From Guilty Pleasure to a Quality Series
At first, watching the American animated series The Legend of Vox Machina was mostly a guilty pleasure. It appealed to dyed-in-the-wool nerds like myself who have a soft spot for anime, video games, fantasy, and the puerile humor of Marvel movies. Based on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign played by a group of voice actors, the series follows a band of mercenary adventurers known as Vox Machina who go on quests to fight vampires, zombies, and dragons.
Its first few episodes of the season are as uncomfortably cringe as one might expect from such humble beginnings. So much of the action, dialogue, and character design feels like nerd-pandering and escapism. Those who seek more depth and maturity from their entertainment may feel tempted to quit.
But they shouldn’t. Somewhere in the middle of the first season, the show actually becomes good. Everything starts to come together as an engaging story, well-developed characters, detailed worlds, and universal themes all start to emerge.
With each episode, the audience learns more about the members of Vox Machina who make their way in the Tal’ Dorei Republic on the continent of Exandria. The first season centers on the gunslinging aristocrat Percival (Percy) De Rolo seeking revenge on the vampires who murdered his family and took over his estate. Partly because he is the focus of the season, and partly because he is a human character who uses his cleverness (inventing a high-powered pistol or “pepperbox”) instead of magic powers or super strength, Percy is easily the most interesting and relatable character of the show.
The second season gives the backstory of all the other characters. Their city is destroyed and conquered by a group of dragons known as the Chroma Conclave, forcing them to go on quests to retrieve enchanted artifacts and enlist others to help them fight back. Each quest and artifact reveal the complex origins and internal conflicts of each character, even the dumb strongman Grog, who is forced to ponder his own identity now that he is a good guy who has given up murdering peasants and raiding villages.
The third season wraps up these quests and covers most of the showdowns between Vox Machina and the Conclave. As this happens, there are also budding romantic relationships between certain members of the group, specifically Percy and the human-elf archer Vex’halia as well as her brother Vax’ildan and the elf mage Keyleth. Meanwhile, the obnoxious gnome Scanlan, a pansexual bard who serves as the comic relief, vainly attempts to reconnect with his daughter.
Aside from some of the juvenile romantic comedy, this season maintains its momentum, intrigue, and excitement. The creators take full advantage of their medium, recreating a beautiful fantasy world filled with magic, danger, and mystery. Their depiction shows that a universe filled with dragons, wizards, and superhuman monsters is necessarily replete with destruction, carnage, and nihilistic philosophies—similar to the amoral lands of Westeros and Essos in Game of Thrones, but far worse. To this end, the creators take this darkness even further this season with an actual hellscape where doomed souls are tortured and mutilated for eternity.
Ironically, the series shines the most when it takes an honest look at such a world. It’s rife with conflict and violence, requiring much more from potential heroes and villains. Moreover, it forces the audience to experience on some level just how high the stakes are in such a world and, like any good fantasy story, poses some poignant dilemmas. How would people react to the reality of gigantic, intelligent dragons that can raze their cities and enslave them? How would they even begin to fight this? And how do elves, halflings, and humans, some of whom have magical powers and others don’t, work together? What kinds of cultural and political norms would be ideal in such a setup?
To its great credit, The Legend of Vox Machina is able to touch on some of these questions and capture the imagination and recreate these fantastical realities so much better than live-action adaptations like the recent Dungeons and Dragons movie, which inevitably comes off as campy, bland, and boring. Better comparisons are the animated steampunk American series Arcane or the animated Japanese series Attack on Titan.
Two scenes from the third season that perhaps best exemplify this visceral immersion into the unappreciated darkness of fantasy are one in which the Conclave wipes out the capital city, slaughtering its denizens and burning down its palaces. The other scene shows a small rural village being absolutely mowed down by a group of ruthless wizards. These scenes are truly frightening, not only for their graphic display of killing, but also for the scale of superhuman destruction juxtaposed with all too human powerlessness.
None of this is to say that The Legend of Vox Machina is a flawless masterpiece. One big problem it has is squandering opportunities to add depth and complexity to some of its characters, particularly the villains. Thordak, the leader of the Conclave, is a big powerful dragon that’s hellbent on destroying the world and … that’s about it. His minions and fellow dragons are pretty much the same. Considering the time and attention they receive, this is something of a letdown.
Two characters who could have challenged this one-dimensional characterization are the dragon, Raishan, who conspires to betray Thordak and the human scientist Anna Ripley who teams up with Thordak for her own personal gain. Without giving away the story, it’s enough to say that both characters end up being power-hungry opportunists with no redeeming qualities. Which is a shame because both have understandable motivations that explain their behavior: Raishan has an incurable sickness, and Ripley is traumatized by her family being vaporized by evil wizards.
Another noticeable drawback of the show is its tokenism—i.e., woke elements that are added for no other reason except to signal the show’s progressive values. Most of this is fairly anodyne but annoying all the same. To list a few instances, there’s a whole episode devoted to a lesbian couple who squabble with one another while fighting off an ice dragon, a scene in which the lord of hell laments the loss of his husband, a dramatic moment where a character finds her inner strength by believing in her inner-girlboss instead of her god, or a conversation where a protagonist expresses his unabashed horror at the possibility of arming a populace with firearms. At least Thordak never wears a MAGA cap and none of the Vox Machina women shout their abortions—but it wouldn’t be completely out of the question.
Hopefully, these are issues that the creators can minimize in future installments—Amazon has confirmed a 4th season. As it stands, the show has laid a sound foundation for all kinds of characters and storylines. Even if it might’ve started as catnip for nerds, it is now a solid fantasy series offering something for any adult, and a fitting alternative to some of the other fantasy forays that can be found on Amazon.
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.
