Critical Role continues to expand the world of Exandria through novels, comics, animated series, and beyond. “Critical Role: The Mighty Nein – Stories Untold” builds out the story of the Mighty Nein through their allies and enemies. With a deeper understanding of perspectives that were only touched on during the second campaign.

“Critical Role: The Mighty Nein – Stories Untold” explores stories through the views of Isharnai, Uk’otoa, the Wildmother, Essek, Sprinkle, and many others. One of these stories, “Fight For The Soul” focuses on Fjord’s story, but through the eyes of the Wildmother and Uk’otoa. This unexpectedly boils down into a conversation of sorts between the two as they battle over Fjord’s future.

In an exclusive interview with Temple of Geek, Betsy Aoki shares insight into capturing the voices of Uk’otoa and the Wildmother. She reveals which iconic Fjord moment was her favorite and why Uk’otoa connected with Fjord. Aoki also reveals which elements of the Wildmother she was most excited to highlight in the story.

Betsy Aoki Talks Collaborating With Critical Role

Temple of Geek: Yeah, because it covers from before the campaign to after the campaign. It’s not a small amount of time.

Betsy Aoki:

That was sort of the trick of it: trying to give enough of what was happening so that even if you didn’t know the story, I mean, who doesn’t? But if you didn’t know the story of Fjord, you wouldn’t be lost. I just didn’t want you to be lost amid the fighting back and forth for his particular soul-dom, I guess you would call it, his soul kingdom.

Temple of Geek: What was the process of how you got involved with Critical Role and how you got involved specifically with this story?

Betsy Aoki:

So this is my plug for all you writers out there. Definitely have a website with a contact web form because you never really know who’s going to write you and ask you to do something. They had said that they had seen some of my work. I have a book of poetry called Breakpoint that won. It was a finalist for a national poetry series award, and then it won a prize that allowed it to be published. And so some of the things that you see in the story are not just sort of straight fiction, but they come out of my poetic background, I guess I would say. I have an MFA in poetry. I’m actually the poetry editor for Uncanny Magazine. So it is a fiction story, and it is prose, but some of that informs how I treated different characters or different moments.

And they just said, “Okay, Uk’otoa and the Wildmother, fight for Fjord’s soul. Go.” You know what I mean? And I’m like, “Oh, well, alrighty then. There’s a lot to cover here.” Like I said, it’s a big expansive canvas, and you want to make sure you hit the points that really matter so that someone reading it doesn’t get lost. And so there was the outline, and then they had set milestones, but I actually inserted there was a rough draft. I inserted my rough, rough draft, and then I put the rough draft in. Do you know what I mean? I was a little anxious. So I actually did a little bit more to make sure I was on track and not violating any canon or anything like that.

So I would say that was about the time when they were like, “Here’s the calendar, and this is where we think the publication date will be, so you need to actually review your galley proofs on this date.” So it was very organized. I was very impressed with the organization of it. But it was definitely a lot of reminding myself of what I had seen because you’re just casually watching; you don’t think, Oh, I’m going to be quizzed on this later by writing a story about how it all went down. So it was a lot of work. It was good.

Temple of Geek: Luckily, they have notes from everything so that you can refer back to. So it’s not on YouTube. I had taken notes when you first watched it.

Betsy Aoki:

Right, right, right. And the transcript people are fantastic in terms of the Wiki fandom that ensures the transcripts are accurate and so forth. I really didn’t catch any mistakes, so I was very grateful to them.

Getting Into The Minds Of Uk’otoa & The Wildmother

Temple of Geek: And then we’ve gotten a little bit of the Wildmother and Uk’atoa’s voices through Matt, but also through Taliesin in The Downfall. How did you approach capturing both of their voices? Because they’re both so unique and different from each other, and you captured them so perfectly in the story.

Betsy Aoki:

The way I first looked at Uk’otoa, because I felt like this story doesn’t really work without the bad guy, but also you really need to understand where he came from. And his dad is the cloaked serpent. I mean, does anyone want the Cloaked Serpent for a dad? No. What kind of dad is that going to be? Probably a really bad abusive dad. So we already know he’s kind of someone who did not have a good childhood and is possibly taking it out on everyone else. But also I think he’s kind of an alien creature. He’s a created Leviathan, and he didn’t naturally show up on Exandria. And so there’s a bit of tension about he doesn’t really have anybody else. There’s nobody like him to talk to. And his relationship with his dad is really fraught.

So I wanted to make sure that I understood where the sea monster was coming from. And then the Wildmother is complicated in her own way. I mean, she’s not just the good guy or the motherly beneficent force. She’s a very complex, clawed creature. I say this because my cat’s probably going to jump in front of the camera at any moment, but like that cat. In Downfall, you see her embodied as a human wolf avatar, which I felt was really. I had to think about how she would be not just as a, I’m the kind of person that rescues Fjord’s feeling bad about himself or whatever. She actually has her own desire.

