Did Critical Role Steal Opal?
Intellectual Property and Online Content
About a month ago, I was scrolling through TikTok when I came across a teary-eyed, red-haired Katy Ford, or @freckledhobo. She explained that her OC (original character) Opal Ruzeman that she used in a streamed and monetized Dungeons and Dragons campaign had served as the inspiration for a character on Critical Role, far and away the most popular D&D streaming channel on Twitch.
Critical Role began as a home game between voice actor friends, some of whom worked for the Youtube channel Geek & Sundry. The channel began streaming their games in 2015 and quickly gained a following for the cast’s roleplay-heavy, entertaining content. Now its own content company, Critical Role is responsible for introducing a new generation to roleplaying games. Aside from streaming their current D&D campaign, Critical Role produces one-shot games (played in one sitting rather than for several years), let’s plays (in which the cast plays video games), merch, comic books, and—coming later this year—an animated series based on their first campaign. Currently, Critical Role has 800k followers on Twitch and 1.3 million Youtube subscribers. Though Ford has nowhere near those numbers of followers on either platform, she does have 1.2 million fans on TikTok, so she’s not exactly a “small creator,” as her initial video claimed.
In the now-deleted video, Ford said that she was worried that Critical Role’s followers would think she had stolen Opal and that she was afraid she couldn’t cosplay her character anymore or sell her Opal-related merch. She then reached out to Critical Role’s legal team and threatened legal action unless they offered her a guest spot on their show. That was the point at which most of the D&D community turned on her.
Online content is a tricky thing. TikTok is inherently a sharable and trend-driven medium. Comedy bits, dances, and even characters are imitated and iterated to infinity, usually without credit. Who owns that content? The algorithm will promote whichever version gets the most views, not necessarily the original creator.
If Critical Role did steal Ford’s character concept, would she have much legal recourse? Her character isn’t copyrighted, but that’s not necessary to claim intellectual property infringement (not until you file a claim, anyway). Beginning May 31, she has plenty of video and photo evidence of her character and even character art — by an uncredited artist.
Here’s where it all starts to unravel. Granted, there are a few similarities between Ford’s Opal Ruzeman and Critical Role’s Opal—they share a first name, opalescent hair, an opal pendant, and both are warlocks—but they are not the same character. Opal is hardly a unique name. There’s no evidence that Aimee Carrero, who plays Opal on Critical Role, took inspiration from Ford’s Opal when designing her character. I don’t see anyone from Cartoon Network threatening a suit, even though Steven Universe features an Opal with an opal gemstone.
If anyone can claim intellectual property infringement in this case, it’s the artist whose work Ford monetized for her character. Aside from not crediting the artist commissioned to draw Opal, Ford has used countless stolen drawings in her monetized stream. When that bit of hypocrisy was pointed out, her response was:
That’s not how credit or consent works. Artists don’t have to come to you and request that you either recognize them or stop using their art. It is not difficult to trace images to their source. Art and digital images also fall very clearly under IP protection.
Character concepts, however, are not so cut-and-dry. Dungeons and Dragons itself is open source material, which is why all of these gamers can monetize their campaigns in the first place. For Ford’s claim to have any weight, her Opal would need to be “sufficiently delineated,” says Michael Feldman or @magicianmichaelfeldman on Tik Tok, an intellectual property lawyer and D&D player. The wronged party would need to prove that people are confusing the two characters. Feldman says, “You can have a copyright in artwork, but you can’t claim that someone ripped it off from you if you didn’t own it in the first place.” So Ms. Ford has very little support for her claim. Why then, would she talk about taking legal action publicly?
If we examine this a bit closer, the claim gets more problematic. Up to this point, there haven’t been serious accusations of character theft against the Critical Role team, even though some of them have played rather tropey characters in the past. So what’s different? Exandria Unlimited, the campaign that introduced Opal, is the first D&D game from Critical Role in which people of color are main players. When some of Ford’s followers commented that it looked like she was weaponizing her whiteness against a new D&D player who was also a woman of color, Ford denied that was possible, since her character was POC. I’m sorry, how does appropriation exempt you from racism, exactly?
She also said she expected the community to “have my back, as a fellow nerd” as part of an apology, not to Aimee or the Critical Role team, but for not giving credit to artists (even though, as her games are monetized, she should have explicit permission to use any art that’s not public domain).
The Critical Role team supported Aimee through all of this and shut down Ford’s demands without making a public statement or giving the issue public attention. There’s also some evidence that Aimee began designing her Opal before Ford began playing and cosplaying Opal Ruzeman. At least as early as May 16, Aimee was planning makeup looks for her (then unnamed) character on Exandria Unlimited.
Intellectual property rights when it comes to online content can be confusing, especially when you get into the territory of cosplay and videos that are meant to be shared and copied. TikTok, especially, is designed to share ideas through replication and iteration. This is a problem when, as we saw with #BlackTikTokStrike earlier this summer, creators in a position of privilege receive credit for an idea that isn’t theirs. The platform itself can be a great way to get a community to rally around the actual creators and give proper credit in situations where a legal case isn’t possible. It can also backfire, of course, if the claim turns out to be flimsily disguised clout-chasing.
But let’s not lose all hope in the internet just yet, y’all. D&D player @that6foot1girl had the genius idea to harness the power of all this Opal drama for good. She organized a game called“Oops, All Opals”—in which all players are warlocks named Opal—in order to raise money forDotsRPG, which helps make gaming more accessible for everyone. Because at the heart of it all, this community should be about storytelling and having fun, not gatekeeping or getting famous.