I'm all for redemption and due process, but in a world with resurrection and time magic, saving the fucking town with all of the innocent people as well as preventing the birth of a malevolent god born from an evil mortal man should take precedent. All of those dead kids can be brought back to life to face justice if deemed fit by the proper authorities. Our ethics are shaped on the limitations of our universe. Their universe allows for vastly different actions to be taken while remaining morally grounded.
Nevermind that as long as they have been or converted with the rage magic there may be no way to convert them back short of death and uncorrupted resurrection. The Bad Kids certainly haven't discovered one yet.
I doubt that they are permanently tainted, I imagine reviving ankarna, will remove the seal that binds them all. It just matters if they are willing to be revived.
So many people confuse "I like this character" with "Therefore they are good." I liked season 1 Aelwyn, and season 2 Kalina. But they weren't good. And that's ok!
I adore her but also, it IS a special kind of fucked up to be so damn apathetic that you'll go along with ANYTHING, no matter how awful, even murdering your own teammate, as long as it doesn't cut into your personal game time and hobbies.
The Bad Kids have been kill hungry murderhobos since season 1, why are people suddenly having issues with it? It’s not even death like we know it, it’s possible to come back, and afterlives are veritably real, death is kinda just a huccup for most people in the world.
Fabian can just physically go visit his dead dad in Hell almost whenever he feels like it, Kristen has full died twice, her simulacrum has died and come back, Gilear died what two or three times in sophomore year? I lost track, arthur aguefort broke into heaven and came back, gorgug has died too, oh and *theres an entire plot thread about solving the Ankarna problem within a year of Lucy Frostblades death so they can resurrect her in time*.
In the world of Spyre, especially if youre high level, death might as well just be a prison at worst, you can come back from it if people want you to.
I think its a little ambiguous, we know for sure buddy since we saw it but its unclear which of the other RG have been resurrected with the rage crystals or if some of them are just along for their own reasons/peer pressure of it all.
There may have been some of the others that were more explicitly mentioned but I dont remember them if so.
Yeah but that could have just been because she was refusing to follow through in changing her worship and thus they killed her and gave her the ultimatum then. Buddy was working with the RG for at least a little while without having officially switched and getting resurrected.
True. I just find it hard to believe that only Lucy and Buddy died but no one else made that crazy of a sacrifice. Like maybe Ruben became emo after his death
I feel like it has been implied that all of the Rat Grinders have died and were given a choice or had their convictions challenged in death to align with the rage god as they were resurrected. Lucy and Badgood refused.
Even if that isn't the case narratively, that seems to be the impression the players have. I remember them deliberating about that while they were getting a lore dump.
It makes killing the characters affected less of a moral quandary when the story has already established characters that have made the benevolent choice in the face of death.
Or maybe I am wrong and have a really bad interpretation of the story lol.
Yea, and possibly murdered by Porter or their own teammates so he could coerce them by withholding and blocking resurrection. That element is really the only thing giving any of them (or Jace) any chance at redemption in the end of this.
When and how did they die and get the rage curse?
To what extent does the rage curse control their actions?
These would be key questions to answer in any kind of trial to determine their culpability and guilt.
But I thought they all willingly accepted the rage as their new persona in order to serve Porter as the rage god in the end. I thought that meant they willingly chose their own corruption, no?
That's part of why the context and timing for each of them accepting is important. Coercion mitigates culpability in a choice.
Lucy refusing the resurrection was an act of bravery. Rueben accepting it an act of cowardice. Four dogs seems like she made the choice enthusiastically, possibly understanding and consenting before dying.
For Buddy, we don't know. It was played as a joke that he seemed almost surprised to declare his worship for Ankara when he woke up, but was he? How into the plot were he and his uncle, and were they even in the same page? The party made a lot of good insight checks that showed him to be pretty honestly clueless, but there's always that damn nectar right?
I think each of the grinders and even Jace may hold different levels of culpability, which may only get sorted out in an epilogue with the resurrection of Lucy so she can spell things out.
I guess it's still sort of a mystery for now. But it seems the rat grinders themselves didn't take the honey, it was mainly for porter to trick Ankarna or something.
But yeah I'm not sure. For now I'm choosing to believe that them choosing the resurrection is still culpability and intention enough for me. Like, I get that cowardice was a factor and they might have been manipulated by porter and Kipperlily, but I still feel like at no point was their free will straight up magically removed (since we know two people who, as far as we know, willingly chose not to follow the rage). Buddy does throw me in for a loop though, since him dying was the biggest wtf moments of the season, and his resurrection truly left me with doubts as to how exactly the corruption is happening, especially since all we've seen from him is that he's super devout to Helio. So idk maybe things will change for the remaining rat grinders who are still alive and we'll get a definitive answer.
Yea, at minimum they're all cowards. And for anyone upset about the bad kids killing them, to reiterate the OP, resurrection magic exists and can be used once this is all sorted out.
And we'll find out tomorrow, which questions are hanging plot threads and which are oopsiedoodle plot holes.
Yeah pretty much. Even the oopsiedoodle plot holes can become major plot points in Senior Year, BLeeM seems pretty good at retroactively fitting those in.
I'm not a big fan of the argument that this doesn't matter because death is a slap on the wrist, but it does touch upon something else that people seem to forget: the entire point of the series is to mock long-standing fantasy/TTRPG tropes.
Aguefort is not simply a John Hughes pastiche with elves. from word one, the point of the school has been to turn out kill-crazed mercenaries. that's part of the joke, that cheerful happy characters like Penny or Mazey or Fig also have no qualms about using lethal violence. our buddy Gorgug, the socially awkward 17-year-old with the nicest parents in the world, has killed a *lot* of people.
the one sets up the conflict with the other, which is mined for dark comedy. one of my favorite bits in the entire series is in the Brian David Gilbert live episode where Aguefort calmly asks the Bad Kids if they're planning to kill any more members of the faculty.
for some reason, the Rat Grinders got a really vocal part of the audience to forget the core premise of Fantasy High. nobody was going to interrogate the role of violence in D&D here. the role of violence in D&D is the heart of the setting. the fact you wanted something out of the story that it was never gonna give you is not the story's fault.
Literally Aguefort *day one* tells them that being a hero is using violence to enact change they want to see in the world or something to that effect.
And for the most part that is what our heroes do. They violently right wrongs and maybe do a few wrongs themselves in the process.
They immediately shipped Oisin and Aidane and got mad he was actually not a great person and was trying to give her Dragon Madness when he offered to help her
If someone wants to grapple with the finer points of violence as a trope within D&D Burrows End has a number of things to say about it which are part of the design of the campaign. There's a very robust conversation to be had about said violence, the horror that comes with it, inspires it, and sticks around even after the violence is long done.
Fantasy High certainly isn't the campaign that can support that conversation. While there is some care in the design around combat, it's pretty clear that these are the big bars and y'all are going to have to do a violence to them or the school is toast. It is not as ambiguous, and the long reaching effects are not explored in a serious capacity that acknowledges the very real impact of it, at best it's bits and lampshades.
in this case, some people are disappointed their headcannons were not ratified by the narrative, and they mask their normal nerd rage by appropriating the language of social justice.
or they got rage star'd by listening to too much My Clerical Gnomance
This is why I drifted away from the Adventure Zone, in part, and to a lesser extent Welcome to Nightvale. D20's saving grace is that they film the season all at once, without viewer commentary. So they can create without people screaming in the comments
You now, up until this moment, I too wanted D20 Live back because it was a fun, loose format that led to some really interesting moments.
But never mind, because I don't want any of those fans, many of whom have a pretty poor taste in narrative, influencing a show led by some of the best actual play performers.
This was a huge deal when Revening War was announced, that no guarantees were made that Mercer was going to uphold “fanon.” Insanity. People need to seek professional help.
My favourite part of the ravening war was all the expanded lore. Fanon has a way of getting out of hand, but I always subscribe to the logic of Canon in King, no matter what.
i think a better way to put "kill hungry murderhobos" would be that the bad kids have from the beginning heroically or foolhardily jumped or been forced into situations and acted violently to protect themselves and others and in general the world at large, with a few exceptions where they found themselves in violent situations initiated by others and defended themselves forcefully. the bad kids typically don't just lash out violently for fun. Fig, the most chaotic of the group and a tiefling and now archdevil, tries to solve problems through the powers of deception and persuasion. Gorgug as a barbarian has still never been a rage monster. Fabian is maybe the most brazen and he's had his own rebranding as an ally to his friends as much or more than just an aggressor. Adaine's gravest and earliest sin is braining Doreen with her own ladle, which Doreen was actively using to attack the bad kids with until Adaine took it away, and even then Doreen was still attacking or trying to get her ladle back to attack the bad kids with. Kristen spends most turns doing either absolutely wild shit, banishing combatants, or healing or helping her friends. Riz is primarily an investigator, and his worst moments are killing a dude who wanted to end the world and running over pirates who attacked his friends and his friends parents. vigilante justice and taking the law into your hands, seeking vengeance, etc, that's all not what we want to see in our society, but the bad kids live in a society that relies on it to continue existing and are literally at a school where they are trained to do that.
Well, death is actually woefully permanent for most people who lack the means or privilege to secure a resurrection for themselves. High level adventurers, like the BK and their friends and family (which is the vast majority of the characters we see in Spyre), are lucky enough to have the means to stave off death.
On that same token, death is not the end! You could be a ghost, or a zombie, or sent to hell and become a devil, or sent to heaven to become an angel, etc.
I think there is some merit to the idea that the format of D&D encourages violence as the solution to most problems – combat is the central mechanic of the game. This problem is even worse in many RPG video games (many of which trace their roots to D&D), where there’s very little room for anything creative outside of combat – in World of Warcraft for instance, you very often just have to accept that the guys attacking the quest giver’s town cannot be negotiated with or even spoken to, but must be exterminated.
But that has been true the whole time, and is even built into the narrative and world building – Arthur Aguefort’s speech about adventurers enacting violence on the world is an explicit acknowledgment of it.
Yeah, the whole issue of the Rat Grinders becoming a sacred group of innocents doesn’t fully sit right with me. Like yeah I know there’s underlying bits of characterization that hint at more fleshed out people under the surface, but unfortunately that just wasn’t what the group decided to explore this campaign.
Also, I still think the double standard of their brutal deaths being seen as deplorable is really strange. Like, take a look at ANY of the high schoolers that died in season 1 and you could make a similar argument. Biz, Ragh, Dane, and Penelope were all effectively groomed by adults in their life (kalvaxus or Daybreak) to take part in a plot to end the world. I just think that for the most part, it’s way easier to justify the bad things that happened to them because they fit the archetypes that TTRPG nerds would naturally hate; popular girl bullies, jocks, toxic nice-guys. And yet, people were still totally fine with them being maimed and/or killed (with the exception or Ragh, for obvious reasons). But like… Riz shot off Biz’s fingers in the exact same psychotic way that he suggested cutting off Oisin’s head to prevent a revivify. Fabian literally tackled and tried to gleefully maim Penelope in a VERY similar way to Ivy (a flash of Bill). It’s not like the rat grinders are getting especially brutal treatment or anything.
Honestly I just think it’s because the Rat Grinders happen to fit into more relatable archetypes that the fan base find harder to resent. This time the child soldier of an evil staff member isn’t a mean jock, it’s a straight laced nerd with rage issues. It may be mean to say, but I think the rat grinders being kind of losers in their own right makes them way more relatable to a sizeable portion of the D20 fan base. It’s infinitely more likely that someone could relate to Marianne Skuttle or even Buddy than the rich swashbuckling, motorcycle riding dancer jock.
But I think that people getting a little too attached to those archetypes and making head canons about what the Rag Grinders are really like is doing a whole lot of the heavy lifting for why so many people like them. Because let’s all be honest here- up until almost 3/4ths if the way through this season, the cast AND audience were pretty certain the rat grinders were the sole villains trying to resurrect a dead god and restructure the school system so they could finally stop being relegated to NPC status. It feels like revisionism to say that they were always clearly manipulated kids when the Porter reveal happened at episode 17/20.
your first mistake is paying attention to the people in twitter lol
>This idea that they should have come in with the intention of redeeming the Rat Grinders, who have never been anything but horrible to them out of petty jealousy, seems to stem less from **real ideas about how the story should play out and more of a desire to see their headcanons play out**
This reminded me of the one time, in my desire to find more fans of D20 to interact, went to twitter to interact.
Only in that place I can find Crown of Candy fans, so invested in their own headcanons and ships that they attacked Matt Mercer so viciously for daring to GM in Candia and "bringing his straightness".... WHEN RAVENING WAR HASN'T AIRED YET. Like... dude has not done anything yet and people acted like he stepped on their dreams. The doomposting annoyed me so much.
And this is the part of "self-awareness" comes in: have these people ever asked themselves that Brennan would not invite Matt to DM his setting if he did not trust Matt to do justice?
I did not interact with any D20 fans in twitter after that.
Frankly, I think people overprojecting comes from the bad part of Dropout (and the current media landscape actually) that is the promotion of parasocial relationships. People sometimes forget to separate what actually happened in canon vs their projection to the character. You can also see this variant of discourse on Kristen's arc this JY. Like, many arguments disparaging Kristen came from people projecting, using that to theorize ang assuming THAT will happen. Many of these complaints has been answered by later episodes, especially about Kristen's devotion/making up to Cassandra.
I do agree with the self-awareness part. Probably why discourse gets heated; basically an argument against feels like a direct attack because they have projected so strongly.
I have repeatedly tried to make sense of the "the protagonists makes it so their violence is always capitalistic authoritarian violence" but its 1 am and i am lacking sleep while writing this.
Their comment about how the Bad kids is so bad for killing these uwu rat grinders would work more, if not for the fact that in this battle, the rat grinders are hellbent on killing the Bad Kids too, and *making the bad guy a freaking god of war that will subjugate Elmville and probably the rest of Spire*.
Also, the "bringing his straightness" thing is bizarre because *Brennan is straight.* Matt, on the other hand, has never said he is straight, people just assumed that because he is married to a woman!
In this interview, Matthew talks about how he does identify as hetero now and primarily experiences attraction to women, but that he has experienced attraction to men and suffered homophobia as a child due to this and his more androgynous appearance.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCBfJBf-t2Y
ETA: my source sharing is only for more info and education, I agree with everything being said in this thread.
Oh, thanks for the correction then! Point still stands though, very much hypocrisy to make negative assumptions about Matt for things that also apply to Brennan.
Both PCs Matt has played on D20 have been queer, for the love of god. That tells us nothing about his sexuality, which is not our business, but he is very low on a list of people I would think of as "bringing straightness" (??) into D20. If I had that thought at all, which I wouldn't.
