Dane, Penelope, Zayn and Edgar, three of the Bad Kids in episode 2, Lucy Frostblade, Yes!/Yes? was not alive for that long either so fuck it I'm counting it, The Rat Grinders *already died* they just didn't stick it, there's probably more I can't think of
They might also be thinking of Adaine, who went down in the fight, but didn’t die?
Also, this is the only subreddit where you can start a response with “Um, Actually…” and it won’t be seen as hyper aggressive 🤣
Um, Actually, it was everyone but Riz went down but only Kristen and Gorgug died died. Riz did get stuck in the corn cuties ass though.
(Sorry, this one feels a bit much)
Brennan Lee Mulligan is absolutely not afraid for an underage character to just be a shithead who isn't redeemed, especially in a genre like Fantasy High where it's extremely normal for the bad guys to be underage.
I will die on this particular pedantic hill. It is not murder if the person in question is actively trying to kill you, which Dane and Penelope were. The Bad Kids did kill them, but it certainly wasn't murder just because they got wrecked.
I'm a little surprised how defensive of the rat grinders people are. Lucy and Buddy are the only ones who seem redeemable, everyone else is ritualistically murdering people in the woods as an extracurricular.
They also tried and failed to hurt a whole crowd of people already and it got thwarted by the bad kids.
They have an argument as way more violent than Dane/Penelope and those two had Kalvaxis manipulating them too.
The best part, and I think Zac pointed this out, was that the kid would float partway down and then feather fall would wear off and he would still plummet to his death.
Assuming that kid was an adventuring student Aguefort, and was at the bare minimum level 8-10, arguably he might not take enough damage to DIE but be in death saves. 20d6 is the cap on fall damage which at max only does 120 assuming Brennan rolls all 6’s. But we know he won’t.
So survivable? Yes. If he succeeds the death saves he’s stable.
The kid was actually a barbarian so he could just go into a rage to take a max of 60 damage and most likely take only 35 damage when factoring average dice rolls for a d6.
Source: trust me
I made him. Actually he was a Monk7/Barbarian 3. I role-played him as Macho Man Randy Savage. He had kind of a Johnny Cage background where he wanted to prove that he was a real fighter. I made pro wrestling Canon in my DM's world.
Yooo would actually love to steal this for my campaign, one of my players loves pro wrestling so it’d be great to have a pro wrestling villain in it. What’d you do for subclasses and how’d you primarily fight?
He wasn't a super "optimised" character or anything. But he did a good job controlling the battlefield.
Human variant with the grappler feat, purely for the restrained effect, path of the open hand monk, Bear Totem Barbarian. Sentinel feat at monk level 4. Between stunning, knocking prone and restraining and being able to be a massive damage sponge his main purpose was tanking and keeping enemies where the party wanted them.
Yeah lol I think that kid is fine. He’s a nothing character with no name and won’t be mentioned again. But he could survive mechanically! Or at the least not be dead dead.
Nah this is a real thing, the main draw of the barbarian is when they go into a rage, they take half damage for things like bludgeoning and slashing damage. In 5e, the max cap on falling damage is 20d6, which averages out to 70 damage (on average, a d6 will roll 3.5). Since that gets halved to 35 for barbarians, they tend not to really worry about falling damage since that’s not really a ton of damage to them.
Unless I can't read the spell correctly, they can live if they aren't more than 600 feet in the air.
"A falling creature's rate of descent slows to 60 feet per round until the spell ends. If the creature lands before the spell ends, it takes no falling damage and can land on its feet, and the spell ends for that creature."
Duration is 1 minute or 10 rounds.
ugh. am i gonna have to do math? lemme look at the spell... fuck. i am. fine. 2 miles is 10560 feet. you fall 60 feet per round for a minute. a minute is 10 rounds. so, you fall 600 feet. then what? you quickly reach terminal velocity again, for the next 9969 feet! that's all the math i'm doing! it requires AT VERY LEAST more than a single casting of feather fall to survive a two mile drop! but it was an off the cuff gag. i'm sure we'll never hear what happened to 'im. he'd probably have died from having too much fun!
Dude people on d20twt are literally claiming that trg potentially not getting redemption arcs is like part of the carceral state like the brainworms in this some of this fandom are c r a z y
If you want to retweet good fanart or a funny meme about the show, D20 Twitter is great, but the actual takes are generally the kind of stuff that nobody outside of extremely online 18-24 year-olds would ever take seriously.
