#I am trying to keep them limited | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

centaurianthropology · 2 days ago

Text

NYbN Belated Meta: Isaac and Fuego (Season 1 Retrospective Spoilers)

Since watching the season 1 retrospective on ‘New York by Night’ on the Project Ghostlight patreon, two things have been spinning through my head like rotisserie chickens for the past while. One of them is outright stated, one is far more implied, but I am gnawing on them, fascinated by them, desperately needing to write meta about them so I can get all my thoughts down.

Now, below the cut are two things I either learned or realized while watching the retrospective. That means that there are spoilers for said retrospective. If you’re a fan of NYbN and want to read this, I seriously urge you to go and sign up for the Patreon and watch the retrospective first! I do not want to make people feel like the information below the cut is in any way a replacement for the massive amount of information you get from that. It’s two things. Essentially a taster for the feast that lies one Patreon subscription away.

Cool? Cool. Let’s get into this.

Okay, let’s start with what may be my favorite revelation from the retrospective, that makes such sense once you know it:

Isaac’s hoarde is people.

This is such a cool concept for a Tzimisce! There are so many ways it can be fucked up, and so many ways it forces the player and the character to act as a team player far more than the Tzimisce might be wont to do otherwise. It is simultaneously monstrous and an enormous weakness, and that is such a great way to set up a character.

It also recontextualizes so many of his actions once you realize this. It not only plays into his position as running a protection racket and craving prey that need things from him, but his particular attachments to Michal and Angela make so much more sense. They were real life colleagues and the closest things he had to friends, who then became the first people in his hoarde. His fierce protectiveness of them also makes so much sense in this context, as people messing with Michael or Angela are people messing with what is HIS.

Particularly after finding out that he’s more or less incapable of feeling most human emotions, I find it super fascinating that his Beast probably feels far more than Issac would on his own. That possessiveness his Beast has is possibly the closest he’s ever felt to real love or friendship (all twisted by wanting to own the people his Beast decides to latch onto, adding a real layer of horror to all his relationships), which makes Isaac the inverse to a lot of Kindred: his Beast almost makes him more human, giving him more of a sense of human emotions and attachments than he might have ever had otherwise.

That puts him in a really unique position: he is particularly weak to social needs. And nowhere is it more obvious than with his coterie. The second they were all paired off by Richter, Isaac essentially looked at these three other vampires and decided that they were now part of his hoarde. I once said Serif was the first of them to really embrace being a coterie, but she wasn’t. Isaac was, just in far more subtle ways. Despite Fuego having a car, he insists on having Michael drive the coterie as a group; he even has Michael get the minivan especially to accommodate his coterie. He invites them to his house quite quickly. Many Tzimisce never invite people to their houses, because they don’t want people touching their things or messing with them. But of course Isaac invited them over: his hoarde needs to be in his house, so they each now have rooms he’s laid aside for them. He logically knows that, as Kindred, he can’t just force them to stay with him (although he’d try it), so he needs them to want it. He has to be an actual friend to them to get his hoarde to stick around.

And that, interestingly, adds another layer to Rey’s betrayal in the finale. Because not only is Isaac pissed that he almost sold them out to the Camarilla, but he is suddenly in danger of losing a part of his hoarde. He may find Rey to be irritating almost constantly, but Rey is also his, and Rey wanting to leave them for the Camarilla?

Unacceptable. Isaac immediately tries to convince Rey that the Camarilla would never take him, or even if they did, they’d never let him forget what he was. And this isn’t even necessarily a lie. Isaac is a master of using limited truths to get what he wants; he rarely outright lies, particularly to his coterie. He simply deploys limited facts in the best configuration to get them to decide to play things his way.

And this is where we get to my second revelation, not outright stated, but more observed throughout the retrospective: Aabria and Alex made incredibly similar characters. Isaac and Fuego are both both overtly and far more subtely manipulators. They are both inherently social, both need people to function. And they are both very territorial when it comes to getting and keeping the people they’ve chosen.

We’ve already talked about Isaac’s need for other people, but Fuego’s is all about how she was built. Aabria explained that she was an exploration of soft power. Aabria looked at how many people looked at the Ventrue as craving power and interpreted in a very patriarchal ‘I’m going to be the boss’ way, so she decided to explore ultra-femininity and subtle power. She was a community organizer, bound to others and to the network of a community since she was a child. She gets her control through getting others to give her what she wants by convincing them it was their idea in the first place. Fuego is built to be the power behind the throne, but that requires that another ass be seated in that chair. So she needs people nearly as much as Isaac does, but because it’s less of a compulsion for her (leaving aside the revelations about Fuego and blood bonds, because THAT is a whole different discussion), she’s able to be more clear-headed about it.