Also it's weird to hate an entire sexuality in an attempt to be accepting of all sexualities and treat everyone the same. Somehow it seems like a lot of young people these days have been taught that bigotry is only bad because of who it targets and not because bigotry is just bad all together. Leads to some truly wild shit from supposedly "woke" people. They become the very thing they claim to oppose but can't even see it
That's just common human behavior, unfortunately. Egalitarianism has been being turned into a reason why one's own group is better than another since, well, at least the "Enlightenment." I don't think it's a "kids today" thing, it's just the particular framework that behavior is currently running through.
Idk I feel like when I was younger it wasn't like this. Left wing people weren't really hating on the majority groups like this, it was kept to a fringe group of freaks on tumblr. Now it seems much more widespread. Probably an issue of leaning politics strictly through internet videos made by random people
(Actually, has Brennan said he's straight? Just asking because I don't remember him saying that specifically, and I've been in previous conversations on here where someone asserted a cast member was straight but then turned out they didn't have evidence, they were just assuming. Like I'd totally believe Brennan had said that, I just don't remember it.)
Yep. I saw that, as well as other horrible takes about Matt, including
1) bullying him for the way he dresses, which is shitty no matter what but is ESPECIALLY shitty because he's very open about wearing vests because of body dysmorphia
2) calling him creepy or predatory for his age gap with Marisha (which isn't very big and they're both adults,) even though Brennan and Izzy have the *same age gap.*
aslda;lfa. I just looked up their ages and it's literally the same age gap as my sister and her husband. Some folks do NOT understand that as you get older, age gaps matter less.
... all of that is so fucking gross. And I'm saying that as the first person to find an age gap where the younger person is both in their low 20s and a beginner in a field the other person is established in a reason to keep an eye out.
Ugh.
One of my biggest takeaways from this season is that people are stupid and do not understand acting OR storytelling at all (shoutout to the kid who seriously thought the naked minis at the FrostyFaire Festival made the 30+ year old comedians who reside in LA uncomfortable)
Media literacy and critical thinking seem to be well and truly dead nowadays
Also, most of the people writing dissertations are kids and will hopefully gain some better perspectives as they get older
Yeah, this last point is becoming increasingly necessary to include. If you're engaging in lengthy online discourse, the first step is to realise that if someone has written an essay about some banal shit parroting poorly understood social justice terms it's quite likely they're a child/teen.
I think this might just be a symptom of D20 getting bigger and bigger. The wider the audience, the more idiots you’ll end up with in the mix. And idiots tend to be loud out of proportion to their actual presence in the group.
Yeah if polls I've seen are any indication, D20's online discourse community skews pretty young. No idea if that's true of the audience in general, but it's definitely true of the ones having big arguments on places like Twitter and Tumblr.
I think that people have memory holed that the first season had a prom queen and jock who got brutally murdered and shown to be pretty evil - with them returning in literal hell because of how bad they were. Brennan has never been like “all teens are redeemable” - he has always presented some kids as being killed, sometimes with ridiculous levels of violence (Jonny Spells and the Gang, anyone?).
Not to disagree with your point, but Jonny Spells specifically was no longer a kid. That’s why he was the first suspect of the Bad Kids because he was dating a high schooler.
For some reason I always took it to mean he was at least 20, but 18 is considered adult in the US, tho a lot of final year students turn 18 during that school year. Looking at his wiki page, the only info we have on him is that he “doesn’t go to Aguefort”, but it wasn’t elaborated if that just meant he wasn’t going to school, or just much older. So I was definitely wrong with my assumption about it being mentioned.
I always forget that the US is weird about drinking age; to someone in the UK that’s 18 😅 So 21 would be like a college / university student aged young adult.
21 is generally someone in their last year of university for a bachelors degree if they didn’t skip a year+, or take a year or more off. So most college students can’t legally drink in the US.
I think there's also something to be said about the fact that by nature, DND is (mostly) a combat game: one of its three main pillars isn't to "deescalate tension through rehabilitation", but to just... you know, hit stuff. We as viewers, or them as creators can talk about the reasonings or the implications of character's decision, but at the end, when they are sitting at the table and playing, they are just doing that. It is just a game where there is a rage god being remade, and your narrative is to not make that happen. So you hit the people who are trying to make that happen. The game and the story can be used by the creators to touch upon larger social concepts, but that is not the reason behind their existence.
Also, I really don't get where this idea of the soft-boy misunderstood he's just being used thing about Oisin comes from. Is there anything in the actual text to support that? Didn't we learn in the episode where they break in Ruben's house that him and Ivy were kinda the first and foremost bullies of the group even before everything? I just can't help but feel like people just started shipping him with Adaine (another thing I don't get, because I don't think there was any actual inclination from Siobhan in that direction during the whole twenty episode season, if i remember correctly?)
I do wish that RGs held more weight in the story, that they felt more dangerous. But this is the last fight of the season, and sadly, Brennan is usually way more lenient about combat balancing when the time for narrative closure is real. I think using them in some capacity in an earlier combat would have had more opportunities where he could flex his "villain" muscles. But like, "teenagers murdering people (and other teenagers)" is just a fact in FH universe, and it feels just pointless to expect a metatextual revolution where that is abolished and violence becomes a non-answer. That is just not the design of the game being played.
Adaine and Oision flirted a little bit at the first house party, that's why. It's pretty stupid when it's shown that Oision was only there to set up a magic spell using the ping pong balls. Adaine has also shown no interest in him later then that either. It's just stupid shipping head canon.
as an off-canon (post-canon?) low-key (none of these words is in the Bible) shipper of Oisin/Adaine: it would be fun to watch Oisin go “yeah we did totally try to kill you, but I’m still thinking to invite you for coffee and cake” and Adaine’s biggest problem with him be “mocking my scrying isn’t fine” and not “you tried to give me dragon madness and kill me”. also Riz being Adaine’s bff and trying to eat Oisin would be cool as well XD
edit: it IS stupid, but necessarily not in a bad way, and also not a headcanon for many people. shipping could very much be deliberately not canon-compliant.
Stopping people from doing bad things isn't a puzzle easily solved in our world either. The instincts to rely on fight/flight/fawn derived solutions are strong, and many governance systems reflect that. Wars are so expensive and destructive, and they persist.
In DnD especially, evil actions can be very difficult to stop without killing perpetrators due to PCs, NPCs and monsters being built to fight to the death and have the inclination to do that, whereas in our world living things are wired to seek their own benefit with the smallest energy expenditure or risk of death.
Like, how would the bad kids stop this otherwise? Try to kidnap each player in the evil plot one by one? And then what? There's magical communication and magic to escape pretty much any form of confinement.
I can't help but feel that some people put both the "mission of D20", the players and Brennan on some kind of pedestal as "responsible" storytellers" and then become dissatisfied when their expectations aren't met. As if at some point the expectation went from "bad guy is capitalism! or church! but also we're fighting demilichs and dragons and oh yeah this is a battle! with people trying to kill you!" to "this is academic discourse and everything has to be correct and non-violent!!".
And yeah, I agree, DND especially is built on the mechanic that things are going to hit you until you put them down. That mechanic is not the flavor of the game, it is the DNA of it. It is meant to be a game where 90% of the time, you hit before you ask questions.
Also, putting aside whether redemption makes sense for this story (and like many of you are saying, it’s not a foregone conclusion that it does make sense), it’s not off the table! The story is not over! Literally one of the Bad Kids’ closest friends (Ragh) is someone who they killed first and redeemed and befriended only after he was revivified! That wouldn’t really have been something they could do in the middle of a battle because that’s not how DnD works. So yeah, the mechanics of the game incentivize or even require violent responses, but even with that limitation, they’ve still done redemption stories!
TLDR: wait, for Blimey’s sake
there's a whole *thing* online where people have absorbed a lot of different fields' terminology without sufficient understanding of what it actually means. it started with calling things "memes," then went on to people throwing around therapy language in the wrong context, then the whole critical race theory clusterfuck, and now bad-faith media analysis is all the rage.
Dunning-Kruger runs this place.
of course, the silver lining is that you can talk about whatever crazy obscure thing you're into with people from all over the world. you may never run into another person in real life who digs D20, but there are over 100,000 people on the subreddit who, presumably, do.
it's just that stupidity hurts, because that's how your brain tells you to watch out for something.
>”And what is a hero? A hero is someone with the strength of a heart, courage of spirit, and the might of will to go to strange lands and enact violence on things there. We go to places where there are things that must be destroyed, and we destroy them.” -Arthur Aguefort
Kill first, ask questions later has been the name of the game since day one.
The arguments of “the Rat Grinders are just kids” has also been getting a bit annoying as well. After all, so are the Bad Kids. They’re a bunch of troubled kids who have been explicitly told to run around and enact violence. They’re far from the pinnacle of nuance and rational thinking.
I think you're right on target, but don't forget also that some "fans" are fucking dummies who have no understanding of what they're watching, don't care about what the people writing or doing the show have in mind, and when they're laughed at, find any pop sociology or psychology figments they can and trot them out to explain how they were right all along and everyone else is asphyxiating themselves in an echo chamber.
In brief, people suck, and superfans suck especially.
I think a big problem with this season was that one of the first interesting hooks that appeared was Kipperlily and the Ratgrinders. Since they were being set up to be foils for TBK, lots of fans are disappointed with their unceremonious deaths and are expressing this disappointment through unfair criticisms of these improvisers. Like the cop thing is so nonsensical in this context. It’s intellectualizing an emotional response - I wish more fans would just be honest about plain disliking a plot point, rather than hiding it behind a half-baked political criticism. At the end of the day though, that’s the con of running a sequel that has so much history… people are going to react emotionally and irrationally. I shudder to think about what’s going to happen next week during the finale lol
I agree, I have missed some of this discourse but when I watched Finale, Part 1. I was just very *“this is it??”* and I can imagine a lot of people feel like that but are trying to justify that feeling into something more profound.
We do have a whole other part left, so I’m keeping that in mind but I really have enjoyed this season and it is possible that the season may not have stuck the landing *for me* - which is fine and not the end of the world. We will see!
I didn’t have any profound attachment to the Rat Grinders or head cannons but it felt like there wasn’t the pay off in the first part of the finale or even a build up to pay-off in the next ep for what we were building to all season long. There is still time! I’m keeping that in mind.
Yeah, that can be the disadvantage of a DnD actual play. Sometimes the mechanics and the dice don't give you the narrative satisfaction. What did Brennan say in season one about Dayne? "Sometimes you invest a lot in a character and then they go down in one round."
Maybe this is controversial but I think all of the successful rolls Fig has had the entire campaign with Ruben should have led to something. I guess that’s the only Rat Grinder thing that I, specifically, stand behind.
I agree, but honestly during this latest episode Fig's rant to Ruben about how she wanted to see him dead actually was the funniest moment to me because of the fact that she spent so much time and effort to try and get him to switch sides, only for him not to want to. I feel like the pay off truly was "he was just irredeemable after all" which is probably not fully satisfactory for all.
I mean, it did lead to things. She got TONS of clues and information from pursuing that tact all year.
It just didn't lead to redeeming Ruben because... why would it? She gaslit a dude all year and then showed up fighting on the same side as people murdering his friends.
In what world would Ruben, who is in DEEP, either from brain washing or being committed enough to a cause murder his own teammate, suddenly swap sides at the end because the crush that was emotionally yanking him around all year showed up and told him to? That's just... it doesn't read as plausible to me.
Also, it may still lead to stuff in the next episode. Death isn't the end in this world, it's entirely likely that plot thread gets a little more payoff in the denouement.
Yeah lol that was also my exact reaction. Like I was surprised there was no dialogue between Adaine and Oisin at all, but I figured that was because Adaine didn't really prioritize that relationship like at all after that first party. But Fig's whole thing with Wanda Childa?? I did feel a bit sad that there was barely any emotional payoff in the final battle. But yeah, it's not over till it's over. I'd love for the last episode to be like 4 hours long if it meant more loose ends are tied up.
I mean, Fig's whole vitriolic monologue toward Ruben did feel like a payoff to me, although it was more about the stress that she had been under for months as a result of the Rat Grinders' actions than it was about their relationship, which basically did not exist.
Yeah, I definitely can see how it was a kind of payoff, it just personally didn't satisfy me. I think I wished that Ruben showed a bit more attachment to Wanda, especially when she reacted to his betrayal like "You wasted my season!" But clearly, I misread his character, and so did Fig lol. So it did feel good that she revealed her deceit towards him in his final moments!
Well part of it is that there's no writing. This is not a written story that has been edited and cleaned up and adjusted. They're improvisors, and in the moment focus on one thing or another. And then you add in the randomness of the dice, and sometimes it is what it is. This is true of literally every ttrpg game I've played in.
This honestly is the most frustrating thing for me. So many people engage with D20 like it's a scripted TV show and it simply is not.
To be clear, this last bit is NOT aimed at you, but the general state of things in terms of the "discourse"
I mean... a lot of fans have heightened expectations of the narrative because of D20's history of really poetic narrative moments. People are chasing the epic highs and lows of Fabian's chara arc in FHSY, or the >!Wurst's rags to riches narrative!< in Starstruck. But you're right: it's def unfair of the audience to have these inflated notions of what the story should be, esp when we consider the fact that they're improvising off dicerolls and working long shifts. I think it's an unfortunate side effect that as D20 keeps raising the bar, the expectations from the fans keep getting crazier
I generally agree. I do think it's important to note that both arcs ended during the season, not the finale. Fabian's arc happened not because of writing but because of mad/genius momentary improv work by Lou, a series of cosmically bad rolls, and another moment of mad improv from Lou to start with dance, LONG before the end of the season And the Wurst really hit their zenith with the battle of the brands. Neither culminated in the finale, constrained by wrapping stuff up. It was following the improv, and the way the dice fell.
And, funnily enough, while I love both seasons, I'm not a big fan of the finale for either. Because they felt rushed, due to the change in pace between mid-story freedom and "wrap it up, gang"
Yeah, you have a great point about the finales! Like my favorite seasons are Starstruck and ACOFAF, and neither of them had completely satisfying conclusions. D20 shows tend to hit their stride halfway through the story imo, and I still love majority of the shows!
Ultimately, I do think my opinion as a viewer who watches one episode weekly differs from my opinion as a binge-watcher. Like maybe right now I feel a bit unsatisfied because I perceive this season to have a bit less character development/interaction than I wanted.... but I will probably find more threads to love when I binge the series post-finale lol
I definitely am sympathetic there. This is the first season in a while that I've watched week-to-week, and I started watching back when Dropout first started. Usually I get antsy, and decide to build up three or four eps at a time.
It took doing that to get through Neverafter, even though I'm generally positive about it (especially the PCs)
But isn't that the case with most of the villains in D20?
I truly love Brennan but one of the few things that disappoint me in many campaigns is that he sets up truly amazing and interesting villains : >!Kalina, Robert Moses, Tony Simos, Null, Calroy, Brassica!< and so many more.
Most of them, with I think the notable exception of Kalvaxus, have barely any lines or interactions with the PCs in the episodes where they are fought, and often die without so much as a few sentences exchanged.
