the way i made this

got distracted

okay here we go so i think MOST OF YOU know the molly lore but lucien fairly recently had his lil book come out which has so much happening SO MUCH

too much im sorry his childhood is trauma after trauma to almost the point of comedy so here we go

lucien is the middle child of two travelling mummers, like they had a caravan and went around doing little performances and songs and plays. his other brother elric was like 5 or so years older than him and his little sister aldreda who are really close in age like a year apart

his parents have ... debt problems, and they run into trouble with the local Shady Creek Run gangs (which are numerous) and they show up to intimidate them and in the scuffle his brother who is like 15 or 16 at the time ends up dead

his mom kind of loses it and his dad starts drinking pretty heavily and they decide that theyre going to try and get elric resurrected, but the person around who can do it is a local witch called Azrahari whos speciality is ... flesh puppets ... more than actual cleric work

so she makes this puppet creature that is sort of alive but mostly not and is this creepy kind of soulless thing that terrifies the shit out of the two younger siblings

and in flashbacks through all of the book its kind of revealed that his parents were definitely abusive - physically and emotionally and when elric was alive he was sort of the target of this, and when he died they focused more on lucien and he took a very strong view of like

i have to protect aldreda at all costs

and he decides (when hes like. 11.) that he has to get his sister and himself out of there, which he does by waking aldreda up in the middle of the night and then locking the caravan from the outside and setting the whole thing on fire with his parents and the puppet brother inside it

family bbq ...

help me not the set your whole family on fire route

HE DOESNT EVEN HAVE THE BRAINWASHED BY TRENT IKITHON EXCUSE ... he just did it ...............

at this point he decided to send aldreda off to rexxentrum (a huge city in the empire) with all the money that they had so she could try and get a job as like a maid, because they decide he can handle himself and she has a better chance

and he decides to stay in shady creek run which is like

its a town but a pretty big one, right outside the borders of the empire but its quite literally lawless - its run by two huge crime families who are constantly at war and is a hub of drinking and gambling and way worse, and theres a good many orphans running around who try and get in with the families there

fwiw he hates the jagentoths (one of the families) because theyre the family that killed elric, so he mostly does little errand jobs for the mardoons. he has a little friend, cree, whos a cute little tabaxi (kitty cat) girl

they do jobs together and eventually one of them starts going REALLY wrong, so they bolt off into the woods and run into that witch azarahi from his brothers ressurection again and hes kinda forced to reveal to cree that he when his parents were still alive, he and them had kind of worked for her - luring people to her cabin so presumably she could do

horrible hag things to them and turn them into puppets.

yucky!

cree is (understandably) really freaked out by this after they escape and forces him at knifepoint to tell her his whole childhood and she is literally the only person on earth who has the whole story out of him EVER

but it basically seals them in this fucked up little codependent relationship forever. its not romantic but its definitely Weird. it would be a deep purple on the doki chart.

she decides that lucien is fate-touched, he has this thing called the Glint that means hes special in some way. not in a good or bad way, necessarily, but he has the attention of the goddess of death sort of way

and that she'll follow him wherever. when ur friend is a lil more into you than u are into them. whomp

lucien then triggers a trap that explodes his face up and they run into Brevyn Oakbender, the daughter of the woman who lucien kind of bums off of and stays in her backyard to sleep in sometimes, who's been training with the Claret Orders and can do some blood healing

theres a bit of a timeskip here but Brevyn offers lucy and cree a kind of way out of shady creek run and a way to get some education and learn magic if they join the Claret Orders which is just straight up the Witchers

if you know witcher lore it is the Same Thing

if you dont its basically like a semi-secret organization that trains people (teens) to use blood magic and then hunt monsters in the aim of protecting people - they have a training school and lucien is pretty damn good at it

he kind of has a Thing about really desperately wanting to learn magic and is a hugely voracious reader and is even noted as having a lot of potential, just. is never in a circumstance where he COULD have any sort of formal training

cree and brevyn fit in really well here and have like, niches. cree is a really talented cleric and enjoys herself and is really personable, and brevyn is good with kids and likes training people and is sort of a favorite of the leadership because she follows the rules and is kinda happy to do it

and lucien is extremely dedicated to training and studying to the point of obsession, and like insists on taking trials and rites early so he can prove himself and not have to follow their rigid rule structure because he hates it

they train with like a mentor and theres a by all accounts very nice older blood hunter who keeps repeatedly trying to dad him but he really resents the attempt. he gets sat down and told like

please get a hobby you are terrifying everyone you are so angry all the time and its worrying to us, the guys who use blood to kill monsters, who aren't known to be touchy feely

karem (his name) is also trying to get him to like. reach out to his sister again, who constantly writes him and he never writes back because he gets in this obsessive hole where he decides he CANNOT see her again until he has enough money for them to just.

