Hello, all! I think the time has come for us to talk about Very Important People's former cryptid Bianca, because, frankly, I think it's fun to have fan theories in play before things start getting canonized -- especially if those fan theories end up being completely wrong! Before I get too deep into tin hat theorizing, let's take a post to review the facts.
To begin, some basics about Bianca herself.
Bianca is host!Vic's stepdaughter via their marriage to Bianca's unnamed father.
The Host dislikes Bianca to the point that they are willing to sacrifice her to dark forces, they fantasize about throwing her into the ocean, and so forth (all to Bianca's face, mind you).
Bianca, in turn, is at minimum not receptive to spending time with the Host.
She works as a PA on the fictional VIP set.
She is well-liked on set.
She and the Host are the same age.
She, the Host, her father, and a certain extraterrestrial are all living together.
And, of course, we now know she is played by the wonderful Talia Tabin! Is this relevant to lore theories....? No, not really. But I'm very excited about the recent face reveal :}
To understand Bianca and her relationship with the Host, I think it's worth also talking about her father/the Host's husband. So far, the husband is a somewhat mysterious figure, but a picture of him is emerging.
Continued under the cut is what we know about him, alongside some more surface-level speculation about what this all means.
The Host describes their husband as "a lovely man".
The Host sleeps and brushes their teeth on set, flirts with guests, and seems overall deeply lonely and unfulfilled. These are not signs of a happy marriage.
The Host and their husband can afford a house and an attached guest house. Presumably in LA. The guy has money.*
He was invited to a Gwyneth Paltrow goop party at some point.
He took the last name Michaelis "in order to feel closer to [the Host]" when they got married.
He is reportedly "in his forties".**
*this could be attributed to a "Friends"-like setup where people are inexplicably able to afford real estate for the bit, but I think that's relatively unlikely; if you've watched enough interviews with Vic, they make a lot of jokes about the LA housing market and how well-off you have to be to own property. Who's to say, though, this is improv and sometimes the bit reigns supreme!
**per the Bonus Content episode, which I personally consider as canonical as anything else.
Extrapolating these facts out, we can gather:
Bianca's father had her fairly young, assuming that in lore Bianca (and the Host) are in their late twenties to mid thirties. Let's do the math for the absolute oldest he could have become a father. If the Host's husband is currently 49 and Bianca is (significantly younger than her actor) only 27, her father would have still been college-aged when he had her. It's possible that the Host lied about their husband's age because they're embarrassed about the true age difference; it's also possible that the "forties" statement was something Vic made up on the spot without fully considering the math. In either case this is worth noting.
Bianca's father is someone with enough of a foothold in Hollywood to procure invitations to celebrity events. He's certainly more prominent in the industry than the Host, who is relegated to "plus one" status.
Building off the previous point, and combining it with the oddity of both his daughter and his spouse working on the same project, I think it's possible Bianca's father was involved in hiring decisions at the VIP studio -- and, with the Host reportedly paying to be there rather than the other way around, it's possible he also bankrolled parts of the production.
He's the kind of guy who would marry a person young enough to be his kid, and he's willing to go through with such a marriage even though it creates friction with his actual kid.
In short, Bianca is the daughter of a man with influence, but for whatever reason she's stuck working alongside -- and living with! -- a step-parent who openly daydreams about tossing her into the sea. There's something keeping the Host and Bianca stuck together despite their mutual dislike, whether that's purely their connection through Bianca's father or something more complicated.
Why, hello! Are you interested in throwing yourself down the rabbit hole of lore for Dropout's "Very Important People"? Are you trying to drag a friend into the madness? Welcome! Hopefully this post can help. This all goes a lot deeper than you might expect after a casual viewing of the show, so let's get down to business.
In the past, the Host's stepdaughter, Bianca Jocasta, was something of a cryptid lurking at the edges of the show's lore. As of season 2, however, she has a face, speaking lines, and an implied crucial role in the meta plot. Us rabid Bianca fans -- and there are indeed a non-zero number of us -- simply never lose. Unless we get a week where Bianca doesn't show up. Which happens often.
PART 1: UNDERSTANDING the CANON.
Let's say you've watched the entirety of VIP. You have questions. Maybe you even have theories of your own. Welcome to the club, friend.
