Alright, I caved and wrote a thing for the bloodloathing divorce au (aka: the doc's toxic trainwreck of a polycule) @areafae has spearheaded. A part of me really wanted to keep going, but I promised myself this was going to stay a ficlet because I have so many other things to work on.
He is talking to the damn lumberjack again.
His doctor attracts quite a bit of attention from the humans of Oakhurst. Under ordinary circumstances, Scott would take great pleasure in watching his sire work. He wields his charisma far differently than Scott (and it is charisma, despite his doctor's insistence otherwise — manipulation for the betterment of those around you is still manipulation, when all is said and done), and Scott doesn't believe he'll ever tire of seeing flickers of the tactician he has only heard distant tales of subtly maneuver his way through the lives of mortals. It is no easy task working in such close proximity to humans without their survival instincts pinging that something is off, even more so when the vampire in question is a doctor. And yet, his sire has gained the respect (if not the trust) of most of the people of Oakhurst with a delicate ease.
His doctor's interactions with the lumberjack are different.
There is a softness to the conversations that Scott has not heard from his sire in centuries. He always had a weakness for individuals suffering from complex chronic conditions (and Scott can smell the disease seeping from the lumberjack's skin, despite his attempts to cover it with bandages and ointments), so Scott isn't exactly surprised by this outcome. It helps that the boy could be considered handsome. Nothing compared to himself, obviously; however, if one could look past his gaunt features, his unmanaged hair, and the mingling scent of sickly bodily fluids mixed with earthy remedies… well, he is fine, Scott supposes. He cannot fault his sire for being smitten by this helpless, pathetic creature. Besides, it is not his sire's social dance that he finds so vexing.
It is the lumberjack's.
You don't know him.
The lumberjack is an oddity in Oakhurst, and not just because of the ailment plaguing his form. He prefers to keep to himself — wandering into the woods alone despite the protestations of the other townsfolk. He is temperamental and distrustful of others — a distrust far greater than the base suspicion all the mortals held on some level towards the other strangers of the town. He keeps conversations to a minimum, and he lashes out towards anyone who makes an attempt to touch him, even as a friendly gesture.
But with Scott's doctor, he changes. He no longer retreats into the perceived safety of the woods or his own cabin — he stays. His words are still defensive and sharp, but he speaks. With time, he even allows the vampire to inspect his wounds, and when the sight is not met with revulsion or pity, he melts.
But you aren't seeing him, are you?
Scott knows how to read people. It is a skill he possessed long before he was blessed with his sire's gift of immortality, and one he has continued to hone to perfection with centuries of practice. He does not know this boy or where he came from, but he can tell one thing: when the lumberjack looks at Scott's doctor, Scott's sire, he is not seeing the vampire. His gaze holds awe, hope, and, most importantly, recognition.
You don't deserve his attention.
Despite Scott's faults (which he will openly admit to having — he is not delusional), he saw his doctor. He saw his raw intelligence, both as a physician, but also as a strategist. He saw his ability to seamlessly switch between kindness and sternness in a way that allowed his patients to feel heard while educating them on how to keep themselves well and safe. He saw his moments of hypocrisy — extending grace to those around him while punishing himself for those same failings. He saw his anger. He saw his endless stubbornness. He saw his love.
He sees all these things now.
Why won't you look at me?
Perhaps his doctor needs to see the lumberjack stripped free from the patient — to see the boy for what he truly is when all of the little pieces of pain and hurt are peeled away. Perhaps the lumberjack needs to see Scott's sire with a fresh perspective, free from the limitations and burdens of a mortal form.
Perhaps this act will simply shatter whatever slivers of affection Scott's sire still, despite everything, holds for him.
really love a corruption arc where the character is trying way too hard to make it work but they're in over their head and it's uncomfortable and embarrassing and they're swallowing their own puke every time they do something awful and damp with sweat and trembling but insistent that they can do this, they want it, they're not a child, but it's like they're playing dressup in clothes that are too big for them and trying to convince their own reflection in the mirror that they fit and it's just no fun to watch at all
+ then they find inside them a capacity for cruelty far more upsettingly vicious than anyone could have imagined and decide that because they enjoy how unafraid it makes them feel for the first time in as long as they can remember it must have been their true nature all along instead of something that had to be starved in the dark until it grew desperate enough to claw its way out 🙂↕️
Alt version, timelapse, and rambles below the cut!
Yall they have me in a death grip. I found the picture below while scrolling Pinterest and I thought it was PERFECT for them.
One thing that always gets me about their relationship is that Legs often purposely looks past all the bloodshed and the murder that Owen has done in order to keep pushing to save him and it keeps putting him in increasingly dangerous situations. Owen really is this man’s blind spot and I LOVE IT. I’m so incredibly proud of this piece y’all. This is my first *big* piece of MCYT fanart and it’s one of those pieces that make me go “I made that????”
