Archives on TV: The Legend of Vox Machina, "De Rolo's Eleven"

SPOILER ALERT: This article will contain spoilers for the episode "De Rolo's Eleven" as well as potential spoilers for Critical Role Campaigns 1 and 2, aka Vox Machina and the Mighty Nein. You've been warned.

If you're new to this website, let me tell you right off the bat that I'm not a fan of the way the team at Critical Role has portrayed archives and archivists in their actual plays and the animated adaptations. The Cobalt Soul has...issues, to put it lightly. Chief amongst my grievances is the conflation of archives and libraries as the same thing.

They. Are. Not. The. Same.

My secondary grievance is the reach Critical Role has in terms of viewership and a fandom who may only be introduced to the archives via the Mighty Nein campaign and the current animated series. There's a reason I haven't watched the newest series. I don't like to actively make myself mad. It's a thing I've been working on where I try to keep my blood pressure down so I don't explode.

And then they went and had Vox Machina pull a heist on the Cobalt Soul and reinforce their misinformation about how archival institutions function.

(cracks knuckles) Here we go.

The Legend of Vox Machina, LoVM, is an animated adaptation of Critical Role's first actual play campaign that is both faithful and loosely based, depending on the episode. In the show, the adventuring group known as Vox Machina act like mostly competent, mostly heroic...heroes, but there's plenty of shenanigans, crude humor, and questionable motivations to appease viewers of the original campaign while drawing in a new audience. Currently in its fourth season, the show has now entered the final arc of the campaign that sees the Whispered One, aka Vecna, ascend to godhood and attempt to really fuck up the world of Exandria.

"De Rolo's Eleven" is the fifth episode of the season and is a mostly original episode in that the events depicted never happened in the original campaign. To be fair, a lot of season 4 has veered into non-campaign territory as the writers/show runners attempt to distance the show from its D&D roots to avoid copyright infringement while shoehorning an arc for Pike Trickfoot (Ashley Johnson) into the main plot because the voice actor was absent from the actual play a lot due to working on a live action show in New York when the show was recording.

In the episode, Vox Machina recount, via flashback, how they attempted to infiltrate the Cobalt Soul archives in Rexxentrum to steal a scroll, which is actually a book, with information about the Whispered One. Unfortunately, things don't go according to plan and shenanigans ensue as secrets are revealed and the archives staff shows why it might've been easier for everyone involved if they'd just asked to view the scroll in the first place.

The plan is simple: have their newly acquired member Taryon "Tary" Darrington (Wayne Brady) "donate" a valuable artifact to the Soul with Pike, a gnome, conveniently hidden in the box and Grog (Travis Willingham) stored in a necklace for her to BAMF out as the item is taken to the high security vault that also contains the scroll. The twins, Vex (Laura Bailey) and Vax (Liam O'Brien), will then use a talisman of truth to obtain the means of opening the vault to get their friends out while Keyleth (Marisha Ray) and Percy (Taliesin Jaffe) disable the antimagic field. And then everyone goes home, I guess?

Simple, right? Probably, but because this is Vox Machina, things never go smoothly. Truly, this heist might've gone a lot better if literally any of the characters had an ounce of patience or went to anger management therapy.

So, first off, I'll give credit where credit is due. The episode is gorgeously animated and the backgrounds are beautiful. Seeing the Cobalt Soul fully realized in its architecture, color scheme, and iconography of the Knowing Mistress is fantastic. The archives itself appears to be bustling with people, users and staff alike, which you don't see as much in media either, so that's a welcome visual. It shows that while the Soul operates as a clandestine knowledge-gathering faction, its public-facing side is still essential to the culture of Rexxentrum.

The only downside to visualizing the Cobalt Soul are the Naruto-running monks with their face masks that make them look more like hired goons than guardians of a repository of knowledge. I'm not saying everyone has to be smart or enlightened to protect the establishment, but the monks don't hesitate to throw presumably one-of-a-kind texts when engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Was it funny when Vex got beaned with a book? Yes. Did my heart break as quickly as the book binding? Also yes.

We also get to meet Yudala Fon (Sara Ramirez), the Head Archivist of the Cobalt Soul who is also called the Prime Curator in the episode. In the campaign 2 guide and actual play, Yudala was just the Prime Curator as that was the highest level one could achieve within the network of Cobalt institutions. So, either they can have both titles because they have no chill or the writers don't know what either of those titles mean and assumed they were the same. It's worth noting that this episode was written by Marisha Ray and Liam O'Brien, two people who should have more intimate knowledge of the workings of the Soul and how it functions.

As a character in LoVM, Yudala is calm and calculating. They pretty much clock that Tary is a fool and that there might be something less than savory happening within the archives once he arrives with his donation. When they have confirmation of the heist, they show exactly how effective they are at interrogation and as an individual warrior monk. I'm not gonna lie, I love a competent Head Archivist who can also get shit done and Yudala proves that workplace advancement doesn't mean you sacrifice proficiency. It's just unfortunate that they happen to be an NPC in someone else's story as Vox Machina proceeds to destroy parts of the archives that probably house important and delicate texts that will now be lost to the rest of Exandria due to their fuck-ups. Somewhere in this episode is another character's villain arc because an important text was destroyed by the supposed heroes of the realm.

As for how the episode describes the archives...the general conceit of the episode rides on the idea that there's only one account of the Whispered One in existence, the Cobalt Soul has it, and for some reason they won't allow anyone to see it. As Percy says:

Apparently, Lord De Rolo has either attempted a request from the archives at some point the audience hasn't been privy to or he just assumes the request would be a cumbersome task. I'm not saying that archival requests can't be frustrating, especially if the website user interface is janky or the likely understaffed institution needs more time to fulfill the request when you've got a deadline, but did anyone in Vox Machina even bother to ask the archives? It's not like Vox Machina isn't an unknown party. They've been on the front lines defending the realm against multiple catastrophic events, which you'd think would afford them some clout when it comes to yet another crisis of the world-ending variety.

From the archival perspective, I can absolutely see why the Cobalt Soul wouldn't dream of entertaining the idea of letting anyone from Vox Machina into their not-so-secret vault of potentially world-shattering texts. I've explained the concept of a dark archives many times on this website, but it always bares repeating that there are some archives that acquire materials without the intention of making them publicly available. This could be for reasons of health and safety, donor agreement restrictions, or digital preservation, so it's safe to assume, in my opinion as an archivist, that the Soul's vault operates in a similar way. Plus or minus the spider-like guardian automaton.

The most disappointing part of the episode is the continued perpetuation of the idea that libraries and archives are the same thing. The team at Critical Role have had multiple chances to correct this misinformation, but have failed to do so. It may seem like an insignificant nitpick when dealing with a fantasy world where literally anything is possible, but when the creators of the fantasy world invoke real-world institutions they should also be obligated to at least use the correct terminology especially when their viewership numbers in the millions.