leave.

and go to another continent and start over and thats kind of his dream for a long time. but he's fucking it up because aldreda is writing him constantly being like? hey i dont know where you are but you can come here and I can get you a job and everything will be okay

and he ghosts her for months at a time

the breaking point with the blood hunters comes when cree gets her first contract (which lucien had been pushing for! he had been trying to help her out for a long time) but it turns out the contract is on ...... azrahari

and he goes on a bad spiral, becoming fixated on how HE has to be the one to kill her for revenge and its a conspiracy by the higher ups to torture him with this figure from his past (even though theres like. no way they COULD know)

but he begs cree to let him have the contract and they go as a group to fight this hag, this terrifying monster from his childhood, and he gets a chewing out from one of the blood hunter leaders thats like

if you dont learn humility youre going to end up in deep shit

but they show up to fight this witch and azrahari is like. creepy but she goes down ridiculously easy and hes kind of shocked and disturbed that this huge figure in his childhood is basically an old woman who cant hurt him. and when he kills her he gets asked like

well you little pissant was revenge worth it?

and he lies and says that it was wonderful, and just feeling like total shit

at this point the Claret Orders are sort of having problems, theres not enough contracts and money is hard to make, but theyre well trained fighters who pretty much outclass every merc group in the area

so they start taking outside jobs

he and cree and brevyn by themselves at first, and then later they pick up a new friend, Otis (who sucks) and they start to get a good reputation as being talented

eventually they get the attention of an assembly member - whos like. one of the Mageocracy who runs the Empire. like in name they have a king but this circle of mages runs the whole thing and are insanely powerful people. like some of the most powerful magic users in the world. Vess DeRogna hires them to take her on expeditions to

a few different really insanely dangerous and terrible locations and they do well so she keeps hiring them

at this point lucien asks for the payment for one of the jobs (which pay really well) to be the address of his sister, who he hasn't spoken to in like. two years at this point. because he figures he's got enough money now that he can convince her to leave

he gets this address, leaves everyone (cree, brevyn and otis) at the tavern and basically bails - hes not planning to come back and goes to find her

but she seems him and freaks out (rightfully so) because they havent seen each other for 10 years and he shows up covered in scars and has like ... blood on his clothes and telling her to up and leave her family. in the meantime she's gotten married and had a kid and has a stepkid and hes asking her to just

abandon her life and still won't explain properly where he got any of this money or where he was for A DECADE because he doesnt want to talk about the orders. and basically the entire time she made her own way and he didn't help her then and then shows up like this. she decides that hes probably dangerous and tells him to leave, that she's cutting him off

at which point he is deeply devastated (HIS OWN FAULT!!) and crawls back to the others, who dont really seem to notice anything wrong

its revealed at this point that lucien and brevyn have like. a Thing going on. and have been for a while.

lucien is really into her and keeps trying to do like romantic gestures, but she's not really about that and always keeps him at a bit of a distance

and the fact their relationship is open is kinda used the same way like he clearly wants more from her and she won't give that or doesn't know how and its a weird source of tension, and when he finally decided okay he's going to abandon these people and get his sister and bounce

shes actually very nice to him about it when he gets back

but shes always very odd about it like she doesnt let him say romantic things and doesnt seem super into affection which are these things he craves sooooooo badly

but hes back and he decides (hes sort of the defacto leader) that theyre going to take a wildly dangerous and wildly well paying job from vess derogna to go to Eiselcross and explore Aeor - one of the ancient cities that crashed in the calamity

this place is known for killing adventurers and it sucks its basically crashed into fantasy antarctica and magic is extremely fucky and its filled with every horrible monster you can imagine

but vess offers so much money and also access to her books and whatever he wants to study while they do the job, and he decides fuck it they will just get wildly rich and it'll be fucking great

the way im rambling too much my god well

its basically at this point he decides okay if i cant have family then i will have power and it will be great (spoilers: it is not great)

