I’ve written before about “geek chic” and how odd it is that my life-long fandoms are now haute couture. I love it! It’s still weird.

So today the gang over at Critical Role (a few of whom are friends of mine) launched a Kickstarter today to fund an animated special featuring the characters from their first campaign. I knew it would fund quickly, I know animation is expensive so the bar was going to be high, and I was still surprised and how epic and quickly it blew right through it’s goals.

You can check it out here if you’re curious (it’s going through April 18th). In less than 45 minutes they went from launch to funded – with a goal of $750,000 USD. But inside of that first hour, they had already hit their first stretch goal of a million. I went to lunch and found that the next stretch goal of $1.5 million was blown through. It seems to be slowing finally (barely) and they are still climbing towards the next goal of $2 million.

It’s a delightful feeling to, first of all, have enough disposable income that I can use my adult discretion to throw money at something awesome like this – I went with the $100 level of dice and cards, because the pins and Trinket plush didn’t interest me and I couldn’t justify $400 for the messenger bag that did. To be stable enough to say “Hey, that thing my friends do is getting bigger, let me throw money at it and get some cool loot that I don’t genuinely need.” Second, to see D&D, in the form of Critical Role, so pervasive in our culture. Not just geek culture, but our general western culture, since there have been billboards and events around the world, it seems they are household names in ways I could never have expected. And last but not least, that people are willing to spend so much of their own disposable income into something like this – people who don’t know anyone on the show. The willingness to invest what they can and see what turns up!

So congrats, CR team – this is pretty great. Keep on doing these beautiful things so we can keep sharing them with you!