NYbN Belated Meta: Isaac and Fuego (Season 1 Retrospective Spoilers)
Since watching the season 1 retrospective on ‘New York by Night’ on the Project Ghostlight patreon, two things have been spinning through my head like rotisserie chickens for the past while. One of them is outright stated, one is far more implied, but I am gnawing on them, fascinated by them, desperately needing to write meta about them so I can get all my thoughts down.
Now, below the cut are two things I either learned or realized while watching the retrospective. That means that there are spoilers for said retrospective. If you’re a fan of NYbN and want to read this, I seriously urge you to go and sign up for the Patreon and watch the retrospective first! I do not want to make people feel like the information below the cut is in any way a replacement for the massive amount of information you get from that. It’s two things. Essentially a taster for the feast that lies one Patreon subscription away.
Cool? Cool. Let’s get into this.
Okay, let’s start with what may be my favorite revelation from the retrospective, that makes such sense once you know it:
Isaac’s hoarde is people.
This is such a cool concept for a Tzimisce! There are so many ways it can be fucked up, and so many ways it forces the player and the character to act as a team player far more than the Tzimisce might be wont to do otherwise. It is simultaneously monstrous and an enormous weakness, and that is such a great way to set up a character.
It also recontextualizes so many of his actions once you realize this. It not only plays into his position as running a protection racket and craving prey that need things from him, but his particular attachments to Michal and Angela make so much more sense. They were real life colleagues and the closest things he had to friends, who then became the first people in his hoarde. His fierce protectiveness of them also makes so much sense in this context, as people messing with Michael or Angela are people messing with what is HIS.
Particularly after finding out that he’s more or less incapable of feeling most human emotions, I find it super fascinating that his Beast probably feels far more than Issac would on his own. That possessiveness his Beast has is possibly the closest he’s ever felt to real love or friendship (all twisted by wanting to own the people his Beast decides to latch onto, adding a real layer of horror to all his relationships), which makes Isaac the inverse to a lot of Kindred: his Beast almost makes him more human, giving him more of a sense of human emotions and attachments than he might have ever had otherwise.
That puts him in a really unique position: he is particularly weak to social needs. And nowhere is it more obvious than with his coterie. The second they were all paired off by Richter, Isaac essentially looked at these three other vampires and decided that they were now part of his hoarde. I once said Serif was the first of them to really embrace being a coterie, but she wasn’t. Isaac was, just in far more subtle ways. Despite Fuego having a car, he insists on having Michael drive the coterie as a group; he even has Michael get the minivan especially to accommodate his coterie. He invites them to his house quite quickly. Many Tzimisce never invite people to their houses, because they don’t want people touching their things or messing with them. But of course Isaac invited them over: his hoarde needs to be in his house, so they each now have rooms he’s laid aside for them. He logically knows that, as Kindred, he can’t just force them to stay with him (although he’d try it), so he needs them to want it. He has to be an actual friend to them to get his hoarde to stick around.
And that, interestingly, adds another layer to Rey’s betrayal in the finale. Because not only is Isaac pissed that he almost sold them out to the Camarilla, but he is suddenly in danger of losing a part of his hoarde. He may find Rey to be irritating almost constantly, but Rey is also his, and Rey wanting to leave them for the Camarilla?
Unacceptable. Isaac immediately tries to convince Rey that the Camarilla would never take him, or even if they did, they’d never let him forget what he was. And this isn’t even necessarily a lie. Isaac is a master of using limited truths to get what he wants; he rarely outright lies, particularly to his coterie. He simply deploys limited facts in the best configuration to get them to decide to play things his way.
And this is where we get to my second revelation, not outright stated, but more observed throughout the retrospective: Aabria and Alex made incredibly similar characters. Isaac and Fuego are both both overtly and far more subtely manipulators. They are both inherently social, both need people to function. And they are both very territorial when it comes to getting and keeping the people they’ve chosen.
