#I have a massive migraine rn so forgive the quality of this

[chaosintheavenue]

A totally unprompted deep dive on my OC Trin, just because I have her on the brain and can’t play 76 as much as I’d like because of real life stealing my time and graphics card Drama.

Basically, for a bit of intentionally vague backstory, Trin is the child of parents from two different factions. Each of these factions has a very distinct identity and physical isolation from other groups, and she grew up moving around between these two culturally ‘enclosed’ locations. There’s also a lot of other stuff involved, like her spending a lot of time living on the road, being forced out of one of her ‘homes’ by the approaching tide of the Legion, her having a much more favourable view of one faction than the other, and so on, but this is the bare essentials version.

If I had to boil Trin down to her most basic elements, a huge part of who she is and who she becomes is the fact that she feels torn between these two identities and can’t quite figure out where she fits into the structure of either faction. Wherever she goes, she feels like an outsider, and that she isn’t seen as a ‘full member’ of either of her factions. She constantly finds that members of Faction A view her as ‘the Faction B kid’, and vice versa.

But at the same time, she wishes that these factions would better understand that she is not ‘theirs and theirs alone’. Both of them place pretty large demands on their members’ time and activities in different ways to further the cause of the factions themselves, and she feels like she’s expected to be two people at once to fulfil these demands.

Little bit of an even deeper dive re: her feelings on each faction incoming.

First of all, I can no longer be vague and continue to make sense, so here goes: she’s part BoS and spent a few years in Lost Hills growing up. Her opinion on them differs from chapter to chapter (having encountered a few in her life), but suffice to say that on the whole, she is not a fan of their whole shebang. Especially in the West Coast Brotherhood, she even faces judgement for being the child of an ‘outsider’ and can find herself looked down upon by virtue of that, which definitely hasn’t helped matters.

Her other faction is Van Buren linked (of course it is, the audience groans), and her main issue here is simply not fitting in. She views this faction in a more positive light generally (through rose-tinted glasses, one could even say), and if she was forced to choose just one faction to identify with, I believe she’d consider herself a member of this group over the Brotherhood. However, these guys are even more isolated than the Brotherhood and have a highly unique system of social values, education and communication. Trin was pretty much ripped away from that and didn’t grow up entrenched in that worldview- rather, an opposite one in ways- and that means that beyond a certain point of academic mutual understanding, she just doesn’t get it. In particular, it irks her that she can’t communicate in the way the group is known for without a huge amount of effort. She knows that if someone familiar with that faction encountered and interacted with her, they most likely would not read her as a member, and that bothers her a lot.

Aside linked to an earlier point: At the end of the Steel Reign plotline, where your character is conveniently proclaimed ‘Knight-Errant’ in recognition of their responsibilities outside the Brotherhood... yeah, that is 100% canon for Trin. She still isn’t sure what to make of the title itself and never uses it outside of necessity, but just getting that recognition that she isn’t ‘100% BoS’ and won’t be expected to act as such would be a pleasant surprise for her.