HOBBIES:The Card Says “Moops” (Internet Trolling): When people say that Internet trolls are pathetic jerks who try to make other people miserable because it distracts them from their own horrible lives, they are talking about Vanya Renault even if they don’t name him. Realistically, he doesn’t need to distract himself from anything because he
should have more than enough going on to keep him busy. And yet, he maintains a small army of different side accounts on various social networking platforms; Twitter is by far his favorite place to troll because people make it so easy with the way they will read “I love pancakes” and turn it into “Oh, so you hate waffles,” but he also has sock-puppets on Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, Tumblr, and various forum websites.
Most of these accounts are basically burners, but some, he’s had for a while and has cared for, nurtured, developed into genuine online personae with actual backstories and specific ways in which they troll people. Whatever the most outrageous thing he can think of is, he will probably say it, pushing the boundaries and testing Poe’s Law over and over and over again with these accounts until it gets too hot. Burners can be abandoned easily when someone catches on to how he’s a troll, but with the accounts he’s truly nurtured, he’ll go private, turn off notifications for a while, let any heat he attracted cool off, and then come back like six weeks later, possibly with a minor rebrand but without changing the core character he made up for the account. Whatever, okay? Leave him alone, he needs to get on his sock-puppet where he’s convincing some nerds from the
Stranger Things fandom
that all the birds in the world were exterminated as part of a CIA conspiracy in the 1970s. He had a bad day, okay? He
needs this.
Life with the dull bits cut out (Drama, Drama, Drama): Unfortunately, Vanya’s interest in drama does not end at the sorts he can sow on the Internet over problems that likely never happened and whatever absurd ways he can bastardize the language of serious discussions in order to pointlessly upset people he doesn’t know. As long as it
isn’t happening to him personally, he ******** loves drama—the more outrageous and asinine, the better. Celebrity gossip is fine because it’s so ubiquitous and perpetually accessible, but rich people behaving badly is only entertaining for so long. Please, tell him all about that b***h from work who you hate and tell him all about the messy s**t they did.
A notable exception: he does NOT want any drama on the social media accounts he runs in his own name. His actual personal accounts on Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, and TikTok are sacrosanct and free from any drama or trolling (almost, but not entirely, free of any opinions whatsoever). Salacious gossip and deliberate muckraking would distract from the content he posts, which mostly consists of, in his words, “short-form one-man films” (i.e., short films he makes himself, with his phone and the same laptop he’s been using since high school).
And I said “What about ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’?” (Cinema): Not movies, exactly, and someone’s god(s) help you if you accuse Vanya of being an enthusiast about
movies. Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t enjoy movies, because he does. But even more than simply
watching movies, Vanya loves to pick them apart, scene by scene and shot by shot, figuring out what the creative teams must have done to make the different visuals happen (one reason he prefers either older or indie films for this specific task: the answer is inevitably more interesting than CGI, see: the chocolate sauce blood in
Psycho), or what choices the actors are making and how they work, or what the directors chose to do with this scene. Directors are of paramount importance to him; rather than focusing on genre, he will always favor looking at who directed it. If a film by someone he admires isn’t in a genre he usually enjoys, he will watch it anyway, out of some weird parasocial sense of loyalty to the director (e.g., Ang Lee’s
Hulk, Guillermo del Toro’s
Pacific Rim, and frankly, most of Paul Verhoeven’s filmography, given his regular genre-hopping, but
Benedetta, his period drama about lesbian nuns, is the most recent example).
Even more than analyzing movies, though, Vanya wishes that he were
making them. He’s wanted that since his childhood babysitter first told him where movies come from……but he also believes that it’s basically an impossibility in his life. Even if he hadn’t left his family, his parents were never going to pay for him to go to film school, and come on, be serious: Vanya Renault is a nobody. He waits tables and delivers Japanese takeout on his bike. He barely has enough connections to know when someone’s shooting something in Destiny City, never mind getting a foot in the door to
actually make his own films. The closest he’s going to get to that childhood dream, he figures, are the usually absurd little shorts he makes himself (which he takes very seriously, storyboarding them and everything).
Also, he’s been saying that Brendan Fraser is outrageously talented and criminally underrated as an actor since before Darren Aronofsky made it cool.
