Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be returning to the Legend of Vox Machina, for a very simple reason: I’m having a great fucking time. My own apartment’s progress through our D&D campaign has slowed to a crawl, leaving me profoundly malnourished and desperate for some gamified high fantasy drama. I have quibbles about Vox Machina here and there, but the show’s enduring strength is that it damn well captures the feeling of a tabletop adventure, striking a difficult balance of earnest fantasy and gamified mechanical design.

So far, it’s actually been better at capturing the feeling of D&D than illustrating a narrative of its own, but I expect that to change as we move beyond the tutorial phase. The introduction of the Briarwoods has given our team a personal stake in the drama, so I’ll be interested to see how the show manages its earnest drama versus its verging-on-out-of-character quipping going forward. Either way, I’m sure there’ll be plenty to talk about, so let’s get right to the action!

Episode 4

Alright, had to duck out to get some breakfast for this hangover, now we’re getting right to the action. Isn’t while nursing a hangover the most thematically appropriate time to watch this show, anyway?

Uriel wants our heroes thrown in irons, and Allura says she’ll handle it. After Vex makes her case, Allura limits the punishment to house arrest

“How can you arrest a house!?” Easily Grog’s best line yet, and a fine demonstration of the humor evolving from general vulgarity to character-reflecting wordplay. Also a very good line read; there’s a great thread of cuddly innocence in Grog, which makes for a fun contrast with his more violent instincts

Was trying to figure out where I recognized Sylas’ voice actor from, and goddamnit, it’s Matthew Mercer doing his Trafalgar Law voice. Gonna be hard to get that connection out of my head

Very fond of the brief cut of Percy doing the Ebata Walk in the opening

House arrest is apparently pretty serious, also involving the surrender of all your weapons

Oh right, Pike’s holy thingy broke. I guess we’ve got another character thread to work on – and not a terribly surprising choice, given Pike’s actress seems to have as much confidence as the main leads, and also her character is grounded enough to already support a personal story. Scanlan and Grog are still mostly comic relief, and Keyleth seems a little too uncertain to headline a narrative, so Pike’s the natural next choice

And a silent visual comedy punchline, as Vax’s “I’m not turning into a vampire, am I?” is answered by Vex glancing at his reflection in the window. A graceful payoff that builds on Vax and Vex respectively neurotic and blunt personalities – we’re really cooking now!

“Let’s bust up these guards and break outta here!” “Ah, so you want to be fugitives to the crown, wanted in every corner of Tal’Dorei?” That response is basically half of what my character does in D&D, as I continually assure my party that we’ll get to kill people later, but probably should not kill the person who would incite an international incident

Vax and Scanlan middle finger dueling each other got me, I admit. Something very funny about Vax maintaining his usual prim expression while being dragged down to Scanlan’s level. This is how narrative elevates comedy beyond context-free open mic sets: our preexisting understanding and assumptions regarding the characters forms the foundation, bolstering the payoff with either the surprise of a greater misdirect, or the satisfaction of validating that understanding

This is also why the greatest sitcoms tend to be doomed to failure – they embrace the comedic possibility of long-term characterization, and thus their later seasons need the context of earlier seasons to even parse as humor. As a result, they lose the ability to gain new fans, lacking the accessibility of sitcoms that freeze their characters as static gag vehicles

“I wanna know about the smoke! Sorry, loud.” Kinda feels like Keyleth’s actress is embracing her shyness by playing a shy character, a smart choice

Percy’s conflict is doing a fine job of teasing out moral distinctions in the group. D&D’s harsh alignment system of Good, Neutral, or Evil is utterly incapable of fully encapsulating any actual living individual, so it’ll be interesting to see how this story either leans into or abandons that system’s artificiality

Percy gives us the short version of his family history: the Briarwoods arrived as allies, had dark ambitions, betrayed their friends, yada yada. It’s all pretty boilerplate stuff that I assume was given more texture in the original recordings. The important takeaway seems to be that he tried to escape with his sister Cassandra, but she was struck by arrows and he ran on, leaving us a perfect opportunity for him to reunite with the sister he thought had died