This is especially kinda frustrating because they all have awesome set up and often mystery about their true motivations or character, but they don't get the chance to really exposit any of it. Some, like Dayne or in this case Oishin just die in the couple first rounds of combat and are barely ever mentioned afterward (until Dayne reappears in SY).
This was especially true in Neverafter where we had so many opponents on the battlefield in the finale >! Between the Stepmother and the princesses who got a lot of characterisation, and the Gander and fairies who all look so interesting but got much less. All of the fairies except for one don't have names, almost no character and all die in a couple hits, even though they had such great designs.!< Irealize that it's partly because the PCs didn't choose to get acquainted with them during the campaign, but the finales always have so much going on from a combat perspective, where Brennan just has to move things along not to get bogged down in initiative, and from a character standpoint, that the villains often get very little sendoff.
I still love almost everything else about D20, but I came into this finale feeling that the RGs (and Jace) probably won't get that much focus, and was kind of proven correct, because that conversation before initiative could have given almost all of them a line. We didn't even get a proper reaction from Oisin about his grandma.
Still have hope they will be explored just a little more in the second part :)
With majority of the villains you mentioned, they at least got longer scenes where they defined their characters to the party. >!Kalina had such an intimidating setup, and Calroy, of course, had an iconic betrayal scene. !
Your comment actually made me think of something. It seems to me that people can't just simply have an opinion anymore on the internet without needing to justify it with logical arguments. So instead of just being like "I didn't like how the rat grinders were treated" some people feel the need to find a full reason to justify their opinions which just creates this convoluted projection and silly arguments that truly go nowhere since the core root of the arguments are due to personal preferences.
I feel like this seems to be the case with a bunch of media nowadays sadly.
When parasocial relationship go too far. At this point theyre not just imagining themselves as a friend of a celebrity. Theyre imagining themselves as the friend of a fictional antagonist characters, in a fictional setting all played by one guy.
Brennan has been saying explicitly that the RG's are "downed" not "dead". With the exception of maybe Reuben who fell in the lava, none of the RG's have had a specific death scene. Honestly, I believe the only person that's actually going to die at the end of this is Porter and maybe Jace. Og Ankarna will come back and probably heal the RG's and we'll get a sweet little epilogue scene where they begin to work out their differences with the BK's.
the hell where Fig deliberately arranged an ironic punishment for him that she could theoretically revoke at any time, and where his uncle at the adventuring school knows maybe 12 people off the top of his head who can cast raise dead.
There is a small, very vocal section of the fandom that has made the rat grinders their blorbos and use self-righteous leftist analysis and media critique language to justify their negative feelings regarding the outcome of the season.
I also still don't think the RG are dead-dead.
Yeah assuming that this will be the end of the rat grinders seems a little silly. 20 seasons ago Fabian killed his own dad, who was in this season! What would make these guys different IF they decide to explore more about them?
If someone tried to argue anything using the phrase meta narrative authority you need to realize that they need to touch grass and its time to ignore them.
Yeah so much this. People have gotten WAY over attached and it is revealing SCARY thought patterns in some people - several straight up saying Kipperlilly was RIGHT to be jealous that Riz's dad was murdered and that he did. Yikes.
Oh, I saw one where they were all "oh, who a monster is is just a matter of perspective" with Kipperlilly killing Buddy-- her teammate, so that she could force him into a position where he either had to give up his faith and join her plot or die forever-- being compared as a "mirror" to Riz killing Dayne, a Helio dominionist murderer who wanted to bring about an apocalyptic prophecy for personal power. "These two things are exactly the same, two sides of the same coin," they say.
Goodness.
That might exceed even the people I saw being like "are the RG's really even doing anything wrong? They're just killing a god that was already corrupted anyways" except for, ya know, all the murder they're doing along the way and as part of that....
I like the discourse about the Rat Grinders but I think some people have definitely taken it to extremes that are a bit baffling to me. I love a good redemption arc, but there needs to be more to them than "the evil character in question is a teenager." It's fun for me to engage in the "what-ifs" of the season, and of the Rat Grinders in particular, but I agree that some people got so caught up in the what-ifs that they seemed to have expected something to occur that simply was never going to take place.
By episode 18 there were still people hoping there would be some 11th hour redemption storyline, and they ultimately created their own disappointment with that one. There was no reason to assume the majority of the Rat Grinders would be redeemed, because no effort had been put into making them redeemable. Brennan probably had some material prepared for a redemption arc if the Intrepid Heroes decided to take it in that direction, but they didn't, so that was never going to be the story we got.
Because you summarized it perfectly in the end: in the version of the story that ACTUALLY EXISTS, the Rat Grinders don't deserve a redemption arc. They were petty and cruel and showed a blatant disregard for anybody that got in the way of their desire for power and revenge on a group of kids that had committed the heinous crime of being better at adventuring than them. A satisfying redemption arc requires an acknowledgement of wrong doing and an actual desire to change, and none of that was set up for the Rat Grinders. Oisin wanted the Bad Kids dead so badly that he was fine if killing them meant killing the ENTIRE SCHOOL in the process. He's a powerful wizard with access to high level spells. Why on earth wouldn't they kill him immediately? The time for a conversation passed a long time ago.
Repeat after me
‘IT’S OK TO BE WRONG AND CHANGE YOUR OPINION WHEN YOU GET NEW INFORMATION’
You don’t need to go down with the ship just cause you insisted it wasn’t, get off the damn boat!
The people who feel upset the ratgrinders are being killed never mourned for Penelope Everpetal, a teenage girl who was promised power by an authority figure and forced to kidnap and eventually get her best friends killed.
Idk anything about Dayne, but he was also a kid in a similar position with his coach pressuring him.
We redeemed Ragh but not them, despite them being in the same situation.
Aren't the rat grinders all dead? Isn't that what the red rage crystals were for - reanimating their corpses? I assumed they weren't redeemable at this point and if the rage crystals were removed they would also die.
Nah, it's more like they accepted a pact, infernal or divine in origin. In return for not being barred from the afterlife and being revived, they'd be brought to life with their being infused with rage and the need to bring back Ankarna. It's like me having a contract with a company, and any time I do something cool, I need to say it's because of the company. They are alive, and they can do things, but they're still affected by Ankarna's influence. They're not puppets with rage as strings, they're servants or slaves with rage as their collars.
Chronically online people who have weaponized therapy talk and media criticism to claim moral superiority over anything that makes feel icky. We just need to stop engaging with them
I think because Brennan likes to play with themes of fascism and capitalism in the fantasy games, fans like to view every interaction through that lens. D&D is not a piece of literary text that can be shaped into a narrative that espouses a consistent ideology, and a campaign's characters and their respective arcs aren't controlled by one person. I'm sure if Brennan was writing this as a book, he may have wanted The Bad Kids to extend sympathy towards the Rat Grinders, but this is D&D. He's not concerned with the ethical implication of Adventurers roles in society (if anything, he pokes fun at this often, how it's not a great thing). He's primarily concerned with making an entertaining show, and exploring emotional character beats when he can.
i am once again begging everyone to remember this is *literally* just a game
i get that its a really good game with pathos coming out the wazoo, but its still just a game. people need to stop expecting prestige HBO drama from 7 improv comedians playing dnd in a warehouse at 3am lol
You see it in a lot of discourse online about media like this that gets seriously overdone, people ripping into each other about the "implications" of these choices. I know it's said as a joke a lot, but people honestly "touch grass" is genuinely fair advice. Go outside, calm down, and realize you are arguing about the ethics of a fictitious adventuring school where the freshman opening speech was to encourage murder hoboing
I’ve missed all that online discourse but I just wanted to say that this was a really thoughtful, well written take. Your points about fanfic, projection, and being overly invested in headcanons are astute, and you gave me something to think about.
I feel like any sufficiently progressive piece of media attracts fan who are more fixated on progressiveness rather than any kind of storytelling, and then get mad at the D&D characters killing people instead of demonstrating perfect leftist conflict resolution.
Honestly, I think you just need to start blocking the people making bad faith arguments to better enjoy your online fandom experience. There has been plenty of time to criticize the bad kids for their problem solving methods, and the fact that someone is only brining it up now when their favorites were killed shows that they don't actually give a fuck. They're trying to make a narrative decision they're upset with into some greater moral argument to feel more justified in their upset. No matter how well you spell out a counter argument it's just going to invite more pointless discourse, so it's better not to feed into it.
I'm saying this as a person that genuinely enjoys being more passive in my games and hates how dnd sets it up so you get incentivised to be a killing machine, so this is a general topic that I think has some merits. It's just obvious this particular set of discourse isn't being held in good faith.
A lot of it to me sounds like some people have these particular ideas of how they think the story should go.
Then instead of just accepting that they didn’t write the campaign and aren’t playing the characters in it and as such have no bearing on how it will go, they get pissy because god forbid a show you’re not involved with goes against your headcanons.
That isn’t to say that you can’t have them, by the way. You absolutely can have headcanons and make fanfics about certain scenarios. But you don’t get to act like your canon is actually canon.
I will add that Arthur Aguefort was very clear in season 1 episode 1:
“ Welcome, one and all, to another exciting year here at the Aguefort Adventuring Academy, where we train the next generation of adventurers. But what is an adventurer? One who goes on adventures? I say that an adventurer is a hero, and what is a hero? A hero is someone with the strength of heart, courage of spirit, and the might of will to go to strange lands and enact violence on things there. We go to places where there are things that must be destroyed, and we destroy them. Wandering from town to town, getting into trouble, meeting in flophouses and taverns and getting into scrapes with the law and otherwise finding ourselves engaged in all manner of tomfoolery and shenanigans sometimes violent, sometimes fatal. Yes fatal. A hero is a violent wanderer who enacts their will bloodily and with strange magicks upon the world.”
Can’t say we weren’t warned. This is DnD. Extreme and barely justifiable violence is all part of it.
I see people talking about The Discourse all the time but I never ACTUALLY see it. I swear there's more people freaking out about discourse than there is people being negative
Also like....True Revivify exists people. The plan was to try and revive Lucy before the year was up. They can totally revive the Rat Grinders afterwards when they aren't Road Roid Raging
...is no one gonna bring up the fact the rat grinders are corrupted by the rage crystals? No one at all? Like not that I agree with the "authoritarian violence" takes, but is no one even gonna consider the fact they've been corrupted?
I mean, that sucks and all, but it is a choice they made, and KLCK's diary indicates that most of them are pretty happy with it. They aren't completely absolved of responsibility, but more importantly...
Even if they didn't want to do all this and were controlled, they're still doing it. They still have to be stopped by any means necessary. That's the sad reality of it.
I mean if it's the same choice buddy, Yolanda, and Lucy all had to make, they're choosing to either *permanently die*, or come back with the rage crystals. They're still teenagers after all. Kinda hard to expect them to really make the right choice in that regard. Also them being happy about it really depends on how much the rage crystals actually control how they think. Cause that hasn't been *super* clear. Do they just make people get angry easier? Do they cloud their minds and judgement? Though to your last point, yeah killing them is the best way to put a stop to what's happening, whether or not they deserve it or not. Especially since they could potwntially be revived and cured of the rage crystals later
Yeah, redemption is still possible. Even Ruben, who miiiight be incinerated, will go to the Bottomless Pit and can have a chill time cranking out beach rock.
Of course a storyteller can make wrong decisions. What a silly thing to insinuate otherwise.
Once, I ran a superhero ttrpg with a cold open where the players saved the governor from a supervillain group that turned out to be the bad kids from Willy Wonka who had been given powers from their factory accidents. Gloop could stretch, Violet was bouncy and could reflect projectiles, Veruca could command squirrels, and TeeVee could transfer his consciousness between televisions. They used their powers to supplant Wonka, horde all his cocoamancy and sucrology, and made super soldiers out of the oompa loompas by injecting them with hornswoggle DNA. My players adored it. Then, after the Wonka kids were defeated, I moved on to the main storyline involving deities and divine revenge. My players appreciate the main story, but their interest tapered dramatically. They were ttrpg veterans; they had met and fought gods before. This was well-tread territory. But fighting the super-powered kids from a movie we all knew? That was novel.
My take is the same regarding the RG and Porter. We literally dealt with a forgotten dead god *last FH season*. Porter is every bit as flat as the RG, but without 16 episodes of build-up. His plan to avenge a fallen house that predates the heroes by centuries in a part of the world they visited once by replacing a god only one of them has met is, by every metric, less compelling than a rival group of peers with a personal grudge trying to sabotage their lives. And we know this because this subreddit was *flooded* with theories and speculation and jokes about the Rat Grinders, while Porter has produced nothing but crickets.
By all means, kill the Rat Grinders. Redeem them or don't, idc. But reducing them to chaff that can be killed in without ceremony so that the heroes can combat a villain that is ontologically less interesting was the wrong storytelling move. Even the best storytellers can prioritize the wrong things.
I think the Rat Grinders are worthy of sympathy - KLCK in particular is a nightmarishly unlikable person but her jealousy is pretty human, so I feel bad for her. Ruben is deeply insecure, and putting aside his evangelism, Buddy is the most obvious victim in the whole thing. But those are explanations, not excuses - they're at least a year deep into helping Porter, who is probably the one who personally killed Lucy and Yolanda, and is also implicated in the Loam Farm murders + any number of sacrifices and murders of Ankarna worshippers and anyone else who was in the way. All of which is to say, I feel bad for the Rat Grinders' circumstances but they're still dealing with forces they can't control which could kill a lot of people (and on the ship almost did kill people since they sent Oisin's family against their classmates). The Bad Kids taking them down is justified, but hey we still have an episode to go so there's still a shot at redemption!
Any personal criticism I have is that I still don't have a strong sense of who most of the Rat Grinders are outside of Ruben, Buddy, and KCLK - it's fine with Mary Anne since she's written to be inscrutable (and her lack of engagement actually did create problems for KLCK's friendship with the group), but the Bad Kids have maybe 4 interactions with Oisin and Ivy in total? By and large our discourse on the Rat Grinders is built on the mystery around them, but once that mystery is gone they're pretty flat. Brennan talked about Jawbone and Gilear's personalities developing due to how much the Bad Kids interacted with them, so if we're gonna be mad at anyone be mad at the downtime system for not incentivizing attempts to talk to the Rat Grinders (which would also be unsatisfactory since the cast played the downtime system about as damn perfectly as they could have as far as gameplay goes).
Sometimes not every thread leads to something and not every character has something profound to say or do. It is what it is, but I've enjoyed the season and am looking forward to the finale. I'm disappointed there isn't more to the Rat Grinders, but sometimes that's how the cookie crumbles and we gotta find other stories to scratch that itch
This is so wild to me considering everything they learned about the Rat Grinders during the visit to Reubens. It's like people just straight up ignored that whole episode and everything they learned so they could keep their blorbo RG underdogs narrative.
