After many months of waiting (I promised to watch with a friend and I do my best to keep my word when I’ve got the choice), I finally watched Season 2 of Vox Machina. These twelve episodes, clearly broken into three-episode chunks with particularly hefty cliffhangers meant to hook the viewer at the end of each weekly chunk of episodes (at least, you know, when the episodes where initially released), cover the beginning of the longest arc of the streamed Critical Role Campaing 1 tabletop game, from the arrival of the Chroma Conclave (an alliance of Ancient Dragons) to the climatic battle against the the first of the four Ancient Dragons that has conquered the kingdom the heroes called home. While much of the first season’s changes were made to adapt the show from a streamed tabletop game to a cartoon, much of the second season’s changes were made to make the story as a whole flow better (on top of continuing the changes required to adapt the story). It even mixes up a lot of the individual story beats from the streamed game of Dungeons and Dragons 5e, but it tells a much cleaner story in doing so. Over all, I have to say I like the cartoon more than the streamed show. Sure, watching a bunch of professional actors play dungeons and dragons is fun, but it is also super time-consuming. They really belabor the various plots, big and small, of a tabletop game in a way that is fun to watch as an on-going streamed game, but not really something that would make an interesting or particularly engaging story in any other medium. While I do hold a special place in my heart for the 100 episodes of Critical Roles Campaign 1 that I watched, I think that adapting the story to a cartoon has allowed it to become the interesting and engaging story I remember rather than the somewhat long and belabored story I have been unwilling to watch a second time and unable to push myself to finish.

Now, I’ve watched a lot of Critical Role, compared to your average person (who has probably watched very little CR). There was a long couple years where I watched everything that group of people did, starting with episodes of their main show from fairly early in Campaign 2 and greedily snapping up anything else they happened to put out until after the conclusion of their second campaign. I definitely enjoyed my experience and only started slacking off with watching Campaign 1 when I got to the last few episodes. Most of what was going to happen had been spoiled for me by then, aside from the specific moment-to-moment roleplaying, so I had little incentive to subject myself to some eighty hours of a tabletop stream when I had so much other stuff going on in my life. Not to mention I’d been watching episode ninety-nine when I got the news that my grandfather had passed away and it became doubly difficult to push myself to continue. On one hand, I was leery of the amount of grief involved in those last sixteen episodes. On the other hand, I had a strong associative memory connecting that moment of mixed grief, relief, guilt, and preemptive exhaustion to the contents of the ninety-nineth episode of CR’s Campaign 1 and I was not up to the effort of breaking past it for a couple years. I did eventually manage it, but I was also starting to fall off the CR wagon at that point, so I never got further than the end of the 100th episode. I also made it twelve episodes into Campaign 3 before I started falling behind (due to difficulties with my sleep schedule and my attempts to address those difficulties requiring I not stay up until 1 or 2am to watch Critical Role live) and I’ve yet to go back.

Nowadays, as I consider the effort required to catch up on what has happened in the Critical Role world, I find myself unwilling to invest. Sure, I spend a lot of time consuming audio media and I could probably just add Critical Role to my list of podcasts since there IS a “podcast” version of their game, but I don’t think I could stand to listen to something meant to be watched and enjoy myself, given the frequent references to and lack of accompanying details about the physical interactions of the players and the battlemaps that the GM builds for them to play on. I think that, maybe, someday, I’ll get back into the show. I have all of Dimension 20 and Dropout TV to watch first, though, so it might be a while. I’m a bit more willing to invest my time in Dropout programming since it isn’t four to five hours per episode. I just don’t have as much time to set aside as I once did and I find myself more eager to invest it elsewhere now that I’m confronted with such a wide array of options in my personal life. I do hope all of the CR campaigns get made into cartoons, eventually. There’s enough material there that they could probably never catch up with the streamed show, especially given the production schedules for each medium. There’s so much more of the first campaign yet to cover, easily enough for another three, maybe four, seasons, and then there’s entirety of Campaign 2, which includes a much tighter story than campaign 1 did, even if it struggles a bit due to the show’s prolonged absence during the height of the pandemic. By the time those are done, Critical Role will probably be done with their fourth camapaign and that’s all without getting into any of the excellent side-ventures, like the shows run by guest GMs. I just think it would be so much more manageable to watch a few dozen episodes at thirty minutes each than to try watching several dozen episodes per season at four and a half hours each.

I’ll admit that I enjoy having an adult cartoon to watch, but I find it a little discomforting that the show revels so readily in violence. I know that the stuff that happened in the first campaign, the parts turned into the first two seasons of the cartoon, is incredibly brutal, but I sometimes feel like the cartoon revels in it a bit too much. I know we’re supposed to see and understand the incredible might and cruelty of the dragons as they sweep in and destroy countless lives, but I just feel like it could have been done in a slightly less gruesome way. I know the conceit of a show like this, with incredible heroes at its forefront, is that the heroes are capable of shrugging off damage that would kill anyone else, but it feels somewhat unbelievable at times that a spray of acid that melts a half giant would only patchily burn a human protagonist. It just feels like they could have toned down how explicit so much of the violence and death was without losing the impact of the various scenes that include it. I don’t think I needed to see quite so many people desolved by a dragon’s acid as the cartoon showed. A quarter as many would have been more than enough to make the same point and it would have involved less graphic, gory death overall.

It’s frustrating to see a story I enjoyed be adapted so well, but include a lot of moments where the sense of the show gets set aside in order to remind the audience that this is, in fact, an adult cartoon that is acceptable only for audiences of 16 or 18 and older. Sure, the worst violence and all the sexual content is gated behind the 18+ episodes, but I frequently wondered why they even bothered rating some of them as 16+ given that any sixteen-year-old trying to follow these ratings would be treated to a nigh-incomprehensible narrative with huge, glaring gaps since apparently all the major plot beats require gratuitous violence. Which, to be fair, was kind of the hallmark of Vox Machina in their tabletop game. They were all, largely, awful people who did a lot of terrrible things without much consideration of what that might mean for other people until after the fact. It’s just easier to handle when it’s an occasional gory description rather than a constant battle reel of every terrible and horrible way to die from acid.

Anyway, it was fun to watch, if a bit gruesome. If you want a cartoon and don’t mind a lot of violence, blood, and acid-dissolving with a tiny bit of butts and lots of innuendo mixed in, you can’t go wrong with Vox Machina. You’ll need an Amazon subscription to watch it, or maybe you can buy it if you don’t have one? I don’t know for certain, to be honest. All I do know is that the show isn’t out on DVD or blu-ray and might never become physical media of any kind, so maybe don’t wait around to watch it. Amazon might not have begun vanishing things yet, but they destroyed the publishing industry and a lot of small local businesses, so it’s only a matter of time before they start wrecking the video media industries.