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In celebration of @CriticalRole being back tomorrow, I thought I'd write out the thread that's been on my mind since the last episode and it's about Representation. This got a little long but hopefully you can stick with me. (Very minor C2 #CriticalRoleSpoilers ahead) 1/18
A few weeks ago my friend @ellieesaurus and I started doing watch parties of the new Critical Role episodes on Friday nights, just after the live airing ended in our timezone. I'd drive to her place after work, we'd make a quick snack run and then we'd start the episode. 2/18
As we are all aware, episode 111 ended with a rather large cliffhanger, and as I headed over to Jim's place I was seeing bits and pieces of the fan reactions despite my best efforts to avoid it. Now Jim and I are big Beauyasha fans. 3/18
As any queer person will tell you, you tend to attach to the queer characters in the media you watch. Representation, it's more and more talked about every year as one very important aspect of any type of media. 4/18
With the recent building happening between Beau and Yasha, it was one of the main things on my mind as I began to see the reactions to the end of 111 roll in... and I started to panic. Because the only history I've known for the characters I love is... tragedy. 5/18
My whole life, growing up and up until recent history, the characters that I love and connect with the most, those characters have only ever been treated like dirt. Written off or killed off in awful and miserable circumstances. Over and over again. 6/18
Now logically I knew that Critical Role would be likely the last show on the planet that would do something like that to it's queer characters. Not just because the cast know how important representation is, but because the format of the show just doesn't work like that. 7/18
I trust the cast and crew of Critical Role more than I have any other piece of media I've consumed my whole life. And yet even that logical and sound knowledge could not overcome years and years of traumatic characters deaths of those I could see myself in. 8/18
Many friends were messaging me "Have Fun" or "Good Luck" in some ominous way and I actually started having an anxiety attack. I thought... no, this can't be happening. Not again. This was supposed to be the one. The one that wouldn't let me down. 9/18
I drove to Jim's place in an absolute haze. I felt light headed, and sick to my stomach. I was imagining every worst possibility. That I was about to lose these characters that were so important to me. I messaged a friend privately and told her that I was freaking out. 10/18
I told her that I didn't care about spoilers, I just wanted to know what had happened. She, being a queer person like I, could tell exactly what I was asking about without much further explanation. She told me Beau and Yasha were fine, great even. 11/18
She said BY had some fantastic moments in the episode and nothing bad had happened to either of them as a potential romantic pairing or as individuals and I started to calm down. I started breathing a little easier, knowing that it was just a twist in the narrative. 12/18
I've been thinking about it for two weeks know, and the whole thing really just made me want to try and impress on the people I know that representation matters. It matters so much. To so many people these are just fictional characters. 13/18
But to people like me, to the groups of people who spent their formative years never seeing themselves in any of the characters on TV, or in movies or books they are more important than I can express in this already very long twitter thread. 14/18
We see ourselves in these characters before we even know ourselves. They help us discover who we are. They're our friends, our mentors, our inspiration when life sucks. We can look to these characters that are just like us and feel seen, and feel heard. 15/18
Growing up the only positive queer role models I had were strangers on the internet. The only queer friends I had were fictional characters. And all of these people, these characters, we spent years watching them face nothing but hardship and death for who they were. 16/18
I'm not really sure where to end this thread, but I hope somewhere in my rambling my point came across. TL;DR: Representation matters. And I can't thank people like @Marisha_Ray, @TheVulcanSalute, @executivegoth, @VoiceOfOBrien and many more for taking that so seriously. 17/18
And I hope I get to see the day the balance shifts and tragedy and heartbreak are no longer simply expected for the queer characters. That just the idea of it happening to me again won't feel as world ending anymore. If you got this far, thanks for reading my rambles :) 18/18
