shoutout to those random peacocks you find in places that are probably unsuitable for a peacock to inhabit in the first place
what the fuck kinds of lives are you guys leading. i’ve never seen a peacock in my life. where are u guys finding them.
Random neighborhoods in Florida
a gas station in morocco
middle of a busy road in england
middle of the woods in a rural town in Mississippi
Irish farms??
Roof of a house in a tiny English village
Screaming their heads off in abandoned fuel stations in the back-blocks of the Rangitikei
with a group of pheasants in the woods in maryland
Strutting outside the window of an elementary school library in Texas.
Walking down the street of a California suburb on a hot summer afternoon like he owns the place
At a golf club in Long Island
At a strawberry festival in SoCal
Outside a café in Ayia Napa
Walking thru my neighborhood in nebraska
watching over fish near a pond in switzerland
walking around the zoo parking lot
on a car roof pulled over on the interstate on the way to Myrtle Beach
Friend’s neighbor’s yard in suburban Maryland
Stealing the dog food off our back porch in rural Oregon.
There’s a big house on a major road across from a college in Salt Lake. They must own peacocks because I somewhat regularly see them on the sidewalk in front of that property.
A cattle farm in rural Australia.
In a buddy’s back yard fighting with a neighborhood cat in Arizona in the middle of fucking summer.
Walking through Lisbon Castle like a tourist.
Chastising its cat friend while strolling along a reforestation trail in northern Ontario, Canada.
Pub garden in England
At the Los Angeles Zoo. He doesn’t belong to the zoo, he just walks around displaying his plumage and posing for pictures. Occasionally chases small children with snacks.
chasing childhood me in Stanley Park in Vancouver. probably because I had snacks.
A hotel lobby in central Mongolia
The Glendale, Arizona library
Chasing dudes down a country highway in Northwest Washington.
At a campsite in South Carolina
Buddhist temple in West Virginia
My backyard in michigan
My cow field s i t t i n g on a back of one chilling, North Carolina
standing right in the middle of the sidewalk in san diego, like he was waiting for me
a viking village in western norway
Casually strolling through an open-air Celtic Festival just outside of Las Vegas.
They wander around inner city Cincinnati. They escape the zoo, and the keepers have to go with nets and grab them on occasion.
The zoo has officially stopped supporting the population because there are too DAMN MANY of them. They reduced the flock from 40 to 6 in 2008. I think they have more now.
They just LEAVE.
Roosting in our barn in Ohio. Roosting in our trees, roosting in our pool shed, just hanging out on our back porch. Look we just had peafoul everywhere for something like four years, and we’ve no idea why.
A breeding pair or two must’ve made it across the river from Cincinnati because I’ve seen a few wandering around northern Kentucky
Grass farm in Texas
suburban roof in small-town Saskatchewan
End of a driveway in a wooded part of northern New Jersey
South Ferry in Manhattan.
Middle of nowhere (as in the town has a population of less than 2000) Maine on a shitty looking farm, roosting in the rafters of a farmhouse porch.
On the backyard of a farm house in the Münsterland area, Germany, also literal middle of nowhere. Chilling out with goats by the train tracks.
(Behind a fence, don’t worry, seemed save enough. I just saw it from the train.)
I keep thinking about the scene where Nott gives Yasha flowers, because like, any sentence starting with “all girls like ____” tends to put my hackles up, but from a strictly Watsonian perspective? There’s something kind of intensely touching about Nott, this filthy, ugly, toothy, twitchy goblin who quietly collects shiny and beautiful things, thinking that of course Yasha would like flowers. Yasha is six feet tall, ferocious, taciturn, terrifying, built like a brick shithouse, decked out in warrior’s plaits and battle paint – why wouldn’t she want a gift of something soft and pretty? Wouldn’t anyone like something pretty? Nott does. And it turns out that she’s right; Yasha, to the surprise of everyone, not only takes the flowers but treasures them. Whoof. Stack that with Nott saying that she knows she’s not very feminine, that most people (or most non-goblins) can’t even tell she’s a girl, and like. Whoof. Nott’s relationship to femininity is getting really fucking interesting, in a way that I find intensely personally gripping. And I’m pretty sure it’s pure serendipity, because that’s like… a lot for a cis guy to come out with off-the-cuff at a D&D game, but the nature of both D&D and storytelling in general is that small accidental details can become significant, and I’m going to end this post here before I go into 21000 words about death of the author and D&D podcasts as a new form of narrative, but the point is: I love Nott
I try so hard to be polite. I wonder if it’s worth it if I’m just gonna get dismissed as “radical” regardless.