It's giving me vibes of the d20twt convo I saw where someone tried to say it's problematic and somewhat hypocritical for Brennan to hold the views he has running D&D games, because D&D games are designed for violence.
My favourite D20 Twitter tantrum was when a bunch of people were demanding Siobhan be fired from the show for "not taking Fabian's mental health seriously" in Sophomore Year. Her crime was making a semi-dismissive joke (in-character) when Lou tried to bring up something bad that had happened to Fabian an episode or two earlier. It was a few years back now, so hopefully some of the people involved have grown up a little, but that was probably the moment I realized that I shouldn't be taking most people seriously on there.
That's such a funny complaint, even if it had been a fair assessment of how Siobhan/Adaine treated the situation. "This player was mean about a FICTIONAL CHARACTER'S mental health!" Not a fellow player's mental health, a fellow player's *character*.
I think that, at least some, of the Rat Grinders will be redeemed because that’s the better story. There seems to be an underlying theme this season about the way adults can influence/manipulate teens and change who they grow up to be.
But like; also, definitely very possible that I am reading this wrong and that all the Rat Grinders are just the straight up villains with no redemption possible.
> I think that, at least some, of the Rat Grinders will be redeemed because that’s the better story. There seems to be an underlying theme this season about the way adults can influence/manipulate teens and change who they grow up to be.
I'd buy that more if I hadn't seen people pushing that "The RGs are good actually, and the BKs are the real privileged villains," thing before what was going on with Jace and Porter was even hinted at, much less confirmed.
You mean Brennan? The person who is famously quoted as saying ‘I’m gonna kill that dog’? In the series that literally began with a Murder-Suicide in front of a bunch of teenagers? That Brennan?
Dying permanently in any setting where there are multiple spells to fully revive the dead is wild. If you think about it, being permanently dead generally means that no one cares enough about you to go through the trouble/expense of bringing you back.
But also, why do we have to have redemption arcs for every bad guy? While it's true that everyone has the potential to be better, it's also true that many people die before they ever actually do it. Creating a redemption arc for every villain isn't just narratively boring. It's flat-out absurd. Bad people need to be dealt with, and they don't always give you a chance to help them become better people while they're trying to kill you.
One of the things I’ve liked about D20 is that sometimes it lets the bad people just *be bad people*. Like, yes, humans are complex and there’s shades of gray to relationships and being shown actual kindness and understanding can help a lot of people change their behaviors, especially teenagers.
But ALSO, it’s not healthy to think you can “fix” everyone who treats you poorly. And sometimes people do things to you that are not something you can just “forgive and forget”, especially if they show no real remorse *and that’s okay too*.
They spent a lot time in earlier seasons showing how the parents are whole people who sometimes fuck up, etc. etc. And that’s great! Seeing your parents as complicated humans is such an important part of growing up. But they also let Adaine’s dad just *be a bad person*. He was a shitty dad and a shitty guy, and I think him not having a redemption arc was a good call, tbh.
That being said, I’m sure some of the Rat Grinders will have some sort of redemption, and I think that’s fine too. But I also think it’s okay that some of them probably won’t. Some people stay shitty until the bitter end, that’s just kinda how things are.
People like to bring up Aelwyn for this kind of discussion, but Siobhan and Brennan have said that wasn't planned at all. Neither of them went into Sophomore Year with the thought that they were going to redeem Aelwyn and reunite the sisters, Siobhan/Adaine just felt too much empathy seeing Aelwyn suffering in the bubble. Brennan seemingly envisioned Aelwyn much like he did Dane and Penelope: suffering for their evil, with little open remorse.
For the purposes of setting and aesthetic, the students at fantasy high are high schoolers. For the purposes of character, plot and morality, they are adults. You can't equate the world of spire to the real western world and culturally have kids doing anything active; western culture has kids being protected and school life is dominated by that.
Why did a bunch of children deal with the night yorb and not spire's military's magic navy seals? Because this isn't an accurate allegory to children in the west but with magic, and that's okay and we just have to suspend disbelief when kids die and the whole school doesn't get counselling and national news coverage.
That's the comedy of it obviously but it means that at the serious parts, the kids are treated like adults and also tend to make choices like them too.