you are not rambling im reading all of this with fascination

things go super bad and when theyre deep in the middle of these ruins of aeor, he runs across this hidden journal right as vess derogna messes something up and the fucking ceiling starts to come down around them

they have to bolt for it but in the process he loses the journal and brevyn who is bodily carrying him out of this is like why are you freaking out about this i will get your stupid journal for you

and she gets smooshed in the process like its described in a really horrible way

shes got one of those crush injuries where youre still alive and lucid but youre GOING to die the shock is just too terrible and cree is trapped too far away to help, and the only rez spell she has at this point isnt powerful enough

so brevyn hands him the journal, gives him some last words that are basically nonsense and dies and they have to leave her because the place is coming down

lucien is basically delirious with grief and derogna (who entirely has his number by the way she roasts him like four times and each time is more devastatingly accurate than the last) is kinda rude and dismissive about brevyn dying

the journal (as my cyoa experienced) is super haunted by ghost wizards and starts ... trying to influence him already. its filled with Mind Control horseshit.

and derogna demands to have the journal, despite their contract stating that the Tombtakers can keep all non-magical things found in the delve, and the journal doesnt ping as magic technically

but basically what it does in the early days is it plays on your emotions and makes them so much stronger and more violent, and he decides okay if DeRogna is here, she's rich and shes a bitch and we CANT let her have the journal because well brevyn died for it so what theyll do is

extort her for more money

and then leave her in the middle of eiselcross

they do this incredibly stupid plan and bolt back for the mainland and basically lucien goes into a disassociative state for WEEKS if not months

he becomes completely obsessed with reading the journal and doesnt care about anything, he has to be forced to eat and basically only sleeps or reads the journal, just a really awful outpouring of both grief and also journal-induced insanity made worse by the grief until eventually he finds himself starting to get these red eye tattoos ...........

and freaks out

hes been sorta taken over by these nine ancient mages who used to run a ward of aeor - cognouza - and they escaped the calamity by teleporting their entire part of the city into the astral sea, and are searching for some way to bring their city back and are promising all sorts of power in exchange like basically

becoming a god.

right now the tombtakers are sort of holed up in a house in a tiny town and starving because - the promissory note theyd gotten from vess derogna had turned out to be a faked with a spell, and they cant return to shady creek run because one of the gang leaders there is out for blood with them (i guess i skipped a lil bit there but its not super important)

and they cant get work with anyone else because they burned that assembly bridge and no one will fucking hire them

lucien decides okay well becoming a god is the only option to survive this - and hes not like underestimating the amount of Going To Die they were in, its a really terrible situation and someone was going to come for them sooner or later but his brilliant (stupid!!!) plan involves having to find someone who knows powerful enough magic

to recite a spell thats in the journal thats supposed to make him the Nonagon - a chosen of the Somnovem

real big hopital vibes

reads this all liket he morning paper

and the only wizard powerful enough they know is vess derogna

(stupid idiot dumb stupid IDIOD)

anyway they call her she agrees to do the spell in exchange for the journal and then she fucking kills him

obviously

NO WHY DID IT EMJOJI GO AWAY

god well its fine whatever

she kills him by basically blasting his soul into a billion fucking pieces so he cant be rezzed, and then scoots off with the journal and leaves him for dead the tombtakers are like

welp hes dead and bury him

and then mollymauk (who is a piece of luciens soul who didnt get powerwashed out) crawls outta the grave on his own as a complete amnesiac

and C2 episodes 1-26 happen

im not explaining those in detail, its fine. go watch them i guess. the gist of it is that molly is just ... a piece of lucien. he is lucien, but with amnesia. they really are super similar people its just the question of like

nature vs nurture and molly is taken by a happy little circus family who teach him a moral and hes still kind of a jackass but in a kind of sweet way

but lucien has the ability to be sweet and charming and funny, hes just ... traumatized.

his life has been fucking horrible and it made him so angry at the world and the state of it and how unfair life is for him and his friends that he didnt know how to process it anymore, whereas molly only has to care about like

silly little manifestos about leaving the world a better place and caring a lot about weirdos

the book describes molly as "death obsessed, but free" which I think is a fun way of putting it just very concerned with when the time is going to end but free of a lot of the burdens of knowing your past

for those who dont know crit role, molly travels with the Mighty Nein and then pulls the "dying in front of you to bring you closer as friends and people" meme on them

molly dies after about two years of being alive, being killed ... by a Jagentoth slave trader (the fucking jagentoths!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and the mighty nein are incredibly distressed by this and it sort of solidfies them as agroup but they yeet molly into a grave

at which point cree reappears and this time she knows the Resurrection spell and is able to successfully bring him back to life

but he sort of ... broken and odd. like his soul got scattered so its made him kind of fucked up, but for a very short while he like

okay im back to life and i want revenge on Vess DeRogna but im free of the somnovem

until they roll back up in his head and are like "its cute you thought death was an escape"

