“(989):
I need a new best friend. Someone who drinks like a fish, hooks up enough to raise eyebrows, and isn't afraid to admit that masturbation is the second best way to spend time. Someone like me! Help me put up posters.“
nothing will ever top c2’s moment of sam slipping in “bren” as foreshadowing for veth and liam desperately panicking thinking he’d somehow learned caleb’s backstory
it's so funny to me that caleb and veth really did just trade off the job of intensely pining for the other at like the halfway point of the campaign. like, imo, nott in the early days did not behave in any real romantic or even romance-adjacent ways toward him--I imagine it would be very hard to even think in that way when you hate what you look like so much, have such low self-esteem, and are actively lying about your entire past, including a secret husband. caleb, on the other hand, is kind of diving directly back into the sort of relationship he had with astrid and eadwulf. very close, very intimate, we-huddled-for-warmth-together-and-oops-it-led-to-something-else sort of thing. he is the one who expresses that he's fine with it if people think he and nott are romantically together when they're talking to keg. nott is the one who pushes back on that. he calls her his life partner. unknowingly, he compares his feelings for nott to nott's feelings for yeza. his behavior only really starts to change after he finds out about veth's husband because suddenly all of that other stuff is rendered inappropriate in retrospect. but even then he compliments her to yeza over dinner in the most awkward of ways, he admits to being jealous, he calls yeza "a lucky man" to have her, he stares at veth and yeza closed bedroom door for far too long, he creates an entire arcane tower with room for her family just so she'll stay with him. in general, his behavior is not, um, totally and completely platonic about it, you know?
like, veth's feelings for caleb are canonical and therefore indisputable in their existence, but caleb in the early days was not that dissimilar to how veth was acting near the end of the campaign. it really paints a picture of "right person, wrong time" in the way things just didn't line up for them. or, as veth would say: "in another world, maybe"
Thinking about how when Liam asked if Nott’s crush on Caleb was something Sam came up with pre-campaign, Sam responded “No, when I stared into your eyes during some of the scenes we had together, it was sort of a natural thing” like that isn’t some of the most romantic shit I’ve ever heard. ‘When I looked into your eyes I knew she was in love.’ Like fuck dude. It wasn’t part of the plan, but it happened anyways. How could it not? Falling in love with Caleb was simple, it was obvious, it was the most natural thing in the world.
of the many injustices put forth toward the show by fans i think the most overall damaging and telling of a complete lack of critical viewership is the idea that sam riegel builds his characters with nothing more than the bit in mind. like you are only telling on yourself if you think characters like scanlan shorthalt and veth brennato are one-dimensional and depthless