I shared the sketch I did for this piece yesterday and this is basically the same piece inked with the exception of Owen’s face. It gave me a lot of trouble but I think the changes I made made it so much better.
I know we like to joke about characters who are fake idgafers (people who pretend not to care but actually care Very Much) but I think Abolish Veylocke is one of the rare actual idgafers. The only things he cares about is his job and his own convenience despite his moments of understanding and empathy and we should talk about that more
like to me he is the perfect example of an empathetic character not really being sympathetic or even kind. He understands why people act the way they do, he's just deeply irritated by it when it interferes with his work
V!Owen is a person with rich emotional depths that primarily serve to drive him and everyone he comes into contact with towards horror and violence. the horror is that he is doing this because he cares and the tragedy is that he is the architect of his own suffering
V!Scott is an incredibly shallow person who gives up evil the same way a normal person gives up tacos. the horror is that it was always this easy for him and the tragedy is that he never had a reason to try before this
Scott Goldsmith’s Native Environment is a Horrible Murder Box
this has consequences
Vampires smp was originally billed as an amongus alike with light roleplay elements, so Scott Smajor basically just took a pile of life series conventions and built a character around it.
The life series, for the uninitiated, is a competitive minecraft youtube series where everyone has a limited number of lives (times they can die), and the goal is to be the last one standing. The mechanics gradually allow more murder to happen over time, so everything starts with people making nice with each other and ends with an absolute bloodbath. The tone is kept light by the mutual acknowledgment that everyone is a youtuber playing minecraft, but there has been plenty of discussion about how much actually living in that kind of world would suck.
And then we have Scott Goldsmith
Scott Goldsmith, who wasn’t intended to be much of a character in the first place, winds up playing the life series conventions to the hilt as genuine character traits and social standards. For the most part, this worked out incredibly well! Scott Goldsmith is an interesting character that works well with the rest of the cast and is fun to watch, which is basically everything you can ask for in an improv series. There are, however, some artifacts from this that have some big impacts on how Scott works.
Most notably, Scott Goldsmith works from the baseline assumption that he will have to crawl over the bodies of other people to survive, and that that’s just normal. It’s not even anyone’s fault. Everyone lives in a horrible murder box and the only way to succeed is to make sure that it’s you on top.
(this doesn’t stick out too badly because noble power games are frequently just a slightly more free range murder box, so Goldsmith being murderbox georg does not particularly contradict his lore or backstory)
The other major consequence of murder boxes being Scott Goldsmith’s main thing is that Scott actually follows a fairly rigid set of rules and assumptions when dealing with other people. His own personal vampire code, if you will.
The code of Scott Goldsmith is as follows:
1: The in group deserves everything and the outgroup deserves nothing. Everything the in group does is good and justified, everything the outgroup does is not.
This is the bedrock of the gaslight, gatekeep, goldsmith social interaction special, and the governing principal behind what Scott is willing to justify and when. Basically, if he or someone he likes did it, then he will defend it and deny even the concept that it might have been wrongdoing. People that are not members of his coven generally have their actions weighed by how dangerous or inconvenient they are to himself or His People.
The most obvious example of this is the interactions with v!Avid in episode 6 and 7. In episode 6, he complains about Avid burning down Shelby’s house, but in episode 7 he defends it by claiming that “it was ugly”. The same instance of the same action performed by the same person goes from something worth complaining about to something worth defending based entirely on where they stand in Scott’s regard.
Note also that this rule has no interest in fairness or reality. If Shelby says “the sky is green and the moon is made of cheese”, and Martyn says “no it's not”, then Scott will back up Shelby because Shelby is coven and Martyn is not. If Shelby kills Martyn, Scott will immediately decide that Martyn had it coming. If Shelby kills Martyn, burns down the town, and declares her desire to destroy the world and rule over the ashes with an iron fist, Scott will fully support her in that endeavor.
2: A lone vampire is a dead vampire. Your power is directly proportional to the number of people that answer to you
On one level, this is just mechanically true for vampires smp. Every person turned is another set of hands that can corrupt the beacons, and, just as importantly, one more person taken away from the effort to consecrate them. Even if that person never switches sides, the fact that they can’t consecrate any more or use the various human powers makes it a worthwhile effort, which is why there was a general OOC limit to turning only one human per episode. (and they had to take a break from turning people if they accidentally turned too many)
a more character driven level, Scott is very much a social threat, and acts the part. Turning people lets him acquire minions, who are easier to manage than outsiders, and generally aren’t going to cause him problems.
Vampirism is generally more then enough to force someone into his faction, because once someone is turned the humans will do the bulk of the work in driving the new vampire away from them and into Scott’s waiting arms. It’s a phenomena Scott is very confident about and takes shameless advantage of.
This is also why in episodes where Scott doesn’t turn anyone (due to the OOC limits), it’s styled as him stopping because the new vampires aren’t joining up- growing his power base is the main benefit of turning new vampires, and when that peters out he becomes more hesitant to do so.
