger at the Assembly for not telling him things. 

Essek keeps returning, with irritation, to the fact that the Assembly are smart enough to continually move the Beacon and not let anyone know where it is. I think that “anyone” included him and he was getting increasingly annoyed about it. This also fits with the theory that they weren’t following through with their end of the deal, and weren’t sharing any of their research with him.

So, with a mercenary group newly in his debt many times over, asking what use they can be to the Dynasty? What harm’s a little white lie about it being the Bright Queen’s will that they do this work for him, and take back what he gave the Assembly in the first place? It might even lead to an end to the war, and doesn’t everyone win that way?

Huh!  That’s so interesting, because with traitor-reveal hindsight, the conclusion I came to about that was exactly the opposite.

My assumption was that various forces within the Dynasty, including the Bright Queen, very much did want to see progress on the ‘retrieving our Beacon’ front, and this was Essek’s attempt to look like he was working hard on getting it back without actually doing so.  “They keep moving it, those wily, tricksy Cerberus Assembly folks,” he says, “that’s totally why we can’t find it.”  Of course!  And of course he wants the M9 to report back as soon as they know where it is rather than try to steal it back themselves–that way Essek can tip off the Assembly before the rescue crew gets there, and it can be moved again.  If he tasked them with retrieval, the M9 might do something characteristically impossible and stupid and actually get it back.

Of course, with all our theorizing about Essek’s Real Job this hiatus, who knows what the BQ is or isn’t ordering him to do–but I definitely took this as Essek’s attempt to make it look like he was trying to retrieve the Beacon, while hopefully minimizing his chances of actual success.

The irritating thing is, that while we definitely disagree about this, I can totally see how your interpretation makes sense. 

My pushback might be that Essek seems like one of the only people in the Dynasty to truly know just how off-the-rails and off-book the Mighty Nein can go, so he might not have put too much trust in the thought that they would follow his instructions and not go after it themselves. There’s also the fact that later, when he suspects he’s being watched or under suspicion from the Dynasty, he asks them to abandon his previous instructions (without stating what they were) and to instead find military intelligence for the Bright Queen (which I took to mean that that was what she actually wanted). But, I can see where you’re coming from! We’re still missing so much information that would actually clarify a lot of this. 

Essek! Tell us your secrets! WHAT IS YOUR JOB??

here’s the thing I want to figure out – what exactly was the turning point where caleb started to think that maybe forgiveness was a thing that he could have someday?  because i think it must’ve happened somewhere in the space between his first conversation with the scourger and his second.  his first meeting with her, once he got past the blood-curdling terror that she might be astrid, was angry.  he was looking at her and seeing himself and hating it.  hating her, hating himself, hating the world that created them both.  “Do you know her?” they ask and in the same breath he tells them “She is a murderer” and “She is me.”

he leaves the prison that day with the words “enjoy your mouth full of lies when they choke it out of you.”  that’s one of the most vicious things we’ve ever heard caleb say!

and then – a few weeks later – what has happened?  he is able, somehow, to be kind to her. 

first off – like he did in this past episode with essek – he puts himself down on her level.  He sits on the floor of this awful little cell to have a human conversation with this woman.  He asks for her name.  (I have previously written about Caleb and names.)  He does not deny that she’s doomed, but he tells her that her name still matters.  He does not deny the awful things she’s done, but he treats her like a human being.  And at the end of it, he gently tells her that he still considers her “a sister,” and that he plans to be at her execution.  

and that, too, is a kindness

i think most of the audience had the same impression that the rest of the nein had when he said he wanted to be there for her death - that he was doing his self-loathing thing again, that maybe he wanted to watch someone like himself die for some kind of catharsis.  and when they ask why he wants to see her execution he says “She deserves it.”  And I think Beau and Jester and everyone though he meant “she deserves to be killed,” but I think what he meant was “she deserves to have someone watching.”

She’s a person, she deserves to have someone other than her enemies witness her death.  She deserves to have someone mourn her.

(And he does, even when her last living act is to try to kill him, he mourns her.  still drenched in his own blood, he grieves for this woman.)

and i just – so much of what we saw with essek the other night came out of that conversation and those moments.  he’s been offering a hand to every broken person like himself he can find, hoping that one of them will take it.  and finally, finally one of them does.

you know, i'm just thinking about that one conversation in episode 77 (just before jester wakes essek up in the middle of the night with a shit ton of sending spells), about whether or not to ask essek for a teleport to rexxentrum

and they have two arguments against this (neither of which are don't message essek at like 1am)

the first of which is "i don't think we can ask essek to just teleport right into enemy territory"

and the second of which, though it does start as caleb's reasonable concern about favors, quickly mutates into "we can't keep asking essek for rides everywhere like he's our older brother"

and knowing what we know now about essek, both of those are hilarious in retrospect

@kaetor​ i do, yeah!

they do have a bit in the middle where they talk about other things, but here for the discussion about essek (that’s 3:08:53 if the timestamp doesn’t work)

and here for jester’s sending spells (3:16:08)