heya, i love your vampires and hope you're thriving
so i was curious about vince's and pep's prior relationships? and how much their past experiences inform their current relationship?
like i recall from your earlier works of vincent that he had a boyfriend in college - was that his first and only relationship up until he met pepper?
whereas pep strikes me as someone who's dated alot but has never really had the time to pursue anything serious due to everything going on with her life - like she's both more and less experienced than vince, if that makes sense
anyway i hope my reading of your characters isn't too offbase but apologizes if it is lol. love your art and i always go feral when you post more
Hii, first of all thank youuu :33 ♡♡♡ I'm always happy to hear when ppl like my ocs I'm absolutely thriving after this 😌
Also, you hit the nail on the head right there with Pepper!! She's got a longer string of relationships under her belt, but they were all short term and ended either badly or abruptly for a variety of reasons, like moving away, too many arguments, overly possessive/controlling partners, etc etc. Her fix for any big problems in the relationship is usually "just end it and start a new one". By the time she met Vincent she was a little burnt out on relationships and had been single for a while.
For Vincent he had that boyfriend in college but that wasn't his first relationship! The first one was with a girl in high school, and they spent about 2 to 3 years together before she had to move away for college and they broke up. He loved her a lot, she was literally his first love, but there were a lot of problems in the relationship especially bc they were teens and still very immature. But overall the memory he has of her is a very fond one. With his boyfriend it was a whole other can of worms, not because the relationship wasn't good (it did have problems that made it more difficult to deal with especially being a gay relationship in the 80s) but mostly bc he was forced to cut it short. He would've stayed and worked through any problems that came their way if it wasn't for the embrace, for his fear of hurting him and of what his sire might do. Breaking up like that was really abrupt and not what he would've naturally done otherwise.
In general, Vincent's approach to relationships is to insist and try to make it work as much as he possibly can. Which is the point where he and Pepper collide. Immovable object meets unstoppable force etc etc.
The way their relationship works before bloodlines is a little weird bc they're not actually in a *romantic* relationship, but they're at that ambiguous place where they're "weird friends". You know? I'm not sure what's the word I'm looking for here, but they're not normal friends, their relationship has been a little weird and ambiguous from jump, but they never talked about it nor got physical with it. I don't wanna go too much on a tangent bc otherwise I'll take forever to answer your actual question jdkfkf [*but* if you do wanna know more about how things worked between them before bloodlines pls let me know, I would love to yap about that :3] but basically, because of the weirdness of their situation Pepper ended up not cutting him off and this became her longest "relationship" before it was even anything other than a friendship. And so Vincent became very important to her.
Which means that, during bloodlines and especially after it, she's at odds with herself. She both wants to make it work and doesn't really know *how* (poor girl never got this far), and so part of her wants to drop him off at the side of the road and leave. It'd be so much easier. But it's not really what she wants either. And Vincent has a bunch of mixed feelings too, but they have a lot more to do with *how* he approaches the relationship, not the fact he wants to deal with it at all. The way he sees it, whether it's romantic or not, he wants to make it work, he doesn't wanna leave. And so this means he tries to stay firmly put while she fluctuates between trying to push him away and pulling him back in.
They get stuck in this song and dance until one of them gives in, and this goes on even after they're romantically involved. But I do like to think they'd gradually learn to work through things, problems wouldn't be so scary anymore, and they'd settle in as a more mature couple in the future. I do like to be optimistic about them, and I think they genuinely could get to that point (maybe by themselves, maybe with some outside nudges). I just don't think it'd be an easy journey, but that they'd be willing to go through it anyway.
AND after the horrors I would like for them to kiss kiss and be happy forever ofc. Bc they're so cutieeeeeeee <3