#i think its so fascinating how the first thing he says to j/ay abt his childhood is like

[pseudoneiiric]

i was talking the other day about how i should write a meta about how vince sees himself, and while i was taking the bus home today i was thinking about it. and it kind of hit me that vince is a really difficult character to nail down writing-wise. like i mentioned this in a voice note a while back, but vince just isn’t tropey. you can’t really assign him tropes and kind of write from that trope, because he doesn’t really fit any trope at all. he’s not entirely the self-sacrificing type, not entirely a doormat, not entirely a fighter, not entirely the fat loser, not entirely an athletic wrestler, not entirely an academic type... and so on. there’s just a lot of complexities to vince that make it hard to kind of get his voice down.

like, here’s an example. we can kind of see through vince’s dialogue that he doesn’t like himself very much. he feels insecure about his size, he doesn’t consider himself to be intelligent, and he pretty regularly hides or covers up his true feelings. but then he’s also calling himself a superhero around zoe, standing up for himself around jim, and really knowing to some degree who he is, what he wants, and what he values. i keep coming back to the constant dialogue around vince being a fighter; the lawyer in his dream says, so you do got a little fight left in you, jim always wants vince to fight back, and if vince tells michelle he’s going to sue the airline, she tells him she’s happy to see him fight for something again. like i think vince is a very passionate character when it all comes down to it. but this post isn’t really about who vince is, but rather who he thinks he is.

and that’s kind of complicated! i keep coming back to the line where jim’s like “you’d make a good shrink” and vince immediately shoots back with “more like a neurotic patient”. im like (lawyer voice) oh so you do got a little anxiety left in you. i just think a lot about how vince was bullied as a kid but he still has such amazing workplace relationships. does he even realize how many friends he has? like, i think that’s the real tragedy of vince, that he probably has a much better support system than he gives himself credit for. i think about how supportive michelle is once she realizes where her priorities are, and like... god, and we can’t forget that line where vince is like “how could you think you’d be better off without your family? without mine, i’d be...” like it’s about him defining himself by his family but still not being a total doormat! he’s not happy making all these sacrifices for them, but he’s not unhappy either. it says something that i can see him pushing michelle about bruce’s texts and i can also see him telling her that it doesn’t matter, that he doesn’t want to know, that if she says nothing happened, he doesn’t want to make problems that don’t exist. like vince is soooo fascinating to me because you really have to be immersed in his mindset to write him. it’s hard to write him if you don’t have your finger on his pulse, so to speak. and i know this is rambly and not very put together but the point is that there’s a lot of contradictions to vince’s character, but not in the same way that we see contradictions in lilian’s character, for example. it’s not really opposing things like how we see for lilian, it’s more that vince is really complicated while also being surprisingly simple.

i wish i could nail this down exactly but unfortunately i am way too tired! but i may return to this concept and continue rambling about it. there are just so many lines for vince that hit different and really make me think about him. the ones i mentioned above (“so you do got a little fight left in you”, “more like a neurotic patient”, “how could you think you’d be better off without your family? without mine, i’d be...”, “i have enough problems without making ones that don’t need to exist”), but then there are a whole ton more, like... when he’s talking to jay about why he didn’t pursue flight school, he mentions that once michelle and zoe came into his life, he just had a new dream and the old one fell to the wayside. which is so important to me! and “fuck you, sheriff” haunts me, alongside lines like “it’s a/c by vince” and “no fear. gonna be awesome”. and like, come on, you can’t say vince is passive and fearful when he tells dale to his face “keep it in the gene pool” like COME ON!!! this man is insane and i haven’t even talked about his complex about his intelligence and appearance. oh my god