man. sorry to talk about colin fucking provolone again. but the fact that he is the only truly decent member of this party. he’s descended from a rebel leader who tried to stand up to a tyrant and was brutally killed. he saw his friend, a man he trusted and cared about, turning into a similar tyrant, and he left, damn the consequences. he got caught up in something he didn’t understand, murdered an innocent, was plagued by guilt, and returned to make whatever amends he could. the only thing he has ever wanted to do is keep people safe.
anyway. you follow a man because you trust him, and you see his potential, and you know that he could be a great leader someday, and you stay by his side for years, and you watch him grow harder and colder and crueler, and you realize he’s not turning into the leader you thought he could be. instead, he’s turning into a tyrant. and decades earlier, your grandfather was brutally murdered for trying to take down a tyrant. decades after that, your father was murdered in the same way just for sharing that man’s name. and now here you are, a grown man yourself, and this man you trusted, this man you believed in, is turning into the thing your grandfather died to stop.
so you turn around, and you walk away, and you try to make the world a better place. you try to be the good man that he doesn’t remember how to be.
zac’s play is SO interesting to me right now because like. everyone at this table has secrets, obviously, and in character, they’re all keeping secrets from each other. delissandro probably the least, but even he’s keeping some things to himself.
but the players, the audience, we get to know at least SOME of those secrets. we see karna and raphaniel with their networks and their research, we see amangeaux with her son, we see delissandro flirting. but colin. we see basically nothing from colin!! we saw him receive that flag, but other than that... even his moment at the docks, that was a move that we can pull some character info from (he’s always looking for an exit), but it doesn’t tell us anything concrete about him.
and that’s fascinating to me!! zac is playing it really close to the chest, and i’m just waiting for his backstory to become more relevant- because matt is giving everyone else pretty ample opportunity to show us the audience what their characters are up to, but zac just hasn’t done that yet
thinking about “honor skips a generation” and how aaron fontina was killed nearly killed simply for the crime of claiming his father’s name, while at the same time representing none of what his father stood for. and how colin provolone threw that same name away, but is the one to hold onto the legacy of justice that the name fontina is supposed to stand for
alright, i need to crowd source this- how old do we think colin is at the start of the campaign? he certainly seems like an adult, but like... how much of an adult? currently thinking 30 at the start, so 32 after the first time skip, and 37 after the second (where we are now), but not sure if that's too old?
alright, now that ravening war is over... what songs are you putting on your playlists? aabria has already dropped some karna songs on twitter (thank u aabria), but what else you got? character songs, relationship songs, campaign songs... toss em my way please!!!
alright it’s wip wednesday and @spirit-of-the-chaos-gospel asked nicely so: a snippet of my (already pretty long) colin provolone backstory fic!!
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Colin is nine years old, and he is having a very bad week. He does most of the stealing, these days, grabs what he can from the Lords and Ladies and hands it all to his father, who buys just enough food to keep them alive and spends the rest on drink. But it’s the dead of summer now, hot enough for some of the softer cheeses to melt in the sun, and the streets are quieter than usual. Greater risk, lesser reward.
Colin hasn’t eaten in a few days, long enough for his legs to feel shaky, and his father hasn’t had a drink in longer than that, and that’s bad. Colin peers in the windows of the bars his father frequents, sometimes, and he knows that some men get angrier when they drink, but drink mellows his father out. So he needs to steal something good- enough for food, and enough left over for drink.
He’s hiding in a shadowed alleyway, now, watching the people go by, his father watching him from a rooftop a few buildings away. And suddenly Colin feels his spine straighten, his gaze sharpen, because the man exiting the shop across the street, walking side by side with his daughter, can only be a Lord. It’s in the swagger of his step, the cut of his coat, the perfect swoop of shaved mozzarella hair. It’s in his daughter, too, herself a ball of softer, pure white mozzarella, wearing a bright yellow dress.
Colin steps out of the alleyway, carefully staying a few steps behind them, while giving every appearance of just another street urchin in Lacramor, lost in his own head.
“What are you going to tell your mother, hm?” the man is asking, and now that Colin is closer, he can see the sharpness of his brow, the scowl that seems permanently etched into his face. “We are paying good money for that tutor, and you are wasting it. Wasting her time and ours, and wasting my money on top of that. Are you even listening to me?”
The girl, who can’t be much older than Colin, certainly doesn’t seem to be listening. Instead, she is staring at a small patch of butter flowers, the same bright yellow as her dress, that have sprung up between the cracks in the road.
The man’s face gets, if possible, sharper, the scowl deepens, and Colin winces in anticipation at what’s coming. Sure enough, the man reaches down and grabs the girl’s wrist, and Colin watches as he squeezes, with enough force to make the girl gasp, her father’s fingers making ugly indents in the soft cheese of her arm.
Colin doesn’t hear anything else that they say. He moves on autopilot- pauses to pick a trio of butter flowers, bumps into the girl so quickly and casually that it can’t be anything other than an accident, dashes off down the street before either figure can even think to stop him. The girl won’t notice the flowers tucked into the front pocket of her dress until she’s home, and Colin hopes they’ll make her smile, hopes they’ll make her forget the pain of her father’s fingers, if only for a moment.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Colin Provolone, Aaron Fontina
Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Backstory, Whump, Child Abuse, Campaign: The Ravening War (Dimension 20), this is just child colin having a bad time. sorry.
Summary:
Colin Fontina learned how to run when he was six years old. Sometimes, he thinks that he never really stopped.
~~
(a Colin Provolone backstory, through age 13.)
