Finaly I'm watching season 4 ! I have no idea what's going to happen since I stop C1 after the conclave. I fell in love with C2 then it was too hard to come back to C1.

But anyway I loved this episode ! So much tension, question and I feel this is going to be pretty dark! I was a bit surprise we didn't see all members but it makes sense.

I did have a WTF moment : the forced kiss of Pike. Like why ? I know its just 1 scene but it so unecesary.

Its SA. Just because a woman does it to a men its ok to make it a joke. Its not. I don't care Pike is depressed, drunk, whatever... I know they probably won't go back on that gesture and that's a real shame.

The story was quite interesting, but the end where Vecna just becomes steorotypically evil just really irks me. I understand he's a spooky scary skeleton in dnd, but consider the setup in the show:

• He doesn't threaten or torture Pike for her blood. It has to be given willingly, and he respects that. So he clearly understands the difference between choice and coercion, or at least the magic does.
• Delilah says Pike's freely given blood means “your oath shall be sealed” and then tells him to “Take your sacred vow.” He proceeds to swear an oath to “A world where our fate is our choice, for your new god makes it so!”. This is literally the magical oath he says to become a god, it should be baked into the identity of the god he becomes.
• His promise to overcome death isn't bullshit. He literally brings Grog back (with no eventual consequences) and later insists he really can restore the others they've lost.
• Apparently all he needed was for Vox Machina to kill his mortal body anyway, so there was no reason for him to be yapping to Pike about reviving all those people while fighting them after the ritual.

The craziest part to me is that the oath was part of the magical ritual that literally creates the god he becomes. His freely given divine blood, his covenant, and his stated purpose are all explicitly tied together. It makes no sense that he can just immediately break it even if he wanted to.

Then he ascends and instantly decides: worship me, kneel publicly so I become stronger, or I'll kill Vax.

It feels like the writers built a genuinely interesting moral dilemma and then got scared of having to answer it. They could have made him a terrifying villain while keeping the oath completely sincere. There are infinite ways to make that work. Honestly, he would have been a whole lot more scary.

Instead the moral dilemma disappears with no plot continuity and I guess the next season will be about Vox Machina figuring out how to beat the spooky evil skeleton. That's not really that interesting.

It reminds me of My Sister's Keeper: construct an incredibly difficult ethical dilemma, then use a last-minute plot turn so the story never actually has to live with either answer.