Me again. I just wanted to share something with you (and thingswithwings) that I think you will enjoy, based on your list of shows you've been a fan of over the years (especially Steven Universe and Korra). It's a hauntingly beautiful narrative song made by two of the ridiculously talented fans of Critical Role (they even collaborated with a bunch of others to make a whole musical about a few particularly epic/emotional chapters of the first storyline), featuring a couple of the show's characters in a f/f romance (at least one of them is canonically bi, so I can't call it "lesbian"). They're NPCs, so while they are often-recurring characters in the story and important allies to the player characters, their scenes on the show are mostly about their plot-related interactions with the player characters, not with each other. So, due to the nature of tabletop RPG (remember that all NPCs are played by the DM - you can't expect the DM to have long conversations with himself) their backstories and private relationship are mostly just hinted at. (Though they do eventually have a Big Damn Kiss in front of the player characters, because the fans got really invested in this relationship, and when the player characters of the second storyline meet them 20 years later, they're a long-married couple.) This storytelling gap is where this song comes in, which takes the various little bits of information given about their "off-screen" lives in the show and fleshes them out into a comprehensive backstory and character study and troubled romance between two middle-aged women who let go of their chance to be together when they were young, and now that fate has thrown them together gain, they try to find a way through the regret and bitterness because they still love each other dearly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FodxC8vl2ns There are subtitles which indicate which character is singing which line, if you have difficulty telling the singers apart.
It's one of the particularly beautiful things about the Critical Role fandom that fan interpretations actively contribute to the experience and are embraced as such by the original creators, who sometimes will even bend the trajectory of the characters' development to accommodate common fan wishes, especially where explicit queerness is concerned. (I mean, they ignore all the porny fanfic, other than giving vague hints and making in-jokes - this show attracts a lot of poly and femdom kink writers, for much the same characterization reasons as with for example Leverage. But when asked directly, the players do say they're happy it's being written, which is more acceptance than I was expecting, considering that tabletop RPG players usually heavily identify with their self-created characters and the sheer amount of cuddling and genuine crying on the show suggests that these players are no different, even if they're professional actors. But the very, very high-quality fanart is an integral part of the show - they happily show it off during the pee break and at the end of the episodes, and the canon character designs for the first storyline - before the show got an official artist - are basically the fanon that the fan artists collectively converged upon.)
[Tangent: I also find it kind of funny (in a happy way) that Matt will happily admit that he based the very femme wizard Allura on himself, and the very butch paladin Kima on Marisha (his girlfriend and later wife, who incidentally did choose to play a butch lesbian character in the second storyline). You see what I meant about the guys actively rejecting toxic masculinity? And why the fanfic-writing contingent of the Critter community has collectively decided that all male player characters who end up in canon hetero relationships will be happy to sub for the female characters? (Or each other, but that's not really canon aside from some semi-platonic for-good-luck kisses and many jokes between straight-but-very-camp/emotional players Sam and Liam, who are BFFs in real life, to the point of affectionally calling each other "husband", and pretending to be dating when they get a bit drunk on "Talks Machina" - and it's truly not the usual mean-spirited game of "gay chicken" designed to make another straight guy uncomfortable, but rather most likely a case of going a bit overboard with their effort to show that they are comfortable with male homosexuality and trying to be welcoming to the show's queer fans. I mean, Liam keeps going out of his way to show that his character is still bi even if he decided to get in a relationship with a woman (he got a lot of complaints for that, because his flirting with the above-mentioned Gilmore was the fan-preferred couple, but I get it: it's much easier to act out a continuous romance subplot with a fellow player than to try and do that with an NPC they only meet every few months) and he gently calls out any gay-stuff-is-inherently-embarrassing type joke the others sometimes still thoughtlessly make. And Sam is notorious for showning up for live sessions at conventions dressed up like he's auditioning for "Starlight Express" or "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert", and has created a (initially closeted) gay character and even a female character (with an estranged husband she still loves, played by the DM), whom he played for months/years on end. And of course every male player has in-character flirted with the DM at some point, and they're generally very good about staying in-character for the scene and not bursting out giggling to relieve their discomfort. But they still shy away from serious m/m romance between player characters - probably because that would embarrass Travis too much (who doesn't want to play-act any romance subplot except maybe with his real-life wife) and because it might make Taliesin (who really is bi) feel put on the spot, given how he clearly suffers contact embarrassment at any queer-related teasing directed at Liam's character and given that he doesn't really make serious flirtation overtures from his side, even when he does play explicitly queer characters. His presumed-straight character in the first storyline also only really started reciprocating after years of being flirted at by Laura's character, so it's probably just that Taliesin is not quite comfortable being publically romantic, as opposed to being publically demonstrative about his queer identity by wearing a purple mowhawk and the occasional pride flag T-shirt. Though once he did get comfortable with having awkward romantic conversations with Laura (while her real-life husband Travis sits right there beside her, shipping them like a 13-year-old fangirl), they quickly graduated their characters to "married couple who have lots of kinky sex off-screen", because Taliesin is a good sport about feeding the fic-writers and Laura has a relentlessly dirty mind.)]
