YMMV / The Legend of Vox Machina

• Alternative Character Interpretation: When Osysa the sphynx tells Scanlan "Nobody cares about you. I'm no different." Was she simply saying she didn't care about him, just like everyone else? Or was she making a "Not So Different" Remark, feeling that due to her forced seclusion, nobody cares about her either? Her sadness on mentioning her mate, and the fact that Scanlan later gained the blessing of the Knowing Mistress in the campaign, and the events of "Into Rimecleft" may lend weight to this.
• Animation Age Ghetto: Sam Riegel emphasized that the creative team wanted to avert this in this video. The source material was never intended for children in the first place, with vivid descriptions of gory kills, sexual innuendos and situations, violence, death, drug use, and other mature themes. The first publicly-available footage from NYCC 2021 emphasizes this — in the span of two minutes, there's a lot of drinking, lots of swearing, a Vomit Indiscretion Shot from a drunk Keyleth, a man asking another man to give him a hand-job (albeit as an Insult Backfire) and somebody getting their hand chopped off. This led to What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids? complaints from people not as familiar with the original show. Hammered in by the final trailer, which is full of blood, ludicrous combat injuries, flipping people off, and swearing. They're outright called "the team who gives evil the finger"!
  Sam Riegel: Something that's really important about this animated series is we wanted it to be definitely and distinctly an adult series. It's for grownups. So, we wanted to make sure that the world, the background, the atmosphere and the character designs both read as sophisticated, mature.
• Awesome Music: Courtesy of Neal Acree
  • The bar fight in episode 1 is accompanied by the jaunty "Tavern Brawl", featuring no other melody than that of "Your Turn to Roll"!
  • "Fighting Back", the bombastic and triumphant track that plays when Vox Machina kills Brimscythe, mixing orchestra and rock guitar in equal measure.
  • "No Mercy Percy", a dark and menacing choral piece that plays when Percy tracks down and brutally slaughters Kerrion Stonefell.
  • "Scanbo", the bombastic theme that plays during Scanlan's Crowning Moment of Awesome in Episode 7.
  • The aptly-titled "When Murder Entered My Heart", a similar track to "No Mercy Percy" that plays when Percy viciously slaughters Professor Anders.
  • Pike's return and single-handed tide-turning of the battle against the undead in Whitestone, to the tune of "The Tide of Bone".
  • The track "Heavy" that plays during Percy's Heroic BSoD suddenly switches to the eponymous style when Scanlan realizes he needs to play something heavy in order to lift something heavy (the team) out of a deadly acid trap: cue the rock guitar.
  • "Turning Tides" and "Blinded by the Light", the glorious tracks that play when Keyleth connects to the Sun Tree, weakening Sylas Briarwood's control over Cassandra and Vax, and while Pike and Scanlan fend off Delilah, Grog and Keyleth work together to incinerate Sylas with Keyleth's magic sunlight.
  • "We All Rage" plays during the Big Badass Battle Sequence between Vox Machina and the forces of Grog's uncle. Not only is the sequence itself awesome for Vox Machina by taking on hardened warriors, but the pounding heavy metal track feels like Unstoppable Rage incarnate.
• Base-Breaking Character: The show's take on Scanlan. Some see him as a fun Plucky Comic Relief character who provides entertaining chaotic energy while still showing hints of the Hidden Depths he has in the source material, while others think he's insufferably annoying and drags down an otherwise-mature show with overplayed raunchy humor. His character is notably less annoying in Season 2, as his aforementioned Hidden Depths get more time in the spotlight.
• Catharsis Factor: Percy's revenge quest takes him down a dark path personally, but after we see what his targets have done, their ends are immensely satisfying:
  • Kerrion Stonefell is a horribly cruel enforcer for the Briarwoods, gleefully slaughtering anyone who stood in his way and aiding in the murder of the de Rolos—including the children—explicitly because he wanted to. He tries to flee from battle with Vox Machina, but Percy catches up to him, and slowly begins taking him down a few pegs before revealing himself. Stonefell has a brief moment of wide-eyed realization before Percy empties his gun into him.
  • Professor Anders not only personally betrayed the de Rolos, including the young Percy and Cassandra whom he tutored, but he also slits Cassandra's throat in front of Percy while mocking him about the deaths of the rest of his family and calling his mother a bitch. He then magically compels the rest of Vox Machina to attack Percy, wanting him to watch his own friends kill him...but his sadism proves to be his own undoing, because Percy is able to buy enough time to pull off an impressive trick shot that shoots out Anders' tongue (which had been enchanted to allow him to control people). Anders goes from Smug Snake to terrified, pinned to the window by a furious Percy, who enumerates his crimes in a bone-chilling speech before shooting Anders out the window and reducing his head to paste on the ground below.