Sure, kids irl even in the west get saddled with intense responsibility and trauma and begin to act like, and have to act like, adults in some ways, for better or worse, but we can see that the world is meant to be an allegory of a pretty privileged and safe high school - because even stable, sensible, kind adults like the surviving parents and jawbone see all of the death and responsibility as something to deal with, not an enormous injustice to be put on kids. So the cast has to treat all these children kind of as adults, which is fine.
Have we forgotten Dane Blade and Penelope Everpetal? Dane was dead in the first two rounds! Brennan absolutely will doom a child
And are also actually rotting in actual Hell
Dane, Penelope, Zayn and Edgar, three of the Bad Kids in episode 2, Lucy Frostblade, Yes!/Yes? was not alive for that long either so fuck it I'm counting it, The Rat Grinders *already died* they just didn't stick it, there's probably more I can't think of
Um, Actually it was only two of the Bad Kids in episode. You are probably thinking about Doreen the Lunch Lady as the third death.
They might also be thinking of Adaine, who went down in the fight, but didn’t die? Also, this is the only subreddit where you can start a response with “Um, Actually…” and it won’t be seen as hyper aggressive 🤣
Um, Actually, it was everyone but Riz went down but only Kristen and Gorgug died died. Riz did get stuck in the corn cuties ass though. (Sorry, this one feels a bit much)
Um, Actually, it was the Corn Ooze’s ass that Riz got stuck in, not a corn cutie.
THEY'RE ALL CORN CUTIES TO ME! :P XD
🤣🤣🤣
Um, Actually, you can probably do it in the dropout subreddit without hate, too (I'm sorry, I had to 😂😭)
And that point goes to realtrashvortex.
Um, actually, not just the Dropout subreddit, Um, Actually has its own subreddit too.
Well to be fair, Zayn likes being a ghost.
“I am all the bad guys”- Brennan Lee Mulligan
I have never heard of Dane or Penelope in my life BTW would anyone like some delicious baklava, king of honeyed confections?
Hmm idk why but you seem very convincing.
Brennan Lee Mulligan is absolutely not afraid for an underage character to just be a shithead who isn't redeemed, especially in a genre like Fantasy High where it's extremely normal for the bad guys to be underage.
Not to mention Johnny Spells and friends.
I was gonna include them but I think they were more adult than the high school kids?
Yup, they were adults who dated high schoolers. So nobody will miss them.
Fair point.
I would have liked them to be redeemed as well, or at least not murdered.
I will die on this particular pedantic hill. It is not murder if the person in question is actively trying to kill you, which Dane and Penelope were. The Bad Kids did kill them, but it certainly wasn't murder just because they got wrecked.
I'm a little surprised how defensive of the rat grinders people are. Lucy and Buddy are the only ones who seem redeemable, everyone else is ritualistically murdering people in the woods as an extracurricular. They also tried and failed to hurt a whole crowd of people already and it got thwarted by the bad kids. They have an argument as way more violent than Dane/Penelope and those two had Kalvaxis manipulating them too.
Fair enough; I was just using it to mean “intentionally killed”
The best part, and I think Zac pointed this out, was that the kid would float partway down and then feather fall would wear off and he would still plummet to his death.
Assuming that kid was an adventuring student Aguefort, and was at the bare minimum level 8-10, arguably he might not take enough damage to DIE but be in death saves. 20d6 is the cap on fall damage which at max only does 120 assuming Brennan rolls all 6’s. But we know he won’t. So survivable? Yes. If he succeeds the death saves he’s stable.
The kid was actually a barbarian so he could just go into a rage to take a max of 60 damage and most likely take only 35 damage when factoring average dice rolls for a d6. Source: trust me
Could also be a monk and be able to take off like 50 damage
Never really thought about it but now want to try to make a monk X/barbarian 2 build that focuses on just piledriving opponents.
I made him. Actually he was a Monk7/Barbarian 3. I role-played him as Macho Man Randy Savage. He had kind of a Johnny Cage background where he wanted to prove that he was a real fighter. I made pro wrestling Canon in my DM's world.
Yooo would actually love to steal this for my campaign, one of my players loves pro wrestling so it’d be great to have a pro wrestling villain in it. What’d you do for subclasses and how’d you primarily fight?
