While watching NY by Night, Rey was my least favorite PC, mostly because I find anger kind of boring in characters when it’s their go-to reaction, rather than a deep driving force. But! Rey is the one I’m most dwelling on a week later.
When he was alive, Reyes [surname unshared] from the Bronx changed his name to “Rey Malcolm” because it’s “nondescript on a piece of paper”, so he could get a job in Manhattan where he always wears suits and can afford a Manhattan apartment and sometimes treat himself to a bottle of fancy whiskey. He assimilated, fervidly, and it worked. (Though we have to ask: did it, really? Rey presents as a Finance Guy, but his go-to Finance Work is money-laundering schemes. His whole career, was he working for richer white men who thought it was apt, maybe even thought it was funny, how this should-be gangster thug from the Bronx had dressed up in a white-collar suit to do white-collar crime?)
And now in his unlife, he’s once again just randomly “born” as a kind of person, by nature, whom those with power look down on. Whom they don’t accept in their ranks. Whom they regard as closer to animals than to humans. Undead society is even more strictly tiered, social groups differentiated, than living society, and there are NO precedents for a Gangrel in the Camarilla (Reyes Malcolm was not, at least, the first Hispanic man to work on adjacent to Wall Street). And he is trying again, SO HARD, to assimilate, to earn & prove his place—because it worked once already! Didn’t it work once already? It will work again, it has to.
If we ever get s3, I hope Rey gets to figure some shit out, and lose his temper with a righteous cause.