I loved learning how quickly Fuego clocked what Isaac was about and started feeding into it. I took it for granted that Fuego’s lack of knowledge about Kindred society was genuine, but I now we know it at least in part was an act. Certainly, she has genuine gaps in her understanding, but I she exaggerated her ignorance, because playing young and dumb is a great way to seem non-threatening, and to assess people around her without letting them know.

And knowing that, you can see her trying to figure Isaac out from the jump. When he offers them a ride, despite her explicitly telling him she has a car, she immediately asks if she owes him something. She phrases it like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but Fuego clearly knows about boons. She’s trying to figure out if he’s boon-fishing by this car-ride, and she’s trying to figure out how honest he’ll be if he thinks no one has any knowledge but him.

And in that scene a few important things happen. Isaac explains Boons without using the word, but at least gives them a broad—and more importantly accurate—portrayal of what would and wouldn’t incur a boon. He also makes clear that this is just on his way. It’s practical.

And that gives Fuego a lot to chew on. Isaac is trustworthy, at least to an extent. But if he’s not after boons, he has to be after something else. And then he offers them rooms at his place (despite both Rey and Fuego actually having really nice places of their own). And then he keeps offering them accurate information, but no more than they ask for. He keeps trying to lure them to stick around.

And she’s got him clocked, at least sort of: he wants them to be around him. And more specifically, he wants they themselves, rather than anything they have or could bring him. She figures out Isaac wants to be the guy with the knowledge first, and keeps on with the ignorant-baby-Kindred act. I’m not sure if she’s also realized his far more base need to have them around him as often as possible, but she has to suspect something like it. Even by their first big argument, her punishment for Isaac being an asshole about her murdering a security guard is to choose to walk home, to choose to not only refuse a ride from him, but to absent herself from his presence.

I seriously hope that season 3 does someday happen, because I desperately want to see how Isaac and Fuego’s relationship evolves. I want Isaac to finally lose his cool and try to dominate his ‘friends’ into not leaving him. I want Fuego to finally drop the ignorant act and let him know exactly what she knows and how long she’s known it. I want them to be forced to lay their cards on the table, to get into a situation where they finally see one another without the masks.

It’s hard to say how that would work out.

They could fall apart. They’re both so poisonous. Isaac’s need to keep the coterie around is so extreme it’s forever threatening to spill over into dangerous and toxic territory. Fuego has to be secretly in control and gets furious when she either loses power or is forced to confront how low down the totem-pole she really is. They could so easily be oil and water once they finally see one another as they truly are and understand the depths to which each would sink for what they want.

Or they could get closer. The level of respect that they might be able to develop if they ever saw eye to eye could make them a terrifyingly adept duo. If game finally recognized game, and they both understood how well they played the exact same field, they might be able to get over their differences and find ways to work around their mutual issues of pride and control to be a power to rival anything in the Bronx.

Hell, even a four-way mutual blood bond seems entirely possible with the mess of ugly co-dependency and family issues swimming around the Minivanarchs. Isaac explicitly wanted everyone blood bonded to him, because that was a way to get them them to want to stay with him without ever having to force the issue. Fuego has complicated addiction-flavored relationships with blood bonds, and has a need for community. Rey might bind himself to everyone either to protect them or as a way to get them to accept him again, if he decided to go that route. And Serif is made of endless family issues, craving a true connection not poisoned the way her connection to Argus and her mother is. And if anyone could make Isaac blood bond himself to the group, it would be a fully-informed Fuego knowing how much he needed them all to stick together.

It could be glorious. It could be terrible. It would probably be the prettiest trainwreck of four needy assholes needing one another to death you’d ever seen. And I hope that someday I get to see how it plays out.

#new york by night #Isaac Brooke #Fuego Walker #Alexander Ward #Aabria Iyengar #I am rotating all I learned in the retrospective through my brain #and I have so many new thoughts!#I am trying to keep them limited #because I do want people to subscribe to the patreon and watch the retrospective themselves #and to get the joy of all the surprises and confirmations I got #Project Ghostlight #NYbN Season 1 retrospective

25 notes · View notes

theokusgallery · 22 days ago

Note

Hiiii I saw you say you have Notes on your Remus and Janus designs 👀👀?

Could we see/hear some tidbits?

FOR SURE !! Here's what the original doodles for their designs look like, first off, (I know you didn't ask for Virgil but I did these three at the same time)

When I drew this I had just finished an exam and had to wait another hour until I could leave the classroom, so I wrote down enough notes that I had to flip the page instead:

Virgil:

- Virgil has light brown hair that he dyes black (badly). It is essential that the dye job look like shit. It looks artificial, his roots are showing, there's patches where the color didn't take, etc etc.

