WHERE'S MY FUCKING DOG?

Reality check on all of them

....coming back here to watch this on a loop cause my character is a hairs breath away from having his own "Whats my mother's name" moment...

First time hearing this I was on his side so much. Like I was talking to the screen saying "if you all did care, why couldn't anyone else bring him back? Why did you need his daughter? No one else could have made an offering???"

Incredibly heartbreaking, poor Man I feel bad because that's how I felt about him at the beginning of the campaign. A silly little man playing silly little songs.

The fact that Laura is not voice acting in this scene just shows how immersed they are in the emotional scene.

i love Taliesin's little smirk, you can tell he's like "this is good"

I love the tone shift as the rest of the party goes from indignation to realising "oh shit no he's kinda right"

As soon as he said "why the fuck would you do that" and eveyrones face change told you everything lol

Scanlan snapping was the slowest buildling eruption I've seen as far as character development. To the untrained eye he is exactly what he says the rest of VM sees him as, a funny little man that plays music. To those more aware, he is probably the most nuanced character in the campaign, and he hides until the right moments. This was a cork firing out of a bottle and ricocheting off the walls for almost 7 minutes that not many saw coming. The delivery was immaculate as he rants off about everything the crew has done for each other - all the crazy feats the team went through for everyone but when it came to Scanlan they took his corpse, desecrated it with pudding and a dress then tied his hands above his head and brought his daughter to see him in that state. That's one of the biggest moments of "hahaha this is funny - oh wait we really just fucked up so bad"

It breaks my heart that scanlan really just gets left in the dust while everyone else gets closer together. It's his own fault in some parts. But heartbreaking none the less.

Wow….. im not even on this episode of the campaign but this was some powerful shit, emotions every where and really good role playing/ improv by sam, Matt just sitting there with full attention just made it that much better i felt like i was watching a Naruto episode or lord of the rings, that shit was simple yet raw and super relatable all together just wow. vox machina fantasy goat.

Damn they cursed a lot more before

I will never forget the moment I pulled over to watch this instead of listen. One of the best moments in Critical Role, as far as I am concerned. What a group of actors we have to enjoy..

On one hand I feel Scanlan's Pain, on the other hand if you care about people you make the attempt to have relationships, you sit and talk about yourself, you share stories of yourself, so on the flip side of the coin, Scanlan is as much at fault for the lack of knowledge as they are, and Scanlan is my second favorite Character after Grog and before Pike.

sucks that this is going to be not included in LoVM, since having a member leave the party for so long doesn't work nearly as well in a proper show as it does in a D&D game

Scanlan is the definition of “Good men don’t need rules…today is not the day to find out why I have so many.” I used to think Sam was a quirky guy, but seeing this for the first time…Dude is the GOAT of this table, and you’re gonna have a hard time convincing me otherwise.

this hits SO HARD!

this is my roman empire

There's such a weird selfishness to your proof that you care about someone being "I changed my outlook on life because of you" and "you could crush me in a second"

That cup sure holds alot of liquid

I cant wait till this gets animated

This single clip is fucking oscar worthy

Freakin bards dude 😢

holy shxt. not only is this top class role-play/acting, it invokes me to check back my own relationships with my friends. we all have that one jokester in the squad, and damn, that just hits. I just feel bad.

Now that I've started watching the animated series his words have more weight now, did they include this in the animation?

I love this cause it’s basically scanland is basically all of us who are alone and think we have people who care about us but probably truly don’t . He shows all that emotion and says everything that we have always wanted to say

"That is bullshit" Flashback "NO! FIX HIM! FIX HIM NOW!"

Chills

travis's face hearing that come from sam is amazing 0:16

That "No we didn't" from Travis was so defeated, wow. Knowing Sam Riegel as the funnyman, this hits even harder. Beware of the moment when the jester doesn't feel like joking.