She wanted Exandria to flourish. She has connections throughout all her creatures and the animals and the plants and the lands and all that stuff. So she has a very complicated worldview that’s not just mine, mine, mine; me, me, me. Uk’otoa would like to conquer the world. So they have to have different voices just for that reason. And I also thought she was actually probably a sassy goddess at some point. So I felt like she’s not just the prim and proper mom; she’s the sassy mom that knows what’s good for you. So again, more experienced with relationships with other beings, I think. And then you have Uk’otoa, the perpetual sea loner. He’s not good at people-ing, I would say, at all. He’s not good at people at all.

Temple of Geek: I love that it felt like there were times where Uk’otoa was throwing a temper tantrum, and it’s just the picture of this serpent demigod throwing a fit because his toy won’t do what he wants. It was so much fun to read.

Betsy Aoki:

I mean, I kind of toned him down a little bit. There was one little note from Critical Role. It was like, “This kind of reads like cranky teenage boy a little too much for a demigod.” And I’m like, “Okay, all right. Yes, he was sent to his room, but now he’s going to…” I’ll try and make it a little more dignified than that. But I think at the heart of it is, I don’t think he ever had a chance to grow up really. I mean, who did he talk to? Not very many people that he wasn’t controlling outright. So yeah, there were very different points of view, and I tried to make sure that they felt different. Each time you flipped point of view, you were anchored in a context that felt different.

Temple of Geek: You definitely succeeded at that. And then one of the things I really liked is it definitely felt like a conversation between a demigod and a god, but not a dialogue. What was your approach to crafting that conversation aspect with Fjord at the center of it but not necessarily actively involved in it?

Betsy Aoki:

Well, I felt like there’s some very cosmetic things. I had a lot of angst about the subtitles. I wanted you to know that the locks were either there or being broken. I wanted you to always know in the Uk’otoa sections, how close was this guy to the TikTok of getting out? And then the other thing about that was the Wildmother is not on Exandria, and her actions are mediated through her creatures.

And so she’s removed from the fray, but she’s really getting sucked in all the time through her connections with her web of being or whatever, her ecosystem. And so I wanted to make sure that there are conversations about Fjord being had. They’re not necessarily between Uk’otoa and the Wildmother. And Uk’otoa is, of course, talking to Fjord when he can all the time to get his job done. But the real 360 view involves the Wildmother and all the creatures because they have a better chance at reporting what’s actually happening with Fjord, I think.

Betsy Aoki Breaks Down Uk’otoa’s Connection With Fjord

Temple of Geek: Then we get to see so many of Fjord’s iconic moments from the campaign through these different perspectives. Was there a specific moment you were really excited to get to show in the story? And did you have a favorite perspective to analyze Fjord through?

Betsy Aoki:

Well, so this is probably a flaw in my character, but the jellyfish was actually my favorite part to write. And I will not spoil a ton of it, but I will say that that was one where I was very tempted. It’s going to be very poetic, high literary language, very compressed. And I will say so myself, I did some really good work there in terms of describing and making it all beautiful and wonderful. But then when you think about what’s actually going on, and then the Wildmother’s kind of acting not exactly as a spy, but she’s trying to observe what’s going on and the jellyfish are not necessarily doing what she wants them to.

So I felt like this was a good way to juxtapose the free will that the Wildmother gives to her creatures as well as just have a little bit of fun with it because the jellyfish are awesome. And the other animal’s commentary on Fjord was actually fun to write too. A second favorite would be the monkey, and I will not talk about the monkey, but you’ll have to read about the monkey. But the monkey was also, and I also ran that by people like, “Can I do this with the monkey?” And they’re like, “Yes, you could do this with the monkey.” And I’m like, “Yes, I could do this with a monkey.” So there’s monkey business in this story as well. But it was totally fun to write that part.

Temple of Geek: Yeah, the jellyfish is hard to beat. Completely understand that. It’s so lovely in the campaign and getting to see it again through this, I was so excited. It’s so beautifully, beautifully portrayed. And we talked a little bit about how the Wildmother and “Downfall” had inspiration to this. Was there anything particular that you wanted to pull from Taliesin’s interpretation of the Wildmother when you were really portraying her outside of her connection to animals? Because I liked in “Downfall” that we see the darker side of the Wildmother through the darker side of nature. I thought that was very, very interesting because so often we portray Mother Nature as super matronly. So was there an aspect of that that you wanted to bring in? You said the sassy mom aspect and things like that, but was there anything specific that really stood out to you from the “Downfall” interpretation?

Betsy Aoki:

Yes, I would say an area we didn’t cover as much earlier is the Wildmother as a humanoid wolf person is hungry all the time. And I actually brought that back because I felt like Uk’otoa is hungry all the time. He’s down there. It’s not just that he wants to eat all the corpses or whatever because he is kind of gross that way, but he is a consumer of things. He wants to consume. And so I was like, I must find the difference between the Wildmother who’s hungry all the time and this monster who is hungry all the time.

