Cleo gets lost in their thoughts and memories sometimes, occasionally needing to be literally shook out of it. When alone and realizing it though they can dig their nails into their palms to ground themselves though.
-đ
Oh yeah, Cleo absolutely dissociates a LOT. She's still getting used to having control over her own body again, I also think they don't use facial expressions like most people since she's just not used to being able to move on her own
I love this, especially the idea of them not using facial expressions and the connotations that come with that!
Like, imagine if when they first get to town, they are using facial expressions, infact they're very animated with them. That's what they do and that's what everyone gets used to, what everyone thinks is normal. Of course, no one knows they're making up for years of not being able to convey how they feel, but that's fine, no one needs to.
Then the house competition happens, and you can tell they're mad. Again they're very obvious with their emotions, even if sometimes the doctor, or maybe Abolish, can tell it's exaggerated.
But then they get turned... they feels like they did back then. And when they meet up with Martyn he can hear the relief and worry in their voice, but their face shows nothing. He can hear they're upset, but they are deadpan.
It gets a bit better once they've told Martyn and Pearl what happened, they return to using big gestures and wide grins, albeit a lot less enthusiastic looking, but every time something happens, they stop. They shut down. Oakhurst can tell nothing from their expression, or lack there of.
Most of them think it's a strategy, as the double, triple, quadruple agent Cleo is, so that no one can tell what they're planning. Only the Doctor knows the real reason. He is the only one who knows their secret, and he brings it with him to the grave.
Years later, after Pearl has once again had to physically shake them out of their trance, they might tell her, but that will be many, many years later, and even more years before they finally indulge Shelby's curiosity.
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Scott Goldsmithâs 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.Â
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 thatâs just normal. Itâs not even anyoneâs fault. Everyone lives in a horrible murder box and the only way to succeed is to make sure that itâs you on top.
(this doesnât 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 Goldsmithâs 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.Â
The code of Scott Goldsmith is as follows:Â
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.Â
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.Â
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 Shelbyâs house, but in episode 7 he defends it by claiming that âit was uglyâ. The same instance of the same action performed by the same person goes from something worth complaining about to something worth depending based entirely on where they stand in Scottâs regard.
Note also that this rule has no interest in fairness or reality. If Shelby says âthe sky is green and the moon is made of cheeseâ, and Martyn says âno it's notâ, 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 canât 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 arenât 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 Scottâs waiting arms. Itâs a phenomena Scott is very confident about and takes shameless advantage of.
This is also why in episodes where Scott doesnât turn anyone (due to the OOC limits), itâs styled as him stopping because the new vampires arenât 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.Â
This is, honestly, the one Scott haters get wrong the most. While thereâs nothing wrong with having a villain in your story, Scott isnât 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.Â
Even if recreation is his main goal, he should ideally have a secondary goal as a matter of both practicality and preference- itâs just more fun for him if heâs 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.Â
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 didnât see v!Avidâs murder coming, and why he was both so pleased with v!Avid and so angered by his death.Â
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 isnât 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.Â
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 youâre all working together for a single goal. In Scottâs case this is especially true, since as the leader heâs deciding a disproportionate amount of the groupâs goals. A well fed minion is a productive minion. A productive minion is a lot more likely to succeed at your goals.Â
This one is the part that can be the hardest to reconcile with Scottâs everything else. However, itâs 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. Scottâs core character concept is âguy that is trying to get a good grade in Minecraft Hunger Games, something that is normal to want and possible to achieveâ
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.
4. 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 doesnât recognize the difference until the end of the series, where he asks Abolish to stop him from doing bad things.Â
5. The finale of vampires smp from Scottâs pov very much pivots around v!Avidâs death. It turns out that the rules that Scott shaped himself around werenât 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 heâs 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 heâs 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, donât have the aggression to cover for it, and with Pyro and Owen lost they donât have enough front liners to cover their weaknesses. If things continue the way theyâre âsupposedâ 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 donât 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. Itâs not easy or bloodless, but it is a strict improvement over the status quo. Itâs an option that keeps his friends alive.
Of course, just leaving this murderbox isnât enough. Scott still has to deconstruct the murderbox in his own head, because otherwise his actions will simply create another murderbox around him.
Thatâs a bad outcome, so he enlists Abolish to kill him if he starts causing problems.Scottâs not great with morals, but heâs 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 wonât do that.
Actually figuring out how to be a functional person outside of the torment nexus is basically an entire novellaâs worth of character development that the series doesnât have time for, so instead it settles on âthey figured it out eventuallyâ.
Other than learning the truth about the supernatural, the main thing Shelby wanted was to belong somewhere. Then the vampires turned her and she got both these things. They accepted her for who she was and loved the quirky parts of her that everyone in her old town hated. She finally managed to leave behind the feeling of not fitting in and feeling stupid for trusting "a liar" (her father).
Only for the townsfolk to tell her time and time again that she's nothing like her new family and that they're only trying to manipulate her...
The reason she stayed with the vampires is not only because they accepted her first, but because in trying to help, the townsfolk continually isolated her from the people she cared about, forcing her back into the very situation she tried to escape.