(This is not a critique of anyone at the table. I just wanted to explore in depth what was happening on a storytelling level, and why i this is so powerful to me) It feels like a matter of role in the group. Vex, Vax, Keyleyth and Percy feel like main characters, the way their characters are tortured by their past, and the tropes they represent. All four of them have something unresolved in their backstory that we know will come up at some point. Plus Vax often behaves as if he's the group leader, protecting everyone from the shadows and always making promises of said protection. Vex is the femme fatale with a dark sensuality to her, Percy the tortured intellectual who tries to shield others from himself, and Keyleyth the closeted child who needs to gain assurance and embody the role she was born to fulfill. I'm not trying to belittle them when saying this. What i mean is these are tropes that we're familiar with, and so we know to expect big character arcs for them. As a dm, i know if a player gives me a story like this, i can "easily" (it's never easy) build an arc around that. Then you have people who are okay with being supporting characters. But even then, there's an underlying hierarchy for these tropes as well. Grog is a big guy with a big heart and a small brain. Sweet, lovable, does stupid things like a puppy would do. Pike is the sweet, somewhat innocent (although she's very intelligent), caring mother figure of the group, who is very powerful but her power comes mainly from her devotion, an arc that's already done when the show first airs. She's also a moral compass to push the group towards good, in a benevolent way. Again, very lovable character. Scanlan's tripe is last in the hierarchy. He's the buffoon and the anomy people like, but from a distance. But of course he's not just that. Like many buffoon tropes, he has an innee depth, but that depth can never be expressed to others, because he is, by essence, chaos and the other. To be clear, none of this is bad. But that last trope is rarely the hero in the mainstream media we're used to. And his problems reflect that : they feel way more real, less videogamy, than those of his peers : loneliness, regret, melancholy, addiction, all hidden away. So it's hard to build a big action arc to solve that, because it is so intimate and psychological. In other wordsw beating the bbeg won't help Scanlan; that's just something he needs to figure out on his own. That's why Matt really did a good job in introducing a new dynamic with his daughter, giving him an antagonist that challenges him deeply on that level. That's also why he needed to have this realization about his place in the group and what he wants out of life, and to go his own way for a while. In short, it's great that they all acted they way they did. Of course high level characters will lose some sense of reality when their daily routine is dealing with monarchs or cosmic entities. If only for a while, Scanlan's plea brought a sense of reality that had been eroded, because his problems, like ours, won't go away by beating the bad guy. He didn't care about being the one to kill the dragon. He only cared about keeping his promise to his daughter.

Do you think Sam was really mad in this moment to a degree?

This sits so hard, because out of all the crazy shot that happens in the campaign and the other pcs backstories, Scanlans just has normal, human, mundane issues, and because they are mundane they are considered lesser or not as important.

Scanlan is in the right here. All of them are gaslighting him and choose the wrong time prank him

I barely know critical role but the acting here, the characters, god now i wamna play dnd but i'm fuckin shit at math lmao

The moment for me when Scanlan went from being a memelord character to an actual person.

Cant wait season 3 if this scene include..

I think the best part about this scene is right afterward, the exchange with Scan / Grog 'Grog - Can I ask you a question? Scan - No, I will not go whoring with you one more time Grog - No, I was going to ask what your mothers name was. Scan - It was juniper... thank you for asking Grog- Im sorry I didn't know that Travis and Sam were the undisputed goats of C1

The silence after "Whats my mothers name" speaks loads. Absolutely brilliant.

I love it when “comic relief” characters get to get loud and mad at being relegated to “comic relief” it’s got to be one of my favorite tropes/trope subversions of all time and this is one of my favorite examples of it

God I cant wait to see this in the animated series

"What's my mother's name?" Batman: "Mary?"

There's so many layers in the opening dialogue alone...

3:15 is the start of an amazing Monologue imo

This is such a impactful monologue and it definitely made the everyone outside of the party really feel for sam's drive and in party they realized he isn't necessarily wrong but that's up to interpretation.

The blame goes all around Vox Machina. Scanlan was a jokester who never really said how he felt. They always asked if he was alright and he'd lie to them saying that he was fine, ala how that one friend in the group is going through some shit and they don't want the others or trust them enough to tell them how they really feel. Vax opened up to Scanlan, so why couldn't Scanlan do the same? On the other hand, I feel the rest of Vox Machina really didnt ask too much about his past and why he does what he does. Maybe they have before the gang took to broadcasting their DND campaign and after awhile of him dodging or blowing them off with a joke, they just stopped asking after awhile and let things lie there.

Everybody: shocked and traumatized by the sudden outburst Taliesin: "damn this guy is good, I'll drink to that"

Let's be real. The only reason Scanlan left is he does not know what pure love is anymore. If he took the plunge with Pike now, he would be a fuck-friend at best. He needs to immerse himself in a relationship devoid of friendship and sexual desire to reconnect with the emotion he hadn't felt since his mother died. That is why he left. To become the gnome that Pike deserves.