And I think part of it was that the Wildmother’s willing to be sacrificed at the end for her brother. She’s sacrificing her mortal avatar to heal the avatar of her brother. And it’s a different thing when you’re willing to be eaten, if that makes sense. You are willing to be destroyed for the betterment of everything as well as eat other things. It’s a very, not egalitarian, but it’s a much more balanced equation, I think, than consume, consume, consume all the time. And so her hunger is more about the cycle of life, and this is about the time when we’re going to eat or whatever. And his is more unnatural. It just keeps coming and he’s never satisfied either. There’s no satisfying Uk’otoa. He can’t ever be full.

Temple of Geek: I thought it was very, very cool that we got to see Uk’otoa identify with Fjord in this unexpected way with the feelings of abandonment and that he’s not enough, but he wants to prove himself. Could you talk to me a little bit about what inspired that connection and making that a really motivating factor behind Uk’otoa’s focus on Fjord?

Betsy Aoki:

Sure. So, I mean, Fjord is pretty much dying in the water when Uk’otoa first encounters him. So I felt like Uk’otoa only had a split second to figure out save the half orc or not. And I felt like that meant that the Leviathan had to know innately whether the two of them were alike. And I mean, he would use it against Fjord, of course, later and all the time, but I mean that’s the only way I think it would really work for him to have taken up with. I mean, he didn’t pick Vandran again. He picked Fjord. So, some of this might be getting back at Vandran, but I think also some of this is he felt like there was something he could work with here. And we mentioned before, both of them don’t really have a good father figure in their life.

There’s no Mr. Rogers in anybody’s universe. There’s only the cloak serpent or the orphanage’s horrible man that oversaw the orphanage. And even Vandran leaves Fjord to his own devices after that shipwreck kind of the way the cloak serpent leaves Uk’otoa on the planet and says, “Hey, go run the seas or whatever. I’m going out flitting away with the gods here.” So, I felt like they had kind of innately a weird resonance. I don’t know how Critical Role does it, but automatically worked into this whole thing. There’s a lot of echoes that you could play with. And that kind of made sense afterward like, oh yeah, of course Uk’otoa would want to rescue this guy. He’s enough like him.

Betsy Aoki Talks “Being Able To Play In The Divine Space”

Temple of Geek: Yeah. One of my favorite parts about Exandria that we’ve explored as Critical Role has expanded is the pantheon of the gods. What was your favorite part about getting to play in that pantheon with a god and a demigod and those perspectives on the events of Campaign Two with Fjord as this tug-of-war rope between them?

Betsy Aoki:

I think first I had to get over the fact that both of these are Matt Mercer creations, do you know what I mean? Bow before the master, and then you can actually do the work or whatever. It was fun, I think, to walk the line between them being too human. And remember, Leviathans are kind of alien creatures, created alien creatures, but recognizable to us. The reader will identify with, hopefully, parts of Uk’otoa and the Wildmother in different ways as well as Fjord.

But I felt like being able to play in the divine space; I mean, there’s a lot of great work in Calamity and, like you’re saying, Downfall. There’s a lot of ways to play with the prequels of Exandria that would be a lot of fun to see what the gods were up to. And just being able to focus on this sort of area of Campaign Two, I had a good time. I mean, it’s not often you get to write gods. And so I went to town and tried to make the most of it. It’s a lot of fun.

Temple of Geek: You did a phenomenal job. Truly, truly. How did your experience as a poet and your background in poetry help you with this sort of short story?

Betsy Aoki:

I think for this one, the other area that more lent itself to the poetic language I think was actually the soul related parts of. And I mean I won’t go into that too much either, but I do feel like I did lean heavily on compressed language. And when you’re in an otherworldly space, either in the Wildmother’s reaching out across the realms to Uk’otoa trying to reach the surface or in the soul world where barnacles are growing on the dude’s soul.

Stuff is happening there that is kind of elevated language. And I felt like I had to treat it with the respect it deserved. I couldn’t just write Hemingway sentences there. I had to elevate it a little bit and compress it because you’re in a liminal space. And especially when you’re in liminal spaces, I feel like poetry, or at least the constructs of poetic language help you get there a little faster.

Temple of Geek: And then what was the process of working with Critical Role? Were you getting notes from Matt and Travis or Dani? What was that process sort of like?

Betsy Aoki:

I only got notes that said, “This is feedback from Critical Role.” So there were no named good or bad, probably good for my nerves. I did not get any specific feedback, although I would love to buy them a beer and hear what they actually thought or whatever. But I think I was reassured all the time, they would tell you if it wasn’t working, so chill Betsy, stuff like that. But yeah, it was mostly group notes, I guess is what I would say. Combined notes.

“Critical Role: The Mighty Nein – Stories Untold” is available now. The book includes stories written by Betsy Aoki, Kiri Callaghan, Dani Carr, Mae Catt, Mike Chen, Rin Chupeco, Nino Cipri, Nadia El-Fassi, and Chase K with a foreword penned by Taliesin Jaffe.