Lean in close to my little record player on the floor (Vinyl Records): Not that Vanya is opposed to any other ways of listening to music (on the contrary, he has to stream it so he can have something to listen to while he’s running deliveries all over town). But he thinks there’s something magical about vinyl records, something that’s just
better than other mediums. He doesn’t care about the genre so much as the tactile experience of taking the record out of its sleeve, placing it on the turntable, and setting it up to play. If the price is in his budget, he’ll buy vinyl by bands he doesn’t really like from the various secondhand stores in Destiny City, just to have more records in his collection; he’s made some pretty great finds this way, too. The fact that so many people his age know that “record scratch” is a sound-effect but don’t know anything about where it came from? Irritates him to no end, and he won’t hesitate to be That a*****e Hipster about correcting you on it or extolling how much better vinyl is than digital music.
Off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and harmony and delicacy (Violin): Not that he thinks he is any good at it, but he does play. ……Not that Vanya’s opinion on his own skills should be taken as an accurate reflection of reality (it isn’t). True, he may not be
amazing, because he doesn’t practice regularly, but he took his old violin with him when he left Louisiana, and he does play sometimes. He even still knows enough of his childhood and adolescent lessons to be passably decent, especially to people who don’t know any better (people who
do know better, however, can pretty easily clock that he’s got the foundations but he’s out-of-practice). As far as he cares to let you know, it’s strictly a practical concern: he doesn’t have the money to license actual backing music for his little films/videos, so he keeps up on his violin enough to make sure his shorts have some kind of music when they need it. Nothing whatsoever to do with him placing any real value on his ability to do anything beautiful, so don’t even ask! Please focus on the very plausible practical concerns he cited. Thank you for your cooperation!!!
VIRTUES:World serves its own needs, don’t misserve your own needs / Well, the years start coming and they don’t stop coming (Rolls With the Punches): Life, in Vanya’s experience, happens to everyone, whether you want it to or not. We’re all just a bunch of weird, loud, perpetually messed up anxiety-cucumbers who think we’re great shakes because we have opposable thumbs and complex linguistic systems, and the universe doesn’t much care about us. Vanya only knows one way of opting out and he doesn’t find it particularly appealing (nor is he inclined to commit to something so permanent when he has no idea what’s going to happen in the next ten minutes, much less tomorrow or five years from now). So, he makes do. No matter how much any given ******** Thing upsets him, dwelling on it for too long only means he’ll be off his guard when the next ******** Thing comes for his a**. He may not have the slightest idea what he’s doing, but he’ll figure something out.
I take what I’m handed, I break what’s demanded / Speed up to the precipice, and then slam on the brakes (Decisive): This isn’t to say that Vanya makes up his mind quickly, because most of the time, he doesn’t.
Most of the time, unless there is an immediately relevant deadline or other extenuating external circumstance hanging over his head and pressing the matter, he prefers to take his time on making decisions because there are really so many potential X-factors and things that could go terribly wrong, y’know? But once Vanya makes up his mind about something, he gets set on it and will not stray from his course unless someone drags him away from it, kicking and screaming, or he finds enough Ways This Will Not Work and goes back to the drawing board about it. Even in the latter of those outcomes, though, he hasn’t truly given up on what he’s decided; he’s just looking for a different means of accomplishing whatever his Objective Of The [Arbitrary Time-Slice] is.
You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, and know when to run / Strike another match, go start anew (Takes Initiative): ……Well, that’s one way of putting it. A somewhat more accurate way of putting it is that Vanya expects to be denied permission to do things, even if what he wants to do today isn’t particularly egregious, so he doesn’t bother asking. Closed mouths don’t get fed, after all. People are unreliable, finicky animals who only care about themselves, in the end, so why bother going through the proper channels to get approval? Best to just do what you want and ******** the rest, instead of waiting around for people to come through for you when they never will. He’d rather beg forgiveness than ask for permission, so once he has made up his mind about something, he probably won’t wait very long to act on it.
Look beyond the broken bottles, past the rotting wooden stairs / You don’t look different, but you have changed (Perceptive): Not that he always interprets the signs correctly or always knows what they mean, but Vanya does pay close attention to the little details of how people talk, dress, present themselves, and generally behave. He pays equally close attention to his surroundings, like an animal sensing an oncoming storm. One of the precious few constants in a chaotic, unstable universe is that bad things will happen and no one else will protect Vanya but himself. All he can do is prepare for that eventuality. Look for the signs, keep tabs on the temperature, read every room he enters just in case someone decides to wreck up the place. That way, if he plays his cards right, nobody can get the upper hand over him.
…………Being so attentive to these little details also helps him keep track of his small army of twitter troll accounts with their unnecessarily complicated backstories, but that’s beside the point.
