Fantasy High Sophomore Year - Blog Posts

I STUMPED THIS STUPID GENIE!

(The answer was the great Bogariel Frogariel.)

okay but when Older Adaine said "I don't know why I was so easy to discard" and "our parents didn’t love us and maybe there is a part of us that made that easy"

and when Illusion Fig asked "what do you think will happen when Ayda sees the real you?" and Fig said "i hope she finds something in me that I didn’t know was there"

and when Ayda said "the fact that i can’t find a redeeming quality in myself doesn’t mean that someone as brilliant as Figueroth can’t find something in me worthwhile"

and when Baron said "time will pass and everyone will find someone who matters more to them than you" and Riz said "I'm the little shrimp of this crew"

and when Fabian said "I don't know what I will be, but I like the direction I'm going"

and when Adaine said "I think the only answer is that we have to keep looking for love"

fuck you Brennan Lee Mulligan & Gang for making me cry my fucking eyes out

currently my brain is going:

so you need to catch up on critical role campaign 3 bc u aren't even in the double digits

vs

ooo fantasy high sophomore year make brain go brrrrr

vs

okay but like you never finished LA by night soooo

thats all, enjoy my struggle

Gorgug: TEEN-AGE-ers.

Telemaine Lomenelda:

It’s kinda crazy that the events at the last few episodes of FHSY were glossed over (this is a very badly written ramble about how The Bad Kids are probably incredibly traumatised after sophomore year and it isn’t addressed much, or kind of at all)

—

Thinking about how The Bad Kids walked into the Forest of The Nightmare King after weeks of travelling, the constant threat that came with sleeping, being vulnerable in foreign lands and people, and that one of their best friends was kidnapped and only just retrieved with her months-of-tortured and previously evil sister a day or two ago.

And then they get to a skeleton-scattered temple of a forgotten god, their friend is violently murdered by a unicorn in front of their eyes, they do a whole bunch of drugs and after, on top of all of that, are tortured by their worst fears come to life?

Then The Bad Kids go on to face a colossal king— no, a god, AFTER having to shake off and give into their deepest fears with their war torn friends and family by their side, all for a school project worth 60% of their grade.

If Kristen Applebees had not hit that Nat 20 (tbf it had to have happened exactly that way but still), the fight would have spun out a very different way

The finale of FHSY fails narratively to address just the insane amount of emotional, mental and physical torture these children went through and because of the amount of real life time between seasons sophomore and junior year, I think we skipped over addressing that these kids are probably very traumatised

ʕっ˘ڡ˘ςʔ 규 🎼

🥋 ʕ •ᴥ•ʔゝ☆ 🎧

☆.○˚∘˙ 🎬 .｡.:*☆

🕳️ (>︿<｡) 🕶

° ͜ʖ ͡ - 🐈‍⬛ ʕ •ₒ• ʔ

🕷 ʕ　˵·ᴥ·ʔ 🎱

something underrated about ayda aguefort in terms of autism rep is that she has a +3 to charisma. everyone who meets her agrees that she's cool as hell

adaine's denim jacket is a mental illness/trauma recovery staple, actually. she wears that jacket every goddamn day and it has fluffy pockets and probably mysterious stains and tears that are a reminder of the life she's lived. a tear from catching on one of gorgug's tin flowers that she wore like a corsage on prom night. a yoghurt stain from gilear that really was powerfully resistant to cleaning, as much as she tried. a pulled seam from kristen shoving her whole buff arm into a pocket to get ecaf out. an extravagant embroidery of her name sewn onto the inside of the collar by cathilda in fabian's calligraphy. an abjurative ward burned into the denim by aelwyn who never learned to sew. an eternally damp spot on the shoulder where boggy cuddles up still wet from the aquatic portion of his backpack. a missing chunk of wool taken by riz for 'analysis' that was really stuffed into a baggie and pinned on a conspiracy board. a tiny unicorn created from fig's illusion in the nightmare forest that seemed to stay real even after leaving the forest prancing about the inner world of the jacket. a pocket in the ethereal realm just so that ghostly edgar the rat can curl up in it without phasing through it. an 'in memoriam' patch sewn in to commemorate the jacket-world person who sacrificed his life to give her a wand of ray of frost in freshman year. a little uplifting message written in ballpoint pen on the inside of her cuff during class. a smattering of wolf hairs that persist no matter how hard she tries to brush them off and keep ending up in her mouth somehow, although she keeps politely quiet about the occasional grey she finds on her shoulders.

does anyone remember who in the bad kids told the others about what they saw in the nightmare forest? i think fabian did and i'm almost certain riz didn't but they keep (accidentally?) triggering each others' forest traumas and it seems like A Thing.

fabian flirted with a mirror right next to riz and everyone teased him about kalina being his girlfriend, riz suggested gorgug answer the riddle for all of them under threat of being killed and eaten by a big animal, fig created a sexy rat for when fabian was talking to spot. is this anything.

always remember 'are we graded on a curve?' when questioning if they should warn the seven about potentially life-threatening information. adaine brained a woman with her own ladle in episode two and siobhan COMMITTED

Brennan: If someone leaves the party or dies, the party becomes pass/fail which is not an option for you. You need to succeed profoundly.

