Genuine question bc I'm curious about your perspective here, because in this post you mention that one of the things you feared the DLC would get wrong was Vaas thinking torture is funny and enjoying it. Now to be clear: I completely agree with all the stuff you've said about the DLC after it came out, esp. re: the nature of the relationship Vaas and Citra had, so I'm not here to stir the pot. I'm mostly just curious what made you think otherwise. Assuming we ignore the DLC, and stick to the the main game and the experience videos, that to me still paints a picture of... I guess the best way I could describe it is that he's someone who doesn't seem to fully realise that he's doing harm? If that makes sense? I might not be verbalising this well, but I find him such an interesting character and I sometimes struggle getting a good understanding of him (insofar as we even can, based on what, 15 min. screentime in-game and like 40 min. of live action footage? 😭) but you seem to have clearly done a lot of thinking about it PLUS strongly valuing canon which is why I figured, no harm in sending this question in, right? Talk to me about this man, please. I will be sat and ready listen to an entire tedtalk
Hey! No worries, it’s totally okay to ask, and I don’t think there’s anything upsetting about your message :)
I agree with you, actually, because what I meant when I said I didn’t see Vaas as someone who enjoys torturing people is that I don’t think he’s sadistic. To me, he doesn’t particularly take pleasure in inflicting pain, but in The Far Cry Experience, it sometimes felt like he did.
In Far Cry 3, while we see him kill a few people, he doesn’t physically torture anyone the way he tortures Chris (and many others) in the web series. I mean, live-action Vaas put a dead deer on a man, probably asked him to run, and then hunts him while he’s riding another one he treats like his horse. He also has a “garden” of human heads. That was weird and, from my point of view, felt a little out of character...
It doesn’t seem (to me, at least) that the film intends to make it look like Vaas doesn’t fully realize what he’s doing; it felt more like the team just wanted him to be “crazy”, “edgy”, and to torture people in creative ways because they thought it was funny. They did say the show was not meant to be taken seriously, and that they wanted the humor to be “bratty” and impertinent, but even though its outrageousness is, admittedly, what makes it entertaining, I think Vaas is more subtle and “serious” than that.
Michael Mando clearly has a lot of affection for the character he co-created, and I love the way he talks about him. Maybe you’ve already seen this interview he did when the DLC came out, but he has the same analysis as you: Vaas “is really not trying to hurt anybody, and his understanding of pain is [simply] not there”. The character is “destroyed”, but deep down, he’s “a child”.
Far Cry 3’s Lead Writer, Jeffrey Yohalem, also said about Vaas in another interview, “He’s not evil, that’s for sure”, and to me, “being not evil” is incompatible with “torturing people because making them suffer is pleasurable to you”. That would be evil… and also exactly what Buck does, by the way, so I think calling him evil makes more sense. I would even say he’s one of the most evil Far Cry antagonists, by this definition. Vaas, though? Not so much.
I wouldn’t necessarily say he acts and thinks like a child, but he’s definitely not always fully connected to reality, if that makes sense. Paradoxically, among all the Far Cry 3 characters, he’s also probably the one who has the deepest understanding of the world he lives in, maybe even in a “meta” way. It’s funny because he’s usually described as “crazy” and “out of his mind”, but on the contrary, I think he’s very clear-sighted. Too clear-sighted for his own good, in fact, because he can see through everyone and everything, including himself, and must be pretty disillusioned about humanity.
That also explains why he’s drawn to drugs, I think; he wants to be out of his mind because his world is dark and hopeless, so the less he feels and the more inconsequential he pretends everything is, the better. He’s still surprisingly lucid (unfortunately for him, I would say), but I think his apparent “craziness” and levity are—at least partly—a choice and a way for him to deal with his sensibility, perspicacity, and almost nihilistic view of life.
So we (and Michael Mando, apparently) have the same opinion: if Vaas were to torture someone and “enjoy” it, it wouldn’t be because he likes to inflict pain; it would be because life is (quite literally, in his case) a game, and the best thing to do is to treat it as such and act like nothing really matters. He’s long realized everyone cheats and that he’s bound to lose anyway, so why would he care? I mean, he still does, clearly, but I think he’s trying to ignore that and have fun while he can, until someone finally sets him free.
