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Our story begins with the most successful Kickstarter campaign in history. A bunch of nerdy voice actors started a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) game which eventually got livestreamed on the internet, and they called it Critical Role (CR). It quickly became massively popular.
And it came to pass that the CR team announced that they were starting a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for a 20-minute animated special featuring part of the story from their (years long) D&D game. Their initial goal was $750,000. They got over $1 million within the first hour. By the end they had raised over $11 million. And so CR decided to do a 12-part series called “The Legend of Vox Machina”, which subsequently got picked up by Amazon…who promptly screwed the backers.
In exchange for their money they’d been promised advanced viewings of the series…and then that just didn’t happen. Amazon now owned the streaming rights, and the Critical Role team couldn’t fulfill this promise. They advised their backers to start up free Amazon trial accounts to watch the show at the same time as all the other people who didn’t help fund it. Outraged postings by longtime fans followed quickly.
Without making apologies for the way the backers got screwed, I must admit that this is a very first world problem. The point was to help CR launch their dream, and it worked. So…what about the actual show? Quick verdict: 5 stars, A+. Go Watch it.
This one is for an adult audience. There’s copious cursing, blood, gore, and animated nudity. It’s a bunch of grown-up nerds having some highly unapologetic grown-up nerd fun…and it is glorious. LVM has the ultra-rare 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 93% audience score to go along with it. Huge promises were made, and they were delivered. The humor is gleefully crude. The action is cheerfully violent, well drawn, well-paced and frequent. The character development is very solid, albeit a little on the nose. But forgoing subtlety feels like a deliberate choice to keep the viewers informed rather than some kind of directorial failing. And it’s fitting too, because the characters in this story are the least subtle people ever. They are oafish, aloof, reckless, oversexed, and violent, but also very well intended when things get serious. At any other time, they’re the kind of party guests you wish you could turn back time and uninvite.
Throughout the story you get the sense that most of them have been through enough horror that they just give up on being conventionally decent. They’ve seen enough death, destruction and betrayal dished out by polite society that they’re incapable of putting out any effort to try and join it. There’s an honesty in their obscenity. Vulgar, destructive, uncouth louts they may be, but they aren’t going to lie to you, gaslight you, stab you in the back, or give up on you. Their collective sense of guilt for being a crew of irresponsible jerks gives them the strength to move mountains. It’s impossible not to root for them.
Of course, that doesn’t stop some people.
Courageous keyboard warriors sniping from the safety of anonymous usernames have always felt free to unload vast amounts poorly thought out, whiney drivel in the comments section. And although 92% of the Amazon reviews for LVM were 5 stars, there were, of course, some angry detractors. But strangely enough, not the kind I was expecting.
Whenever Amazon releases a show week-week fans pitch an epic of impotent, bad-faith, first-world whining. “I PAY FOR AMAZON SO I CAN BINGE!! I WILL CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION!” And since LVM was releasing three episodes each week, I naturally expected a hurricane of such infantile noise. But instead there were a bunch of pearl-clutchers moaning about the cursing and the nudity. Well, mostly. There was also another much more sinister flavor of review arguing in favor of what we call ‘Respectability Politics’.
Respectability Politics is a repressive tool used to defang the expressions of marginalized people, unpopular opinions, or new types of artistic work. Frequently all at once. And it is sometimes self-inflicted in the name of broader acceptance. These reviewers argued that the highest responsibility of the CR team should have been to make the show palatable to general audiences, and their decision to produce an unapologetic series was unacceptable.
If you’re at all familiar with the personalities of the CR team you know they would respond to talk in the best possible way: by ignoring it to death. We are in no danger of this show losing its edge to make itself presentable. That’s just not what they do. This one was of the fans, by the fans and for the fans: exactly as it was intended.