Everyone Else: Oh god, what if someone dies?

Siobhan: If we kill one of the Rat Grinders, they don't get to go to college.

PALADIN KRISTEN. i will die on this hill.

i don't want kristen to lose her faith entirely. i think back to prompocalypse, talking to the ether the gods get their answers from, and saying into the ether that she cares. she wants a god that cares, not just about her but about all the good people she wishes she could help, because if there's nobody more powerful that cares then it's her responsibility to care for them and she's not a god. she couldn't trust her family to care, couldn't trust her church, couldn't even trust her god, and she had to step up and be the person who cares even though she's just a clumsy kid who got her girlfriend newspaper-copying putty for a joint anniversary/birthday gift.

[and then she makes cassandra, still desperate for that perfect god that she can trust to protect people for her. but cassandra, just like yes, is created and controlled by her and thus entirely dependent on her and her ever-changing ideals. kristen still only trusts herself to do right by people, so the only god she will accept is one that she designs to be just like her and indulge her every phase and that means without her there to decide what the god should be there is no god. there is no morality to a religion that bends to your every will because your actions don't have consequences - cassandra and yes weren't created to be good, just to give power to kristen when she wants it. and that means that all of the responsibility still falls on kristen to be good.]

because the alternative would be being complicit, and kristen cannot rest unless she is doing everything possible that she can to help people. and so she never rests. even doing nothing, she's wandering labyrinths in her head trying to be better and find the answer, and she can't let herself take a break from trying to be better without being plagued by guilt. she can't push let go of the guilt because she's seen first-hand what happens when people don't feel guilt or question themselves.

and in the summer starting junior year she and tracker break up and the guilt becomes unbearable and suddenly she can't remember why she let herself feel it. so she stops feeling guilty. she forgets to heal her friends, she devotes herself to her own body (my faith is mostly physical, tracker had once said, kristen doesn't remember what she meant by that) and she breaks all the promises she made to protect cassandra. she stops caring.

until she sees bucky again. until she sees her parents again. she remembers why she wanted to fight to stop bad things from happening to good people, and more importantly she remembers what happens when you don't question yourself. how mac and donna follow their beliefs blindly and never questioned whether they could be wrong if they could be better. how they promised to love her and left her to suffer, how helio let the people he swore to love suffer, and how she was leaving cassandra to suffer. and she doesn't realise until after that cassandra wanted to help. cassandra was always encouraging kristen to grow the church not just because she couldn't rely on kristen to keep her alive but because she knew kristen couldn't handle the responsibility of keeping her alive on her own.

kristen chose to be a cleric of cassandra because she thought cassandra was good and wanted them to have a religion. it was the only way to revive her, but if she can grow the church then kristen would be free to work on herself with cassandra being free to take care of her, not the other way around. as a paladin kristen could take an oath she will always believe in - an oath to care and love her friends, perhaps - and trust that cassandra's church will still be helping people on a large scale even when kristen needs a break. kristen can get swole and learn to fight and know in her heart that what she's fighting for is right. she can trust that cassandra wouldn't bless her if she didn't deserve it, and in that trust she doesn't have to worry so much about being a perfect person because she knows she's good.

listen. listen. as a pastor kid ex-ministry person who left the toxic religious group they were raised in. it’s not about cassandra being rad or not (she is i really think she is). it’s about whether or not kristen can make peace with what being devout means. if she can take that leap of faith. if she can really settle in on a belief system and ask others to do the same.

i think this arc is gonna be about kristen giving up on cleric and reclassing (my guess on barb) because this is about kristen finally FINALLY giving up on how she was raised. she didn’t need to a different god. she needs to reject, wholly, that lifestyle and figure out the best version of herself and what she needs. maybe she doesn’t need to be a cleric. maybe trying to force herself to be one is perpetuating the harm she escaped. maybe she can step back.

i think this will have HUGE complications. but it really feels like ally is interested in explored why kristen has struggled this whole time with this. maybe she doesn’t want to be a cleric at all.

I'm in love with both of them your honor

i've said it before and i'll say it again: kristen applebees' character progression in fantasy high from her losing faith in helio was an act of pure rebellion from ally beardsley that brennan did not, in fact, canonically make their god an omniscient animated cob of corn.

When I picture Baron- I just imagine this dude from Hardcore Henry...

And then I am haunted...