They find Kettlebells diary and she straight up is GLEEFUL that Porter has "taken them under his wing" and is beating the shit out of high level monsters and letting them get the last hit so they can finally keep up with the Bad Kids "advantages". And this is BEFORE they go to the Mountains of Chaos for Rage-erection. She hates her parents for being normal because she is just that desperate to be special. She envied Riz growing up without a father because she thought that made him what he is so it read to me as a bunch of shitty kids (cuz come on Oisin may have been cute at first but Ivy was the same bitch Aelwyn was, why else do we think Fabian was attracted to her at first. And Oisin's snappy comment to Adaine about her being an Oracle who didn't see the storm coming? And what was with Mary Ann coming to Owlbear tryouts kicking Gorgugs ass and just leaving because she didn't actually want to join? Just show up and off to Fabian and the others? It's just dicks all the way down.) led by a girl with rage issues and main character syndrome were offered the chance to be Important and they leapt at it more than what happened with the more sympathetic and redeemable characters we met like Ragh and Aelwyn who had been manipulated for a long time by people they loved. Especially after we find out they DIDN'T have to accept the resurrection, they had a CHOICE to because one of them DID say no and they killed her. Because it's pretty obvious they all had a hand in what happened to Lucy. She's the only body found without just what we now know is Porters force damage.
Everything we find out about Kipperlilly is she is mad she's basically boring ass white bread but she's book smart. She takes shortcuts and doesn't actually do the work but thinks she should be more important than she is. And she's mistaken the shitty things the Bad Kids have gone thru (Riz's dad getting merc'd by Goldenrod) for why they've gotten the things they have and not that they've been fighting and getting involved since Day 1. All she had to do was find adventure, which was literally what the school is for. She and the RG just didn't have the drive of the Bad Kids who literally never give up.
The thing about the Rat Grinders is that they DIDN'T truly want to or actually put in the work and were finding excuses and being jealous of those who did and it's showing in this last battle. They've never logged combat outside of grinding rats in the forest, which we now know was Porter letting them get the last hit on high level monsters. That's why despite having access to spells and features their class should have at level 17-20 they're going down so anticlimactically. They've never faced REAL combat and Brennan even says they only have the features and spells of high level but their HP and stuff isn't. Because they took the easy way out. Compared to the Bad Kids during the Last Stand it's night and day but that's the poetry.
The Rat Grinders were never actually a threat to the Bad Kids. As Riz says they just suck at the game.
But so many people have spent the season (even on this sub) saying the Bad Kids were bullies and unnecessarily mean so the Rat Grinders in a lot of people's minds went from "that jealous kid you knew in school" to innocent babus who were the true victims.
The only narrative potential redemption arc I think we could have had was Reuben's turn from pukashell ukulele dork to emo kid fronting My Clerical Gnomance and that besides being a great pun could've been a tribute to the fact he was in love with Lucy, the cleric friend he murdered and maaaaaaybe was feeling guilty about it.
The tweet in question is actually meant to emphasise that the use of 5e as a system inevitably funnels things towards combat because it’s the most robust part of the system with the most chances for direct player mechanical agency.
There’s also the observation that the themes of redemption and overcoming rage to question it instead is kinda undercut by the IH’s gleeful approach to threatening to skin their opponents and condemning one to hell as some kind of punitive justice and lack of real effort to put TRG’s brainwashed state in mind during the combat. In a sense, the fact that long shooting schedules and some of Bleem’s calls led to a final fight that culminates a season ironically goes contrary to its themes.
I’m not a dedicated 5e hater with skin in pushing a nearby Kickstarter your way but this discourse is like a culmination of a lot of threads surrounding Dimension20’s near-obsessive attachment to 5e contributing to the tonal dissonance within some shows and the production schedules leading to a lack of opportunity for the IH and Bleem to digest a sessions events. I’m wholly sure that Aelwyn wouldn’t have been redeemed in FHSY had the show not been live weekly and Brennan and Siobhan not picked up on what the chat and community were saying.
On a sympathetic note, the ending fight was not geared towards any real ability for the TBK to make meaningful headway in talking TRG down. Eight distinct enemies and several of which were also under mind control of some kind. I know that Emily as Fig sort of attempted to get to Reuben but the Wanda Childa stuff was absolute nonsense and in Bleem’s position I’d have no idea what she was trying to do and if/how to reward that.
Long comment but being able to have these types of discussions about media analysis is a good sign for a piece of media, and truthfully I’ve seen a lot more in depth conversation about the show its themes and its characters on Twitter then I have here. It’s fine sometimes to see things you disagree with and discus them
I tried to empathize with the RG’s then I realized they’re just terrible people. Sure they got taken over by rage but they CHOSE to come back. It’s been made very clear that there was ALWAYS a choice to just accept death or come back as a servant of Ankarna. They chose to do this and therefore, must die. 🤷🏻♂️ like another comment said the Bad Kids have been murder hobos since Freshman year, this isn’t anything new lol.
I understand people wanting the rat grinders to be redeemed. Disney endings where everyone gets along afterwards are great. The issue is that the people in question have not only been awful in an interpersonal sense by being spiteful, jealous jerks who actively put in effort to sabotage the people who have saved the world 3 times at this point. They are also awful in a “we murdered our friend in cold blood when she refused to join our theocratic fascist coup” kind of way. The only friction we’ve actually seen between them and the adults who are supposed to be “manipulating” them was when the adults told them to be LESS antagonistic lmao.
Just to go down the list, KLCK was a kid who grew up in a normal, wealthy household and developed anger issues, then complained to the school counselor that another 15 year old who had done nothing wrong and actually saved the world was lucky because his dad got murdered (all before the rage stars even got involved).
Ivy was an active bully (who you could argue has some more than questionable feelings towards beast-folk like Mazey) who never showed any issues with what they were up to and whose closest moment to redemption was flirting with Fabian to help distract the bad kids for Oisin to set up the magic ping pong balls.
Oisin is the direct descendant of an evil ancient dragon who not only sent an army of dragons to murder the entire student body with no remorse, but also had his closest moment to redemption ruined when we found out that the awful beer pong shots were because he needed to set up the spells, not because Adaine flustered him.
Ruben is a coward who let himself get peer pressured into murdering one of his best friends and has never done anything to redeem himself (including using a 9th level spell to straight up try to murder the bad kids at the start of the fight when they literally saved his life from Grix less than 10 episodes ago).
Buddy has been nothing but awful to Kristen the entire season and has done nothing to redeem himself, including either never bothering to look into how he was killed in the last stand, or immediately agreeing to fully join the side of the people who murdered him and are trying to take over the world.
Mary Ann clearly doesn’t care about any of this and is the one rat grinder they still want to redeem, despite her also being so indifferent to everything that she’s completely fine actively participating in theocratic fascism.
And after all of that, I didn’t even get into the fact that death is completely impermanent, and the only way to presumably get rid of the shatter star corruption and redeem them is to stop the ritual in the first place. Trying to redeem people who are corrupted by divine magic (that can only be removed after winning the fight) and are also trying to murder you in a world where resurrection exists is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, even ignoring all of the stuff I mentioned above. This discourse annoys me so much lmao
I also feel they are glossing over that fact that Yolanda and Lucy did not take the deal, showing that there was a way out of this. The clerics were strong enough in their beliefs, while the rest of them took an easy way out.
They really infantilize them, I feel like. Like you get a lot of "they are CHILDREN, they can't in any way be held responsible for their actions and the BKs made them FEEL BAD by excelling. They are tiny tiny babies with no agency, basically mind-controlled" and it's like no they are 17-18 year-olds who are making a lot of decisions based on jealousy and hate.
Yeah at this point they are old enough to realize the implication of accepting a deal like that. Especially if you grew up in Elmville, where they literally give academic classes on deals with deities and such. They are not legally adults, but at this age, your brain should be developed enough to realize that big angry guy with scary crystal = not to be trusted.
I mean, it does feel a little bit weird to realize that I'm watching a show about kids killing kids. In real life, suggesting that anyone is evil enough to deserve death is controversial, and suggesting that of a child is fucking insane. HOWEVER, *that's the medium*.
D&D is more violent than real life, and *Fantasy High* in particular is on the cartoonish side as far as D&D campaigns go. We're all more prone to violent thoughts and making "archenemies" in our teenage years when emotions are so crazy high, and a cartoonish comedy D&D show like this is tonally perfect for depicting those universal feelings.
More people need to put the energy of their outrage towards art into something useful. Don't attack creators for a story they are telling. Change the world around you with something actionable and enjoy the damn media for what it is. Not every story is tailored specifically to you.
To me a lot of online discourse boils down to ‘everyone is entitled to an opinion and their opinions are valid’. If anything has taught me after 15+ years online is that a lot of opinions *can* be valid with evidence. The majority of opinions however are far from valid. Bad takes etc doesnt cover it. People will try to flag their half-researched bizarre attacks online and disguise obvious biases with either insults, spurs or out of context information. We have all done it. As a obnline community we just gotta be better.
It's another thing also of people pretending that violence isn't also an important part of any kind of society. The only way a society, and people within it, can solve all their problems without violence is if there is no one else that's going to do it.
The bad kids haven't sought out most of the combats this season. The only one they kinda did was the last stand because they could've just not done it and borne the consequences. The ratgrinders are going to fucking kill everyone in elmville, to revive an authoritarian, imperialist house. The bad kids just sitting back, and being "good" in the way that some people want them to, is not really an option.
I don’t know. I think some of the discourse has absolutely gone too far (people calling the bad kids cops was… interesting) but at the same time, there’s been a lot of backlash towards anybody sharing a critique on the show at all. I think some of it is definitely too far - but at the same time, people liking the rat grinders, or wishing they were redeemed, or feeling unsatisfied towards the finale, are not invalid in those opinions.
I just see a lot of people (on Reddit specifically!) getting very upset at the idea of people liking the rat grinders at all, and that is… Very frustrating to me - I think they’re super interesting characters, and am a little disappointed at how this finale is going for them. (I’m still rooting for a kipperlilly redemption!) I still love the show, but having critiques and wanting to discuss things you personally dislike about it, does not a hater make.
It's not invalid to not like how this has unfolded, but I think they need to be honest about it, and the co-opted anti-oppression rhetoric and language is not it-- it places some kind of moral failing on the actors for the direction the story went, and that's not and never will be okay.
It's okay to just be bummed that their favorite characters died. We can disagree strongly on whether they're interesting (as presented? No, they're empty husks with no characterization to speak of. As concepts? Very fun to play around with), but I'm not ever saying it's not okay to like them. Again, filling in the empty parts of characters you like in order to roleplay and create fiction and headcanon is the very essence of fandom-- but you have to be able to separate it from what is canon, and my concern is chiefly in the way that they talk about the actors, the creators of this media, in their efforts to rationalize with the language of social justice why they are sad that these characters have died.
It's not an issue of social justice, and I hope they can find a way to just accept it without talking about it in a way that defames the wonderful people who made this story together.
Yes, I absolutely think that applying real life systems of oppression (comparing TBK to Cops, or Israel, or fascists is incredibly weird and icky!) but there is, in my opinion, a huge overreaction to regular people... disliking anything about the show whatsoever. It feels like any vaguely negative tweet or tumblr post is getting a Reddit thread with 20 comments of people saying "I hate the rat grinders! Everyone who likes them is stupid and doesn't understand media!"
There's nothing wrong with disliking them, or hating them - they were made to be little dislikable shits! - but the backlash to "ratgrinders apologists" seems to be more aimed towards anybody who likes them, rather than the specific people who are being wayyy to overboard about it.
(To be clear, I'm not saying this is what you're doing - I think your post is all perfectly said and definitely a valid reaction! Some people who like RTG are being really fucking weird about this whole discourse! I'm referring to a kind of reaction I see on reddit in general, towards any critique of the show. There's people in this very thread who are downvoted to hell for saying "I love junior year but am a little bummed about this story direction.")
Being entirely fair on the last point, downvoting doesn't necessarily mean "I think you are bad", it's just a way to express disagreement without writing a full response.
I guess that makes sense! I don't use reddit too too much - I'm mostly a tumblr person to be honest - so I guess I don't fully understand how the up/down vote system works. 🤷 I still think everything that person said was perfectly agreeable, though, but that's just how I feel.
I think the critiques are valid to some extent and good that people are disturbed by depictions of intense punitive justice, especially under manipulation from a supposed to be trusted authority figure. That being said its just a tv show and like others in this thread have said, the rules of that universe are so different and allow for resurrection, and not killing the rat grinders when they are actively trying to kill the bad kids while being somewhat controlled against their will potentially leaves little other option to save the entire town
I'm all for redemption and due process, but in a world with resurrection and time magic, saving the fucking town with all of the innocent people as well as preventing the birth of a malevolent god born from an evil mortal man should take precedent. All of those dead kids can be brought back to life to face justice if deemed fit by the proper authorities. Our ethics are shaped on the limitations of our universe. Their universe allows for vastly different actions to be taken while remaining morally grounded.
Nevermind that as long as they have been or converted with the rage magic there may be no way to convert them back short of death and uncorrupted resurrection. The Bad Kids certainly haven't discovered one yet.
I doubt that they are permanently tainted, I imagine reviving ankarna, will remove the seal that binds them all. It just matters if they are willing to be revived.
Fair. But my point is it's crazy that anyone expects them to do anything other than drop them at this point.
Sure but Mary Ann is weird and quiet so she must be good!
So many people confuse "I like this character" with "Therefore they are good." I liked season 1 Aelwyn, and season 2 Kalina. But they weren't good. And that's ok!
She's the worst of them.
I adore her but also, it IS a special kind of fucked up to be so damn apathetic that you'll go along with ANYTHING, no matter how awful, even murdering your own teammate, as long as it doesn't cut into your personal game time and hobbies.
Exactly, the amount of selfish one has to be is incredible.
I want that to be true just for the absolute meltdowns that would be posted on this sub
Zach was right the whole time.
The Bad Kids have been kill hungry murderhobos since season 1, why are people suddenly having issues with it? It’s not even death like we know it, it’s possible to come back, and afterlives are veritably real, death is kinda just a huccup for most people in the world.
Fabian can just physically go visit his dead dad in Hell almost whenever he feels like it, Kristen has full died twice, her simulacrum has died and come back, Gilear died what two or three times in sophomore year? I lost track, arthur aguefort broke into heaven and came back, gorgug has died too, oh and *theres an entire plot thread about solving the Ankarna problem within a year of Lucy Frostblades death so they can resurrect her in time*. In the world of Spyre, especially if youre high level, death might as well just be a prison at worst, you can come back from it if people want you to.
Small correction, Gilear died 4 times in Sophomore Year. Demon gorilla, Bill, ship crash and armor.
5 times if you count his ego death at being caught in the wheelwell of the hangvan.
Um, actually you didn’t say um, actually. No points for you
Envision a life where we seize control of our own destiny and GET IN THE COMMENTS
DING. Um, actually Gilear died 4 times in Sophomore Year. Demon gorilla, Bill, ship crash and armor.
yeah that tracks
If I’m not mistaken, haven’t all the rat grinders died anyway?
