The newest season of Dropout’s Dimension 20, Gladlands, wrapped up this week, bringing the rollicking post-apocalyptic tale to a fun and heartwarming conclusion. I sat down with D20 newbies Vic Michaelis (who played Hugi the Ashmaker) and Kimia Behpoornia (who played Test Tube5 the surprisingly ripped human/bug hybrid) to get some insight into the season, their first time at the D20 table, and how abs can overcome all fears.
Dan: This is both of your first time at the table with D20, correct? Did you have a background in this? Have you played much tabletop, done much playing or?
Vic Michaelis: A very small amount for me. I had a home game with a couple of people that, again, we really used our combat time as a way to sort of see what kind of cheerleading stunts in gymnastics we could do. A lot of us had never played before. I’ve done some other little things, audio only, but this was like my first real run at doing like D&D proper and by “D&D proper” I of course mean our kids on bikes homebrew.
Kimia Behpoornia: I also hadn’t played I played in a failed friend group try at doing some D&D, then I’d played kids on bikes once in preparation for a play I was in.
Vic: The Stranger Things play?
Kimia: No, we we were playing a bunch of little kid detectives and was part of the thing to use our imaginations. But I hadn’t experienced it until we did this season.
Dan: Every season of D20 is a new theme. Gladlands is obviously more post apocalyptic, but kind of hope punk. How did that influence how you made your character?
Kimia: The setting was directly involved with the first idea of my character because I thought “What survives out until the apocalypse.” And I just wanted a character that just been maybe lonely or purposeless from the before times but now lives in the apocalypse and is a helper. So I thought…cockroach! I wouldn’t have been a bug otherwise because I actually am scared of bugs and I do not like them.
Vic: But what if they’re really hot?
Kimia: That’s the only way I could maybe lock in so I had to make him hot, mostly not bug, just bug head so that I had something to hang on to and was able to play this character.
Vic: You made sure the abs were defined enough that you could get a foothold.
Kimia: Yes, I was Alex Honnold on those abs.
Vic: With Hugi, I I really wanted this kind of scary, Grim Reaper-esque character, but also somebody that is competent and has that charm that comes from being able to make people feel comfortable and safe around death and death ritual. Brennan is sure that make sure that we are at every turn aware of how dangerous this place we’re living in is; we’re dealing with death a lot. So somebody that can really make people feel safe and comfortable in those situations is helpful. But when it comes to the day to day stuff, it is a lot harder. It was sort of an ethos of the season where it’s the big stuff, the mayhem comes easy, but it’s the everyday things that are a lot harder. So I thought that that would be kind of fun to explore with Hugi.
Dan: One of the themes this season is a lot of interest in emotional intelligence and mental health, which is not a usual topic with this kind of setting. How did you you explore that at the table and bring that to the audience?
Kimia: For me, it was really nice that that’s how the play was pitched, the way that we were going to play this season and the combat being about emotional intelligence and mental health. In improv we’re normally doing ridiculous silly silly scenes and you can do that maybe for three or four minutes…but at a certain point you gotta lock in and say well what’s the real reason? What’s actually going on in there? And I love pulling that move whenever I play with anybody.
This was a whole season where everybody at the table was pulling that move on each other and it just makes it so rewarding and full of heart to play that way. I almost preferred it. So I loved it.
Vic: Yeah, I totally agree with that. There also is a thing in improv where sometimes you talk about this big thing that you’re gonna do a lot. And then it is the easy thing to say “let’s talk about this big thing that we’re gonna do, and then by the end of the scene, we’ll do the big thing.” That’ll be where the scene goes. But I always think it’s way more interesting to do the big thing right away and then we’re dealing with the fallout of that big thing for the rest of the scene. This was six episodes of us going, we’re gonna do the big thing and then deal with the fallout. It’s unique and I do think that the season has got a really beautiful bow on it. So I’m really curious to see what people think of it.
Dan: If there’s one thing that you would want the audience to take away from Gladlands or from your character what would it be?
Vic: We live in a time where there’s a lot of bad things happening. I think it’s really easy to look at the whole picture and say “there’s nothing I can do to fix this.” But I think looking at the people around you and going,
“how can I make the situation better for my community, for the people that are right around me?”
I think that is the best way to start. You can tell that it’s the best way to start because I feel like people in positions of power are constantly telling us you can’t do that. So that’s the answer. That’s what it is. We really got to dig down into community.
Kimia: It’s absolutely that. It’s everything Vic said. It’s community. It’s to remember that you don’t always have to do the biggest thing to be helping someone. I think Brennan said this once when we were talking about the idea of the Gladlands, where he’s saying “Wen you go to volunteer somewhere and go to an organization, the person making the playlist that everyone’s listening to while they’re doing all of the work is just as important as the person who organized everyone and got them there. Because you sort of do need morale to be able to keep going.
You can catch all six episodes of Dimension 20: Gladlands on Dropout.tv!
Images via Dimension 20 and Dropout.tv
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