I know that everyone built their own characters, and that this is entirely a coincidence, but that makes it all the more interesting that the Camarilla coterie of season 2 really does work beautifully as dark mirrors of the Anarch coterie.
I got to thinking about this when I realized that, while season one had a lot of talk about convictions, morals, and struggles with the Beast, we have had virtually none of that from the Camarilla coterie. And that makes sense. The Camarilla don’t really have morals; they have rules and regulations in place of morals. The Anarchs have to rely on personal codes and ethics to keep themselves sane and in line. The Camarilla play a different game, at least so far in S2 of New York by Night. We haven’t seen any ethical quandaries. We haven’t seen them have to grapple with much yet that wasn’t just an assignment from their elders.
Which makes them interesting comparisons to our Anarch coterie, who are nothing but ethical minefields, struggles with the Beast and struggles to cling to whatever humanity they have left. They feel, on the whole, much closer to humanity than the Camarilla coterie, who seem almost entirely divorced from it. Isaac is the outlier in that he is the Anarch who really does accept his own monstrous nature, even while he tries very hard to keep a low profile and to cling to his own particular ethics. He values manners and politeness. He treats his ghouls more like friends than servants a lot of the time. He is better at hiding his humanity, but it’s still very much present.
On the other hand, Brawn is the most human of the Camarilla coterie. Him slipping in the most recent episode and admitting his real name was so devastatingly sweet. He wants to be tough, but he has such a depth of emotion in him. His coterie mates do seem to appreciate that, but all of them seem to struggle to meet his emotion with their own.
And this is where the dark mirrors come in. Because the coteries seem to have pairs of characters who highlight what the other could be if they walked a slightly different path. Season 2 feels so much like a mirror version of season 1, where the kindred are more successful, more comfortable, and much more monstrous.
Fuego vs Khalida
This is the most obvious parallel, given that they’re the equivalent of ‘vampire sisters’. Khalida has embraced what Rafferty offers. She is something of a pampered princess, even as she’s warned that Rafferty is in it for number one. But in many ways she’s been shielded from this, because she does play the dutiful daughter. She does as he asks and he takes care of her.
This is the reality Fuego could have had, the reality her intense blood bond with Rafferty offers up to her every time her Beast talks to her. But Fuego has intense ties to community and to family, and that was more powerful than the bond. So instead of being a willing puppet, she ran. She fled all the way back to the Bronx to protect it rather than give in.
Khalida definitely has the ready road to power, at least on the surface. She has the contacts. She has the political acumen. She is not only in the Camarilla, but she’s the one member of her coterie who seems genuinely happy to be a part of the Camarilla. And why wouldn’t she be? She’s clearly a natural social climber who sought out Rafferty for what he could do for her. She is in it for number one, and fully expects everyone around her to be the same. She seems to view other perspectives and altruism as adorable naïveté. Not bad, per se, but unrealistic. She understands Camarilla politics on an instinctual level. If any of the Cam coterie ‘chose’ to be in the Camarilla, she did. And that gives her strength. She has a network of Rafferty’s making at her disposal. She has money and connections and social standing enough that she can garner a great deal of power far faster and easier than Fuego could ever hope for.
Fuego, on the other hand, is a community activist. She loves her family, her community, and that’s more powerful than the pull toward power that comes with being Ventrue. She will always feel the pull to be in power. I wouldn’t be surprised if she eventually became the baron of the Bronx, and did so to protect it. Because that would be squaring the circle for her, taking her new vampiric nature and trying to turn it into a superpower to care for her people. And that’s both what makes her more vulnerable than Khalida—she wears her associations and her loves on her sleeve—and stronger than Khalida—she gathers people around her. She shows them genuine care. She not only wins over people like Richter with her charms, but her more earnest and kind side has won her the friendship of all of her coterie-mates. They may struggle with that friendship, because that sort of thing is never simple for vampires, but even Isaac seems to like and respect Fuego on a level that none of of the Camarilla coterie so far feel for Khalida.
Isaac vs Coco
The ice-cold competent characters from former Sabbat clans were another obvious parallel. Both Isaac and Coco have a lot to prove, and face discrimination and threats based on what they are at every turn. Neither the Camarilla nor the Anarchs trust the Lasombra or the Tzimisce, but each has chosen a clan to at least tolerate.
But being only tolerated is wearing, and it’s interesting to see their reactions to it. Isaac embraces his outsider status, or at least he appears to. He is all smiles and politeness, leaning in to the creepy manners and courtesies of Clan Tzimisce. He is unfailingly well-spoken around other kindred, only slipping around his coterie mates, and only after some time of being acquainted. He acts as though he enjoys the discomfort of people who learn what he is, and he acts as though their disgust doesn’t bother him. It’s difficult to tell if this is true or not, as Isaac’s masks are frankly impeccable, but it’s telling how much he clings to his coterie. These are not people he seems naturally inclined to want to spend time with. They are all far more reckless and far more prone to messy violence than he is. He clearly gets frustrated with them.
