☆ Burri ☆

I take the hand with my new accoutrements, and I stick it into his left pectoral muscle, and I just throw him from the top of the crate.

First off, I don’t think Isaac looks at Rey as an animal, but he is 100% certain that the Camarilla does and that view would forever exclude Rey from the Camarilla clubhouse.  That is not what I find most interesting about this moment.  What I find most interesting is that Isaac is both wrong and right at the same time, and both how he’s wrong and how he’s right are shaped through a lens of aggressive and unrecognized projection.

See, he’s wrong in that I do think that if Rey did enough and kept working at it the Camarilla probably would eventually let him in.  But he’s right that Rey will never be anything more than an animal to the Manhattan Camarilla (your mileage varies city to city, but the Manhattan Cam is yuppie and elitist as fuck, from what we’ve seen).  They would accept Rey, but he would never be anything more than a pet to them.  He would never be treated as an equal, and to Rey that’s going to be just as bad as being excluded entirely.

I think it would be similar for Serif.  Isaac insists that she would be executed by the Camarilla right along with him, but from what we’ve seen in season 2, reactions to Argus are not nearly so extreme.  If anything there is a generalized apathy about him.  So I think that Serif would not be entirely shut out, but she would be treated very much akin to how the homeless are treated by an elitist society: she would either be ignored, shooed along to be someone else’s problem, or treated as a charity case.  She would also never be equal, but she could be someone’s pity-cling-to-their-humanity-project.  Which would be frankly on the same level of mistreatment as Rey, and just as unacceptable to her.

But I say Isaac is projecting because he really is.  He looks at how the Camarilla would treat the others through the lens of how he knows they would treat him.  Just look at how Coco reacted when she learned that there was a Tzimisce in the Bronx.  This was not the apathy given to the Ravnos or the vague fascination given to the Gangrel.  This was a visceral horror and disgust, and it seems to be shared from the bottom to the top of the Camarilla.  The only thing they told Panhard that seemed to really get her attention was that their city had a Tzimisce in it, because Isaac is not a person to the Camarilla, and he’s not even something as benign as an animal.  To the Camarilla, based on nothing more than his clan, Isaac is a monster.

  And you don’t treat monsters as pets or charity cases.  You put them down.  

Isaac is in the unique position of being part of the one clan who the Camarilla genuinely would not accept, and would hunt down and kill rather than even consider tolerating.  He is a threat that has to be eliminated, the stain of the Sabbat never washed away the way that the Lasombra managed.  His clan isn’t just mystical or  strange or ruthless; they are body horror personified.  And there is nothing he can do about that except keep his head down and get in good enough with the Anarchs that he buys himself a measure of protection.

So of course he looks at the people who--through no choice or fault of his own-- want to exterminate him, and view them and their actions through the least possible charitable lens.  And it even makes sense that he would take the danger he’s in and project it onto other ‘outcast’ clans like Gangrel and Ravnos.  It’s safer, and frankly there’s a level of comfort there, not being alone to face the axe.  If there’s  a whole lot of clans who would also be killed or shunned, he’s less of a priority.  If he’s alone as the one Anarch Tzimisce, the only one of that faction that the Camarilla would actively hunt down purely based on his clan, that’s so much worse.

Storyteller: As you leave the car, [Angela] glances at you again for the third time this evening, in a direct and peculiar fashion.