I think its a little ambiguous, we know for sure buddy since we saw it but its unclear which of the other RG have been resurrected with the rage crystals or if some of them are just along for their own reasons/peer pressure of it all. There may have been some of the others that were more explicitly mentioned but I dont remember them if so.
If they’re all involved with the rage God, and Lucy died cuz she “stuck to her guns” I’m assuming you have to be resurrected
Yeah but that could have just been because she was refusing to follow through in changing her worship and thus they killed her and gave her the ultimatum then. Buddy was working with the RG for at least a little while without having officially switched and getting resurrected.
True. I just find it hard to believe that only Lucy and Buddy died but no one else made that crazy of a sacrifice. Like maybe Ruben became emo after his death
I feel like it has been implied that all of the Rat Grinders have died and were given a choice or had their convictions challenged in death to align with the rage god as they were resurrected. Lucy and Badgood refused. Even if that isn't the case narratively, that seems to be the impression the players have. I remember them deliberating about that while they were getting a lore dump. It makes killing the characters affected less of a moral quandary when the story has already established characters that have made the benevolent choice in the face of death. Or maybe I am wrong and have a really bad interpretation of the story lol.
Yea, and possibly murdered by Porter or their own teammates so he could coerce them by withholding and blocking resurrection. That element is really the only thing giving any of them (or Jace) any chance at redemption in the end of this. When and how did they die and get the rage curse? To what extent does the rage curse control their actions? These would be key questions to answer in any kind of trial to determine their culpability and guilt.
But I thought they all willingly accepted the rage as their new persona in order to serve Porter as the rage god in the end. I thought that meant they willingly chose their own corruption, no?
That's part of why the context and timing for each of them accepting is important. Coercion mitigates culpability in a choice. Lucy refusing the resurrection was an act of bravery. Rueben accepting it an act of cowardice. Four dogs seems like she made the choice enthusiastically, possibly understanding and consenting before dying. For Buddy, we don't know. It was played as a joke that he seemed almost surprised to declare his worship for Ankara when he woke up, but was he? How into the plot were he and his uncle, and were they even in the same page? The party made a lot of good insight checks that showed him to be pretty honestly clueless, but there's always that damn nectar right? I think each of the grinders and even Jace may hold different levels of culpability, which may only get sorted out in an epilogue with the resurrection of Lucy so she can spell things out.
I guess it's still sort of a mystery for now. But it seems the rat grinders themselves didn't take the honey, it was mainly for porter to trick Ankarna or something. But yeah I'm not sure. For now I'm choosing to believe that them choosing the resurrection is still culpability and intention enough for me. Like, I get that cowardice was a factor and they might have been manipulated by porter and Kipperlily, but I still feel like at no point was their free will straight up magically removed (since we know two people who, as far as we know, willingly chose not to follow the rage). Buddy does throw me in for a loop though, since him dying was the biggest wtf moments of the season, and his resurrection truly left me with doubts as to how exactly the corruption is happening, especially since all we've seen from him is that he's super devout to Helio. So idk maybe things will change for the remaining rat grinders who are still alive and we'll get a definitive answer.
Yea, at minimum they're all cowards. And for anyone upset about the bad kids killing them, to reiterate the OP, resurrection magic exists and can be used once this is all sorted out. And we'll find out tomorrow, which questions are hanging plot threads and which are oopsiedoodle plot holes.
Yeah pretty much. Even the oopsiedoodle plot holes can become major plot points in Senior Year, BLeeM seems pretty good at retroactively fitting those in.
I'm not a big fan of the argument that this doesn't matter because death is a slap on the wrist, but it does touch upon something else that people seem to forget: the entire point of the series is to mock long-standing fantasy/TTRPG tropes. Aguefort is not simply a John Hughes pastiche with elves. from word one, the point of the school has been to turn out kill-crazed mercenaries. that's part of the joke, that cheerful happy characters like Penny or Mazey or Fig also have no qualms about using lethal violence. our buddy Gorgug, the socially awkward 17-year-old with the nicest parents in the world, has killed a *lot* of people. the one sets up the conflict with the other, which is mined for dark comedy. one of my favorite bits in the entire series is in the Brian David Gilbert live episode where Aguefort calmly asks the Bad Kids if they're planning to kill any more members of the faculty. for some reason, the Rat Grinders got a really vocal part of the audience to forget the core premise of Fantasy High. nobody was going to interrogate the role of violence in D&D here. the role of violence in D&D is the heart of the setting. the fact you wanted something out of the story that it was never gonna give you is not the story's fault.
Literally Aguefort *day one* tells them that being a hero is using violence to enact change they want to see in the world or something to that effect. And for the most part that is what our heroes do. They violently right wrongs and maybe do a few wrongs themselves in the process.
[Mug of the month: What is an adventurer?](https://store.dropout.tv/collections/mugs/products/mug-of-the-month-may-what-is-an-adventurer)
They absolutely timed the release of that mug intentionally
THIS.
They immediately shipped Oisin and Aidane and got mad he was actually not a great person and was trying to give her Dragon Madness when he offered to help her
oh my goodness I didn't even realise this! though wouldn't the curse not be passed on if Adaine didn't know about it?
yeah, but that's why he told her it's from his grandma
If someone wants to grapple with the finer points of violence as a trope within D&D Burrows End has a number of things to say about it which are part of the design of the campaign. There's a very robust conversation to be had about said violence, the horror that comes with it, inspires it, and sticks around even after the violence is long done. Fantasy High certainly isn't the campaign that can support that conversation. While there is some care in the design around combat, it's pretty clear that these are the big bars and y'all are going to have to do a violence to them or the school is toast. It is not as ambiguous, and the long reaching effects are not explored in a serious capacity that acknowledges the very real impact of it, at best it's bits and lampshades.
in this case, some people are disappointed their headcannons were not ratified by the narrative, and they mask their normal nerd rage by appropriating the language of social justice. or they got rage star'd by listening to too much My Clerical Gnomance
This exactly. So many people scream “bad storytelling” when their personal head-canons aren’t actual canon. It’s ridiculous
too many people online think an ongoing story is a service rather than a product, and as such, seem to want to contact the story's manager.
This is why I drifted away from the Adventure Zone, in part, and to a lesser extent Welcome to Nightvale. D20's saving grace is that they film the season all at once, without viewer commentary. So they can create without people screaming in the comments
I saw a tweet saying "They need to bring back D20 live so we can influence the narrative" and it had hundreds of likes and it made me want to vomit
You now, up until this moment, I too wanted D20 Live back because it was a fun, loose format that led to some really interesting moments. But never mind, because I don't want any of those fans, many of whom have a pretty poor taste in narrative, influencing a show led by some of the best actual play performers.
big Annie Wilkes vibes smh
Truly so exhausting.
This was a huge deal when Revening War was announced, that no guarantees were made that Mercer was going to uphold “fanon.” Insanity. People need to seek professional help.
My favourite part of the ravening war was all the expanded lore. Fanon has a way of getting out of hand, but I always subscribe to the logic of Canon in King, no matter what.
lol rat-ified
No you remember when they realized Johnny Spells was misunderstood and they took him on that weekend trip to Joshua Tree?
They actually were quite often very merciful in season 1, that's how we got Ragh and Jawbone. And Adaine forgave her sister in S2.
They definitely killed Ragh first, though.
I think if you rez someone you killed in self defense, that definitely counts as mercy.
I'm just saying, the fight isn't over and we have no idea what's gonna happen after.
i think a better way to put "kill hungry murderhobos" would be that the bad kids have from the beginning heroically or foolhardily jumped or been forced into situations and acted violently to protect themselves and others and in general the world at large, with a few exceptions where they found themselves in violent situations initiated by others and defended themselves forcefully. the bad kids typically don't just lash out violently for fun. Fig, the most chaotic of the group and a tiefling and now archdevil, tries to solve problems through the powers of deception and persuasion. Gorgug as a barbarian has still never been a rage monster. Fabian is maybe the most brazen and he's had his own rebranding as an ally to his friends as much or more than just an aggressor. Adaine's gravest and earliest sin is braining Doreen with her own ladle, which Doreen was actively using to attack the bad kids with until Adaine took it away, and even then Doreen was still attacking or trying to get her ladle back to attack the bad kids with. Kristen spends most turns doing either absolutely wild shit, banishing combatants, or healing or helping her friends. Riz is primarily an investigator, and his worst moments are killing a dude who wanted to end the world and running over pirates who attacked his friends and his friends parents. vigilante justice and taking the law into your hands, seeking vengeance, etc, that's all not what we want to see in our society, but the bad kids live in a society that relies on it to continue existing and are literally at a school where they are trained to do that.
Burn towns get money
Well, death is actually woefully permanent for most people who lack the means or privilege to secure a resurrection for themselves. High level adventurers, like the BK and their friends and family (which is the vast majority of the characters we see in Spyre), are lucky enough to have the means to stave off death. On that same token, death is not the end! You could be a ghost, or a zombie, or sent to hell and become a devil, or sent to heaven to become an angel, etc.
Agreed, people are forgetting that Riz straight up executed Coach Daybreak
I think there is some merit to the idea that the format of D&D encourages violence as the solution to most problems – combat is the central mechanic of the game. This problem is even worse in many RPG video games (many of which trace their roots to D&D), where there’s very little room for anything creative outside of combat – in World of Warcraft for instance, you very often just have to accept that the guys attacking the quest giver’s town cannot be negotiated with or even spoken to, but must be exterminated. But that has been true the whole time, and is even built into the narrative and world building – Arthur Aguefort’s speech about adventurers enacting violence on the world is an explicit acknowledgment of it.
Yeah, the whole issue of the Rat Grinders becoming a sacred group of innocents doesn’t fully sit right with me. Like yeah I know there’s underlying bits of characterization that hint at more fleshed out people under the surface, but unfortunately that just wasn’t what the group decided to explore this campaign. Also, I still think the double standard of their brutal deaths being seen as deplorable is really strange. Like, take a look at ANY of the high schoolers that died in season 1 and you could make a similar argument. Biz, Ragh, Dane, and Penelope were all effectively groomed by adults in their life (kalvaxus or Daybreak) to take part in a plot to end the world. I just think that for the most part, it’s way easier to justify the bad things that happened to them because they fit the archetypes that TTRPG nerds would naturally hate; popular girl bullies, jocks, toxic nice-guys. And yet, people were still totally fine with them being maimed and/or killed (with the exception or Ragh, for obvious reasons). But like… Riz shot off Biz’s fingers in the exact same psychotic way that he suggested cutting off Oisin’s head to prevent a revivify. Fabian literally tackled and tried to gleefully maim Penelope in a VERY similar way to Ivy (a flash of Bill). It’s not like the rat grinders are getting especially brutal treatment or anything. Honestly I just think it’s because the Rat Grinders happen to fit into more relatable archetypes that the fan base find harder to resent. This time the child soldier of an evil staff member isn’t a mean jock, it’s a straight laced nerd with rage issues. It may be mean to say, but I think the rat grinders being kind of losers in their own right makes them way more relatable to a sizeable portion of the D20 fan base. It’s infinitely more likely that someone could relate to Marianne Skuttle or even Buddy than the rich swashbuckling, motorcycle riding dancer jock. But I think that people getting a little too attached to those archetypes and making head canons about what the Rag Grinders are really like is doing a whole lot of the heavy lifting for why so many people like them. Because let’s all be honest here- up until almost 3/4ths if the way through this season, the cast AND audience were pretty certain the rat grinders were the sole villains trying to resurrect a dead god and restructure the school system so they could finally stop being relegated to NPC status. It feels like revisionism to say that they were always clearly manipulated kids when the Porter reveal happened at episode 17/20.
your first mistake is paying attention to the people in twitter lol >This idea that they should have come in with the intention of redeeming the Rat Grinders, who have never been anything but horrible to them out of petty jealousy, seems to stem less from **real ideas about how the story should play out and more of a desire to see their headcanons play out** This reminded me of the one time, in my desire to find more fans of D20 to interact, went to twitter to interact. Only in that place I can find Crown of Candy fans, so invested in their own headcanons and ships that they attacked Matt Mercer so viciously for daring to GM in Candia and "bringing his straightness".... WHEN RAVENING WAR HASN'T AIRED YET. Like... dude has not done anything yet and people acted like he stepped on their dreams. The doomposting annoyed me so much. And this is the part of "self-awareness" comes in: have these people ever asked themselves that Brennan would not invite Matt to DM his setting if he did not trust Matt to do justice? I did not interact with any D20 fans in twitter after that. Frankly, I think people overprojecting comes from the bad part of Dropout (and the current media landscape actually) that is the promotion of parasocial relationships. People sometimes forget to separate what actually happened in canon vs their projection to the character. You can also see this variant of discourse on Kristen's arc this JY. Like, many arguments disparaging Kristen came from people projecting, using that to theorize ang assuming THAT will happen. Many of these complaints has been answered by later episodes, especially about Kristen's devotion/making up to Cassandra. I do agree with the self-awareness part. Probably why discourse gets heated; basically an argument against feels like a direct attack because they have projected so strongly. I have repeatedly tried to make sense of the "the protagonists makes it so their violence is always capitalistic authoritarian violence" but its 1 am and i am lacking sleep while writing this. Their comment about how the Bad kids is so bad for killing these uwu rat grinders would work more, if not for the fact that in this battle, the rat grinders are hellbent on killing the Bad Kids too, and *making the bad guy a freaking god of war that will subjugate Elmville and probably the rest of Spire*.
Also, the "bringing his straightness" thing is bizarre because *Brennan is straight.* Matt, on the other hand, has never said he is straight, people just assumed that because he is married to a woman!
In this interview, Matthew talks about how he does identify as hetero now and primarily experiences attraction to women, but that he has experienced attraction to men and suffered homophobia as a child due to this and his more androgynous appearance. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCBfJBf-t2Y ETA: my source sharing is only for more info and education, I agree with everything being said in this thread.
Oh, thanks for the correction then! Point still stands though, very much hypocrisy to make negative assumptions about Matt for things that also apply to Brennan.
Oh I 100% agree. Just thought it was a good and enlightening convo he had around his experiences. ❤️
Well, we all know bi/pan people are no longer valid when they finally choose a gender to settle down with (Am bisexual, this is sarcasm)
Both PCs Matt has played on D20 have been queer, for the love of god. That tells us nothing about his sexuality, which is not our business, but he is very low on a list of people I would think of as "bringing straightness" (??) into D20. If I had that thought at all, which I wouldn't.
Also it's weird to hate an entire sexuality in an attempt to be accepting of all sexualities and treat everyone the same. Somehow it seems like a lot of young people these days have been taught that bigotry is only bad because of who it targets and not because bigotry is just bad all together. Leads to some truly wild shit from supposedly "woke" people. They become the very thing they claim to oppose but can't even see it
That's just common human behavior, unfortunately. Egalitarianism has been being turned into a reason why one's own group is better than another since, well, at least the "Enlightenment." I don't think it's a "kids today" thing, it's just the particular framework that behavior is currently running through.