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Date: 2020-04-03 11:16 pm (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FodxC8vl2ns
There are subtitles which indicate which character is singing which line, if you have difficulty telling the singers apart.
It's one of the particularly beautiful things about the Critical Role fandom that fan interpretations actively contribute to the experience and are embraced as such by the original creators, who sometimes will even bend the trajectory of the characters' development to accommodate common fan wishes, especially where explicit queerness is concerned. (I mean, they ignore all the porny fanfic, other than giving vague hints and making in-jokes - this show attracts a lot of poly and femdom kink writers, for much the same characterization reasons as with for example Leverage. But when asked directly, the players do say they're happy it's being written, which is more acceptance than I was expecting, considering that tabletop RPG players usually heavily identify with their self-created characters and the sheer amount of cuddling and genuine crying on the show suggests that these players are no different, even if they're professional actors. But the very, very high-quality fanart is an integral part of the show - they happily show it off during the pee break and at the end of the episodes, and the canon character designs for the first storyline - before the show got an official artist - are basically the fanon that the fan artists collectively converged upon.)
[Tangent: I also find it kind of funny (in a happy way) that Matt will happily admit that he based the very femme wizard Allura on himself, and the very butch paladin Kima on Marisha (his girlfriend and later wife, who incidentally did choose to play a butch lesbian character in the second storyline). You see what I meant about the guys actively rejecting toxic masculinity? And why the fanfic-writing contingent of the Critter community has collectively decided that all male player characters who end up in canon hetero relationships will be happy to sub for the female characters? (Or each other, but that's not really canon aside from some semi-platonic for-good-luck kisses and many jokes between straight-but-very-camp/emotional players Sam and Liam, who are BFFs in real life, to the point of affectionally calling each other "husband", and pretending to be dating when they get a bit drunk on "Talks Machina" - and it's truly not the usual mean-spirited game of "gay chicken" designed to make another straight guy uncomfortable, but rather most likely a case of going a bit overboard with their effort to show that they are comfortable with male homosexuality and trying to be welcoming to the show's queer fans. I mean, Liam keeps going out of his way to show that his character is still bi even if he decided to get in a relationship with a woman (he got a lot of complaints for that, because his flirting with the above-mentioned Gilmore was the fan-preferred couple, but I get it: it's much easier to act out a continuous romance subplot with a fellow player than to try and do that with an NPC they only meet every few months) and he gently calls out any gay-stuff-is-inherently-embarrassing type joke the others sometimes still thoughtlessly make. And Sam is notorious for showning up for live sessions at conventions dressed up like he's auditioning for "Starlight Express" or "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert", and has created a (initially closeted) gay character and even a female character (with an estranged husband she still loves, played by the DM), whom he played for months/years on end. And of course every male player has in-character flirted with the DM at some point, and they're generally very good about staying in-character for the scene and not bursting out giggling to relieve their discomfort. But they still shy away from serious m/m romance between player characters - probably because that would embarrass Travis too much (who doesn't want to play-act any romance subplot except maybe with his real-life wife) and because it might make Taliesin (who really is bi) feel put on the spot, given how he clearly suffers contact embarrassment at any queer-related teasing directed at Liam's character and given that he doesn't really make serious flirtation overtures from his side, even when he does play explicitly queer characters. His presumed-straight character in the first storyline also only really started reciprocating after years of being flirted at by Laura's character, so it's probably just that Taliesin is not quite comfortable being publically romantic, as opposed to being publically demonstrative about his queer identity by wearing a purple mowhawk and the occasional pride flag T-shirt. Though once he did get comfortable with having awkward romantic conversations with Laura (while her real-life husband Travis sits right there beside her, shipping them like a 13-year-old fangirl), they quickly graduated their characters to "married couple who have lots of kinky sex off-screen", because Taliesin is a good sport about feeding the fic-writers and Laura has a relentlessly dirty mind.)]