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As the tale of the Circle of the Silver Screen came to a close, MC Taliesin Jaffe took the podium at The United Theater on Broadway in LA—historic symbol of the very story they just told—and delivered these closing remarks before reintroducing the cast for the closing bows.
"Friends, colleagues, precious audience, they say that art is as close to immortality as most could ever hope to achieve. And therefore, it is always coveted by the powerful, and it is precious beyond measure to the creators who would see their visions realized.
"Tonight, our Circle of the Silver Screen have reminded us of a vicious truth: Art demands sacrifice. And all that raw material has to come from somewhere."
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."
(You should read or watch the whole speech. It's short, but earthshaking.)
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 Role found its start at formerly independent studio Geek & Sundry, which had been sold to corporate media behemoth Legendary Entertainment the year before (2014). In 2016, ten months after Critical Role started airing, Legendary were devoured in turn by Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group. These corporations funded them and let them experiment and grow, waiting to see how productive their TTRPG cash crop yields would be after a few years of cultivation. They developed what Critical Role could be with D&D.
Marisha (as producer and creative director of G&S), Matt (actor), Taliesin (actor), and Ivan Van Norman (game master, now head of Darrington Pres) were all part of Sagas of Sundry: Dead on the newly launched Alpha streaming platform. Here they tried costumes and sets and an indie horror TTRPG that focused more on intense expressive roleplay with 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 with Marisha (creative director, producer, and player whop had to trust her team to handle certain things she was not allowed to have meta-knowledge of); Liam (actor), and Ivan Van Norman (game master). 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 in 2018. A huge and terrifying leap into the unknown to save their creation that was precious 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 its way onto YouTube. SoS: Madness did not (legally), and it only survives through piracy.
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 own 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 demonetize 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.
In the last year, they sold out both Wembley Stadium in London and 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 big-name 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 a famous worker's rebellion for their own rights under their own control.
But eventually legal trouble and poorly received pictures sank United Artists and the corporate machine devoured it. Today it exists 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 that a few measly lives is a reasonable price to pay for progress. After all, it's not usually their lives being sacrificed; it's just artists and crew.
In a 2017 episode of the Dungeon Life documentary by Todd Kenreck—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, in front of their own audience, on their own platform (as well as Google's and Amazon's). Working with a great many other creatives and backend folks to all bring it together (and who are no less important to their success). Telling a story about the town that eats people in the preserved remnants of one of its victims while trying to not be another.