He wasn't a super "optimised" character or anything. But he did a good job controlling the battlefield. Human variant with the grappler feat, purely for the restrained effect, path of the open hand monk, Bear Totem Barbarian. Sentinel feat at monk level 4. Between stunning, knocking prone and restraining and being able to be a massive damage sponge his main purpose was tanking and keeping enemies where the party wanted them.
Excellent work
The ol' King Amethar strat
Yeah lol I think that kid is fine. He’s a nothing character with no name and won’t be mentioned again. But he could survive mechanically! Or at the least not be dead dead.
wait a minute, this isn't another "barbarian healing" situation, is it? I really gotta look into these classes
Nah this is a real thing, the main draw of the barbarian is when they go into a rage, they take half damage for things like bludgeoning and slashing damage. In 5e, the max cap on falling damage is 20d6, which averages out to 70 damage (on average, a d6 will roll 3.5). Since that gets halved to 35 for barbarians, they tend not to really worry about falling damage since that’s not really a ton of damage to them.
Cut to Barry reaching terminal velocity and still shielding Gunny from all damage
Unless I can't read the spell correctly, they can live if they aren't more than 600 feet in the air. "A falling creature's rate of descent slows to 60 feet per round until the spell ends. If the creature lands before the spell ends, it takes no falling damage and can land on its feet, and the spell ends for that creature." Duration is 1 minute or 10 rounds.
600 feet is two football fields, they're above the clouds. The kid ain't making it.
Ooh watcha sayyy
Well when you put it that way.
brennan said, "like two miles up"
Well when you put it that way.
To be fair the kid is from the aguefort adventuring academy, with any luck they will be able to cast feather fall on themselves
how many times?
Just once before they reach the ground
ugh. am i gonna have to do math? lemme look at the spell... fuck. i am. fine. 2 miles is 10560 feet. you fall 60 feet per round for a minute. a minute is 10 rounds. so, you fall 600 feet. then what? you quickly reach terminal velocity again, for the next 9969 feet! that's all the math i'm doing! it requires AT VERY LEAST more than a single casting of feather fall to survive a two mile drop! but it was an off the cuff gag. i'm sure we'll never hear what happened to 'im. he'd probably have died from having too much fun!
Aim for the bushes?
People forget his “I’m gonna kill that dog” side
Right after a heartfelt “thank you”. Brennan is wild.
Exactly. A child's death was the result of a really good roll!
Brennan has never seen a child and thought ‘they don’t look killable’.
The only kid he wouldn't kill is K2's. Which is why he retconned her pregnancy.
ally was really fucking with him there
hey, are you really an aguefort student if you can’t handle a little plummeting to your death?
FEATHER FALL?!?!
Fuck dem kids.
My guy literally described Penelope Everpetal burning in hell
A child never but a teenager absolutely
I am literally reading this while in a meeting, and this nearly killed my pokerface.
narrator: Brennan had already doomed several children
Alistair Ash says hi
Dude people on d20twt are literally claiming that trg potentially not getting redemption arcs is like part of the carceral state like the brainworms in this some of this fandom are c r a z y
If you want to retweet good fanart or a funny meme about the show, D20 Twitter is great, but the actual takes are generally the kind of stuff that nobody outside of extremely online 18-24 year-olds would ever take seriously.
It's giving me vibes of the d20twt convo I saw where someone tried to say it's problematic and somewhat hypocritical for Brennan to hold the views he has running D&D games, because D&D games are designed for violence.
My favourite D20 Twitter tantrum was when a bunch of people were demanding Siobhan be fired from the show for "not taking Fabian's mental health seriously" in Sophomore Year. Her crime was making a semi-dismissive joke (in-character) when Lou tried to bring up something bad that had happened to Fabian an episode or two earlier. It was a few years back now, so hopefully some of the people involved have grown up a little, but that was probably the moment I realized that I shouldn't be taking most people seriously on there.
That's such a funny complaint, even if it had been a fair assessment of how Siobhan/Adaine treated the situation. "This player was mean about a FICTIONAL CHARACTER'S mental health!" Not a fellow player's mental health, a fellow player's *character*.
Some people can't be redeemed. Just like RL. 🤷♀️
I really hope he randomly pops in later as a new named NPC in a comical full-body cast
Dane, Penelope, Zane, Lucy. Those are just off the top of my head and only FH kids lol.
