I Am Laughing At Caleb And Nott Assuring Each Other That If Things Go Sideways They'll Be The First Out

Thinking about how Essek is, like, the elven equivalent of 22 at the time of C2, and imagining him at like five or six hundred looking back at his youth floored by how reckless he was/the stupid stuff he did.

I'm not even talking about everything with the Beacons and the Assembly, but like: "Shit, how did I EVER think it was a good idea for Me, a Wizard, who relies solely on magic, to travel to Aeor, -alone-, with only my Wizard lover, who -also- only relied solely on magic, in a place WELL KNOWN to be brimming with Extremely Deadly Anti-Magic Creatures, Anti-magic Fields, and a surplus of Anti-Wizard Traps???"

spent way too long making a shadowgast propaganda slideshow for the tumblr ship poll….. EVERYONE GO VOTE NOW FOR THE BEST SHIP IN THE BRACKET!

!! Spoiler for Peeps who don't know the majority of the M9 Campaign Events !!

I'm sorry, but Molly saying to Toya at the start of the episode that Kyle had something bad inside him, something that made him do bad things and couldn't help it. . .

And I can't help but be reminded of how Molly rises again, way down the line through no intention of his own, and isn't quite Molly no more. . . Someone who does many really, really bad things ;u;

Everyone who doesn't speak German, I want you all to understand just how good Liam's German accent is.

Especially compared to for example Matt's (as the Zemnian guy in the bar) - that's what I'm expecting an American guy to sound like when he's doing a half-decent German accent; like, well that's not reeeally what I speak like, but sure, I get what you're going for.

Liam tho? This is genuinely how we all sounded in my highschool English class. Hilariously authentic. No notes from my part.

I mean, it’s just a thought. . .

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)

there's something so funny about how the early Nein talks like Fjord has a high charisma but only took intimidate and lie as his skills and also only talks when it's clear everyone else has fucked the situation so bad he has to step in. Jester, Molly, and Beau all have proficiency in lie but all three of them have +0/+1 to Charisma and prof bonuses aren't that great at early levels and also none of them will shut up. Sam has a negative to charisma and cannot stop trying to talk because he hasn't really registered that he's not Scanlan any more. Caleb has both a decent charisma and also has a proficiency bonus to lie but he really only uses it in PVP. the ONLY person who took persuade was Jester.

I did a watch-through of c2e1 a few months ago so I'm going off my memories of that, but I recall realizing that - during the Circus Performance - Caleb was clapping a little along w/ everyone else during each performance (which in itself felt more to me like he was blending in). . . Until the fire act.

I've seen others mention how still he gets when stuff from his past is brought up, and I forgot if he went fully still here, but it stood out to me that while the others were clapping, impressed, he wasn't clapping at all™

My Therapist: "American-Accent Caleb isn't real and cannot hurt you." Caleb c2e1: