u/CardInternational753

I too love how they connect with the fan base by -checks notes- doing livestreams.

And don't even get me started on how the McElroys have never used AI EVER in ANY of their shows!

Jesse Thorn has gone from asking for "Stankus Art" to laying off some of the people who bought him out of his own company.

Sad.

1. Justin McElroy as Marvel's MODOK

2. Travis McElroy but he's even whiter

3. Griffin McElory but he suffered the same fate as Violet Beauregarde

When someone leaves your life, those exits are not made equal. Some are beautiful and poetic and satisfying. Others are abrupt and unfair. But most are just unremarkable, unintentional, clumsy. And then then there's the ending to The Adventure Zone: Royale, where everyone involved just sort of gives up and a 30-episode campaign is wrapped up in about 15 minutes, with literally nothing that's happened in the previous twenty-nine-and-nine-tenths episodes ending up mattering.

Hello friends, we're back for the true finale of Royale - the TTAZZ wrap-up episode. Let's be honest, they're not going to answer any interesting questions and we're all here to learn what the next season is going to be, if there is going to be one at all.

How am I, you ask? I'm doing pretty good. My big OF shoot went well enough and now I have a lot of content to play around with for the next couple months. Still chasing a few more collabs for the rest of the year and beyond. If you would like to support a weirdo making porn, I only charge for the porn itself. Up next is a three-week jaunt to the East Coast to see friends. And after that, it's full steam ahead on getting my book published. As for my onward jerking plans... I did make a promise to someone that I would stay on as a recapper if the next season if a Travis season, as finishing a Travis season is one of the few McElroy things I haven't done yet. If it's not a Travis season, I'm going to pick up the mantle left by DNALab_Ratgirl and start work on a wholly original season of The Adventure Zone. We'll see what happens. But now, as is tradition. Let us settle in for like, an hour or so of the McElroys answering made up questions about how good their most recent season of TAZ was.