Meanwhile, the Briarwoods are off dabbling in some friendly necromancy

Aw shit, Percy makes the inspired choice of performing a perception check on their own living room, discovering a hidden wall in the process. An interesting branching point of game and narrative assumptions – there’d be no reason for these characters to assume their house contains the next step of their quest, but if your dungeon master has locked you in your manor and insisted you can’t leave, they’ve basically guaranteed it

They’re now directly tying Keyneth’s shyness in with her powers, as she mumbles an apology while failing to summon a light source. A classic trick, tethering her eventual confidence as a team member to her martial prowess

“Your group clearly can’t be trusted, so we’re separating you, like children.” And there’s a convenient way to forcibly develop individual character dynamics, by locking new pairs of characters in rooms together

The twins consider simply abandoning the group and escaping. I appreciate this being raised as a possibility, even if the game structure couldn’t really handle it

The primacy of the group structure is another interesting divergence point between D&D and fantasy fiction. Generally, even fantasy stories that begin with a set group of travelers will eventually split that group up, as they tackle personal issues or different aspects of a world-shaping conflict. But in D&D, to split the party would mean changing the dynamic from “a group of friends collaborating” to several individuals just going back and forth with the DM about their own personal adventure, while everyone else waits for their adventure’s turn. This demand for group consistency drastically limits the sort of stories you can convey through D&D, but it’s a necessary concession to the medium’s actual goal

This is also one of the reasons D&D stories still feel like D&D stories, even when translated into a traditional narrative: D&D stories have a thousand invisible walls that don’t seem obvious when you’re participating, but become immediately clear when you’re watching

Some nice imagery for Pike attempting to connect to the Everlight

Even this splitting-the-party-into-pairs trick requires a certain kind of player pool. The primacy of “the party” as a collective can allow less confident players to find their footing, without being called on to perform an invented personality at length. The assurance that you can just sort of float along in the background is necessary to get a lot of people on board in the first place

“When people can’t hear me, I just shout louder.” Grog and Pike have a wonderful dynamic. No wonder even the opening pairs them up

Keyleth and Percy are the awkward pair, of course. Keyleth attempts small talk, but Percy is having none of it

They finally bond a bit over family troubles

I love that Percy’s response to having his gun confiscated is simply to build another gun. A very in-character move that also exploits the specialties of his unique class, A+ material

But no time for bonding, there’s zombies on the loose! The party reconvene after the final guards are gruesomely dispatched

The party get fucked up by the physical-immune zombies. This show is taking the concept of dropping to one hit point pretty seriously, I can’t imagine Keyleth’s got much blood left inside her

This guard captain’s doing great work! I generally try not to get too attached to any NPC companions, as they have a tendency to be treated like dramatic seasoning in much the same way as Star Trek’s redshirts, but I could see this guy going places

In a moment of crisis, Keyleth unlocks the power to summon a blinding light. I wonder how the original campaign handled this, as this is precisely the sort of dramatic revelation that works perfectly in fiction, but far more clumsily in game design. In fiction, it of course makes sense that you’d tether a character’s emotional journey to their physical prowess, and have them do things like unlock secret powers at their moments of greatest need. But in a game setting, that sort of thing feels a lot like the dungeon master taking control away from the player, perhaps even “stealing their fight” through exposition. Narratives demand surprise while game design demands firm strategic variables, and it can be very hard to negotiate that disagreement

Pike heads off to get her amulet revarnished, while the others head for Whitestone

And Done

Well shit, now Keyleth is their only healer? The group is well and truly fucked, then. But dubious compositional dynamics aside, this was undoubtedly Vox Machina’s strongest episode yet, and demonstrated the actors embracing their characters more fully than ever before. As I said at the start, beginning with archetypes is an easy way to establish assumptions that you can later build on, and Vox Machina is doing plenty of construction work, demonstrating new sides of basically all its characters. With introductions far behind and an exciting quest stretching before them, it feels like the story has truly gained its stride!

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