Found this old sketch while cleaning the drive and decided to color it. Enjoy those two green idiots and one tired wizard who’s there just to make Nott taller.
Veth has kind of come full circle in her emotional arc, from spouse and parent to adventurer and back. And if you follow it through, it makes perfect sense, but it’s still very bittersweet.
She was once anxious about having to choose between a future with the Nein, and one with her family, but over the last dozen episodes, the Nein have become so scared that it seems the choice is whether to die with the Nein protecting her family, or stay with her family and hope someone else somehow steps in.
Nott had accepted her old life and her love for Yeza and Luc as part of a past life - they were no longer current to her after she’d spent her time falling in love with the Nein and going on adventures. She was emotionally distant from her old family, because she’d accepted the loss of that closeness and consoled herself to watch from afar with a new family, for whom her love and life was current and vibrant. Even after she got her body back, she seemed to mostly interact with Yeza for sex, probably over-compensating for emotional distance, or to talk about their son and little else. Sure, the massive degree of emotional infidelity, both romantically but also just sort of generally, made her feel awful - but it didn’t make her in love with Yeza.
But as time has passed and she’s seen her son grow up, the danger has become more and more overwhelming, and Veth has been second guessing herself again. She’s gotten used to being able to occasionally see him. She’s resigned herself to the idea that either Caleb doesn’t return her romantic feelings, or he is so averse to disrupting a child’s family that he’d never act on them if he did. The excitement of adventure have been yielding less and less reward for their mounting risks, and the tasks they’re doing are becoming less and less optional and the results of failure more terrible. She’s stopped promising to always be with Caleb, and begun thinking about going back to Yeza and Luc - and has begun to see them not as distant people she loved in the past, and may see in the future, but part of her imminent future and present.
When Veth went to talk to Yeza before what happened in 129, it wasn’t clear to me if she actually wanted to go back to him, or had actually been considering calling for a “break” to whatever their relationship was, to make doing what she’s about to do feel easier. But nothing will hammer home how close and present your child is when he’s blown up and killed right in front of you. That relationship is now linked to his life and wellbeing and is suddenly the most important, urgent thing in Veth’s life.
She’s completed the journey from loving the Nein and wanting to be with them but feeling obligated to go back to her us and and son, to desperately wanting to be with her son and husband and feeling obligated to continue a dangerous mission with the M9. The adventure is now an obstacle to her being with her child. Caleb might be fried and unconscious on the ground but she’d step over him a thousand times to reach Luc. She didn’t spend a day talking about parenting, or guiltily spoiling Luc or fucking Yeza - she spent a day doing chemistry with her husband like she used to and spending precious time with her child - she even denied him excessive gifts in a world first for her.
I have a lot of feelings about it. I want the best for her but I also still want her to be curled up inside of Caleb’s grubby coat on the side of the road stealing trinkets and cracking cases with Jester and having little adventures with the M9 which didn’t threaten the world.
in no particular order and for no particular reason: best examples of fjord and veth fucking with one another
the whole saga of captain button beard, which veth fully realized was him being patronizing and sarcastically played along with, and then repeated and threw back at him in the tunnels to xhorhas, to which fjord not only played along but outright echoed her “this fucker!” line when he did.
the first use of veth’s disguise self being to turn herself into a mini version of fjord, arguably setting off their rivalry forever
the first use of disguise self after fjord regains his powers being to turn himself into a huge version of nott
fjord letting her cross a dangerous river and only then parting the waters, rendering the effort pointless, after assuring her he would do no such thing. (bonus: caleb, ever biased, using her rope anyway).
that time fjord woke her up by gently picking up her while she slept and then fucking dropping her
i will throw you in the lava… you couldn’t
when fjord got swallowed by that worm thing and veth tried to pull him out, failed her strength check, he made fun of her, and she decided to push him back in instead
screaming and wailing they’re gonna be best friends they’re gonna save each other’s lives but first they have to break out of this cell
[Image description: A panel from The Mighty Nein Origins: Caleb Widogast. Caleb has his hands held out to Nott, who flinches away in fear. He says “… Caleb Widogast. How would you like to get out of here, Nott the Brave?” End image description.]
[image description: a drawing of Nott and Kiri, facing each other in a swamp. Nott is a goblin girl with green skin, long black hair, and a long tufted tail. Kiri is a humanoid bird creature that looks like a crow. She’s holding an orange tabby hat in her wing-like arms and looking at Nott with question marks drawn near her face. Nott has a thought bubble with two hearts drawn inside, and she has a small smile on her face as she looks at Kiri.]
[ID: A three panel comic of characters from Critical Role. The first panel shows Nott, a goblin dressed in torn clothing covered in bandages, standing next to Jester, a blue tiefling. Jester is holding up a large sign that says “dying” on it. Another word above it is covered with paper. Nott: “There’s only one thing worse than dying” The next panel shows Nott’s hand pulling down the piece of paper revealing “Caleb dying”. Nott, from out of view: “Boom”. The final panel shows Caleb, a human man with chin length red hair and a beard. He says, “Caleb.” Nott, from out of view: “NO”. /end ID]
(SPOILERS C2E65) Hey, remember that scene where Jester falls off the tree in episode 65? Well here’s my reimagining of it. I wanted to interpret and expand on what the characters may have been feeling and how they were reacting in that moment!