THIS IS A DIRECT QUOTE THEY LITERALLY TELL HIM ITS CUTE HE THOUGHT HE WAS FREE

and he finds he has all sorts of powers now, he can read minds and control people, and can see a little bit of the future, but he also has constant Wizards talking in his head, making demands and yelling at him and demanding he do things and its like

driving him mad

he decides that okay, if he cant die to escape them, he has to head to Aeor and figure out what to do from there - theyre promising all this power to become a god, and as a god he can do whatever he wants. make the world a better, more fair place. or at least end it all and be free of whatever this is.

and this is basically where C2 picks up with ep 120 or so? its not super clear how long he was alive again for but I put it at a few weeks

but the rest of the story is C2 from luciens perspective, and the twist is kinda like. molly is in his head the whole time. talking to him and they have full on conversations all the time - molly is acting as his conscience basically and he HATES molly he resents this so much

because hes deluded himself into believe this piece of himself, mollymauk, is entirely different and separate instead of just a part of him that remembers some actual good life and cares about people and loves them

anyway this was his item

he is constantly calling molly names and "splinter" is one of them

but over this course of time, lucien is getting worse, hes not really able to fight off the Somnovem in his head telling him to do more and more horrible things - he mind controls the other Tombtakers and ignores cree trying to tell him to please be more sane every four seconds but he drags them all to aeor to start digging up what they need

to bring back Cognouza (macguffins called threshold crests basically) and eventually the Mighty Nein catch up with them because they find mollys grave empty, and scry on him to see Lucien and follow them all the way to the middle of this awful place to try and track molly down

The Tombtakers by this point all have eyes of their own because it spreads like a DISEASE and he does care about them but hes sort of convinced himself this is the only way he can help them

the Mighty Nein catch up and they have a lot of weird tense conversations where they are trying to figure out luciens deal, and agree to travel together - cree desperately wants to kill the Nein but Lucien has no ability to actually kill any of them. molly like. straight up won't let him.

i forgot to mention he murdered the shit out of Vess DeRogna by blasting her brain his Mind Rend is wildly powerful

shes like a level 20 wizard and went down in one hit of this thing

wizards and their lack of hp ...

the canon point lucien is from is basically at a point where the Tombtakers have stolen a bag of holding with a Threshold Crest in it, which Otis grabbed off of one of them - taking Lucien by surprise. lucien was sort of weeble-wobbling on well we ahve to keep traveling with the nein because the circus ghost in my brain says so

but the Somnovem got impatient, took over one of the other Tombtakers (otis) and had THEM steal from the Nein to sort of force him to act, like it was threat to say

if you dont do what we tell you, we will simply replace you

the Tombtakers take off into the night with the stolen bag and the Nein follow and then there was the most stressful five hour long live show episode C2 has ever done I WATCHED THIS SHIT LIVE

help

its this horrible drawn out fight where basically Lucien and his team wipe the floor with the Mighty Nein and they start to have to figure out how to run away without ALL being murdered because lucien has Had Enough

they do eventually get away but the Tombtakers still have their stuff, and Lucien decides two things:

1) the somnovem have pissed him off enough and hes going to maim them and take their power for himself, instead of just being their little pawn

and 2) has a very good conversation with molly in his head where molly is like trying to convince him that its NOT too late to turn around and ask the mighty nein for help, that they dont care what hes done they just know he used to be molly and that theyd help a friend

and lucien is like its absolutely too late to strike an accord, you saw what happened, we betrayed them and theres no choice now, no turning back from the worst of it

ooooouggggghhh it makes me howl

anyway thats his exact canon point!

is right at this conversation because i think its super interesting its like

it really could have gone either way at this point he could have gotten worse (which, in canon, he did .......)