We’ve already talked about Isaac’s need for other people, but Fuego’s is all about how she was built. Aabria explained that she was an exploration of soft power. Aabria looked at how many people looked at the Ventrue as craving power and interpreted in a very patriarchal ‘I’m going to be the boss’ way, so she decided to explore ultra-femininity and subtle power. She was a community organizer, bound to others and to the network of a community since she was a child. She gets her control through getting others to give her what she wants by convincing them it was their idea in the first place. Fuego is built to be the power behind the throne, but that requires that another ass be seated in that chair. So she needs people nearly as much as Isaac does, but because it’s less of a compulsion for her (leaving aside the revelations about Fuego and blood bonds, because THAT is a whole different discussion), she’s able to be more clear-headed about it.
I loved learning how quickly Fuego clocked what Isaac was about and started feeding into it. I took it for granted that Fuego’s lack of knowledge about Kindred society was genuine, but I now we know it at least in part was an act. Certainly, she has genuine gaps in her understanding, but I she exaggerated her ignorance, because playing young and dumb is a great way to seem non-threatening, and to assess people around her without letting them know.
And knowing that, you can see her trying to figure Isaac out from the jump. When he offers them a ride, despite her explicitly telling him she has a car, she immediately asks if she owes him something. She phrases it like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but Fuego clearly knows about boons. She’s trying to figure out if he’s boon-fishing by this car-ride, and she’s trying to figure out how honest he’ll be if he thinks no one has any knowledge but him.
And in that scene a few important things happen. Isaac explains Boons without using the word, but at least gives them a broad—and more importantly accurate—portrayal of what would and wouldn’t incur a boon. He also makes clear that this is just on his way. It’s practical.
And that gives Fuego a lot to chew on. Isaac is trustworthy, at least to an extent. But if he’s not after boons, he has to be after something else. And then he offers them rooms at his place (despite both Rey and Fuego actually having really nice places of their own). And then he keeps offering them accurate information, but no more than they ask for. He keeps trying to lure them to stick around.
And she’s got him clocked, at least sort of: he wants them to be around him. And more specifically, he wants they themselves, rather than anything they have or could bring him. She figures out Isaac wants to be the guy with the knowledge first, and keeps on with the ignorant-baby-Kindred act. I’m not sure if she’s also realized his far more base need to have them around him as often as possible, but she has to suspect something like it. Even by their first big argument, her punishment for Isaac being an asshole about her murdering a security guard is to choose to walk home, to choose to not only refuse a ride from him, but to absent herself from his presence.
I seriously hope that season 3 does someday happen, because I desperately want to see how Isaac and Fuego’s relationship evolves. I want Isaac to finally lose his cool and try to dominate his ‘friends’ into not leaving him. I want Fuego to finally drop the ignorant act and let him know exactly what she knows and how long she’s known it. I want them to be forced to lay their cards on the table, to get into a situation where they finally see one another without the masks.
It’s hard to say how that would work out.
They could fall apart. They’re both so poisonous. Isaac’s need to keep the coterie around is so extreme it’s forever threatening to spill over into dangerous and toxic territory. Fuego has to be secretly in control and gets furious when she either loses power or is forced to confront how low down the totem-pole she really is. They could so easily be oil and water once they finally see one another as they truly are and understand the depths to which each would sink for what they want.
Or they could get closer. The level of respect that they might be able to develop if they ever saw eye to eye could make them a terrifyingly adept duo. If game finally recognized game, and they both understood how well they played the exact same field, they might be able to get over their differences and find ways to work around their mutual issues of pride and control to be a power to rival anything in the Bronx.
Hell, even a four-way mutual blood bond seems entirely possible with the mess of ugly co-dependency and family issues swimming around the Minivanarchs. Isaac explicitly wanted everyone blood bonded to him, because that was a way to get them them to want to stay with him without ever having to force the issue. Fuego has complicated addiction-flavored relationships with blood bonds, and has a need for community. Rey might bind himself to everyone either to protect them or as a way to get them to accept him again, if he decided to go that route. And Serif is made of endless family issues, craving a true connection not poisoned the way her connection to Argus and her mother is. And if anyone could make Isaac blood bond himself to the group, it would be a fully-informed Fuego knowing how much he needed them all to stick together.
