Whee-oo, whee-oo. Big ass fucking #CriticalRole Campaign 1 #spoilers in my thread here. Do not read it if you don't want to know. This is my big Campaign 1 conspiracy theory and how it could relate to Campaign 2. https://twitter.com/Wally_Wests/status/1288307929695899648

Thinking about how Professor Anders fits into this. How did he know the Briarwoods? Where and what did he study before becoming a private tutor? How does he fit with certain other teachers who used mental manipulation to persuade their students to do otherwise unthinkable things?

A couple things have always sat a little off for me in Percy's story and are the basis for my most speculative CR conspiracy theory: Percy let the Briarwoods into the castle because Professor Anders used his magic to manipulate him like he did Cassandra.

Evidence:
1. Anders' was the face Percy saw when murder entered his heart, not the Briarwoods.
2. While there are no doubt gaps in Percy's memory about the night of the coup, he seemed deliberately evasive about a few things.

C1 Ep24:
0:21:21 Percy: "[The Briarwoods] are evil. They are corrupting. The few survivors of--" he squeezes his eyes closed and hides his face, "Castle Whitestone who did survive only survived through DECEIT and by working for the Briarwoods, turning on their masters."

Note that he is among those few survivors. Keyleth noticed this too, but didn't press it.

CR C1 Ep 24:
0:23:36 Vex: How did you get away when they-- with the rest of your family?"
Percy, turns away and buries his face in his hand: My sister Cassandra, my younger sister. She somehow evaded capture. I don't know how. She set me free. --

Percy [cont]: "I don't know what became of her. I don't know what became of any of my siblings."

We know he is ashamed of this and it is as least a partial lie to cover his guilt.

CR C1 Ep 24:
0:25:53 Vax: "And the remains of your family, were they killed by the sword?"
Percy: "I don't know. There was an interrogation." He buries his face in his hands" Dr. Ripley was asking questions. I assumed, for all these years, that that's what became of my family."

Note how much work the passive voice is doing there. Not, "I was interrogated," but "there was an interrogation. Ripley was asking questions." Of who? What questions? Was Percy just witnessing this? He did say part of his memory was faulty because he wasn't equipped for torture.

C1 Ep24:
0:27:25 Keyleth: "And Professor Anders? Who's that?"
0:27:29 Percy: "Professor Anders..." he sighs and buries his face in both hands and subtly turns away from them, "was my teacher. He was my tutor," he unburies his face, --

Percy [cont] "and he was in collusion with them, & he was the one who I believe--"
Vex: "Allowed them in?"
Percy's mouth twitches subtly
Percy, hesitating: "Allowed them..." a thought occurs to him & he says more rapidly, "to take the castle in the night." Buries his face again.

Again, notice how much work the passive voice is doing. Vex explicitly offers, "[Anders] Allowed them in?" Instead of agreeing, Percy more vaguely says he "Allowed them to take the castle in the night." This implies Anders did not actually let them in, but caused it to happen.

Those are the only times in that conversation he buries his head in his hands and turns away from them and all of them he gets noticeably more passive about, and some we know he feels guilty, complicit, and ashamed of, not just traumatized.

Also, Percy almost always lies by using the passive voice to lead people to conclude something happened without outright stating false information. That's one reason I kept coming back to this scene. This is his tell lying.

3. When he talked to the Raven Queen in the pool of blood in C1 Ep57, he is again deliberately evasive, as is Matt, about something he is ashamed of and doesn't want his friends to know about.

CR C1 Ep 57
2:01:50 The Raven Queen: "Your deeds will guide your path to salvation or damnation. The choice is yours. You skirt that line still."
Percy: "But the first deed is so... there's so much, and I don't think any of them see it. I want it to die before anybody sees it."

Note: this is well after the whole Whitestone arc. VM know about Orthax, they know about Cassandra, they know about inventing guns and Ripley spreading them. They know everything we think be know about the worst things Percy has done. So what is the first deed?

So we know Delilah Briarwood was Archmage of Antiquity on the Cerberus Assembly (EGTW, CR C2 Ep 88 4:07:55). So it stands to reason she was already studying ancient records of residuum and trying to rediscover how to make it. We know Anna Ripley helped with this research.

But in order to do this she would also need a supply of Whitestone, and the world's best and most abundant supply is in the city named for it. So what if she gathered enough intel on the de Rolos to know they had kids who would presumably need a teacher?

She sends Anders along not just as a spy and infiltrator, but if the Cerberus was already weaponizing students of the Soltryce Academy through mind altering magic and mundane brainwashing, it stands to reason they intended to do that to that large family of kids.

Percy would have made the perfect target: highly intelligent, inquisitive, board, low wisdom, lonely. Like Caleb, easy to isolate and control through the promise of mastering the secrets of the universe. Gain his trust. Tell him this research is worth it.

And when the time is right, feed him exactly the right information and mental manipulation to make him invite the Briarwoods in, especially Sylas the vampire, which Anders may not have had supernatural standing to do because he was a guest in the house himself.

And by the time Percy realized what was really going on, it was too late, and they could easily restrain him and throw him in the dungeon. Unclear how much information they got out of him by torture or how much he volunteered through months or years of being manipulated.

And what would be really brilliant about this is that if it just happened to Percy, we can conclude the Briarwoods, Professor Anders, and their allies are just one group of evil people. And if it just happened to Caleb we can say Trent is evil and the Cerberus looked away.

But if it happened to both of them 7-8 years apart by different members of the Cerberus Assembly to first obtain refined residuum, secure an ongoing large supply, and then unlock it's arcane potential in human weapons trials, it's not evil people, it's an evil system.

It is a system of people who having knowingly and repeatedly abused children, murdered their families, turned them into weapons, and threw them away for the sole purpose of consolidating power and making themselves untouchable by even the crown.

Even when the Cobalt Soul tried to stop them through official sanctions and consequences, they operated as a secret society to keep furthering their research in secret. How many other worshipers of Vecna are among a group that would do anything for secret arcane knowledge?

And the Chamber of Whitestone at some point likely signed a trade deal with a venerable institution of academic research in the Dwendalian Empire having no idea that they were in fact responsible for the coup that so destructively subjugated the city.

The Cerberus Assembly was perfectly willing to start a war to study the Beacons, and they found it perfectly easy to manipulate citizens in Xhorhas to help them. This is exactly the same pattern for exactly the same sort of goals.

And it would show that Vecna was terrible and evil and powerful, but what's just as powerful and evil is a branch of government researchers who don't care who they have to kill and hurt to gain power and have done it continuously for decades at minimum.

And that is a hell of a bigger, more complicated, and more radical moral that sounds exactly up Matt Mercer's ally. Plus, he gets to surprise his friends with even more terrible connections, consequences of their actions, and long held secrets.

But wait: @DarkwaterSmidge pointed out how this gets even spicier: the other names Anna Ripley inscribed on Animus were Oz Gruude, King Bertrand Dwendal, Richter Wells, and two blanks. Gruude, Wells, and the blanks were her four people she worked along side --

-- developing weapons technology for the Empire. They discovered her illegal human experimentation into arcane diseases and turned her in (or scapegoated her to save their own asses). She was set to be court marshaled by King Dwendal when she escaped.

Percy is exactly the sort of person to exercise "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" utilitarian thinking. He might have assumed that people who tried to prosecute Ripley and banish Delilah for necromancy were probably fine, and maybe didn't do enough digging.

Trent's deal for the residuum, much like for the beacons, was probably shady and manipulative, but in this case might have been a legal trade. We know Whitestone does export residuum. Percy may have been fooled, and that will fucking haunt him if he finds out what they did.