  • Sylas, who has up to this point been an unstoppable Lightning Bruiser, is eventually incapacitated by Grog (whom he previously dismissed) and restrained so Keyleth can finish the job. And she does, unleashing a powerful beam of magical sunlight that slowly, graphically incinerates him; the viewers are treated to long close-up shots of the skin being burned off his body.
  • Delilah gets perhaps the most satisfying treatment of them all. She is Forced to Watch as Sylas is killed, and to add insult to injury, she fails to summon her patron The Whispered One to revive him. She's taken prisoner by Vox Machina, with Cassandra dragging her off by the hair, but she still defiantly declares that she won't answer to them and that they can take no more from her, inviting Percy to kill her. Percy, sporting an Orthax-induced Slasher Smile, declares that he fully intends to make her death as slow and painful as possible in retribution for what she did to his family, with his threats actually managing to frighten the previously smooth Delilah. While the team tries to keep Percy from killing her (as it would do more harm to his soul than good at this point, what with Orthax exerting more and more control), they don't give her any dignity; Scanlan uses his Giant Hand Of Doom to drag her around on the floor by the arm. She's absolutely terrified of Percy at this point, but she recovers when he fully rejects Orthax's influence and chooses to spare her, beginning to deliver one last speech with a prepared spell... only for Cassandra, the girl she tortured and controlled, to cut her off by stabbing her in the neck.
  • After an entire season of watching Umbrasyl destroy countless lives and just overall being a bane to our heroes, watching Scanlan ram Mythcarver into his eye and proceeding to fry his brain inside his skull is so many levels of cathartic.
  • After a lifetime of unprovoked slaughter of innocents (including killing much of Westruun to take their gold or for fun if they had nothing left), paused only when it became inconvenient to them, seeing the Herd of Storms fall to Vox Machina and later Umbrasyl is rich. The herd member who happily axed a retreating civilian in front of Grog and Pike specifically gets a torrent of acid.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Continuity Lockout: While most of the story can be enjoyed without knowledge of the Actual Play show, Season 2 only gives vague context on why the Vestiges of Divergence exist, and doesn't explain what the Divergence was. Fortunately there's a video on Critical Role's channel explaining Exandria's creation myth and history, but anyone who hasn't seen it won't have the full context.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Keyleth quieting the dying duergar by shoving it deeper into the lava. Even the rest of the party is appalled.
    • On that note, Scanlan nonchalantly admitting to having finished in the monster he was having sex with before killing them.
  • Vox Machina's discovery of their body doubles on the Sun Tree is painted as nothing but absolutely horrific in the show. In the watch party, however, the cast reveals that they call the doubles "cosplayers" and hope fans will actually cosplay them.
• Epileptic Trees: Due to the focus on the Whitestone arc, longtime fans started keeping an eye open for a possible Easter Egg cameo by campaign 3 fan favorite character Laudna, whose origins were tied explicitly to the undead uprising in Whitestone and Delilah Briarwood in particular. Sadly Production Lead Time made this seem unlikely...until campaign 3 episode 17 revealed that Laudna was indeed one of the bodies hanging from the Sun Tree, specifically the woman who was made to look like Vex.
• Evil Is Cool: Very common in this show, it has to be said.
  • The Briarwoods are a wedded pair of cultist tyrants, Delilah a necromancer and Sylas a vampire, who tortured Percy and Cassandra, murdered their entire family and noble house, and exert an iron-fisted rule over the people of Whitestone bolstered by undead monstrosities. This all while being classy and erudite, obviously in love with each other, and respectively voiced by Grey DeLisle and Matthew Mercer.
  • The Chroma Conclave are an ungodly union of five exceptionally cruel and ambitious chromatic dragons, easily and willingly capable of leveling an entire city on their own and murdering protagonists and beloved supporting characters without even struggling that much. They're also magnificent, with the Satanic-looking Thordak in particular quite literally standing out as the most awe-inspiring.
  • While not nearly on the same level of power as his draconic masters, Kevdak also cuts a place for himself here. He's a cruel, monstrous, abusive bandit king and nearly murdered his nephew Grog for the perceived failure of sparing a helpless old gnome, but his might and endurance - especially while wearing the Titanstone Knuckles - is absolutely ballistic both visually and mechanically, enabling him to swat even Grog aside like a fly without much effort. When presented with the issue of mostly losing his left arm, Kevdak rips it off and uses it as a war club, which even Grog rightly decrees, verbatim, as badass.
• Fan Nickname: "Cabbage Matt" for the Matt Mercer NPC since just like the Cabbage Man, something horrible always seems to happen to him.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • A number of fans of the animated version of Invincible are also fans of this show due to both shows using similar animation styles and having good stories.