Bianca generally pops up in only brief mentions -- amidst the chaos of the show it's sometimes hard to piece together exactly what's going on with her. Luckily, I've written it down for us!
Analyzing everything we know about Bianca (as of s2e3) for a review of the basics, plus some surface-level theorizing.
Analyzing the Host's relationship with Bianca (as of s2e3) for a more character-centered approach to figuring out what's going on here.
Revisiting the s2e4 loredrop.
Unpacking the s2e6 loredrop.
And of course, the sacred texts: this gifset by the talented @/avadaniels capturing their first on-screen interaction.
Dissecting the s2e11 loredrop.
PART 2: INTO the METAVERSE.
So there's something funky going on here. That's to be expected, because this show is an improvised fever dream and the Host is a certified freak. But is this actually leading up to something...? Signs point to yes.
Asked to describe the relationship between the Host and Bianca in one word, Vic chose "tethered". A normal word to describe coworkers who purportedly hate each other.
Asked for any further information about the two of them, Vic responded... like this.
Okay. Here's where we jump off the deep end. Hold my hand. Vic likes to reuse material, and the "stepdaughter the same age as her stepparent" is an idea that's been around in their work for a while now. Take a look here and here for more on that. Do you see the vision?
It seems like Vic and Talia are very down to go down interesting paths with their improv together, and they're certainly able to conjure up chemistry. Case in point.
PART 3: EXPLORATION via FANWORKS.
That's it. That's the canon, that's the relevant supplemental material from Vic. But this is tumblr, and we all know that's just the beginning of the fun.
The wonderful @/owleanders draws Bianca so beautifully and I think about his art of her non-stop. Go look at his stuff!
I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention Star Maker, my fic that attempts to blend our knowledge of the Host's lore with the "Bride Comforting Stepdaughter" sketch. It is my version of a long-form thesis for why this dynamic has the potential to be so compelling.
We use the tag #bianca vip for her here on tumblr. (edit: now that we have a last name for the character, #bianca jocasta is also in use! it's a mishmash but we'll muddle through somehow. i personally will prefer to use her full name now that we have it, but i'll be using both for a while as i adjust.)
The AO3 tag for our Bianca is wonderfully vibrant for a character with so minimal screen time, and well worth checking out if you want more!
welcome back, folks! this is a deceptive one, because on paper it's just two lines on a wikipedia page. here they are now:
the thing is, there's a lot of information compacted into those two lines. let's break 'em down together!
bianca and the host are alums of the same college.
this is from the "notable alumni" section wikipedia page for the host's college (uc irvine as per s2e10), and this is definitively our bianca. these two went to school together. this is actually something i've been speculating about since the mid-season break (i talk about why in this post).
this is a story, so there is no world in which this is a coincidence and they didn't know each other during their schooling -- this means the two of them go back at least a decade as of the in-world filming of season 2. "tethered" is starting to make more sense, huh? this is a long, long relationship, and it's likely that it started out as something very different than the current stepparent-stepdaughter dynamic. i'd hazard to say it's most likely that the host actually met their husband through bianca.
bianca graduated one year before the host did.
i'm taking this to mean that bianca is in the class year before the host, and is roughly a year older than her stepparent. we know the host's birthday is in november, so assuming bianca didn't graduate early we're looking at an age gap of 3-15 months. absolutely beautiful stuff.
bianca's last name is jocasta.
this is the big one, which is a wild thing to say after the massive reveal that these two have known each other for 10+ years. but, well -- that's just the point we're at. i've already been operating under the assumption that the 10+ years thing is true, so while it's fantastic to have confirmation i'm not overly shaken up about it.
"jocasta", on the other hand? brand-new. unforeseen. unhinged.
we can talk about whether this is her dad's previous surname or if she took her mom's after the divorce but i don't think any of that is too relevant to the story being told here. let's chat instead about the name itself, because holy hell is there baggage.
in greek myth, jocasta was the mother-turned-incestuous bride of oedipus rex. a queen doomed by fate to marry her son, so on and so forth. absolutely classic, absolutely devastating. in freudian psychoanalysis, a 'jocasta complex' describes the erotic fixation of a mother on her child. oedipus complex but move it slightly to the left. in short: her last name is an incest reference any way you flip it.
bianca's wiki page has been viewed before.
