Taliesin's remarks feel in dialogue with Ursula K. Le Guin's famous remarks in her 2014 acceptance speech of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters:
"Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words."
Taliesin's words are the horror genre warning of the same conflict in the related artistic industry of Hollywood. An industry that birthed him, that is a multigenerational legacy for him, and also nearly broke him as a teenager. Until he found a niche in it voice acting. And then this weird world of professional TTRPGs found him through the act of creating with his friends.
Critical Roller found its start at formerly independent studio Geek & Sundry, recently sold to corporate media behemoth Legendary Entertainment. Who were devoured in turn by Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group. These corporations funded them and let them experiment and grow, waiting to see how productive the cash crop would yield after a few years of cultivation. They developed what Critical Role could be with D&D.
Marisha (producer, creative director of G&S), Matt (actor), Taliesin (actor), and Ivan Van Norman (Game Master) were all part of Sagas of Sundry: Dead of the newly launched Alpha platform. Here they tried costumes and sets and an indie horror TTRPG that focused more on intense expressive roleplay with key key moments of luck and ability decided by the mechanics. Directly after filming Taliesin remarked that it felt like a new form of commedia dell'arte. This was the golden age of Geek & Sundry where the possibilities of the medium seemed only add limited as the imagination.
The follow-up was Sagas of Sundry: Madness. Marisha was the creative director, producer, and one of the players (and had to trust her team to handle certain things she was not allowed to have meta-knowledge of; Ivan Van Norman was the Game Master; and Liam was another player. They pushed the format even father with a set that was part stage, part escape room. They gave incredible and intense performances. It had a great reception. It felt very avant garde.
And then it all unraveled. Legendary pulled the plug on Alpha. Critical Role had been VERY careful with their IP, and managed to break off into their own independent company. A huge and terrifying leap into the unknown to save their creation that was prescious beyond measure to them, and discardable to the powerful. Geek & Sundry didn't survive the summer. A footnote in corporate bookkeeping. SoS: Dread eventually made it's way onto YouTube. SoS: Madness did not (legally), and it only survives through piracy.
And so now here they are, years later, nurturing their creation themselves. Probably not growing fast enough for VC tech bros, but enough to have their production studio, two animated series, a game publishing press, a music label, a charity, comics, books, and now their own streaming platform where no one can shut it down or demonatize it but them. There was plenty of money to make so much art and support so many other artists when corporate interests weren't talking a cut.
They sold out both Wembley Stadium in London and the The United Theater on Broadway in LA. The United Theater opened in 1927 as the flagship theater of United Artists. United Artists was founded in 1919 by like-minded silent film Hollywood creators who were already fed up with the predatory treatment of corporate studios. They wanted a studio where they could own their own work. It was famous worker's rebellion for their own rights under their own control.
But eventually legal trouble and poorly revived pictures sank United Artists and the corporate machine devoured it. Today it exists only in-name-only under Amazon. A legend about the artists that tried to escape the Hollywood machine that eats people. Each new generation improving on the Torment Nexus based on the warnings of the storytellers ahead of them pleading for it to stop. Calm capitalists who think they're helping revolutionize the world and a few measly lives is a reasonable price too pay for progress. After all, it's not usually their lives they're sacrificing; it's just artists.
In a 2017 episode of the Dungeon Life documentary by Todd Kenreck—that is also now lost media—Taliesin said, "I live in LA where we are—it's a city made of aspirations. And some of them are designed to be eaten by others so they can maintain their youth. And some are designed to blossom into beautiful creatures. There's tons of aspirations. But this is a wonderful—I'm so proud of this and pleased with this."
Nearly seven years later, Critical Role is still an aspiration blooming into a beautiful creature. Saved from the jaws of a malevolent entity that tried to eat them to maintain its youth. Their own acting partners in their own company playing their own game to their own music on front of their own audience on their own platform (as well as Google's and Amazon's). Telling a story about the town that eats people in the preserved remnants of one of its victims while trying to not be another.