  • There are fans of both Final Space and Infinity Train who became drawn into Vox Machina partially as a result of frustration and anger towards Warner Bros Discovery for cancelling both shows without giving them proper conclusions, but they were also drawn in to the show due to it going the middle line between being funny and being serious like Final Space.
  • And, of course, people who appreciated the chaotic energy of Slayers tend to dig what VM is going for, especially with Slayers having concluded its run many years prior to VM hitting screens.
• Genius Bonus: A party by the name of Murder Hobos is mentioned to have been killed. In tabletop gaming, a "murderhobo" is a player who wanders the game world, indiscriminately killing and looting, often without asking many questions or roleplaying. They are the bane of game masters who aren't interested in indulging these tendencies or run a story-heavy campaign. The other mentioned parties—the Torian Butchers, Death Dealers, and Agar's Assassins—have the kind of names that murderhobo groups would take up for themselves.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In Episode 7 of season 2, "The Fey Realm", Keyleth sees a pretty bird that she coos at, only for it to be torn apart a few seconds later by killer plants. As a joke, the animators designed the bird to look like Matt Mercer and Marisha Ray's pet bird Dagon. Unfortunately, Dagon passed away in real life before production of the episode was finished, and when Matt saw his dead pet get torn apart onscreen for the first time, he nearly went Laughing Mad at the black humor of it all.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Syldor. Dear god Syldor. Despite Vox Machina's enemies ranging from murderous marauders, a pair of evil tyrants, and apocalyptic ancient dragons, many find Syldor's pompous attitude and seething racism towards his own children much more despicable than any of the former.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "No Mercy" Percy is back. ^Explanation Percy's brutal interrogation of Desmond in Episode 3, as well as his rage at the Briarwoods escaping, is cited as a hallmark of the early series for its sheer cruelty. This interrogation in the original show was also one of the things that led to the "No Mercy" Percy fan nickname forming in the first place.
  • Is it Friday yet? ^Explanation Fans expressing their anticipation for the next batch of episodes have adopted a modified version of the main series' catchphrase "Is It Thursday Yet?". Made even funnier when fans realized that the episodes were actually released at midnight GMT, meaning that in America they were released in early evening...on Thursdays, three hours before Critical Role proper would begin streaming.
  • Percy is an anime protagonist. ^Explanation Fans were quick to notice the anime elements around his character, like the fish eye zoom, doing a Naruto run and especially having a similar story arc as Sasuke Uchiha.
  • Keyleth is a Disney Princess. ^Explanation She has magic hands, animals talk to her, and her arc is the most straightforward version of the Hero's Journey of all of Vox Machina.
  • EMOTIONAL DAMAGE! ^Explanation During Kamajiori's trial, Scanlan was able to wound him not through physical attacks, but with a heartfelt love ballad that literally caused emotional damage.
• Moe: Velora Vessar, Vex and Vax's half-sister, is adorable enough for them to act less like roguish adventurers and more like loving family members. She even partakes in Innocent Swearing as her last line of Season 2.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Brimscythe crosses this when he massacres a village of civilians. This act of violent cruelty gives Vox Machina the motivation to put their act together and take him down.
  • The Briarwoods and their collaborators crossed it when they ordered the entire de Rolo family to be killed, causing Percy to be traumatized and vengeful from seeing his family die in front of him, and nearly being killed himself. They even have the gall to slander the family in front of Percy.
  • Ripley in particular crossed it when she horrifically mutilated Percy to torture him for information, and then Cassandra when he wasn't giving the answers she wanted.
• Nausea Fuel: Keyleth throwing up after a drinking contest? Gross, but understandable. Keyleth throwing up again during the Bar Brawl, into someone else's mouth? Disgusting.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Though Keyleth got Character Perception Evolution in post-Campaign 1 material, she was a Base-Breaking Character before then. Marisha's characterization of a shy and awkward girl learning to come into her own felt like an Informed Attribute with how Keyleth actually behaved, along with her anxiety and reluctance to fight earning her some ill will, leading to the character having a lot of detractors. When this series began airing, the majority of the Critical Role fanbase adored the kinder, shyer, more anxious interpretation of Keyleth, including a number of people who disliked her. Many former detractors saw what it was that Marisha was trying to do with Keyleth, and found her characterization significantly more likable than she was in Campaign 1, bringing Keyleth a lot of good will and finally pulling her out of her Scrappy status.
• Signature Scene:
  • Episode 5 recreates a major one from the campaign, with innocent people killed and made up to look like Vox Machina, then strung up on the Sun Tree.