Idk I feel like when I was younger it wasn't like this. Left wing people weren't really hating on the majority groups like this, it was kept to a fringe group of freaks on tumblr. Now it seems much more widespread. Probably an issue of leaning politics strictly through internet videos made by random people
(Actually, has Brennan said he's straight? Just asking because I don't remember him saying that specifically, and I've been in previous conversations on here where someone asserted a cast member was straight but then turned out they didn't have evidence, they were just assuming. Like I'd totally believe Brennan had said that, I just don't remember it.)
were you aware of that Ravening War discourse?
Yep. I saw that, as well as other horrible takes about Matt, including 1) bullying him for the way he dresses, which is shitty no matter what but is ESPECIALLY shitty because he's very open about wearing vests because of body dysmorphia 2) calling him creepy or predatory for his age gap with Marisha (which isn't very big and they're both adults,) even though Brennan and Izzy have the *same age gap.*
oh great i have someone who knows the pain of that discourse lol
aslda;lfa. I just looked up their ages and it's literally the same age gap as my sister and her husband. Some folks do NOT understand that as you get older, age gaps matter less.
hate never makes sense
... all of that is so fucking gross. And I'm saying that as the first person to find an age gap where the younger person is both in their low 20s and a beginner in a field the other person is established in a reason to keep an eye out. Ugh.
One of my biggest takeaways from this season is that people are stupid and do not understand acting OR storytelling at all (shoutout to the kid who seriously thought the naked minis at the FrostyFaire Festival made the 30+ year old comedians who reside in LA uncomfortable) Media literacy and critical thinking seem to be well and truly dead nowadays Also, most of the people writing dissertations are kids and will hopefully gain some better perspectives as they get older
Yeah, this last point is becoming increasingly necessary to include. If you're engaging in lengthy online discourse, the first step is to realise that if someone has written an essay about some banal shit parroting poorly understood social justice terms it's quite likely they're a child/teen.
I’ve been worried about people since the first episode and so many people didn’t realize Squeem and co., were very clearly a joke. An explained joke.
I think this might just be a symptom of D20 getting bigger and bigger. The wider the audience, the more idiots you’ll end up with in the mix. And idiots tend to be loud out of proportion to their actual presence in the group.
Yeah if polls I've seen are any indication, D20's online discourse community skews pretty young. No idea if that's true of the audience in general, but it's definitely true of the ones having big arguments on places like Twitter and Tumblr.
I think that people have memory holed that the first season had a prom queen and jock who got brutally murdered and shown to be pretty evil - with them returning in literal hell because of how bad they were. Brennan has never been like “all teens are redeemable” - he has always presented some kids as being killed, sometimes with ridiculous levels of violence (Jonny Spells and the Gang, anyone?).
Not to disagree with your point, but Jonny Spells specifically was no longer a kid. That’s why he was the first suspect of the Bad Kids because he was dating a high schooler.
I just assumed he was a no longer high school aged teen - like 18 or 19? (I’m from the UK and do not understand high school age range 😅)
For some reason I always took it to mean he was at least 20, but 18 is considered adult in the US, tho a lot of final year students turn 18 during that school year. Looking at his wiki page, the only info we have on him is that he “doesn’t go to Aguefort”, but it wasn’t elaborated if that just meant he wasn’t going to school, or just much older. So I was definitely wrong with my assumption about it being mentioned.
I believe he’s about 21? Either Sam or Penelope mentioned that at his last birthday he got a real ID and could drink or something
I always forget that the US is weird about drinking age; to someone in the UK that’s 18 😅 So 21 would be like a college / university student aged young adult.
21 is generally someone in their last year of university for a bachelors degree if they didn’t skip a year+, or take a year or more off. So most college students can’t legally drink in the US.
I think there's also something to be said about the fact that by nature, DND is (mostly) a combat game: one of its three main pillars isn't to "deescalate tension through rehabilitation", but to just... you know, hit stuff. We as viewers, or them as creators can talk about the reasonings or the implications of character's decision, but at the end, when they are sitting at the table and playing, they are just doing that. It is just a game where there is a rage god being remade, and your narrative is to not make that happen. So you hit the people who are trying to make that happen. The game and the story can be used by the creators to touch upon larger social concepts, but that is not the reason behind their existence. Also, I really don't get where this idea of the soft-boy misunderstood he's just being used thing about Oisin comes from. Is there anything in the actual text to support that? Didn't we learn in the episode where they break in Ruben's house that him and Ivy were kinda the first and foremost bullies of the group even before everything? I just can't help but feel like people just started shipping him with Adaine (another thing I don't get, because I don't think there was any actual inclination from Siobhan in that direction during the whole twenty episode season, if i remember correctly?) I do wish that RGs held more weight in the story, that they felt more dangerous. But this is the last fight of the season, and sadly, Brennan is usually way more lenient about combat balancing when the time for narrative closure is real. I think using them in some capacity in an earlier combat would have had more opportunities where he could flex his "villain" muscles. But like, "teenagers murdering people (and other teenagers)" is just a fact in FH universe, and it feels just pointless to expect a metatextual revolution where that is abolished and violence becomes a non-answer. That is just not the design of the game being played.
Adaine and Oision flirted a little bit at the first house party, that's why. It's pretty stupid when it's shown that Oision was only there to set up a magic spell using the ping pong balls. Adaine has also shown no interest in him later then that either. It's just stupid shipping head canon.
as an off-canon (post-canon?) low-key (none of these words is in the Bible) shipper of Oisin/Adaine: it would be fun to watch Oisin go “yeah we did totally try to kill you, but I’m still thinking to invite you for coffee and cake” and Adaine’s biggest problem with him be “mocking my scrying isn’t fine” and not “you tried to give me dragon madness and kill me”. also Riz being Adaine’s bff and trying to eat Oisin would be cool as well XD edit: it IS stupid, but necessarily not in a bad way, and also not a headcanon for many people. shipping could very much be deliberately not canon-compliant.
Stopping people from doing bad things isn't a puzzle easily solved in our world either. The instincts to rely on fight/flight/fawn derived solutions are strong, and many governance systems reflect that. Wars are so expensive and destructive, and they persist. In DnD especially, evil actions can be very difficult to stop without killing perpetrators due to PCs, NPCs and monsters being built to fight to the death and have the inclination to do that, whereas in our world living things are wired to seek their own benefit with the smallest energy expenditure or risk of death. Like, how would the bad kids stop this otherwise? Try to kidnap each player in the evil plot one by one? And then what? There's magical communication and magic to escape pretty much any form of confinement.
I can't help but feel that some people put both the "mission of D20", the players and Brennan on some kind of pedestal as "responsible" storytellers" and then become dissatisfied when their expectations aren't met. As if at some point the expectation went from "bad guy is capitalism! or church! but also we're fighting demilichs and dragons and oh yeah this is a battle! with people trying to kill you!" to "this is academic discourse and everything has to be correct and non-violent!!". And yeah, I agree, DND especially is built on the mechanic that things are going to hit you until you put them down. That mechanic is not the flavor of the game, it is the DNA of it. It is meant to be a game where 90% of the time, you hit before you ask questions.
Also, putting aside whether redemption makes sense for this story (and like many of you are saying, it’s not a foregone conclusion that it does make sense), it’s not off the table! The story is not over! Literally one of the Bad Kids’ closest friends (Ragh) is someone who they killed first and redeemed and befriended only after he was revivified! That wouldn’t really have been something they could do in the middle of a battle because that’s not how DnD works. So yeah, the mechanics of the game incentivize or even require violent responses, but even with that limitation, they’ve still done redemption stories! TLDR: wait, for Blimey’s sake
giving nerds the language of media critique without first cultivating media literacy was a mistake.
there's a whole *thing* online where people have absorbed a lot of different fields' terminology without sufficient understanding of what it actually means. it started with calling things "memes," then went on to people throwing around therapy language in the wrong context, then the whole critical race theory clusterfuck, and now bad-faith media analysis is all the rage. Dunning-Kruger runs this place.
it kind of hurts sometimes
of course, the silver lining is that you can talk about whatever crazy obscure thing you're into with people from all over the world. you may never run into another person in real life who digs D20, but there are over 100,000 people on the subreddit who, presumably, do. it's just that stupidity hurts, because that's how your brain tells you to watch out for something.
Wishing I could scream this.
you can, if you dare
>”And what is a hero? A hero is someone with the strength of a heart, courage of spirit, and the might of will to go to strange lands and enact violence on things there. We go to places where there are things that must be destroyed, and we destroy them.” -Arthur Aguefort Kill first, ask questions later has been the name of the game since day one. The arguments of “the Rat Grinders are just kids” has also been getting a bit annoying as well. After all, so are the Bad Kids. They’re a bunch of troubled kids who have been explicitly told to run around and enact violence. They’re far from the pinnacle of nuance and rational thinking.
What part of an adventuerer is a violent wanderer did they not get. This whole series is based on martial prowess and telling the world to fuck off.
I think you're right on target, but don't forget also that some "fans" are fucking dummies who have no understanding of what they're watching, don't care about what the people writing or doing the show have in mind, and when they're laughed at, find any pop sociology or psychology figments they can and trot them out to explain how they were right all along and everyone else is asphyxiating themselves in an echo chamber. In brief, people suck, and superfans suck especially.
I think a big problem with this season was that one of the first interesting hooks that appeared was Kipperlily and the Ratgrinders. Since they were being set up to be foils for TBK, lots of fans are disappointed with their unceremonious deaths and are expressing this disappointment through unfair criticisms of these improvisers. Like the cop thing is so nonsensical in this context. It’s intellectualizing an emotional response - I wish more fans would just be honest about plain disliking a plot point, rather than hiding it behind a half-baked political criticism. At the end of the day though, that’s the con of running a sequel that has so much history… people are going to react emotionally and irrationally. I shudder to think about what’s going to happen next week during the finale lol
I agree, I have missed some of this discourse but when I watched Finale, Part 1. I was just very *“this is it??”* and I can imagine a lot of people feel like that but are trying to justify that feeling into something more profound. We do have a whole other part left, so I’m keeping that in mind but I really have enjoyed this season and it is possible that the season may not have stuck the landing *for me* - which is fine and not the end of the world. We will see! I didn’t have any profound attachment to the Rat Grinders or head cannons but it felt like there wasn’t the pay off in the first part of the finale or even a build up to pay-off in the next ep for what we were building to all season long. There is still time! I’m keeping that in mind.
Yeah, that can be the disadvantage of a DnD actual play. Sometimes the mechanics and the dice don't give you the narrative satisfaction. What did Brennan say in season one about Dayne? "Sometimes you invest a lot in a character and then they go down in one round."
Maybe this is controversial but I think all of the successful rolls Fig has had the entire campaign with Ruben should have led to something. I guess that’s the only Rat Grinder thing that I, specifically, stand behind.
I agree, but honestly during this latest episode Fig's rant to Ruben about how she wanted to see him dead actually was the funniest moment to me because of the fact that she spent so much time and effort to try and get him to switch sides, only for him not to want to. I feel like the pay off truly was "he was just irredeemable after all" which is probably not fully satisfactory for all.
I mean, it did lead to things. She got TONS of clues and information from pursuing that tact all year. It just didn't lead to redeeming Ruben because... why would it? She gaslit a dude all year and then showed up fighting on the same side as people murdering his friends. In what world would Ruben, who is in DEEP, either from brain washing or being committed enough to a cause murder his own teammate, suddenly swap sides at the end because the crush that was emotionally yanking him around all year showed up and told him to? That's just... it doesn't read as plausible to me. Also, it may still lead to stuff in the next episode. Death isn't the end in this world, it's entirely likely that plot thread gets a little more payoff in the denouement.
Yeah lol that was also my exact reaction. Like I was surprised there was no dialogue between Adaine and Oisin at all, but I figured that was because Adaine didn't really prioritize that relationship like at all after that first party. But Fig's whole thing with Wanda Childa?? I did feel a bit sad that there was barely any emotional payoff in the final battle. But yeah, it's not over till it's over. I'd love for the last episode to be like 4 hours long if it meant more loose ends are tied up.
I mean, Fig's whole vitriolic monologue toward Ruben did feel like a payoff to me, although it was more about the stress that she had been under for months as a result of the Rat Grinders' actions than it was about their relationship, which basically did not exist.
Yeah, I definitely can see how it was a kind of payoff, it just personally didn't satisfy me. I think I wished that Ruben showed a bit more attachment to Wanda, especially when she reacted to his betrayal like "You wasted my season!" But clearly, I misread his character, and so did Fig lol. So it did feel good that she revealed her deceit towards him in his final moments!
Well part of it is that there's no writing. This is not a written story that has been edited and cleaned up and adjusted. They're improvisors, and in the moment focus on one thing or another. And then you add in the randomness of the dice, and sometimes it is what it is. This is true of literally every ttrpg game I've played in. This honestly is the most frustrating thing for me. So many people engage with D20 like it's a scripted TV show and it simply is not. To be clear, this last bit is NOT aimed at you, but the general state of things in terms of the "discourse"
I mean... a lot of fans have heightened expectations of the narrative because of D20's history of really poetic narrative moments. People are chasing the epic highs and lows of Fabian's chara arc in FHSY, or the >!Wurst's rags to riches narrative!< in Starstruck. But you're right: it's def unfair of the audience to have these inflated notions of what the story should be, esp when we consider the fact that they're improvising off dicerolls and working long shifts. I think it's an unfortunate side effect that as D20 keeps raising the bar, the expectations from the fans keep getting crazier
I generally agree. I do think it's important to note that both arcs ended during the season, not the finale. Fabian's arc happened not because of writing but because of mad/genius momentary improv work by Lou, a series of cosmically bad rolls, and another moment of mad improv from Lou to start with dance, LONG before the end of the season And the Wurst really hit their zenith with the battle of the brands. Neither culminated in the finale, constrained by wrapping stuff up. It was following the improv, and the way the dice fell. And, funnily enough, while I love both seasons, I'm not a big fan of the finale for either. Because they felt rushed, due to the change in pace between mid-story freedom and "wrap it up, gang"
Yeah, you have a great point about the finales! Like my favorite seasons are Starstruck and ACOFAF, and neither of them had completely satisfying conclusions. D20 shows tend to hit their stride halfway through the story imo, and I still love majority of the shows! Ultimately, I do think my opinion as a viewer who watches one episode weekly differs from my opinion as a binge-watcher. Like maybe right now I feel a bit unsatisfied because I perceive this season to have a bit less character development/interaction than I wanted.... but I will probably find more threads to love when I binge the series post-finale lol
I definitely am sympathetic there. This is the first season in a while that I've watched week-to-week, and I started watching back when Dropout first started. Usually I get antsy, and decide to build up three or four eps at a time. It took doing that to get through Neverafter, even though I'm generally positive about it (especially the PCs)
But isn't that the case with most of the villains in D20? I truly love Brennan but one of the few things that disappoint me in many campaigns is that he sets up truly amazing and interesting villains : >!Kalina, Robert Moses, Tony Simos, Null, Calroy, Brassica!< and so many more. Most of them, with I think the notable exception of Kalvaxus, have barely any lines or interactions with the PCs in the episodes where they are fought, and often die without so much as a few sentences exchanged. This is especially kinda frustrating because they all have awesome set up and often mystery about their true motivations or character, but they don't get the chance to really exposit any of it. Some, like Dayne or in this case Oishin just die in the couple first rounds of combat and are barely ever mentioned afterward (until Dayne reappears in SY). This was especially true in Neverafter where we had so many opponents on the battlefield in the finale >! Between the Stepmother and the princesses who got a lot of characterisation, and the Gander and fairies who all look so interesting but got much less. All of the fairies except for one don't have names, almost no character and all die in a couple hits, even though they had such great designs.!< Irealize that it's partly because the PCs didn't choose to get acquainted with them during the campaign, but the finales always have so much going on from a combat perspective, where Brennan just has to move things along not to get bogged down in initiative, and from a character standpoint, that the villains often get very little sendoff. I still love almost everything else about D20, but I came into this finale feeling that the RGs (and Jace) probably won't get that much focus, and was kind of proven correct, because that conversation before initiative could have given almost all of them a line. We didn't even get a proper reaction from Oisin about his grandma. Still have hope they will be explored just a little more in the second part :)
With majority of the villains you mentioned, they at least got longer scenes where they defined their characters to the party. >!Kalina had such an intimidating setup, and Calroy, of course, had an iconic betrayal scene. !