I mean… you… know Liam reads all the scripts right?
And that all of this takes place before the games we didn’t see, and before they were remotely the characters we know?
And yet somehow, all the other characters are at least recognizable in their core characteristics and traits. Except for Vex, who is a bitchy taunt machine Vax has to put up with. I wonder why that is.
I try so hard to be polite. I wonder if it’s worth it if I’m just gonna get dismissed as “radical” regardless.
Sorry, but I definitely didn’t read this as “I hate my peasant mother”, but more as “I’m traumatized as fuck, desperately trying to fit in my dads upperclass lifestyle, but it’s actually a facade”.
We KNOW Vexs history, don’t ignore that history in your interpretation. Vex was the one who wanted to seem like she came from money when she visited her father. Vex is the one who had a hoarding problem after coming from poverty. She never hated her mother, but she always FEARED being poor. She FEARED peoples opinion of her.
And in the comics we don’t yet get to see the happy Vex who is supported by loads and loads of friends. We get a Vex who has a near case of Stockholms syndrom, after forceful adoption by her father.
So yeah, it’s pretty ‘radical’ to imply that your interpretation is the only possible interpretation. Having the creator (who often communicates with Matt Mercer and the players) ask you how you came to such an interpretation, so that he can clear things up in the next issue, is not rude or dismissive. It’s a bewildered creator asking for more feedback on a twitter that gives little room for lengthy detailed explanations.
The comic takes place a decade after the twins voluntarily ran away from Syngorn. They fled from there as soon as they could, apparently just after graduating from assassin school for assassins. They fled from Syngorn because it sucked and they hated it there, Vex included.
Stockholm’s is very much refuted as a real condition, and even when taken at face value, Vex meets literally none of the criteria needed to qualify for it. She doesn’t on the show, she doesn’t in the short story Laura wrote for her that takes place also almost a decade before the comics, and she doesn’t even really show any signs of that in the comic.
What the comic does show is Vex making crude and dismissive remarks about her mother, in front of Vax, who is very much offended by them. Not just in the panels shown, where she actively denies being related to her, but also before, when at the sight of a drowned baby, Vex quips that at least the baby’s mom tried to keep it. Which Vax also takes offense with.
Vex wanted to look like she came from money when visiting Syngorn because she hated being judged there due to her social and racial status, yes. A social and racial status that also made her very much aware, every day, that she was most definitely not nobility, because I guess assassin school for assassins is classist that way. Acting like she is, in front of Vax, the literal only person to know for sure she’s bullshitting, is just stupid. It’s not how the twins interacted, ever, be it on-screen or from what we got from the pre-stream adventures or Liam and Laura recounting their backstory or Laura’s short story from Vex’s POV.
Also, remember how after they went to Syngorn, Vax was really confused by how much being raised to nobility meant to her? As in, he literally didn’t even know she cared about that? Which Liam confirmed later on a talks episode? How does that add up with Vex putting up this front, ever? I’ll be the first to admit that Vax isn’t the best with context clues, but he’s not that dumb. If anything, you’d think it would stick with him due to how much he cares about his mother and was offended by Vex talking this way.
Vex is stand-offish, yes, she hoards money because she’s afraid of poverty and suffering, yes. She’s never cruel. Especially not about her mother in front of Vax. In fact, what she consistently does, from the short story Laura wrote to the final episode of the show, is put up a front for Vax that she is okay, no matter what, so he doesn’t have to worry about her. Yes, they bicker and argue, but Vex is competitive, not downright mean and cruel and dismissive.
These things on their own already paint a really unflattering picture, but somehow, every other character manages to be a two-dimensional version of who they will eventually be in canon. Like, you can see the character already, but not with Vex. She seems to exist solely to be a mean sister for Vax to bounce off of, who for some reason is way nicer than during the first 25 or so episodes of the show. Even though him turning nicer and taking up Keyleth’s moral compass was a major point of development in and of itself. But no, he’s in the comics as a perfectly nice soft boy bravely putting up with his really mean sister.