  • Vex encouraging Percy to take off his mask, revealing his crying face as he attempts to fight a demon's control.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • A motley crew of fantasy heroes of various backgrounds and abilities become champions of a city and must deal with courtly politics as well as their pasts catching up to them? Probably the closest we’ll get to a Dragon Age II adaptation.
  • Being adapted from creators' tabletop sessions, this animated series can be seen as an American version of Record of Lodoss War.
  • Our crew of fearless heroes being, uh, not entirely heroic but saving the day anyway, along with a lot of the humor being various forms of off-color, also calls the animated versions of Slayers to mind.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Inevitable. As an adaptation of a much longer tabletop campaign, as noted below, a lot of changes have had to be made to ensure things fit more cleanly into twelve-episode seasons. Some of these changes have sat less well with fans than others:
  • The big one is probably the overall treatment of Allura and Kima. Because the animated series goes from the defeat of Brimscythe straight into the Briarwood storyline, skipping over the entire Kraghammer/1st Vasselheim arc from the original web video sessions, it completely guts Kima's relationship with Vox Machina and even her screentime; she was an absolute favorite of both the players and the fans in the actual-play broadcast (the players actually cheered when she came back in the AP's version of the Chroma arc!), and here she barely has any screen presence and has no particular relationship with VM. And as a result of this, Allura is also less close to VM than she otherwise should be, since she doesn't owe her wife's continued survival to the gang.
  • For that matter, starting with the Briarwood arc, and thus the general loss of the Kraghammer arc or other pre-streaming material, is a bit contentious. While the Critical Role crew asserted that they knew existing fans would want to see the Briarwoods adapted ASAP and that said arc is also where the web show "found its feet" and got to the point they were proud of it, the Briarwoods were in fact pretty deep into the campaign.^note The team was around level 11 when the Briarwood arc kicked off, and had already gone through a number of adventures and gear upgrades in the pre-stream days, including the adventure of unmasking Krieg, so they were already roughly halfway through level progression. Effectively starting here has the effect of feeling like the show is beginning deeply In Medias Res, where a lot has already happened and the show doesn't really slow down to try to explain or establish some things about the crew and their relationships that might be helpful to know^note Granted, this is an issue the stream had as well, since the Kraghammer arc was also In Medias Res with the cast at 8th level and most of their past adventures being treated as funny Noodle Incidents, like the fight with the Dread Emperor being referenced only in a one-off joke about Keyleth killing a kid. It also means that, after the opening two-parter, the whole first season is mostly about Percy, rather than a broader focus on the entire ensemble to help fully establish all their characters; as one example, we don't get a fuller exploration of what the deal with the Ashari is and hints of the source of Keyleth's anxieties until almost halfway through season two, a full 17 episodes deep into the series. There are still plenty of viewers, both existing CR fans and new arrivals, who are satisfied with the show as it is, but there's still a contingent who believes following up Brimscythe with Kraghammer as in the original web show - or going back even further into the pre-stream days! - might have served as a better establishing arc.^note It should be pointed out that Kraghammer would have incredibly difficult to adapt, not only because the plot would have to be rewritten extensively to account for the lack of Tiberius, but because it is filled to the brim with Wizards of the Coast copyright content - Mind Flayers, Beholders, and even the very term Underdark itself are considered intellectual property of WOTC and are not covered by any of the reference documents released.
  • The antagonistic dynamic Zahra has with Vox Machina is completely different from the fire forged friendship they develop in the stream, which ruffled fans of the character the wrong way. One notable moment in the show has Zahra unleash The Onlooker to actively impede and almost kill Vox Machina, which feels especially callous after Vex was pulled back from death's door only moments before.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: One of the most frequent complaints about the first season is that due to each episode being a 30-minute condensation of hours upon hours of deliberated-upon tabletop gameplay with uncertain outcomes, it causes many of the show's plot elements to feel very rushed-through for those not familiar with the source material. And of course, some adaptational changes (see above) make things contentious, too. Season 2 further compounds this by adapting the Chroma Conclave arc, which in the stream was a huge storyline composed of multiple sidequests and subplots, many of which the show condenses and skips over, resulting in feeling like content that could have been a full season on its own reduced to a single episode.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The show is a Dungeons and Dragons-themed adventure series from the same people behind Critical Role. It looks like something children would enjoy at first, but it's really not. The first episode airs with The Chosen Many getting painfully, bloodily, viscerally slaughtered, and the following Council scene begins with an Atomic F-Bomb. Cut to our intrepid heroes, who spend their first minutes onscreen drinking, cussing, barfing, getting into a bar fight (except for Scanlan, who's shagging the tavern keeper's daughter), getting kicked out of the bar, and instantly shooting down the idea of being more than just a marauding band of murder hobos.

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