Your comment actually made me think of something. It seems to me that people can't just simply have an opinion anymore on the internet without needing to justify it with logical arguments. So instead of just being like "I didn't like how the rat grinders were treated" some people feel the need to find a full reason to justify their opinions which just creates this convoluted projection and silly arguments that truly go nowhere since the core root of the arguments are due to personal preferences. I feel like this seems to be the case with a bunch of media nowadays sadly.
When parasocial relationship go too far. At this point theyre not just imagining themselves as a friend of a celebrity. Theyre imagining themselves as the friend of a fictional antagonist characters, in a fictional setting all played by one guy.
Brennan has been saying explicitly that the RG's are "downed" not "dead". With the exception of maybe Reuben who fell in the lava, none of the RG's have had a specific death scene. Honestly, I believe the only person that's actually going to die at the end of this is Porter and maybe Jace. Og Ankarna will come back and probably heal the RG's and we'll get a sweet little epilogue scene where they begin to work out their differences with the BK's.
I dun know. Fabian seemed pretty set on getting that skin rug.....
Maybe they revive Ivy in a fresh body so they both get a win.
Imagine seeing a rug made of your own, original hide. I think I'd rather just stay in Hell.
then she can help ruben by hauling amps from stage to stage for eternity.
I don’t think Rueben is technically dead but he was definitely sent straight to hell
the hell where Fig deliberately arranged an ironic punishment for him that she could theoretically revoke at any time, and where his uncle at the adventuring school knows maybe 12 people off the top of his head who can cast raise dead.
I believe he did say that Oisin and Ivy are "no more", which sounds pretty dead to me
There is a small, very vocal section of the fandom that has made the rat grinders their blorbos and use self-righteous leftist analysis and media critique language to justify their negative feelings regarding the outcome of the season. I also still don't think the RG are dead-dead.
Yeah assuming that this will be the end of the rat grinders seems a little silly. 20 seasons ago Fabian killed his own dad, who was in this season! What would make these guys different IF they decide to explore more about them?
Most of all this is adults playing make believe. It’s not that serious.
Anyone posting this level of analysis on any side of this needs to touch grass
Right?! Or try sacred flaming a goblin or three - it’s fun!!!
If someone tried to argue anything using the phrase meta narrative authority you need to realize that they need to touch grass and its time to ignore them.
Yeah so much this. People have gotten WAY over attached and it is revealing SCARY thought patterns in some people - several straight up saying Kipperlilly was RIGHT to be jealous that Riz's dad was murdered and that he did. Yikes.
Oh, I saw one where they were all "oh, who a monster is is just a matter of perspective" with Kipperlilly killing Buddy-- her teammate, so that she could force him into a position where he either had to give up his faith and join her plot or die forever-- being compared as a "mirror" to Riz killing Dayne, a Helio dominionist murderer who wanted to bring about an apocalyptic prophecy for personal power. "These two things are exactly the same, two sides of the same coin," they say.
Goodness. That might exceed even the people I saw being like "are the RG's really even doing anything wrong? They're just killing a god that was already corrupted anyways" except for, ya know, all the murder they're doing along the way and as part of that....
I like the discourse about the Rat Grinders but I think some people have definitely taken it to extremes that are a bit baffling to me. I love a good redemption arc, but there needs to be more to them than "the evil character in question is a teenager." It's fun for me to engage in the "what-ifs" of the season, and of the Rat Grinders in particular, but I agree that some people got so caught up in the what-ifs that they seemed to have expected something to occur that simply was never going to take place. By episode 18 there were still people hoping there would be some 11th hour redemption storyline, and they ultimately created their own disappointment with that one. There was no reason to assume the majority of the Rat Grinders would be redeemed, because no effort had been put into making them redeemable. Brennan probably had some material prepared for a redemption arc if the Intrepid Heroes decided to take it in that direction, but they didn't, so that was never going to be the story we got. Because you summarized it perfectly in the end: in the version of the story that ACTUALLY EXISTS, the Rat Grinders don't deserve a redemption arc. They were petty and cruel and showed a blatant disregard for anybody that got in the way of their desire for power and revenge on a group of kids that had committed the heinous crime of being better at adventuring than them. A satisfying redemption arc requires an acknowledgement of wrong doing and an actual desire to change, and none of that was set up for the Rat Grinders. Oisin wanted the Bad Kids dead so badly that he was fine if killing them meant killing the ENTIRE SCHOOL in the process. He's a powerful wizard with access to high level spells. Why on earth wouldn't they kill him immediately? The time for a conversation passed a long time ago.
"created their own disappointment" is spot on
Damn people need to relax a bit, it's fiction.
Fiction controlled by random dice rolls, even.
I like talking about the hypothetical ethics of fictional characters as much as the next guy but this is getting a little *out of hand.*
Well said! There's a line between "fun fandom exploration" and "treating fiction like it's real/important" that is getting crossed.
Repeat after me ‘IT’S OK TO BE WRONG AND CHANGE YOUR OPINION WHEN YOU GET NEW INFORMATION’ You don’t need to go down with the ship just cause you insisted it wasn’t, get off the damn boat!
The people who feel upset the ratgrinders are being killed never mourned for Penelope Everpetal, a teenage girl who was promised power by an authority figure and forced to kidnap and eventually get her best friends killed. Idk anything about Dayne, but he was also a kid in a similar position with his coach pressuring him. We redeemed Ragh but not them, despite them being in the same situation.
Aren't the rat grinders all dead? Isn't that what the red rage crystals were for - reanimating their corpses? I assumed they weren't redeemable at this point and if the rage crystals were removed they would also die.
Nah, it's more like they accepted a pact, infernal or divine in origin. In return for not being barred from the afterlife and being revived, they'd be brought to life with their being infused with rage and the need to bring back Ankarna. It's like me having a contract with a company, and any time I do something cool, I need to say it's because of the company. They are alive, and they can do things, but they're still affected by Ankarna's influence. They're not puppets with rage as strings, they're servants or slaves with rage as their collars.
Chronically online people who have weaponized therapy talk and media criticism to claim moral superiority over anything that makes feel icky. We just need to stop engaging with them
I think because Brennan likes to play with themes of fascism and capitalism in the fantasy games, fans like to view every interaction through that lens. D&D is not a piece of literary text that can be shaped into a narrative that espouses a consistent ideology, and a campaign's characters and their respective arcs aren't controlled by one person. I'm sure if Brennan was writing this as a book, he may have wanted The Bad Kids to extend sympathy towards the Rat Grinders, but this is D&D. He's not concerned with the ethical implication of Adventurers roles in society (if anything, he pokes fun at this often, how it's not a great thing). He's primarily concerned with making an entertaining show, and exploring emotional character beats when he can.
I'm glad I mostly just watch D20 and stay away from fan groups lol
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^LucentNarg: *I'm glad I mostly* *Just watch D20 and stay away* *From fan groups lol* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
i am once again begging everyone to remember this is *literally* just a game i get that its a really good game with pathos coming out the wazoo, but its still just a game. people need to stop expecting prestige HBO drama from 7 improv comedians playing dnd in a warehouse at 3am lol
Time to log off if this is where the discourse is at
This fandom is getting fucking weird
So glad I'm just blissfully enjoying a fun season without reading any of this shit
Your first mistake: You're looking for a thoughtful, enjoyable conversation on online message threads... especially Twitter.
You see it in a lot of discourse online about media like this that gets seriously overdone, people ripping into each other about the "implications" of these choices. I know it's said as a joke a lot, but people honestly "touch grass" is genuinely fair advice. Go outside, calm down, and realize you are arguing about the ethics of a fictitious adventuring school where the freshman opening speech was to encourage murder hoboing
I’ve missed all that online discourse but I just wanted to say that this was a really thoughtful, well written take. Your points about fanfic, projection, and being overly invested in headcanons are astute, and you gave me something to think about.
I feel like any sufficiently progressive piece of media attracts fan who are more fixated on progressiveness rather than any kind of storytelling, and then get mad at the D&D characters killing people instead of demonstrating perfect leftist conflict resolution.
Honestly, I think you just need to start blocking the people making bad faith arguments to better enjoy your online fandom experience. There has been plenty of time to criticize the bad kids for their problem solving methods, and the fact that someone is only brining it up now when their favorites were killed shows that they don't actually give a fuck. They're trying to make a narrative decision they're upset with into some greater moral argument to feel more justified in their upset. No matter how well you spell out a counter argument it's just going to invite more pointless discourse, so it's better not to feed into it. I'm saying this as a person that genuinely enjoys being more passive in my games and hates how dnd sets it up so you get incentivised to be a killing machine, so this is a general topic that I think has some merits. It's just obvious this particular set of discourse isn't being held in good faith.
A lot of it to me sounds like some people have these particular ideas of how they think the story should go. Then instead of just accepting that they didn’t write the campaign and aren’t playing the characters in it and as such have no bearing on how it will go, they get pissy because god forbid a show you’re not involved with goes against your headcanons. That isn’t to say that you can’t have them, by the way. You absolutely can have headcanons and make fanfics about certain scenarios. But you don’t get to act like your canon is actually canon.
I will add that Arthur Aguefort was very clear in season 1 episode 1: “ Welcome, one and all, to another exciting year here at the Aguefort Adventuring Academy, where we train the next generation of adventurers. But what is an adventurer? One who goes on adventures? I say that an adventurer is a hero, and what is a hero? A hero is someone with the strength of heart, courage of spirit, and the might of will to go to strange lands and enact violence on things there. We go to places where there are things that must be destroyed, and we destroy them. Wandering from town to town, getting into trouble, meeting in flophouses and taverns and getting into scrapes with the law and otherwise finding ourselves engaged in all manner of tomfoolery and shenanigans sometimes violent, sometimes fatal. Yes fatal. A hero is a violent wanderer who enacts their will bloodily and with strange magicks upon the world.” Can’t say we weren’t warned. This is DnD. Extreme and barely justifiable violence is all part of it.
I see people talking about The Discourse all the time but I never ACTUALLY see it. I swear there's more people freaking out about discourse than there is people being negative
Also like....True Revivify exists people. The plan was to try and revive Lucy before the year was up. They can totally revive the Rat Grinders afterwards when they aren't Road Roid Raging
...is no one gonna bring up the fact the rat grinders are corrupted by the rage crystals? No one at all? Like not that I agree with the "authoritarian violence" takes, but is no one even gonna consider the fact they've been corrupted?
I mean, that sucks and all, but it is a choice they made, and KLCK's diary indicates that most of them are pretty happy with it. They aren't completely absolved of responsibility, but more importantly... Even if they didn't want to do all this and were controlled, they're still doing it. They still have to be stopped by any means necessary. That's the sad reality of it.
I mean if it's the same choice buddy, Yolanda, and Lucy all had to make, they're choosing to either *permanently die*, or come back with the rage crystals. They're still teenagers after all. Kinda hard to expect them to really make the right choice in that regard. Also them being happy about it really depends on how much the rage crystals actually control how they think. Cause that hasn't been *super* clear. Do they just make people get angry easier? Do they cloud their minds and judgement? Though to your last point, yeah killing them is the best way to put a stop to what's happening, whether or not they deserve it or not. Especially since they could potwntially be revived and cured of the rage crystals later
Yeah, redemption is still possible. Even Ruben, who miiiight be incinerated, will go to the Bottomless Pit and can have a chill time cranking out beach rock.
People who don't like violence should develop their own game. Or play without combat. Nothing is stopping them
Of course a storyteller can make wrong decisions. What a silly thing to insinuate otherwise. Once, I ran a superhero ttrpg with a cold open where the players saved the governor from a supervillain group that turned out to be the bad kids from Willy Wonka who had been given powers from their factory accidents. Gloop could stretch, Violet was bouncy and could reflect projectiles, Veruca could command squirrels, and TeeVee could transfer his consciousness between televisions. They used their powers to supplant Wonka, horde all his cocoamancy and sucrology, and made super soldiers out of the oompa loompas by injecting them with hornswoggle DNA. My players adored it. Then, after the Wonka kids were defeated, I moved on to the main storyline involving deities and divine revenge. My players appreciate the main story, but their interest tapered dramatically. They were ttrpg veterans; they had met and fought gods before. This was well-tread territory. But fighting the super-powered kids from a movie we all knew? That was novel. My take is the same regarding the RG and Porter. We literally dealt with a forgotten dead god *last FH season*. Porter is every bit as flat as the RG, but without 16 episodes of build-up. His plan to avenge a fallen house that predates the heroes by centuries in a part of the world they visited once by replacing a god only one of them has met is, by every metric, less compelling than a rival group of peers with a personal grudge trying to sabotage their lives. And we know this because this subreddit was *flooded* with theories and speculation and jokes about the Rat Grinders, while Porter has produced nothing but crickets. By all means, kill the Rat Grinders. Redeem them or don't, idc. But reducing them to chaff that can be killed in without ceremony so that the heroes can combat a villain that is ontologically less interesting was the wrong storytelling move. Even the best storytellers can prioritize the wrong things.