And yet he keeps trying to make things work with them. He asks Michael and Angela to be more free with their feelings and thoughts around the coterie, as he understands that Serif in particular is uncomfortable with his ghouls, and he knows he needs to show her that he doesn’t treat Michal and Angela as disposable or faceless servants. It helps that he really does seem to view Michael and Angela as his closest friends, to the point where it’s unclear if he realizes exactly how much of their free will he took when they agreed to be his ghouls.
But Serif’s comfort matters to him. It matters enough he let her rearrange part of his home, which is a huge thing for a Tzimisce. And Fuego’s opinions matter to him. During the blow-out in the season finale, he was the one who noticed she wasn’t speaking. He wanted to know what she was thinking, because he understands that Fuego gets community, and she gets family, and she’s got a good head on her shoulders. He even seems to care about Rey. After all, Rey’s betrayal seemed to hit him particularly hard. Perhaps a part of that was the shock that he really had started to trust Rey, and that trust wasn’t well-founded.
As much as Isaac values his privacy and his solitude, he seems to crave contact. Not just because he knows that without a coterie he’s as good as dead, but over the course of the season it seems more like he wants at least some people he can trust, some people he can relax just a little around. There are flashes of loneliness about Isaac that make his connection to the coterie, his offering of space and advice and contact with his own sire more than just convenient. And it means that, if he’s ever in trouble either due to his background or his clan, I think the coterie would rally around to help him out of a sticky situation.
Coco is also isolated. The Lasombra are treated with less disgust than the Tzimisce, but are treated as inherently untrustworthy. She is in a dangerous position, and she finds her clan to be just as much a burden as a blessing. She has power, but she can’t use technology. She can’t even see her reflection anymore. Much like Isaac, she has a ghoul who helps care for her. We haven’t seen much of their relationship yet, but I would be interested to find out if that was a friendship or more of a traditional ghoul relationship.
Both of them were thrown into a coterie without their own voluntary choice. Richter played matchmaker in season 1 and made them a coterie mostly because they all fucked up at the same time. Rafferty built the season 2 coterie from the ground up. Coco has been told to socialize with these people, but she is constantly reminded not to trust them.
And this leads to distance. She is quick to snap at her coterie-mates, particularly butting heads with Khalida, but also keeping herself apart from them. She seems to have forged a tentative friendship with Brawn, and it was interesting to see her go out of her way to punish someone just for commenting on his appearance, even though that someone was one of Khalida’s pets.
There is caring in her, but being Lasombra beats that down in her. She is pushed to be the best, and that manifests in competitiveness and distrust. She needs to be accepted in the Camarilla because that was where she was told she needed to be. She’s questioning if that’s true, yes, but changing sides would be too much like defeat, and she can’t accept that.
So Coco is finding ways of being more and more Camarilla. She dresses in her designer clothing and has her PA do her makeup. She focuses on the rules, reciting them faster than anyone else in the coterie. She pushes to get in with power players like Aisling and Rafferty while being fairly open about the fact that she doesn’t trust them. She doesn’t trust anyone, and in the Camarilla that paranoia is praised.
Both Isaac and Coco are emotional fortresses, with chinks in the armor where their tempers are concerned. Both are outsiders, but while Isaac leans into that status, Coco tries desperately to be accepted, to shift herself into a shape acceptable to the Camarilla. Neither approach is without cost. Isaac is basically doomed to always be on the outside looking in with the Anarchs, his coterie being the only people who act as though they genuinely don’t care what he is. Coco’s cost is that is constantly tested and pushed, and she can never let her guard down, especially around a coterie that seems ready and willing to stab her in the back. Maybe that’s why the only one of them she seems to actually like is Brawn. He’s the one who has been open with her, who has trusted her, who has treated her as more than an outsider pretending to fit in with the Cam.
Serif vs Brawn
These two have more in common than taking on single-noun names. They were also the two who were apparently crafted for singular purposes. Serif was crafted to be the legacy of Argus and Alicia. She was meant to be an artist for Argus and to care for Alicia’s gallery. They built her as their child (though I doubt she is Argus’ biological child), and like overbearing parents everywhere, Serif’s individual interests were superseded by their desire to have her be what they need.