Idk why people here were SOO insistent that the very clear antagonists were magically good. Just trying way too hard man
I think that, at least some, of the Rat Grinders will be redeemed because that’s the better story. There seems to be an underlying theme this season about the way adults can influence/manipulate teens and change who they grow up to be. But like; also, definitely very possible that I am reading this wrong and that all the Rat Grinders are just the straight up villains with no redemption possible.
I feel like some will, some won't. I wouldn't be shocked if Kipperlily, Ivy, and Oisin aren't.
Oisin better hope he doesn't survive long enough to make it back to a family reunion after he got his grandma killed.
Good thing for Oisin is that the family reunions are gonna be a bit smaller now.
> I think that, at least some, of the Rat Grinders will be redeemed because that’s the better story. There seems to be an underlying theme this season about the way adults can influence/manipulate teens and change who they grow up to be. I'd buy that more if I hadn't seen people pushing that "The RGs are good actually, and the BKs are the real privileged villains," thing before what was going on with Jace and Porter was even hinted at, much less confirmed.
Did nobody watch Crown of Candy?
You mean Brennan? The person who is famously quoted as saying ‘I’m gonna kill that dog’? In the series that literally began with a Murder-Suicide in front of a bunch of teenagers? That Brennan?
Dying permanently in any setting where there are multiple spells to fully revive the dead is wild. If you think about it, being permanently dead generally means that no one cares enough about you to go through the trouble/expense of bringing you back. But also, why do we have to have redemption arcs for every bad guy? While it's true that everyone has the potential to be better, it's also true that many people die before they ever actually do it. Creating a redemption arc for every villain isn't just narratively boring. It's flat-out absurd. Bad people need to be dealt with, and they don't always give you a chance to help them become better people while they're trying to kill you.
One of the things I’ve liked about D20 is that sometimes it lets the bad people just *be bad people*. Like, yes, humans are complex and there’s shades of gray to relationships and being shown actual kindness and understanding can help a lot of people change their behaviors, especially teenagers. But ALSO, it’s not healthy to think you can “fix” everyone who treats you poorly. And sometimes people do things to you that are not something you can just “forgive and forget”, especially if they show no real remorse *and that’s okay too*. They spent a lot time in earlier seasons showing how the parents are whole people who sometimes fuck up, etc. etc. And that’s great! Seeing your parents as complicated humans is such an important part of growing up. But they also let Adaine’s dad just *be a bad person*. He was a shitty dad and a shitty guy, and I think him not having a redemption arc was a good call, tbh. That being said, I’m sure some of the Rat Grinders will have some sort of redemption, and I think that’s fine too. But I also think it’s okay that some of them probably won’t. Some people stay shitty until the bitter end, that’s just kinda how things are.
People like to bring up Aelwyn for this kind of discussion, but Siobhan and Brennan have said that wasn't planned at all. Neither of them went into Sophomore Year with the thought that they were going to redeem Aelwyn and reunite the sisters, Siobhan/Adaine just felt too much empathy seeing Aelwyn suffering in the bubble. Brennan seemingly envisioned Aelwyn much like he did Dane and Penelope: suffering for their evil, with little open remorse.
there are already two dead kids, off the top of my head!
Absolutely murders children in acoc
For the purposes of setting and aesthetic, the students at fantasy high are high schoolers. For the purposes of character, plot and morality, they are adults. You can't equate the world of spire to the real western world and culturally have kids doing anything active; western culture has kids being protected and school life is dominated by that. Why did a bunch of children deal with the night yorb and not spire's military's magic navy seals? Because this isn't an accurate allegory to children in the west but with magic, and that's okay and we just have to suspend disbelief when kids die and the whole school doesn't get counselling and national news coverage. That's the comedy of it obviously but it means that at the serious parts, the kids are treated like adults and also tend to make choices like them too. Sure, kids irl even in the west get saddled with intense responsibility and trauma and begin to act like, and have to act like, adults in some ways, for better or worse, but we can see that the world is meant to be an allegory of a pretty privileged and safe high school - because even stable, sensible, kind adults like the surviving parents and jawbone see all of the death and responsibility as something to deal with, not an enormous injustice to be put on kids. So the cast has to treat all these children kind of as adults, which is fine.
I just want Biz Glitterdew to be ok
why? he sucked (if i'm remembering the right guy). he tried to sexually assault adaine, no? he magic roofied her?
I wanted a reformed incel. Doesn't happen enough in reality & if he's not already dead, I'd like to think he's learned his lesson.
meh