3. Your actions should always advance your agenda
In other words, Scott mixes business and pleasure in the sense that his hobbies always contain some practical value.
This is, honestly, the one Scott haters get wrong the most. While there’s nothing wrong with having a villain in your story, Scott isn’t the sort of person to torture someone in his basement for the sake of it when he could be torturing someone in his basement for information, or to break them down into something more psychologically dependent on him.
Even if recreation is his main goal, he should ideally have a secondary goal as a matter of both practicality and preference- it’s just more fun for him if he’s being paid to be evil. (or buy some ice cream. Or pet a dog. Or help someone out)
4. Betrayal is a crime of the highest order. Loyalty is a virtue of the highest order.
What, exactly, Scott considers betrayal varies over the course of the series, but this is generally the governing principal behind the various times he menaced Pyro, why he didn’t see v!Avid’s murder coming, and why he was both so pleased with v!Avid and so angered by his death.
Scott Goldsmith values loyalty, and to a degree both expects it as his due and considers it an obligation to give loyalty in turn. This isn’t surprising- most Scott Smajor characters run along lines of loyalty and devotion. Scott Goldsmith is not an exception just because he is also a Dracula.
5. Support your allies however you can
Scott is, in fact, an incredibly dedicated ally. He does things like give Pyro food while having low hunger himself as early as episode 2, and the tendency to act like that only goes up over time.
This makes a certain amount of sense- helping other members of your faction also helps you because you’re all working together for a single goal. In Scott’s case this is especially true, since as the leader he’s deciding a disproportionate amount of the group’s goals. A well fed minion is a productive minion. A productive minion is a lot more likely to succeed at your goals.
This one is the part that can be the hardest to reconcile with Scott’s everything else. However, it’s important to remember that Scott is not immune to the desire for companionship, and also that he actually needs to keep people on side in order to not die. In some ways, this is very much an extension of rule 2.
6. (new) be a good friend
Over the course of the series, Scott gradually gets attached to the other vampires, and comes to see them as companions with needs he should consider outside of their mutual victory. He realizes that he likes the people around him, and he wants them to be happy. That he cares about them as people, and not just as tools.
The process of this takes the entire series, but by the end of it his friends are a big enough priority that he points out opportunities to escape to his own detriment.
In conclusion:
1. Scott’s core character concept is “guy that is trying to get a good grade in Minecraft Hunger Games, something that is normal to want and possible to achieve”
2. Scott Goldsmith does not so much have a moral compass as he has a set of rules designed to keep him alive. The bad parts of this are obvious, but there are good parts, too: when it mattered most, Scott was able to change and grow to suit the people around him. Owen and Ren, by contrast, violently self destructed and that hurt the people around them because they were too rigid in their personal convictions.
3. The support he offers to other people in the coven is real and sincerely meant. The expectation that those coven members will aid and abet his own misdeeds is also very real. Scott himself doesn’t recognize the difference until the end of the series, where he asks Abolish to stop him from doing bad things.
4. The finale of vampires smp from Scott’s pov very much pivots around v!Avid’s death. It turns out that the rules that Scott shaped himself around weren’t as ironclad as he thought, because the people around him would literally rather die than put up with them. The mechanics that demand violence and bloodshed can be subverted in a way that causes unnecessary death and suffering.
And, to be clear, Owen and Pyro are dead to him as soon as they do this. In part because he’s planning on killing them himself, yes, but also because their actions are tactical suicide.
When he next talks to Pyro in what is basically his eulogy, Scott thanks him for the reminder that he should expect death and misery, because as far as he’s concerned death and misery are the normal course of events. Scott was winning so much he forgot that murder boxes suck, actually.
This is increasingly a problem because, by the laws of murderboxes, Shelby and Drift are almost certainly going to die- they both struggle with pvp, don’t have the aggression to cover for it, and with Pyro and Owen lost they don’t have enough front liners to cover their weaknesses. If things continue the way they’re “supposed” to, more people that Scott cares about are going to die.
So, Scott starts looking for another way out. After all, if the rules can be broken in ways that are bad, maybe they can be broken in ways that are good. Maybe they don’t have to kill everyone. Maybe murderboxes are bullshit, and all of this was entirely unnecessary.
So he starts looking, and, surprisingly enough, there is a path out. It’s not easy or bloodless, but it is a strict improvement over the status quo. It’s an option that keeps his friends alive.
Of course, just leaving this murderbox isn’t enough. Scott still has to deconstruct the murderbox in his own head, because otherwise his actions will simply create another murderbox around him.
That’s a bad outcome, so he enlists Abolish to kill him if he starts causing problems. Scott’s not great with morals, but he’s excellent with rules and practical consequences. So long as backsliding into the worst of his old behavior is guaranteed to go badly for him, he can be fairly sure that he won’t do that.
Actually figuring out how to be a functional person outside of the torment nexus is basically an entire novella’s worth of character development that the series doesn’t have time for, so instead it settles on “they figured it out eventually”.