Brawn was even more directly created to be something. In his case, he was built to be a weapon for the Camarilla. Glass Jaw chose him, built him, and then sent him out to Rafferty less as a person than as a tool. Rafferty said as much this week to Khalida: Brawn is a weapon of the Camarilla, and only Rafferty and the other higher-ups in the Cam are allowed to wield him.
These are two characters treated more as objects than people, but again their responses to those circumstances are radically different. Brawn wants to be ‘worthy’ of being a tool. He is constantly trying to prove himself, constantly downplaying any positive attributes he might have outside his ability to hit things. He clearly has crippling self-esteem issues, desperately wants people to like and respect him, and the only way to that end he can see is to follow orders. To be the weapon, even if there are hints that he’s starting to find being a tool to be unfulfilling.
But every time he doubts, every time he wonders if he could be more, he stomps that feeling down. He doubles down on his loyalty to the Camarilla, his ability to follow orders, his existence as the ‘right hand of the Camarilla’. Yet the conflict continues to build, because he, most of his entire coterie, is still deeply human under the monster. He still feels everything acutely, and this makes him far more open and honest than the others. He is better suited, probably, to being Anarch, but he’s trying to make himself fit this mold, because he was told he didn’t deserve it.
Serif took one look at the mountain of responsibility that was being someone else’s tool, and she ran as far and as fast as she was able. She is also a deeply human character. She loves her mother and wants to save her. She loves her sire, but also hates him for the twisted family situation he’s created.
But no matter what they feel, Serif craves freedom. She said it herself: the one thing she wants more than anything is to be simply viewed as herself, and not as whatever other people want from her. That’s what makes the coterie so important to her, because they were the first people to just accept her as Serif. If Brawn wants to be respected for being the thing he was made to be, she wants to be respected for being the thing she chose to be. It’s notable that Brawn is the identity of the weapon, while Derek is the complex person beneath. Serif, on the other hand, is the complex person bled out onto the concrete in spray-paint and rage, and Theodora is the tool she left behind.
They are walking in opposite directions. Neither of them are happy. Serif is quickly realizing that freedom is complicated and constantly curtailed by forces all around her, even in the Anarchs. Brawn is realizing that he is more than a weapon, and hates the thought because it introduces doubt. Both of them want to be certain of their place in the world, and respected for their talents, and both are finding the attempt far more difficult than anticipated.
Rey vs Kiem
Both these characters are well-dressed and seem, at first glance, to have their shit together. They also lose that shit at the first provocation, showing off massive anger issues, and general lack of self-control. They also, notably, both seem to believe they’re in the wrong place.
Rey is the member of the Anarch coterie who wrestles with his Beast and his choices the most. He puts up a tough front. He’s loud and brash and constantly on the verge of losing his temper. But he also clings to his humanity fiercely. He hold the ID of the man he killed. He ghouls a security guard so another person doesn’t die on his watch. He loathes his Beast even as he recognizes how powerful it makes him.
And he cares. At every turn there is a deep level of caring in conflict with his ambition. He’s attracted to Fuego; he wants Serif to like him and take his advice about self-worth because he sees worth in her; he wants Isaac to respect him and is envious of his self-control. He wants to protect all of them. Part of his central conflict in the last episode is the pull of getting his old life back vs not wanting to give the Camarilla what they want, which is everything. The cost of entry for him is Fuego and Isaac, and he genuinely wanted to give the Camarilla the wight instead in a hope he could have both. He wants to achieve his ambitions, but he’s not yet willing to step on his coterie to do it.
Kiem, on the other hand, is what Rey could be if he embraced the Beast, if he reveled in violence and enjoyed pain. Kiem is, frankly, more unhinged than most kindred. There was something of an implication in this most recent episode that she might have been a hunter prior to her embrace (she was sent to ‘take care of’ her sire, making me wonder if he’s not so much missing as she’s already killed him). This would make sense. She’s proficient in several weapons. She is good at stealth, and she looks at everyone around her less as people and more as assemblages of parts.
Her obsession with the human body feeds into her dehumanization of everyone. She has none of Rey’s guilt, none of his questions, none of his humanity. She revels in violence. She laughs at pain. She enjoys the suffering of others to a level that worries even her morally dubious coterie-mates. They both fall victim to rages, but while Rey fights it, Kiem embraces it. For her, the anger is incandescent. It doesn’t hurt her like it does Rey; it lets her be her truest self. And if other people have to burn to get her there, they weren’t any of her concern to begin with.
Rey feels like he doesn’t belong with the Anarchs. He likes his suits and his luxuries. He likes Manhattan, and he likes the orderly image of the Camarilla (I think he’d be disappointed in the reality of the Cam, but that’s neither here nor there). The season ends with an abortive betrayal by Rey, a discussion of defection. He is torn between his desire for Camarilla power against his care for these people who have been forced to be his something-like-family. It puts him at a moral and emotional impasse.