SPOILERS I GUESS BUT LUCIEN IS THE BIG BAD OF CRITICAL ROLE SEASON 2

he is a bad guy ........ the worst guy

and in canon he goes off the deep end and he DOES successfully take over the somnovem shout out to the haters who did not believe in him

but he winds up being the final boss battle and gets super killed because ........ he is the bad guy

but i was like i think for the game, I can really play this as a good moment

becuase in the game he won't have the somnovem, so he'll have a chance to be normal ("normal") again and some time to think through the decision and it doesnt have to be the worst one though i was honestly very up in the air

which direction it was gonna go

i was like there is a strong possibility he just gets worse because he is a hard sell right like hes a huge asshole with a personality problem and getting through that is kind of hard?

but people DID try with him and it ended up okay IT WORKED OUT

oh lord did some of them try

YEAH

anyway i do have some problems with the book (why does brevyn exist, cree is right there) but i do like a lot of it because much like matthew mercer this is my blorbo

but this is so funnily OBVIOUSLY matts blorbo too

matt loves this creature

this is such a wild ride

stares at all of this with wild eyes

*wide, i read akis comment above me and changed my eyes apparently.

there's something insane about hearing about lucien like years before about chroma and then REALLY hearing about lucien

O_O

I'm so glad i finally understand what the hell was going on THIS WAS ALL SO FASCINATING TO READ

yeah i think its interesting bc in like c2, the mighty nein try so hard to reach out to lucien assuming molly is in there but eventually decide he's a lost cause and totally a bad dude and they're just. going to kill him a res molly instead

and the fandom was really divided for a long time on like. are molly and lucien the same person? and a lot of people seemed to be on the side that molly was a totally different person who was good and lucien was bad

so i think the post canon materials like more kingsley content + the lucien book coming down much stronger on the side of like

no. lucien is the same person as molly just burdened by years of trauma and mistreatment and with a lot of insane wizard ghosts haunting his brain, you can't like molly and not at least feel some sympathy for lucien

yeah the book comes down really explicitly on molly and lucien being the same to the point of like. molly himself repeatedly trying to explain this - i think the crux of it is more like. they are sort of terrified of each other. to lucien, molly is this sort of fairytale creature that got everything he ever wanted and then squandered it by dying

and to molly, lucien is just a version of yourself where youve made every horrible mistake possible and always picked the wrong choice when faced with one

and hes got a lot of resentment for the nein who are like "well we're here to save molly!" and hes like well no one has ever come to save me so fuck yall? and it didnt help they kept like openly talking about killing the tombtakers the second they were like suspicious

just to put a bow on it, in canon what goes down is basically lucien decides to double-down on his Going Insane arc and finish his mission to take over the somnovem, and along the way the nein kill 3/5 tombtakers (the survivors are cree and lucien)

and even at this point they know its a suicide mission, they mention running out of food before they even got to aeor

and lucien is more completely-brainwizarded at this point and not really in control - though he does have a couple of good conversations with molly mostly about mollys obvious caring for the nein and lucien becoming obsessed with this idea of bringing his childhood back even though he KNOWS it wasnt good and hes remembering a past that just isnt true

and they have a good convo about being non-binary it is really sweet

but by the time they reach cognouza its definitely too late and he is full on delusions of godhood and all he gives his monologue

Lucien’s Monologue C2E138 | Critical Role Sound Desi...

PLEASE ITS SO FUNNY ...

theatre kid ...

hes so fucking dramatic and for what

IM GLAD WE'VE ALL SYNCHRONIZED OUR SCHEDULES THROUGH THIS CHAOS

get therapy

get therapy ......................

important to know this is like

the third monologue he gives

he has so many he loves to yap

hes such a funny villain

he can dispel magic so he can just take the M9 hostage bc they can't long rest or anything

and all he does with it is talk their ear off with NONSENSE

cree in his ear like

please kill them????????????????? and hes just like shut up cree IM TALKING

just the most annoying guy in the world

his main villain energy isnt being evil its just being wildly annoying

ANYWAY c2 ending spoilers he gets fucking dead

and the nein try and rez molly and in the process whats described in the book is like Kingsley (who is the third lucien-molly persona iteration) is sort of the accord between the two of them

so hes less carefree (and careless) than molly was and less angry than lucien was because apparently when you put a goth and a clown in a blender you get a pirate

Lucien is the villain???? I'm shooketh

But no I loved this

lucyyy

YOU KNEW THAT

No this is spoilers how dare you

If Lucien is also molly that means he is lolly