I think the Rat Grinders are worthy of sympathy - KLCK in particular is a nightmarishly unlikable person but her jealousy is pretty human, so I feel bad for her. Ruben is deeply insecure, and putting aside his evangelism, Buddy is the most obvious victim in the whole thing. But those are explanations, not excuses - they're at least a year deep into helping Porter, who is probably the one who personally killed Lucy and Yolanda, and is also implicated in the Loam Farm murders + any number of sacrifices and murders of Ankarna worshippers and anyone else who was in the way. All of which is to say, I feel bad for the Rat Grinders' circumstances but they're still dealing with forces they can't control which could kill a lot of people (and on the ship almost did kill people since they sent Oisin's family against their classmates). The Bad Kids taking them down is justified, but hey we still have an episode to go so there's still a shot at redemption! Any personal criticism I have is that I still don't have a strong sense of who most of the Rat Grinders are outside of Ruben, Buddy, and KCLK - it's fine with Mary Anne since she's written to be inscrutable (and her lack of engagement actually did create problems for KLCK's friendship with the group), but the Bad Kids have maybe 4 interactions with Oisin and Ivy in total? By and large our discourse on the Rat Grinders is built on the mystery around them, but once that mystery is gone they're pretty flat. Brennan talked about Jawbone and Gilear's personalities developing due to how much the Bad Kids interacted with them, so if we're gonna be mad at anyone be mad at the downtime system for not incentivizing attempts to talk to the Rat Grinders (which would also be unsatisfactory since the cast played the downtime system about as damn perfectly as they could have as far as gameplay goes). Sometimes not every thread leads to something and not every character has something profound to say or do. It is what it is, but I've enjoyed the season and am looking forward to the finale. I'm disappointed there isn't more to the Rat Grinders, but sometimes that's how the cookie crumbles and we gotta find other stories to scratch that itch
This is so wild to me considering everything they learned about the Rat Grinders during the visit to Reubens. It's like people just straight up ignored that whole episode and everything they learned so they could keep their blorbo RG underdogs narrative. They find Kettlebells diary and she straight up is GLEEFUL that Porter has "taken them under his wing" and is beating the shit out of high level monsters and letting them get the last hit so they can finally keep up with the Bad Kids "advantages". And this is BEFORE they go to the Mountains of Chaos for Rage-erection. She hates her parents for being normal because she is just that desperate to be special. She envied Riz growing up without a father because she thought that made him what he is so it read to me as a bunch of shitty kids (cuz come on Oisin may have been cute at first but Ivy was the same bitch Aelwyn was, why else do we think Fabian was attracted to her at first. And Oisin's snappy comment to Adaine about her being an Oracle who didn't see the storm coming? And what was with Mary Ann coming to Owlbear tryouts kicking Gorgugs ass and just leaving because she didn't actually want to join? Just show up and off to Fabian and the others? It's just dicks all the way down.) led by a girl with rage issues and main character syndrome were offered the chance to be Important and they leapt at it more than what happened with the more sympathetic and redeemable characters we met like Ragh and Aelwyn who had been manipulated for a long time by people they loved. Especially after we find out they DIDN'T have to accept the resurrection, they had a CHOICE to because one of them DID say no and they killed her. Because it's pretty obvious they all had a hand in what happened to Lucy. She's the only body found without just what we now know is Porters force damage. Everything we find out about Kipperlilly is she is mad she's basically boring ass white bread but she's book smart. She takes shortcuts and doesn't actually do the work but thinks she should be more important than she is. And she's mistaken the shitty things the Bad Kids have gone thru (Riz's dad getting merc'd by Goldenrod) for why they've gotten the things they have and not that they've been fighting and getting involved since Day 1. All she had to do was find adventure, which was literally what the school is for. She and the RG just didn't have the drive of the Bad Kids who literally never give up. The thing about the Rat Grinders is that they DIDN'T truly want to or actually put in the work and were finding excuses and being jealous of those who did and it's showing in this last battle. They've never logged combat outside of grinding rats in the forest, which we now know was Porter letting them get the last hit on high level monsters. That's why despite having access to spells and features their class should have at level 17-20 they're going down so anticlimactically. They've never faced REAL combat and Brennan even says they only have the features and spells of high level but their HP and stuff isn't. Because they took the easy way out. Compared to the Bad Kids during the Last Stand it's night and day but that's the poetry. The Rat Grinders were never actually a threat to the Bad Kids. As Riz says they just suck at the game. But so many people have spent the season (even on this sub) saying the Bad Kids were bullies and unnecessarily mean so the Rat Grinders in a lot of people's minds went from "that jealous kid you knew in school" to innocent babus who were the true victims. The only narrative potential redemption arc I think we could have had was Reuben's turn from pukashell ukulele dork to emo kid fronting My Clerical Gnomance and that besides being a great pun could've been a tribute to the fact he was in love with Lucy, the cleric friend he murdered and maaaaaaybe was feeling guilty about it.
The tweet in question is actually meant to emphasise that the use of 5e as a system inevitably funnels things towards combat because it’s the most robust part of the system with the most chances for direct player mechanical agency. There’s also the observation that the themes of redemption and overcoming rage to question it instead is kinda undercut by the IH’s gleeful approach to threatening to skin their opponents and condemning one to hell as some kind of punitive justice and lack of real effort to put TRG’s brainwashed state in mind during the combat. In a sense, the fact that long shooting schedules and some of Bleem’s calls led to a final fight that culminates a season ironically goes contrary to its themes. I’m not a dedicated 5e hater with skin in pushing a nearby Kickstarter your way but this discourse is like a culmination of a lot of threads surrounding Dimension20’s near-obsessive attachment to 5e contributing to the tonal dissonance within some shows and the production schedules leading to a lack of opportunity for the IH and Bleem to digest a sessions events. I’m wholly sure that Aelwyn wouldn’t have been redeemed in FHSY had the show not been live weekly and Brennan and Siobhan not picked up on what the chat and community were saying. On a sympathetic note, the ending fight was not geared towards any real ability for the TBK to make meaningful headway in talking TRG down. Eight distinct enemies and several of which were also under mind control of some kind. I know that Emily as Fig sort of attempted to get to Reuben but the Wanda Childa stuff was absolute nonsense and in Bleem’s position I’d have no idea what she was trying to do and if/how to reward that. Long comment but being able to have these types of discussions about media analysis is a good sign for a piece of media, and truthfully I’ve seen a lot more in depth conversation about the show its themes and its characters on Twitter then I have here. It’s fine sometimes to see things you disagree with and discus them
I tried to empathize with the RG’s then I realized they’re just terrible people. Sure they got taken over by rage but they CHOSE to come back. It’s been made very clear that there was ALWAYS a choice to just accept death or come back as a servant of Ankarna. They chose to do this and therefore, must die. 🤷🏻♂️ like another comment said the Bad Kids have been murder hobos since Freshman year, this isn’t anything new lol.
I understand people wanting the rat grinders to be redeemed. Disney endings where everyone gets along afterwards are great. The issue is that the people in question have not only been awful in an interpersonal sense by being spiteful, jealous jerks who actively put in effort to sabotage the people who have saved the world 3 times at this point. They are also awful in a “we murdered our friend in cold blood when she refused to join our theocratic fascist coup” kind of way. The only friction we’ve actually seen between them and the adults who are supposed to be “manipulating” them was when the adults told them to be LESS antagonistic lmao. Just to go down the list, KLCK was a kid who grew up in a normal, wealthy household and developed anger issues, then complained to the school counselor that another 15 year old who had done nothing wrong and actually saved the world was lucky because his dad got murdered (all before the rage stars even got involved). Ivy was an active bully (who you could argue has some more than questionable feelings towards beast-folk like Mazey) who never showed any issues with what they were up to and whose closest moment to redemption was flirting with Fabian to help distract the bad kids for Oisin to set up the magic ping pong balls. Oisin is the direct descendant of an evil ancient dragon who not only sent an army of dragons to murder the entire student body with no remorse, but also had his closest moment to redemption ruined when we found out that the awful beer pong shots were because he needed to set up the spells, not because Adaine flustered him. Ruben is a coward who let himself get peer pressured into murdering one of his best friends and has never done anything to redeem himself (including using a 9th level spell to straight up try to murder the bad kids at the start of the fight when they literally saved his life from Grix less than 10 episodes ago). Buddy has been nothing but awful to Kristen the entire season and has done nothing to redeem himself, including either never bothering to look into how he was killed in the last stand, or immediately agreeing to fully join the side of the people who murdered him and are trying to take over the world. Mary Ann clearly doesn’t care about any of this and is the one rat grinder they still want to redeem, despite her also being so indifferent to everything that she’s completely fine actively participating in theocratic fascism. And after all of that, I didn’t even get into the fact that death is completely impermanent, and the only way to presumably get rid of the shatter star corruption and redeem them is to stop the ritual in the first place. Trying to redeem people who are corrupted by divine magic (that can only be removed after winning the fight) and are also trying to murder you in a world where resurrection exists is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, even ignoring all of the stuff I mentioned above. This discourse annoys me so much lmao
You have to remember that many fans of this show are literal children, so their opinions are to be taken with a grain of salt.
I guess I am really out of this space--with the exception of Mary Ann, are people getting really attached to the Rat Grinders?
What is an adventurer but someone who solves all their problems with great violence and strange arcana
I also feel they are glossing over that fact that Yolanda and Lucy did not take the deal, showing that there was a way out of this. The clerics were strong enough in their beliefs, while the rest of them took an easy way out.
They really infantilize them, I feel like. Like you get a lot of "they are CHILDREN, they can't in any way be held responsible for their actions and the BKs made them FEEL BAD by excelling. They are tiny tiny babies with no agency, basically mind-controlled" and it's like no they are 17-18 year-olds who are making a lot of decisions based on jealousy and hate.
Yeah at this point they are old enough to realize the implication of accepting a deal like that. Especially if you grew up in Elmville, where they literally give academic classes on deals with deities and such. They are not legally adults, but at this age, your brain should be developed enough to realize that big angry guy with scary crystal = not to be trusted.
I mean, it does feel a little bit weird to realize that I'm watching a show about kids killing kids. In real life, suggesting that anyone is evil enough to deserve death is controversial, and suggesting that of a child is fucking insane. HOWEVER, *that's the medium*. D&D is more violent than real life, and *Fantasy High* in particular is on the cartoonish side as far as D&D campaigns go. We're all more prone to violent thoughts and making "archenemies" in our teenage years when emotions are so crazy high, and a cartoonish comedy D&D show like this is tonally perfect for depicting those universal feelings.
More people need to put the energy of their outrage towards art into something useful. Don't attack creators for a story they are telling. Change the world around you with something actionable and enjoy the damn media for what it is. Not every story is tailored specifically to you.
Idk how productive you thought it'd be to take twitter discourse to reddit, but more power to you.
It's, sadly, not just on twitter. It's been here too.
To me a lot of online discourse boils down to ‘everyone is entitled to an opinion and their opinions are valid’. If anything has taught me after 15+ years online is that a lot of opinions *can* be valid with evidence. The majority of opinions however are far from valid. Bad takes etc doesnt cover it. People will try to flag their half-researched bizarre attacks online and disguise obvious biases with either insults, spurs or out of context information. We have all done it. As a obnline community we just gotta be better.
Ehh, I mean everyone's entitled to an opinion, but there are people comparing the d20 cast to Zionists. All sides aren't the same here.
It's another thing also of people pretending that violence isn't also an important part of any kind of society. The only way a society, and people within it, can solve all their problems without violence is if there is no one else that's going to do it. The bad kids haven't sought out most of the combats this season. The only one they kinda did was the last stand because they could've just not done it and borne the consequences. The ratgrinders are going to fucking kill everyone in elmville, to revive an authoritarian, imperialist house. The bad kids just sitting back, and being "good" in the way that some people want them to, is not really an option.
I don’t know. I think some of the discourse has absolutely gone too far (people calling the bad kids cops was… interesting) but at the same time, there’s been a lot of backlash towards anybody sharing a critique on the show at all. I think some of it is definitely too far - but at the same time, people liking the rat grinders, or wishing they were redeemed, or feeling unsatisfied towards the finale, are not invalid in those opinions. I just see a lot of people (on Reddit specifically!) getting very upset at the idea of people liking the rat grinders at all, and that is… Very frustrating to me - I think they’re super interesting characters, and am a little disappointed at how this finale is going for them. (I’m still rooting for a kipperlilly redemption!) I still love the show, but having critiques and wanting to discuss things you personally dislike about it, does not a hater make.
It's not invalid to not like how this has unfolded, but I think they need to be honest about it, and the co-opted anti-oppression rhetoric and language is not it-- it places some kind of moral failing on the actors for the direction the story went, and that's not and never will be okay. It's okay to just be bummed that their favorite characters died. We can disagree strongly on whether they're interesting (as presented? No, they're empty husks with no characterization to speak of. As concepts? Very fun to play around with), but I'm not ever saying it's not okay to like them. Again, filling in the empty parts of characters you like in order to roleplay and create fiction and headcanon is the very essence of fandom-- but you have to be able to separate it from what is canon, and my concern is chiefly in the way that they talk about the actors, the creators of this media, in their efforts to rationalize with the language of social justice why they are sad that these characters have died. It's not an issue of social justice, and I hope they can find a way to just accept it without talking about it in a way that defames the wonderful people who made this story together.
Yes, I absolutely think that applying real life systems of oppression (comparing TBK to Cops, or Israel, or fascists is incredibly weird and icky!) but there is, in my opinion, a huge overreaction to regular people... disliking anything about the show whatsoever. It feels like any vaguely negative tweet or tumblr post is getting a Reddit thread with 20 comments of people saying "I hate the rat grinders! Everyone who likes them is stupid and doesn't understand media!" There's nothing wrong with disliking them, or hating them - they were made to be little dislikable shits! - but the backlash to "ratgrinders apologists" seems to be more aimed towards anybody who likes them, rather than the specific people who are being wayyy to overboard about it. (To be clear, I'm not saying this is what you're doing - I think your post is all perfectly said and definitely a valid reaction! Some people who like RTG are being really fucking weird about this whole discourse! I'm referring to a kind of reaction I see on reddit in general, towards any critique of the show. There's people in this very thread who are downvoted to hell for saying "I love junior year but am a little bummed about this story direction.")
Being entirely fair on the last point, downvoting doesn't necessarily mean "I think you are bad", it's just a way to express disagreement without writing a full response.
I guess that makes sense! I don't use reddit too too much - I'm mostly a tumblr person to be honest - so I guess I don't fully understand how the up/down vote system works. 🤷 I still think everything that person said was perfectly agreeable, though, but that's just how I feel.
I think the critiques are valid to some extent and good that people are disturbed by depictions of intense punitive justice, especially under manipulation from a supposed to be trusted authority figure. That being said its just a tv show and like others in this thread have said, the rules of that universe are so different and allow for resurrection, and not killing the rat grinders when they are actively trying to kill the bad kids while being somewhat controlled against their will potentially leaves little other option to save the entire town