This Was the Moment I Realized Brennan Lee Mulligan Was an Important Artist

During the weeks I couldn’t move or really think I had a lot of time to kill and ended up getting into the new Critical Role season on YouTube. I’d tried to get into their stuff a few years ago but didn’t. But once I got about half an episode into the new season, I was hooked, and burned through the backlog of 10 episodes¹ before I was back into a semi-functional state. And now I’m a huge fan, watching every official or fan video YouTube throws at me.²

I was already a fan of Brennan Lee Mulligan’s work since before CollegeHumor became Dropout, although I’d never watched his TTRPG stuff. But I’m confident part of why I’m so into this season of Critical Role is because he’s DMing. There are subtle but powerful through-lines in his worldbuilding and storytelling. But it wasn’t until I watched this video that I realized his work is what I would categorize as important.³

📺 Tale Gate Episode 1: Discussing Up To C4E11

I’m dropping you straight to the pertinent bit in the link above, but there were quite a few other moments in the discussion that were powerful and led up to this one. (Edited for clarity in text.)

…the point of storytelling or the point of, like any kind of art in general, is to try to talk about your experience of life in the world as faithfully as possible.

And I do sort of subscribe to, like, the first moment you misrepresent the feelings or argument of your opponent is where you slip into making propaganda…In other words, if there’s something you disagree with and you start to reframe it and straw-man it and go, “Let’s make a less compelling version of their argument, or let’s make a less compelling version of this other ideology,” I think that you betray your own faith and your own notions of the world.

If you think that you’re right, you shouldn’t have to misrepresent what people you disagree with are saying, and I think that within the Candescent Creed…there are certain constants that feel true to life to me, which is that, any large enough institution will have tremendous privilege and power for the people at the top, and therefore people who, as a core tenet of their personality, seek position, privilege and power, will be drawn to that.

Life is very complicated, and there’s lots of different kinds of people everywhere. But if you’re pressed for time, being skeptical of people in power [is] not a bad guideline to go by… 😂 “There might be a degree of moral nuance here, but I only got ten minutes, so you might be up to something.” 😂 That’s not a bad way to go through life. And I think that there’s a certain degree of, “If I had a whole year to get to know you, maybe. But you seem pretty fucking bad.” 😂

So I think within the Candescent Creed, a lot of it is…

“What brings people to that ideology?”

He doesn’t say that last part as a question, but I’ll take license here to phrase it as such for my purposes.