This one hits home to me because I had something happen very similarly in my Rifts group, except that it was both in character and out. I was only real friends with the dm, and sort of an associate more than anything with one other player. Two of the other players were friends with the associate and it was clear the dm was trying to get in good with the other two, so I generally got the short end of the stick. Despite rolling my character in front of the dm, I had to cut my stats so only one was exceptional when 3 were rolled that way. He said he didn't want anyone too stacked. The two people I wasn't friends with rolled up their characters at home, one had 3 exceptional stats, the other had four. During missions for over a year, loot was given to who could use it and money divied up equally. Until my character, having been separated from the group by their actions, fought and beat one of the enemy bosses and secured a bag of gems. My character was a techno-wizard. Not a fighter, basically an enchanter/mechanic/weaponsmith in dnd parlance (honestly, percy would be a TW in Rifts), that uses gems to make their devices. Suddenly the looting rules were changed and I had to give up my cut of the money in order to keep the gems when the dm flat out said they were meant for me. It all came to a head near the second year of the game (played roughly twice monthly) though when the group abandoned my character again on a job. I was left to watch a mine while they were going to ambush the people coming to raid the mine. I was left with a npc orc who was part of the gang that from the mission with the gems. My character didn't trust him and said they shouldn't keep him with them, but once again, outvoted. Anyway, they blew the ambush, and got beaten so bad they had no way to get back to the mine in time. The criminals arrived at the mine in their flying vehicle. They, out of character told me to hide. The DM told me just to hide. I said screw it. As soon as they dropped ropes, to come down, my character jumped the guy dropping down (thanks to jump boots I made), so he landed with a crack and fought, solo through the vehicle. 27 crits over 12 dice (dm demanded I tried new dice since they thought I was doing something screwy) out of 31 rolls had me basically go bad guy to bad guy, beating all of them and seizing control over the ship. Amazing end of the night. Dm handed me the stat sheet for the vehicle so I could come up with ideas for it for what I was going to do to it during the down time. Next game starts, I start saying what I had done to it, and the dm cuts me off. "We were hanging out the other night and they told me what they were going to do with it already." To chuckles from the three of them. I wait a moment and then say "Considering its MY ship, I don't see how they have any say in the matter." "You were just going to be outvoted anyway. You should have been there if you wanted a say" (a bar, which I can't go to as I get sick around alcohol). I say fine then, but if I don't get a say, then I'm certainly not doing the work on it, and the cost of their alterations can come out of their cut of the money, not mine. That quickly ended it there as they had already bought things with their money, again at the bar, so they couldn't afford anything, where I had already budgeted for my changes to the ship. They wanted their toys, so they lost the ship. But I wasn't done, that was the last straw. We play out that mission, it goes really well, we get a bunch of money and other stuff, and its loaded into the ship. I tell them I was going to repair the damage, and they decided to go into the town to celebrate. Once they're doing so I turn to the dm, cutting them off mid joking around "So, just to be clear, how far is the ship from the bar?" they say about 30 minute walk. I then say "Ok, I write a quick note, then I take each of their bags, make sure there's a change of clothes, some pocket change, a ration, a canteen and a knife in each, and I toss them out the door. I then power up the ship and fly away with their stuff and grog (the orc, who, after my characters antics taking the ship feared/liked/respected my character more than them). The note reads. "Hello from your mechanic, medic and doormat. Over the last few months, I've watched you make rash moves and continue to fail, time and time again, only to be saved by my successes. As such, I'm taking what I think I and grog are worth and leaving you what I think you are worth. Good luck with your future endevour! PS: We did vote on it. You should have been here if you wanted a say." They were stunned. Then they got angry and I just sat there smiling (I'm a big guy and unlike the other three I've actually been in fights in my life and know how to fight so I was not afraid of them reacting physically, and they knew that). I let them scream themselves out. The dm looked at me and tried to calm things down and said "How do you think I'm going to allow this? This is totally unfair." I then pull out a list (two pages long) that I had been working on through the game since the start, basically all the times he sided with them over me, all the times rules were bent in their favor, but not for me. "Funny, you allowed all of this, so I don't see how this is any different. Of course, I was you friend all along so it was safe to trash me to get in good with them. But that olive branch only bends so much before it snaps. Its your game, do what you want. Have a nice life, I'll see myself out." I left, though I know he was sobbing while I was getting my coat on. I think I've spoken to him twice since then and that was almost 2 decades ago now. I don't know how the game went from there. Don't really care either to be honest.