That is the problem here. There’s no regard for the canon information we have about Vex, serious continuity issues, and no sign of Co/vil/e actually wanting to address these. When someone else raised these concerns on reddit after the last issue, his response was basically to dismiss the concerns. Matt Mercer at least tried to be reassuring and apologetic, and he tries to do better whenever an issue is raised, and takes on a way kinder tone that actually invites discussion, rather than dismiss his audience as radical, even when things get ridiculous.
When they said “Vox Machina Origins comic,” I pictured, like, a retelling of the events from the “story so far” recap video. You know, the actual origins of the characters. Why isn’t the story that? Who is this weird evil elf woman we don’t care about? And why isn’t he taking advantage of the seven books he’s been given to spread the focus out amongst the seven characters?
Based on what I saw of the first issue, I would’ve paced the whole thing out like this:
Issue 1: Twins-focused, leaning towards Vax. They meet Keyleth and decide to head into Stillben to look for work. This is interspersed with bits of their backstory, and also Trinket is already there because fuck you Colville Vex was a teenager when she got him you don’t even have to watch the damn show to get that backstory do your goddamn research.
Issue 2: Scanlan-focused. Show what he and Grog are getting up to, hint at that mysterious past of his. End with them also returning to a pub in Stillben to look for work.
Issue 3: Keyleth-focused. Start with an explanation of her backstory and move into telling events from her perspective as the disparate parts of VM are brought together by an NPC and hired for their first quest. Maybe end the issue with the reveal of that fetal god monster thing.
Issue 4: Twin-focused, leaning towards Vex, who reflects on how it’s always just been the two of them. Fight the fetal god monster thing. Go back and kill the person who tried to trap them. Everyone decides to stick together and the S.H.I.T. is formed. They agree to meet up after taking care of their own business, and the twins privately discuss how it might be nice to have others around.
Issue 5: Grog-centric, but mostly in the perspective of the others puzzling over his absence when he fails to meet up with them. Travel to Westrunn, introduce Pike, investigate the missing Goliath, end off with finding him.
Issue 6: Pike-centric. They beat the lich and investigate the phylactary inside Grog. A trip is made to the wizard to learn of the ingredients they need to help him. Maybe rearrange the order a bit if there’s still pages to fill, and end off with them going to find the cult with the Nightmare.
Issue 7: Percy-focused. Spend a fair chunk of the issue flashing back and forth between his backstory and the current plot. The others find him in the cell, he shows off his guns for the first time. They save Grog and decide to head to Emon, Percy opts to come along (maybe because of encouragement from Keyleth and Vex), end comic with them all riding off into the sunset.
Just try to tell me that wouldn’t be more interesting than Colville’s OoC fanfic fearuring assassin school.
And why isn’t he taking advantage of the seven books he’s been given to spread the focus out amongst the seven characters?
From what we’ve seen, Scanlan is his favorite, he doesn’t know what to do with Grog because Grog doesn’t quip, and he really doesn’t know what to do with Vex because he didn’t watch the Feywild Arc or indeed much of the show at all. (He thinks she hates her mom, is regularly mean/bitchy to her brother, and brags about being a trained killer. What the … what?)
I think if he felt this uncomfortable handling some of the ensemble, and was so unprepared having watched very little of the show, he should have turned down this offer and suggested they hire someone else. Someone who was familiar with the characters and their histories. Someone who had worked in comics before. Preferably, someone with both of those qualities.
But didn’t you get the memo, trained killers never train on actual living things and will always be tortured by a decade by that one first time they killed someone who locked them into a cage. Also, I guess she skipped lock picking class at the assassin school for assassins.
Part of me is tempted to @ everyone who insisted that “assassin school for assassins” line was Vex being sarcastic or lying, to explain away that ridiculous moment.
Turns out, nope, she was telling the truth. That is canon in the comics. That is genuinely what Col/ville thinks her backstory is. No bear, no love for her mom or brother, but plenty of snark, and also she was a trained assassin for some reason.
because i’m a monster and can’t ever let anything go, ever:
col/ville pretty much already said, months ago, that it was intended to be taken at face value, and that his motivation in adding it to the canon was because it was a thing he likes writing. it was a Ma/tt Col/ville Thing.
vex’s canon backstory was dropped because it wasn’t something that he, personally, enjoyed writing. col/ville felt entitled to re-write a character because he saw her canon personality as something that needed to be fixed.
also, from a comment just below this one, since i’ve seen his quip-heavy writing style compared to whe/don before:
yeah.
You can’t make up how far this man is up his own ass. You really can’t.
Overdressed & Underappreciated 