Please tell us everything about your Vanserra oc’s xoxo
hi cutie thank you so much for asking !! the one thing about the vanserra boys sjm can pry from my cold, dead hands is how much they love each other. they're not some cartoonishly evil copies of beron, because that's not how abuse fucking works - they're off-putting, selfish, petty and fickle, but i genuinely don't think any one of them is mindlessly cruel.
so, without further ado, these are my vanserra brothers!!! more ocs to come soon, hopefully, but this a good enough starting point :
raoul vanserra, second son, the spare, came into the world screaming, his mother's most painful labour. that was perhaps the only time he'd been allowed to take up space unrepentantly. all his life he's been the second one to eris, and that influenced him very early on to becoming everything eris wasn't. where eris was careful, raoul became brash. impulsive, hot-headed, he spurned eris' careful plotting, and that (eventually) costs him his head when he challenges beron too blatantly.
antolin vanserra followed, and he was eris' first, most beloved baby. he'd been old enough by then to recognise he had to be the role model his beron was not willing to be and the nurturer aurélie (lady vanserra) couldn't. eris coddled and protected anto with a single-minded devotion that only lucien rivalled. it allowed him to be gentle, the dreamer poet of the vanserra clan. i like to imagine that, paralleling lucien, anto also had a lesser fae lover he hid from beron. him agreeing to hunt lucien down was thus less abject cruelty and more deflection. his last words to eris, as he died in the same arms that had first held him, were his daughter's name and location. protect them, he'd begged, the way you could not save us.
marcel and cyrus vanserra were the infamous twins. neither of them particularly cared for the autumn court politics; the roles had already been decided by the time they came of age, and they were content to remain unimportant and unintrusive. cyrus was the charmer, the one flirting with anything that moved and talked his way everywhere. marcel, on the other hand, was quieter, the string to cyrus's kite, the brawn to his brain. at least, up until lucien killed his twin flame, and then marcel plummeted into drink and despair so severely that the only thing keeping him from joining cyrus was that he owed it to him to keep living when he could not. it didn't stop him courting death, though - he egged raoul on to be more abrasive, mouthed off to beron and fucked married women, searching for something to light up the gaping vaccuum his other half's loss had left behind.
(he finds it, eventually, in the form of a certain winter court princess, whom he steals from under his younger brother's nose, but liana morozova is her own story.)
ashar vanserra is the second-last of the lot, and there's no other way of describing his life other than to say he was discarded pretty much immediately after his birth. eris tried to care for him, give him the semblance of a childhood, but he was so busy and so tired and beron was so hard on him. at some point in their youth, anto hands him a glass of wine to shut his ceaseless questions up and that begins ashar's most loving affair. he drinks to forget how little anyone has to give him, he drinks to make good conversation with strangers, he drinks to feels some semblance of warmth, and he drinks and drinks and drinks. he'd almost be content with it, the knowledge that it's no fault of his own but his family's own fucked up mentality, were it not for blessed, adored lucien who was born naturally receiving the love and attention ashar thought non-existent.