Kiem also doesn’t feel like she fits with the Camarilla. She had almost the same image of them as Rey did, but it’s far easier for her to be disillusioned, being in constant contact with the reality of Camarilla and with Rafferty in particular. Kiem talks about joining the Anarchs, clearly exploring that philosophy, but her behavior and her viewing of others as either tools to be used or as a collection of attractive parts she wants to collect is not the behavior of an Anarch.
Kiem acts like a member of the Sabbat. And that’s the logical end-point of the violence and the anger. Especially with Kiem, who has already lost most ability to empathize, who delights in pain and violence, there are very few other places she could go.
Neither of them can control themselves very well. Both have revealed frequently the anger and the feeling of not belonging that drives them. But while Rey struggles every time to master his Beast, Kiem almost never contends with it. She sees something that enrages her and she goes for it. Her existence is simpler, cleaner, more focused on the goal without the distraction of morals or emotional ties. She may well have an easier time in her unlife while Rey tears himself apart trying to hold onto the scraps of who he used to be.
First off, great performances from everyone! Xander Jenneret continues to shine as Brawn, Noura Ibrahim really got to show off as Khalida in this setting, Cynthia Marie continues to be one of the most strategic players at the table, and Michelle Nguyen Bradley is still gloriously committed to being as weird and unhinged as her character should be. But there needs to be special congratulations for the absolutely stellar performance of Persephone Valentine this episode. She was great in season one, but I think she was almost a better foil for the Cam coterie (House of Heels) than she was for the Anarchs, and that gave her room to really stretch and show what the Ministry was really capable of. Within the Cam there is so much longing, so much pent up aggression and ambition and scheming that she can hook into easily. And she played them all like a master, getting information and juicy personal tidbits out of all of them. She had Kiem practically offering herself up to the Ministry. Even with her house losing the Walk she was still in charge, still the arbiter of the winner and still the gracious host. Persephone Valentine was exquisite this episode.
This was definitely my favorite episode of the season, if only because it builds on the revelations from last week and starts to show directions this story could go in the final two episodes of the season. Khalida is getting mounting evidence that Rafferty is not only not a great guy, but keeps throwing her into situations where she could get killed or humiliated. Maybe it’s all a test, but it feels like he’s setting her up for a fall. That she is secretly not the preferred childe, and it’s clear that’s infuriating to her. Simone knew exactly how to play on her jealousy over Margot to draw out more vulnerabilities.
Coco has a stalker, and we still don’t know what the man underwater is supposed to mean. She is also the one most actively hunting down the pieces of the conspiracy and putting them together, finding ways of meeting with powerful kindred to shore up her connections just in case Rafferty betrays them all. I also love that Cynthia really got to show off her dance background with the Walk too. While everyone else’s descriptions of what they did were great, her additions of flourishes, footwork, and heavy taps gave her performance a weight and reality that meant her victory felt exceptionally well-earned.
Brawn, sweet, dumb Brawn, didn’t reveal much politically, but he did reveal that he’s gay, something he grapples with along with all his other issues with masculinity. And of all of them, I think this simple struggle got through to Simone the most, and she gave him the most honest and direct advice of all of them, without much bullshit coating it. I really look forward to him meeting the Anarch coterie, if only because they might be more accepting of him, and at least some of them are less manipulative (I also think he might develop a bit of a crush on the pretty boy with the impeccable self-control, like Coco but a hot dude). And honestly, I really liked him and Simeone. They had a rapport that was something other than information and boon swapping.
Kiem continues to be full of rage, and directionless. She doesn’t trust her coterie, and is inches from slitting all their throats. I think she saw the Ministry as a place she could finally be herself, maybe be accepted and appreciated, and she was really into that notion. But according to Simone that wasn’t her path. I find that interesting, and I wonder if it was because Simone noticed how dangerous Kiem could be. She’s going to be a masquerade breach or a bloodbath waiting to happen no matter where she goes, and other than the Sabbat, no faction is going to want that time-bomb in their midst. If someone took her on as a personal project, directing her anger and helping her get it better under control, she might be welcome, but it seems like Rafferty is setting her up for failure too.
Given that it seems likely that Amadeus was determined to be the weak link in the conspiracy and was eliminated, I wouldn’t be surprised if Rafferty intends to scapegoat either Kiem or the coterie as a whole for whatever their sires are planning on doing. There are a lot of machinations going on above this coterie’s heads, and they’re only starting to see the shapes of them. And with two episodes left if the season, I can’t help but worry that they’ll all be caught flat-footed when the shit hits the fan.