FLAWS:The only salvation is I’ll never see you again / I’m gonna swing from the chandelier (Escapist): Hello? Oh, Reality? Ah, yes, my old friend.…… No, no, Vanya doesn’t want to hear from you right now.…… He doesn’t much want to hear from reality
ever, actually. The less often it happens, the better. If you ask Vanya, reality sucks and is garbage, and he doesn’t honestly know what you expect him to do about that. He’s pretty sure that he
can’t do anything—at least, nothing meaningful. Reality is like a raging river, and at most, Vanya is capable of tossing in little pebbles that only affect Vanya himself,
maybe a small handful of others. Letting himself get swept up away the rest of it just sounds awful and he’d rather not, thanks? Please, give him movies to pick apart, access to Twitter so that he might troll, casual hook-ups off Grindr, and maybe something to get drunk on? All of these things sound
so much nicer than whatever reality has cooking for him today.
I’m pretty sure I’m worthless if I can’t be of service / So what if I’m the monster that’s been here all along (Fatalistically Negative Self-Image): Unfortunately for pretty much everyone who has to deal with him, one of the things that Vanya is Most Decisive about is this idea he has that he is garbage actually. You could write a 19th-century Russian doorstopper novel like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky about all the reasons
why he has decided this thing about himself, but he’s still felt certain of it for long enough that, while he remembers a few temporary bursts of confidence (and how spectacularly they all ultimately crashed and burned), he doesn’t remember ever
not feeling like he was garbage—at least, not in any meaningful or lasting ways. As far as Vanya’s aware, he has always, in every way that has mattered, felt like nothing about him as a person is worth the effort to
notice, much less praise, because why would you? Since they’ve been around for so long, his feelings are probably accurate to reality. His only real value comes out of what he can do for other people, and if they’re willing to let him pretend they really care about him, then why should he
care if all they ultimately do is use him? At least he’s being
useful instead of being a giant problem for anybody who gets close to him, <******** up your stories, truth’s so hard to say / Said the prayer you taught me to keep myself alive
(“Creative Truth-Telling”): You know that old joke about lawyers? “Q: How can you tell when a lawyer is lying? / A: His lips are moving”? ……Well, strike “a lawyer” and replace it with “Vanya Renault.”
Look, the fact of the matter is that everyone is going to hurt you eventually. Worse, they almost definitely won’t warn you in advance. No matter how nice they seem, no matter how kind they insist on acting, and no matter how much they say that you’re special or they’d die for you or you complete them or they love you most ardently, it’s just not true. None of it is. Maybe they don’t mean it to be a lie, but ultimately, it will be proven as such. When that day comes, the knife will twist and the rug will be ripped out from under your neatly ordered life, unless you get ahead of the curve first. To Vanya, the best way to prevent people from hurting him is lying. On one hand, it keeps some people from getting close enough to hurt him (can’t do that if you only know his lies and not the real person!). On the other, giving people whatever they want from you—or at least stretching the truth so they can hear whatever they most want to hear from him—is the best way to keep them happy, which will hopefully keep them from noticing that the real person here is irredeemable garbage.
No matter what he does, that revelation will inevitably happen at some point, sure—anyone he lets himself care about is, someday, going to see him the way that he sees himself and then they’re going to rightfully leave him—but he’d like to delay that for as long as possible? If that’s okay?
Besides, if you really think about it (read: in his terms and from his incredibly skewed perspective), he isn’t doing anything different from anybody else. Everybody’s a liar about something, even if they don’t mean to be. At least
he’s doing it on purpose, for specific reasons and goals, rather than just lying for the sake of lying, and most of the time, he doesn’t intend for his lies to hurt people or anything.
Woke up afraid of my own shadow, like genuinely afraid / There’s only one way this road ever ends up (Panicky): Vanya sees danger everywhere, even (arguably
especially) when there isn’t any. In certain regards, he would probably be happier in a chaotic combat situation than sitting quietly with someone at home, because at least in combat, you can see where most of the danger is. Situations that appear stable and happy, in his experience, are really the exact opposite. Victories might feel nice for a moment, but getting too swept up in them will give someone—even if it’s just karma or whatever—a chance to get you while you’re distracted and unceremoniously rip the rug out from under your entire life. Bad Things are always lurking in the periphery, and even if you can’t see them, they can see you. In fact, they’re probably trying to figure out the best way to harm you for their own sick amusement. He’s always waiting for Bad Things to happen, so when they do, he feels vindicated, but when they don’t, he can’t understand why Bad Things aren’t happening, it’s
stressing him out that they aren’t happening (and will stress him out even more if “too many” Nice Things have been happening lately). Then, he usually creates trouble and digs himself into a hole by either trying to find where the Bad Things are, or lashing out to push the Nice Things to their breaking point.
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