It could be glorious. It could be terrible. It would probably be the prettiest trainwreck of four needy assholes needing one another to death you’d ever seen. And I hope that someday I get to see how it plays out.
fuego is a very interesting type of ventrue to me, because what does she have? ventrue are rulers basically by definition. what does fuego rule over? what are her connections, her companies, people who owe her boons? she has cash, but ventrue pop out of the ground with 7-figure net worths, so thats meaningless in kindred society. shes.... the ex-girlfriend of a city council member? part of a family involved in local politics? she shares domain (so long as she pays rent to baron richter) over the port morris neighborhood in the bronx? and... thats it
or, moreover, its all shes willing to claim. she actually has a very valuable connection as rafferty's childe. she could stop everyone from kicking her around. she could have all the influence and wealth that her "sister" khalida enjoys. shes standing over a gold vein holding a pickaxe. but she doesnt swing it. because what she really has, her most valuable possession of all, is her dignity and the values that define her, and shes not willing to throw it away for anything. so she bites her tongue and takes her lumps because she knows that they can strip her of the clothes off her back but they cant take what makes her fuego fucking walker
well done, @quiddie youve created a ventrue i can respect
I looooove that we got the Ventrue overlap between our two coteries for NYbN, not just because of the endlessly juicy drama of Rafferty’s two childer and the tension of that soon-to-come meeting, but also because of the two different flavours of Ventrue that we’ve gotten to see with Fuego and Khalida.
I like to categorise Khalida as a Dominate Ventrue and Fuego as a Presence Ventrue, though this is not simply based on the mechanics alone as both of them make ample use of both disciplines. The Ventrue compulsion is arrogance, a desire for power and obedience, and more than most other clans new Ventrue are very often chosen for already displaying an aptitude for this desire. But how they go about achieving this is what differentiates them.
Khalida is a dominator. She has a specific vision of what she wants from the world, and she will (somewhat ruthlessly) shape the people around her in order to get it. She uses The Forgetful Mind and Mesmerize flippantly, rewriting the world in her vision. She is measured and calculated, arguably much more so than Fuego, but that does not stop her from using her abilities as she sees fit, even going so far as to Dominate Simone, a much older and more powerful kindred, into giving her what she wants, despite the danger. She even uses Presence the same way, as a cudgel to command those around her. She uses Awe on mortals the same way she uses Mesmerize, to have them do her bidding. I think this is deeply informative of who she was as a mortal, and why Rafferty chose her in the first place; you get the sense that she was equally as cutthroat as a highend art dealer, taking what she wanted whenever she wanted it regardless of the consequences, an endless ambition for power that made her shine to her future sire.
Fuego is a manipulator. Aabria described it best during ep 3 of Club Auspex, in that she has a soft command of power over those around her that she’s slowly learning to make use of. She isn’t a Queen on a throne making demands, she understands that (unlike Khalida) she doesn’t have guidance or actual political power in this world yet. And so she watches, looks for the soft, vulnerable parts of the people around her, and quietly molds them into what she wants them to be. We talk a lot about that delicious moment in episode 3 with Rey and the businessman, but look at it again: both in luring that man to the alleyway and in asking Rey to kill him, she doesn’t even use Presence or Dominate, she doesn’t need to. She already knows what buttons to push, what poisonously honeyed words to whisper in someone’s ear to get what she wants out of them. Even her use of Dominate reflects this. She doesn’t try to push beyond her means, force someone to kill themselves (I doubt she knows that wouldn’t work yet, but even if it did its just not her style), she just nudges them in the direction she wants. Sit. Stay still. Give me the gun. Its quiet and simple, and lethally effective.
Ironically I think the two of them would have a lot to learn from each other if daddy dearest doesn’t succeed at pinning them against one another. Simone is right that Khalida sometimes uses her disciplines as a crutch, one that might get her killed if she continues to wield it so openly against other kindred; she could stand to learn from Margot’s more subtle manipulation tactics. But outside of her disciplines, Fuego is a deeply impulsive individual, taking risks and making big in-the-moment emotional decisions because of her desires (killing the security guards, trying to dominate the skull, dancing with Riktor in front of Consuela, etc) that could seriously get her hurt or worse if she doesn’t learn. Khalida’s cool, cold, slightly detached and measured outlook could help Fuego’s survival chance quite a lot. But this is just speculation of what’s to come, and I’m deeply excited to see how it all transpires.