- He also has blue eyes, which I decided on mostly because it makes it even more clear that his hair isn't naturally black.

- He wears earrings, but his ears aren't actually pierced — they're fake little little clip-on things.

- He wears black nail polish at all times, but it's always chipped because he gets the cheapest stuff he can get his hands on.

- His hair (especially his bangs) get very long at times because he gets too socially anxious to go to the hairdresser. Back in middle school, he used to have Janus cut them for him (Remus could have done a better job but trusting him with scissors would have been a mistake). Now he mostly cuts it off by himself — it looks about as good as his dye job.

- Virgil's purple hoodie is a leftover from Remus' fashion design endeavors that Remus thought didn't look weird enough.

Janus:

- He has naturally strawberry blonde hair. The length is very important to him — he started growing it towards the end of middle school. (He allows Remus to experiment with hairdos sometimes as long as he doesn't cut anything off. I need to draw that sometime)

- I'm not entirely settled on his eye color. I know at least one of his eyes is a very pretty brown, but I have half a mind to give him a yellow glass eye for his left side — I'm not sure it'd make any logistic sense for his situation, though

- He got his ears actually pierced when he was 16.

- He also may or may not have a forked tongue. Not sure how I'd ever be able to show that off — but if he does have one, then Remus definitely was the one to encourage him to do it.

- His fashion style was definitely influenced by being around Remus (who may have used him as a mannequin/dummy because he's small.) so much. Remus also attempted to make clothes for him, but Janus is very fancy and picky, so he doesn't wear those clothes very often (though he might accessorize with stuff Remus made for him occasionally).

Remus:

- He has naturally very dark hair. He uses temporary/surface level dyes a lot, but if he's using permanent or semi-permanent dyes, he's usually limiting himself to the grey streak — it's kind of a sample strand, since it's already bleached. He 100% copied his hairstyle from Roman's.

- He (and Roman, of course) has greenish blue eyes.

- Janus paid for him to get his ears (and eyebrows) professionally pierced because otherwise he was just going to do it himself with a sewing needle.

- He has a lot of very shitty stick-and-poke tattoos he made/makes on himself. They're almost always hidden by his outfits.

- Speaking of which, Remus makes most of his outfits costumes himself. The quality of the work may vary, but they are always way too over-the-top for casual wear, because he stands out anyway, so... in for a penny, right. (As I said in the tags of a post: he is very creative and has no shame or social anxiety at all, so he had his whole aesthetic ("overdramatic green") figured out by the time he was 13)

- He also has SH scars, but, again — they're hidden by his outfits 99% of the time. He's a slut who never shows an inch of skin

#their design go in order of intensity Virgil → Janus → Remus #virgil likes to express himself but is too chicken to do anything too extreme so he's limited to softcore emo #janus is definitely fancier than most but he wears stuff i still definitely see every day at my uni #(i see people wearing corsets regularly at my uni idk what other people's experiences are. English litt major in a non-English country...)#(for those who don't know that's a gay as fuck major)#and then Remus looks like he's in the middle of a stage production every single day. with makeup to match #OH this is somewhat of a college AU ! Roman is also there and Remus' class does costumes for Roman's occasionally #Roman does theater and Remus does visual arts (design major/fashion minor bc there was no fashion major)#Janus and Patton are philosophy majors and of course Virgil is a psychology major #and then we have Logan in biochemical ingeneering for obvious reasons.#i have so much lore sorry for rambling .#anyway they keep a lot of their original designs because it just fits them #BUT i needed to include virgil having a shitty hairdo/dye and etc because he is. SUCH a try-hard in my mind.#emo sure. but he looks wannabe emo. it's Essential. he's fake ! he wants to fit in! with the gay kids sure but he still wants to fit in!#it's very clear that his hair is dyed because it's very clear that he is a wannabe. it is so important to me.#also the tidbit about him not being able to go to the hairdresser. is ALSO SO IMPORTANT. he pretends the shitty hairstyle is intentional.#even his signature hoddie is someone else's leftovers. He Borrows. From A Lot Of Places. but he doesnt have a real identity of his own yet.#you wouldnt guess while reading these tags but im actually way more passionate avout Janus and Remus than i am about virgil #it's just that i project onto virgil so so so much .#anyway SORRY FOR THE RAMBLE AGAIN. I KEEP DOING THAT #ask #idrawgaystffs #sanders sides #lbau #drawing #traditional #rant #do i character tag this. i dont feel like feel like character tagging this #OH AND thank you so much for asking !!! as you can tell i really like talking . about them

46 notes · View notes