we've just "hacked into" the host's accounts, so i think it's safe to assume that the implication here is that the host has been hanging out on bianca's wikipedia page. i'm not going to offer any analysis here because you know exactly what i'm gonna say about That.
conclusion:
yeah okay. i'm done playing coy about this. i've been trying to keep my biases regarding these two's backstory in the realm of fanfiction, where speculation on that level belongs, but this all essentially confirms that the show and i are on the same page. there is a romantic/sexual component to the relationship between bianca and the host, it is Weird, and it goes back at minimum ten years.
everyone strap in. i have a feeling we're in for a wild ride from now until the end of the season. we know they shot around an hour of bianca footage total (i think this was mentioned in a tamar interview with jordon brown?). they could pull just about anything.
obligatory bianca post. this episode we've gotten some tasty tasty new scraps:
bianca is now a producer on vip, effectively reversing the workplace power dynamic between her and the host that we saw in season 1 -- now, bianca is calling the shots.
bianca is the one who drives herself and the host to work and back. this makes such perfect sense to my brain that i'm struggling to find commentary to add beyond the facts of the matter. (this does mean that the host leaves set sometimes, though. which is nice to know!) (i like to think about how awkward these car rides must be)
i also want to make some meta notes, because after bianca's first appearance i made some bad assumptions about how filming her cutaways worked.
i had assumed that they maybe had talia on set for a day of filming and cut to her in the moment. in retrospect this made zero sense and i don't know what i was thinking; it's a lot more likely that they filmed these cutaways after the fact the way they do with every other cutaway in the show. like... obviously. this is actually great because if it's true, it means it's possible we'll be seeing more such cutaways.
one bianca appearance is a treat. a second is Setup. it'll be interesting to see if this is something they continue to build up every episode until we hit... some sort of breaking point? something that forces bianca into the interview (on a planned day when talia is on set)? i'm not sure yet. i'm very excited, though.
welcome back to the madness, friends. as i do every time we get an appearance from bianca, i'm going to break down the new lore -- which is a lot more than usual, this week. not only did we get our first spoken lines from our favorite producer, we got a lot of information about her dad and her home life with host!vic. so... let's get into it!
i'm actually going to start out with an inventory of all our new information about bianca's father, aka the host's husband:
his full name is "david michaelis". this means i have something to write on the dolls i'm burning in effigy! yay.
he travels a lot for business -- he was a small business owner, but he "sold to a bigger business". this seems to confirm my speculation about the host's husband being wealthy.
he is one of ta'tania's regular suitors/clients (and thus cheating on the host in spectacular fashion), and has a thing for ketchup/squished tomatoes; he has talked about the host to ta'tania as well as requesting ta'tania dress in a suit like theirs during their sessions. i am violently holding myself back from kink-shaming this man.
the host has not seen him in six months. six months.
about bianca, we've learned:
she "hang[s] out all the time" with ta'tania. (learning this distresses the host to the point that their professionalism slips substantially; even hearing about their husband's cheating didn't prompt such a strong reaction, interestingly.)
the host has asked bianca to spend time with them, including a trip to new york city together. she has repeatedly declined -- despite planning her own trips. she and the host are sufficiently divorced from each others' schedules that the host had no knowledge of her trips to nyc (despite the fact that they live in the same house. alone with just each other. again, for six months).
bianca has explicitly asked the host to only use her full name rather than the familiar nickname "b".
we now have a clearer sense of the dynamic between bianca and the host: the host seems desperate for a closer relationship (perhaps in a bid to resolve the curse they received in season 1?), but bianca repeatedly and firmly shuts them down with thinly veiled irritation.
below the cut, i'll outline some of the questions raised by this episode in the interest of getting people's theory-brains going. do i have any answers...? nope.
so -- there's a lot going on here. let's take a look.
what is the nature of bianca and ta'tania's relationship? is bianca a suitor of hers? are they friends? if they met through david, is his relationship with ta'tania tight enough that he wanted her to "meet the family", or did he instead refer his favorite dominatrix to his daughter?? is it all a coincidence and this nyc-based fairy just happens to be particularly popular with this la-based family?
what specific kind of business is david in? when vic gets vague, i get suspicious that they're hinting at written-down lore.
six months. that's so long. this isn't a question i just feel like it bears repeating.
