I honestly think one of Griffin’s greatest feats in the entire Balance campaign was his writing of Lucretia. I can’t think of any other example where a woman- let alone an older black woman- is written as both entirely competent but also incredibly flawed.
She makes mistakes, really bad ones, but these mistakes are well intentioned. Her fundamental flaw is that she cares so much for people, especially her friends, that she doesn’t think to ask them for help. She is stubborn and prideful and often unthinking but ultimately she is selfless. She doomed herself to what she thought would be perpetual loneliness because she thought that it was the right thing to do for the greater good.
It would have been so easy for Griffin to make her into a flat villain, the kind of “I know what’s best for you, don’t get in my way” kind of villain that’s so common in media. But instead he turned her into a hero that’s earnestly trying, but failing. Her arc, maybe even more so than Magnus’ experience with the Power Bear, shows that true strength comes in being able to feel humility and ask for help. As someone who really struggles with allowing vulnerability to overcome pride, I just really connect with her and I’m really grateful to Griffin for not taking the easy way out when it came to her character.
Yes! And Griffin even said in one of the The The Adventure Zone Zones that people thought of her as the villain but he never thought of her like that. People can do terrible things and not be terrible people. Lucretia for sure did terrible things that break my heart into pieces but it’s also so apparent that she loves her family so much. She absolutely also feels the pain that she brought them but her pain is inconsequential to her. It broke her heart over and over again to do the things she did and that just shows that she thought it was the right thing to do, that she would go through so much to do it. And yes, I actually hadn’t even really thought of it but Lucretia for sure shows that true strength lies in asking for help, albeit in a less obvious but, yes, also more effective way. She only succeeded when she asked for help. She went through so much and she’s so powerful and capable but she could have never done it without asking for help.
Fucking Griffin, man. Every time I think I’ve gotten all that I will from that fucking story, I’m wrong. He’s such a brilliant writer and story teller.
ayy this is really good ! gotta say my heart still belongs to THIS generator but this ones definitely more useful for making things thatre Really Out There in terms of creature design lemme just
kprattatat asked: I read your post and I'd like to help you get started. Please talk to me about how vegetables aren't real, because that sounds like an interesting af conversation.
Everybody and their cousin has experienced the argument “is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable” at some point in their lives. It’s a fun bit of trivia, and let’s know-it-all’s speak condescendingly, or at least they did like 10 years ago. “Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad”. Whatever.
Which brings up the point, that botany and culinary sciences are very different. Botany is the study of plants, culinary is cooking and how things taste. Botany is science, and it has rules (kind of), where cuisine is full of guidelines that are completely cultural.
Tomatoes are a fruit. A fruit is how many plants have babies, and are made in the ovary of a flower. I have a diagram.
Armed with this knowledge we can know that tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, beans, peas and peppers are all fruit.
“Now”, I ask you, “what are lettuce, and cabbage, and spinach, and kale”?
“Vegetables”, you say, assuredly.
“Yes, but, what are they?”
“…vegetables”, you say, slower, and louder this time, not quite sure what I’m wanting from you.
No. They are leaves.
What are carrots, beets and radishes? Roots. What about celery and rhubarb? Stems. Potatoes? Tubers (food storage for the plant, and where new plant babies will grow from). Garlic and onions? Bulbs (also food storage). Mushrooms? They’re not even a plant, they’re a fungus, in the kingdom of fungi, which is somewhere between the plant and animal kingdoms.
“Vegetables” is just a word for plants that we eat, that doesn’t have enough sugar to be a fruit, and not enough flavour to be a herb or spice.
Botanically speaking, there is no such thing as a vegetable. They’re just different parts of a plant that happen to be edible.
There are other plants, normally considered weeds, that can be “eaten like a vegetable”. Dandelion, stinging nettle, dock, purslane, can all be cooked and eaten, making them vegetables, at least to the people to treat them as such. It’s all very cultural, and biased, and based on nothing but what people think it is. Therefore, they are not a real thing, it’s just a concept.
