RuffianGoat's Extended Fiction Blog

First Post and Reflection on Vincent as someone who knows where the roads ends.

4/29/2022

I've been writing more about Vincent lately. Something about writing about a transmasc person while being a few days from top surgery myself is very gender affirming. I'd be lying if I said that I didn't live vicariously through him a lil bit at times. I would love to be a successful person, trans, hot, and also friends with rich people who are a lil dumb but support me unquestioningly.

If you meet those criteria then please feel free to contact me or simply send me a hundred dollars no strings attatched to show your richness. Otherwise just hmu in general and I'll gush about Vincent I guess. (I do gen love talking about writing so feel free to message me if you're interested in talking about OC writing and such.)

In general Vincent is someone who I think is probs the most different from the rest of the cast I've written about. I used to think that was Holly mostly cause she's one of the only women I have written about but him being an outsider to Eddington even moreso than Cinna who lived outside The Gauche gives him a really interesting perspective on the politics of the people in charge. I think I might eventually write up my dissertation about what the themes of Pars are since I am one of the two main creators of our specific world, but I think that's outside the scope of what I am writing about right now. tl;dr, Vincent is an outside and I think that he's fun to write because he isn't familiar with the rules of the city at first. The campaign I'll be playing him in will be fun cause if he survives that means he can impart his views onto Cinna as well. They know a LOT of the same people and they have very different views on all of them.

I think it's also interesting to image Vincent as a player even apart from myself because he acts in very self-defined ways. He doesn't stick with the easy route and is trying to uncover a truth which means he has to sacrifice a lot of the things that make him comfortable. His story of searching for a woman that he treats like a sister is especially interesting from the perspective of somewhat knowing (as an MC) what kinds of things may have happened to her. Svetlana is a person who fits into a role that we ascribed as a past reflection of one of our "Big Bads" and it's interesting to think that she is simultaneously a character and also a representation of a type of generational trauma/social trauma that one person suffered that has rippled out.

Dealing with the trauma that a person is going through has been an underlying theme of Pars and despite the fact that I ultimately love writing stories that can be many different allegories in a trenchcoat, I do concede that for Pars to work it takes a lot of background knowledge. When I started extended fiction as a subgenre of Pars lore I didn't think it would really last. I've been writing fanfiction since I was in middle school (elementary if you count the fact that I would write stories and copy the ideas that they shared with me with my own people) so I've always written about the things that I am fascinated with. Pars just happens to be the first one where I created the world from almost scratch. (Apocalypse World is the basis for our system, so some names DO come from the playbook. I've fallen in love with the name Rolfball for Timothy, and the names Camo, Toyota, and Beem (originally Been) for people.) Before then I would create an OC and lend them to the world to try and insert my interests and thoughts into an existing landscape. The few "original" stories I started never got past the first few paragraphs or character drafting stages. Working with players and my fiance to make a world really encouraged me to continue.

This is getting to be less about Vincent, but I do want to talk about him more, so I will. I want to dissect him as a person both as a character and as a foil to my first character, Cinna.

I learned the word foil in middle school like most people and I like to create characters opposite of ones I've done previously to spice up things. I can draw an exact line through my people that way. First, we had Ash "Cinna" Jacobs. They were a bartender who lived a hedonistic lifestyle and formed their routine around a man that they tried their hardest to hate. Next, Holly Jacobs, their mother. A relentless Christian in denial of her love for women and men alike. She would overcompensate by making religion her whole personality so that she could try to live the life that looked to be easiest for her. Then, Mercury. A mutated teen from an isolated farm in Illinois who wants nothing more than to find a new purpose for themself outside of a farm that they have lived on their entire life. And then Vincent. A man who loses his sister while they're traveling around Eddington. He has no ties, no love for anyone (other than her) and he hardly has a purpose; a purposeless drifter who only lives to live. He isn't even able to transition until getting to the city, but quickly takes advantage of the people offering to help him.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for diversity. The diversity of only LGBT+ spectrum people but. I prefer to think most of us survive The Collapse because The Maelstrom isn't homophobic.

Anyways, those are the kinda thoughts Vincent gives me. He's fun cause he's new and he's going to be very fun to play in that campaign.