why does bianca dislike and reject the host so strongly? is it just a matter of them being an abusive boss with terrible politics and a personality that is, and i say this affectionately, bad? well... maybe. maybe. but with vic michaelis and talia tabin, i don't know if anything can be that simple.
if the host's investment in bianca liking them is motivated by trying to fix their relationship and thus the curse, how is the curse concretely manifesting? the episode where they receive it hints at a "crumbling life" and a monstrous transformation, and we certainly are seeing the former -- but it also seems like the host's life has been in a state of complete disaster and ruin from childhood to now, so i'm not sure if the current state of affairs would feel too new to them.
that's all i have for this post! if you have anything to add in terms of analysis, theories, or details i missed, please feel free to add on.
Hello again! Welcome back to the theory zone. Last time, we discussed the basic facts we know about Very Important People's Bianca (the original post is here, and here's a version with great additional analysis from @/alittlevillainy).
This time around, I want to focus in on specifically Bianca's relationship with her step-parent, Host!Vic -- the facts, the paradoxes, and even some hints we can pull from Vic (the human comedian's) past work.
So... here's what we know so far!
The Host is borderline obsessed with Bianca. They bring her up incessantly -- most episodes have at least one reference to Bianca, and repeat guests (so far, this means Anna and Jacob) have made comments about this apparent fixation (see: "I don't care about your boy").
One interpretation is that this is a status thing for them. Having a stepdaughter establishes them as someone with power over another person on set even when the cameras cut. This behavior (always "my stepdaughter", or "my stepdaughter, Bianca") also doubles as 'reminding' Bianca of the dynamic between the two of them and reestablishing their control over her.
The Host relies on Bianca. At the end of the Leighanna-Jean episode, when Leighanna is applying lipstick to the Host, we get the following interaction:
This is vulnerable! This is open! The Host is trying so hard and Bianca "will tell them the truth."
3. The Host feels bullied by Bianca and expresses a desire to be rid of her. In Jasper and Casper's interview, the Host talks about their longing to throw Bianca into the sea, like Jasper and Casper's children. In Martha Tops and Lucian Azathoth's episode, the Host seeks a solution to the "bullying" they face from Bianca. "She's so mean to me," they say; they are also ready to sacrifice her until they realize what that might entail ("planes that the mind cannot comfortably conceive" and so on), at which point they respond, "We'll keep her for now," with the implication that they are 'keeping her' as a favor to her father more than anything else.
4. When the Host mentions people they'd (like to?) "sit and talk with" to Jukebox, they specifically mention their mother and Bianca. Their mother seems to be a source of pain and abandonment (see the Zeke episode's "sometimes your mom hates you even when you're not rocks"). So what does this shared context imply about the Host's relationship with Bianca...? Well, I'm not quite sure, actually. But there's something there. To me this line implies that they feel like they should have a closer relationship with Bianca.
5. Bianca genuinely seems "done" with the Host in her brief on-screen appearance. This is valuable to note because of how biased the Host's account of their relationship is; I don't necessarily trust them when they describe Bianca as 'bullying' them, for example, because that would require a power dynamic between them that is opposite of what we see on set.
So there are a lot of gloriously, humanly contradictory notes in here.
As we just discussed, the Host views Bianca as a bully, despite the fact that they have power over her both in the home and the workplace, and despite the fact that Bianca is apparently genial enough to be well-liked by her coworkers.
The Host is fixated in some degree on Bianca -- whether that's personal or just related to her role as stepdaughter. So, is this obsession based on a desire to heal their relationship? According to the Martha Tops and Lucian Azathoth episode, nope.
The Host is like a pathetic wet bird with a broken wing who is constantly making cries for help. This is just true. They're also deeply off-putting and weird -- but still, when I put myself in Bianca's shoes I have trouble imagining why she wouldn't try in some way to "save them". So what gives? How has the Host hurt them -- or was their marriage to her dad enough to create this rift? (This one is a bit of a reach, admittedly, because it relies on Bianca being a normal and good person, but I think about it a lot.)
The Host trusts and relies upon Bianca despite everything else. Indeed, it seems like Bianca is the only person they trust and rely upon.
Where does this leave us? With a lot of questions and a messy, messy relationship. Below the cut I'm going to share something a little different that opens the way to new theories: a sketch written by Vic Michaelis (the human comedian) that has some hauntingly familiar elements.