• The boys can only manage 69 minutes of TTAZZ, great sign.
• Wow, they sound fucking DONE. This has got a real 'smoking in the recording studio, dead-eyeing each other as they wait for the audio tech to finish up' vibe to it.
• Griffin starts with the acknowledgement that they would go long stretches without recording due to 'life finding a way to fuck us over'. I am going to guess this is primarily a reference to the deaths of their grandmother and Griffin's father-in-law. Now I am going to sound incredibly harsh here but...and? What do you mean you are a DECADE into this podcast and 16 YEARS into podcasting in general and batch recording is still an alien concept to you. This is your fucking job, the thing that allegedly pays your bills, the thing you ask US, the listening audience, to pay for. And you are still not doing any sort of forward prep? Holy fucking shit, y'all.
• "Are you ready to get started?" Griffin wants to be fucking outta here so bad.
• They fuck around pretending to answer a bunch of fake mundane questions. Clint says one was sent in by Claude so I guess the hog was AI the whole time, sadly.
• Valerie asks "Was there any moment in the podcast that made you want to play your character differently?"
• Travis jumps in to talk about how in the beginning, he wanted to play Rictus as an aspiring healer who happened to have been born into a family of necromancers. Which, hilariously, was not Rictus' original motivation because Rictus, originally, was the black sheep of a necromancy family who just wanted to do necromancy less manipulatively and exploitatively than his family. PERHAPS THE HEALER ASPECT WOULD HAVE BEEN CLEARER IF YOU HAD CHOSEN NOT A NECROMANCY SPELL, TRAVIS
• The Gentleman stealing Rictus' key derailed that and turned into a vendetta arc for Rictus...meaning that his character motivation was like, paper-thin to begin with at best.
• I know we've all had our eyes opened about Travis thanks to Interrobang being brought into the light but yeah, this is a very Travis-coded character - "I am going to pay lip service to wanting to be good, but my words will actually reveal how easy it is for me to be bad" (We haven't yet talked about the story Travis tells in one Interrobang where a dude is being rude to him and Tybee at the movies and Travis, on air, claims he would have physically assaulted the man if the movie hadn't begin right as he was about to go up to the man)
• "This one fucked up thing" - sorry but Griffin referring to The Gentleman using his magic to steal a key in the wizard death game that was pitched in the beginnng as proving yourself worthy of joining the ultimate wizard council as a 'fucked up thing' is laughable. Again, Griffin, what? IT'S A FUCKING DEATH GAME.
• "No one had a destiny" - Justin McElroy
• "We had to find our reason to fight" - Justin McElroy. In...In the voluntary death game? You needed to find the reason to fight in the death game YOU SIGNED UP FOR?
• I know a lot of you didn't listen to the first episode of Rumble, our shitpost Royale parody, but at least in that we spend five minutes establishing that basically our version of the Octave is trying to build super soldiers to fight a centuries-long demon war.
• It's just staggering that this was a voluntary death game but they are all sat here like 'Oh yeah so what I enjoyed was finding a way to keep my character from not just putting a magic missile in my mouth.'
• 'The structure of the killing game is something we had to work against' - Griffin what?
• Griffin confirms that The Gentleman was just playing the game and had to turn him into Rictus' nemesis because of Travis' hyperfixation
• Justin brags about how great and fun it was to play Lorovith being racist toward Helgrammit
• "How two of them wouldn't survive" - Aw, Clint legit thought it was going to have a single survivor
• Clint, in response to another question, says Blackadder was the inspiration for Helgrammit. I love Blackadder and I think Clint is great 87% of the time but I just don't see it. Helgrammit was too team-oriented and not conniving enough. Like to do a Blackadder, you really have to 1) Think you are the coolest and smartest person in the room at all times and 2) You do have to have a charisma that Helgrammit just didn't have. A lot of Blackadder's temporary successes stem from the fact that he does have the ability to manipulate the world around him but Helgrammit was always kind of a loner.
• "Doing impressions of Shogun is really fun" - Oh god Justin, the temptation to twist that to imply that you are just a racist motherfucker who spends your time off-mic doing Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's is so strong.
• Boring question about whether their spell or character came first
• Griffin admits that Clint's homebrew specialty took him by surprise, which is a wild thing for a DM to admit
• Clint says he felt like they ended up with too many spells, which is a wild thing to say about their entire premise. Again, to not to bring up Rumble - but huge shoutout to u/CherrypopIsBestGirl, our wonderful DM for Rumble, who created this fantastic system of having a signature spell that we added effects to throughout the season, while also allowing us to wield a full arsenal of spells. I know the boys just don't really fuck with the spellcaster classes, but what a wild thing to say, Clint
• God, they are just ranting about how much they hate D&D as a system
• Travis like the Trial of Necromancy, Justin and Clint like the Trial of Illusion
• "I really didn't have, like, an ending in mind" - Griffin "Only you can make this podcast possible" McElroy
• Griffin tries to claim it was all one big AI analogy, which sounds like an AI summary of the whole season if ever there was one.
• Griffin basically talks about how player choices derailed his original plan, with Travis fully admitting he thought he was following Griffin's breadcrumbs of plot. NO ONE IS DOING IT LIKE THE MCELROYS
• One of Griffin's original plans for the Trial of Illusion was putting them in a room full of mimics but didn't just want them standing in the middle of the room throwing things at objects. Y'all, I think Griffin might be really bad at this job?
• Oh god this is so funny to me - Griffin's ad break bumper is the exact same one as last episode so here Griffin is, asking for you to send in questions for TTAZZ. God.
• Was Doober meant to be important?
• Lot of natter but no, he was just a 'fun character' to put them in the PCs group in the staircase trial
• "Part of my fixaton was that I thought Doober Sweetleaf was a child" - JUSTIN, AGAIN, THIS IS SO JUICY TO TAKE OUT OF CONTEXT
• LMAO JUSTIN HAS A MOMENT OF CLARITY, WHERE HE ADMITS THAT LOROVITH STARTED GETTING TOO CLOSE TO JUST BEING FIRBOLG AGAIN
• Justin claims Lorovith gave Rictus a 'wide berth' because he was creeped out with the necromancy? THEN WHY DID YOU KEEP TEAMING UP WITH HIM?
• Travis brings up DCC and how him reading the books inspired Rictus' mentality
• Lol. Lmao even. Griffin admits that this was meant to be a Balance tie-in, presumably because of the graphic novel coming out. And then characters just...did not interact with any of that stuff so Griffin had to abandon it
• Justin calls him out on this
• "All the Octave members' names were numbers in different languages" - Yeah, we all picked up on this Griffin and yeah, it was a nothingburger. God, you're really fucking bad at worldbuilding Griffin.
• "Deep as hell" - no Travis, it's not. But then again, you like DCC so makes sense that you think this is deep. Hey Travis, how do you feel about the name of Princess Donut's pet dinosaur? I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on that. Do you shake your head while you devour the books so people know you dont' agree with that sort of thing?
• They all had other rejected character premises. Travis wanted to play a shit magic dwarf.
• "I remember Amnesty, we had a session zero where we talked about how these characters all know each other" - Yeah, Travis, because that's BAKED INTO THE FUCKING SYSTEM YOU WERE PLAYING
• "I really wanted to win" - Justin McElroy, who uh never really tried to win?
• "It feels bad to mess up other people's stuff" THEN WHY DID YOU DO A DEATH GAME
• "A lot of people asked this" in relation to the PCs dying.
• Griffin basically stammers his way through trying to say that PC death was on the table but you can tell that he's just trying to cover his bases. "There were times y'all got pretty close" - GRIFFIN, YOUR DAD DIED EPISODE 2 AND YOU JUST NOPED OUT OF THAT COMMITMENT
• "That event left you indebted to the Spiders" - But it didn't though, Griffin, because I don't think Helgrammit ever directly interacted with those characters ever again?
• Anyway, they pay lip service to PC death being on the table
• Next steps - there's nothing on the horizon. They'll put out some live shows, and then say that there will likely be a mini-arc before the next long-form campaign. I think this might be the end of TAZ, honestly. The fact that they have NOTHING coming down the tube and just gonna move some live shows from BoCo to main feed is damning.

And with that Royale is over and...nothing awaits. Royale is a strange beast - it is objectively a bad media project but it did bring me back to the McElroy fandom, albeit the cooler side that understands that you can criticize things even if you like them. So I know I was very in on Travis doing DCC as the next campaign but I have to imagine that was not the pick because it's so against the McElroy brand (I imagine their brand manager wants to avoid the straight up slurs from those books as much as possible)

To my fellow recappers - mission accomplished, we did it. Gorb - I have always loved the bluntness of your recaps. Truly the most honest among us. Yorba - your descent into madness has been a joy to behold. Your increasingly indecipherable character psuedonyms have been a joy to read. And Kimmie - you are perhaps the bravest of us all in your decision to studiously serve as the objective keeper of the Royale record. You are also just a joy of a person to know. I pour one out for our fallen creators - Hurrrrrrmione and Pam. I hope the both of you are kicking it cool style in amongst your best life.

So uh yeah, see you around I guess?