Legend Of Vox Machina

Somehow I didn’t review LOVM seasons 1 or 2 so I’m going to do all three seasons at once.

The Legend of Vox Machina is an adaptation of campaign one of Critical Role, an Actual Play streamed D&D game with a bunch of self-proclaimed nerdy-assed voice actors that started as a birthday present for one of them, grew into a regular home game, then a steamed AP, then a creative and gaming giant in its own right. Next March will be their tenth anniversary as a streamed game.

By the end of season three we’ve had 36 episodes and a bit under 18 hours of animation. We’re also, depending on how you look at it, either at episode 85 or 100 of the show. That’s over 350-400 hours of content compressed into <18 hours. There is an amount of content that’s relatively easy to put aside - shopping episodes and so forth can be rapidly discarded - but even allowing for that, there are a lot of things that are going to changed. I prefer to look at this as the history book version whereas the AP is the actual events. History is always tidied up a bit. Other changes have occurred because Ashley, who played and voices Pike, was acting in Blindspot for a lot of campaign 1 and the start of campaign 2 and was frequently away. But she’s available throughout the filming of this, and present a lot more. She does have a bit of season 1 where she goes away and comes back through astral projection at a critical moment - that mirrors a surprise appearance over zoom in the actual play, although Matt knew, it was a shock to the rest of the cast, so they kept it in. But Pike’s on-going presence changes the group dynamics and the storytelling in a lot of ways.

Some people have their noses out of joint because their favourite moments have been changed, or even missed completely, and while I understand their upset - one of my favourite moments is missing in season three - I have to say that stepping back, I’m enjoying the story as they are telling it, I’m liking the surprises that they’ve worked in and I will live with the changes that they’ve made. Ultimately I am enjoying this show and trust their creative choices to retell the story in a different, more compact, form.

Overall, seasons one to three deal with the threat from the Chroma Conclave, an unprecedented alliance of chromatic (and therefore evil) dragons that are threatening Tal’Dorei. Season one focuses on the first of these dragons, introducing us to Vox Machina (a waste of time for all the critters, but there are non-critter fans) and the backstory of Percy in Whitestone (which will be a central location for basically the rest of the show). In season two the party start searching for powerful artefacts, called Vestiges, that will help them face the rest of the Chroma Conclave (who are really only fully revealed in the season one finale), take down the weakest of the Conclave dragons and focuses mostly on Grog, although most of the rest of the cast get good episodes too. In season three the group explore the world a bit more, thanks to Gilmore and Allura, take down the rest of the Chroma Conclave and their next threat is revealed right at the end. Ziggurats are involved is all I will say. In this season Vex, Keyleth and Scanlan probably get the biggest dives into their backstory, although Pike (plus a surprise guest star) get a huge chunk of two-handed story in one episode and Pike is front and centre later on as well, so she’s not forgotten. Vax also gets a significant amount of character development work. Percy and Grog are not forgotten but are, having been a bit more front and centre in the first two seasons, a bit more supporting characters this seasons, for various reasons. It’s not instantly obvious unless you’re a super-fan of one of them, but looking back it’s easy to think “oh and X did Y” for a lot of them, but Percy and Grog’s names don’t crop up that often. I could say more, but spoilers.

Particularly in season three there are a lot of what I’ll call authorial tricks. It’s hard to say what they are without spoilers, but there are a load of lovely parallels in this show. The duplicate phrasing of a love declaration, the way a mechanical effect lands with such different emotions and more. Little easter eggs from other films and other seasons of their game are also amazing. There are a number of moments that are lifted directly from the campaign (again spoilers), some where the essence is lifted from the campaign (hard to talk about without spoilers but there’s an NPC death where the PC death blow is a direct lift but a so much of the rest of the scene is so changed it lands quite differently). It makes for interesting viewing.

I want to give a shout out to Titmouse. I struggle with a lot of animation, and some live action shows, that show action where it’s hard to understand what is going on. If you have seven members of Vox Machina, often with allies in this latest season, fighting whatever, often in crowded streets or similar, and leaving me feeling like I understood what was going on in almost every shot and my exclamations were of the form of “Oh wow!” rather than “WTAF is happening?!” was a delight, at least to me. I also want to call out their lighting choices. The ways they include a recognisable Matt Mercer in every episode is also fun.

In parallel to that, I also don’t usually notice voice work - possibly because I don’t watch much animation. But when you have a group of respected, hard-working voice actors and voice directors as your core cast their ability to reach out to others that they’ve worked with and get all kinds of people in their show is amazing. And it shows. All the voice work is just so on point.

I don’t normally recommend reactors, but I want to for this, obviously when you’ve seen it. The links are to their episode 1 reactions. Nerdy Nightly are a couple, they’re both bi but doing their best for bi erasure. They watched s1, and since then he has basically watched all the APs (he’s somewhere in the mid-90’s of c3). She watches bits because she’s a cosplayer. I like the interplay between his expectations and expressions from the AP and her just taking it all in as new. Xiao Long are another queer couple with that same “one knows the AP, one doesn’t” vibe. Sky McSparkle who also reacts to the current campaign. But she talks about the differences between the shows, not always in a lot of detail, but she highlights them. I have others I have enjoyed watching but these are three I’d recommend watching to anyone.

We’re going to have s1 of a Mighty Nein show and s4 of this one. I hope we get a Bell's Hells show down the line too. The order seems to be LOVM s4 then M9 although I’m not sure, that’s something I heard on YouTube and I’ve also heard they had started voice recording M9 before s4 of LOVM was announced, so who knows? I’m certainly looking forward to them both, and to rewatching season three soon, and all the seasons before season four is released.

Bechdel Test: Pass. The core cast is basically half female and those characters talk to each other pretty frequently, mostly about how to kill dragons. There are a lot of other characters around, some major (Gilmore, Allura, Kima), some minor (there are women in market scenes and so on). Lots of conversations between named women and while some are about men, most aren’t. Ko Test: Null. As usual I give animation a null rating for this. I believe wholly, where it makes sense, POC are cast if the character is a POC. Kima, for example, is voiced by Stephanie Beatriz. But who do you cast as a red dragonborn? A green dragon? So I just leave it null. Russo Test: Pass. Everyone is queer! Not quite true, and we don’t know about everyone that we know to be canonically queer in the game by the end of s3. However, Vax, Gilmore, Allura, Kima, J'mon Sa Ord (strictly we don’t know about J'mon, but they’re played by a NB actor so I wanted to give them a shout out) and they’re drawn in a wonderfully ambiguous way too, in a show where you can easily gender every other adult. I may have missed some but we have a chunk of characters that easily pass.