This is where we get into the groundless speculation and entirely non-canonical realm of "fucked up if true". So, uh, proceed at your own risk? Nothing that follows is real, but I think it's fun!
Okay, buckle up! I've attached two videos here. They're different versions of the same sketch: a shorter version with higher audio quality (plus a Hot Bill Summer cameo that made me giggle enough that I couldn't stand to cut it out), and a longer version with lower audio quality. Pick your poison; if you aren't able to watch right now, don't worry, I'll break 'em down for us in a moment.
(content warnings for potential grooming; please be careful)
So, here we've got a bride on her wedding day speaking to her (offscreen) future stepdaughter, who is upset. We learn:
The stepdaughter and the bride are the same age (specifically born three months apart).
The stepdaughter and bride were childhood best friends.
The bride was previously engaged to her future stepson.
That's a familiar setup, right? The crucial difference between this sketch and VIP is that the sketch turns on the inherent weirdness of the childhood friends dynamic, while VIP has left the nature of the Vic-Bianca relationship mysterious. They've been very slow and deliberate with feeding us our Bianca scraps, from the same age reveal to the recent appearance in the flesh.
So -- are we seeing a slowburn reveal of the same setup from this sketch (which Vic knows is funny, to the point that they've included it in their character reel and have performed it across the years in different formats and to fit different lengths)? I mean, in all honesty, I'm... not sure.
The points against:
This sketch is dark! It just is! It's funny, don't get me wrong, but I don't know how well it would go over with the Dropout audience.
The Host having had a childhood best friend doesn't gel with our understanding of the character.
This setup rests on the "bride" character living in more or less the same place from the age of 12 to about 22; the Host moved around a lot as a child.
The points in favor:
It would explain so much of the weirdness and resentment between Bianca and the Host. The reliance, the longing, the obsession. If this was once a close relationship turned poisonous, suddenly things start to click into place.
Would That Be Fucked Up Or What.
Interested to hear what people make of this! Like I said, it's deeply non-canonical, but I think it's such a fun thing to think about.
("what are you doing. how did you find these. are you okay." fic research. i'm 18k deep don't talk to me it's FINE.)
...because i never fully covered this one on my blog at the time of airing. i believe at the time i saw the intent of this scene as too murky to definitively call it canon bianca lore, but in the months since i've folded it into my personal understanding of the character -- and i now think the intent is clearer than i first thought. there's really no reason for these to just be random senseless nonsense, which is the only reasonable alternative.
for context, these "holidays" are being written out by bianca for the host to read into camera. bianca is fucking with them and reminding them of her power over them (as well as their husband's history of shitty behavior). i think the clear implication is that the "holidays" are in reference to events in bianca's own life.
let's take a look.
okay, so we can gather:
bianca's parents divorced at some point in her childhood -- i'm getting the vibes of somewhere in the 8-16 year old range, but it's impossible to say a precise age.
bianca's father, david, remarried (also at some point in her childhood) to a woman named janet. david is a liar and a cheater (he's also possibly not financially stable at this time). this lines up perfectly with our knowledge of his most recent marriage in the current day.
(in my opinion) the version of child-bianca presented to us here displays a level of emotional stability and level-headedness; a capacity for forgiveness, and a willingness to compromise in order to make the people around her happy. she's a good, dutiful daughter.
Bianca having a wikipedia page and Vic not... much to contemplate here
i'm personally inclined to brush this one off as a case of "true because it's funny" (because bianca's notable achievement listed by her name is producing 'Very Important People', and if that's enough to get her a page the host of the same show should definitely also qualify), but here are some relevant guidelines from wikipedia for the theoryheads to peruse:
bianca would fall under 'creative professionals' and the host under 'entertainers'.
in-world, both of them should meet the basic criteria: their show won a people's choice webby award, and that would have garnered coverage in additional to their internet virality and such. let's play in this space where bianca is more Notable than the host, though, shall we? for that to be true, i think, she'd have to have some other achievement or innovation beyond vip that was both significant to her field and obscure enough that it wouldn't be listed in her blurb on the alums page.
what on earth could that possibly be? i have no clue. what does a producer even Do. hell if i know.
for myself, i'm just gonna take this as an indication that my girl is damn good at her job and not think about it too terribly hard. i love her.
