Hate was too simple a word. He and Eli were bonded, by blood and death and science. They were alike, more so now than ever. And he had missed Eli. He wanted to see him. And he wanted to see him suffer. He wanted to see the look in Eli's eyes when he lit them up with pain. He wanted his attention.
Okay, nothing struck me down, no simp-fans came for me, let's do this.
Victor Vale is a fucking fantastic protagonist.
Absolutely, unequivocally.
The audacity of this guy.
He's this unflappable mixture of Kaz Brekker's checkmate brain, Silco's effortlessly regal kingpin gravitas, and something... just something.
Quick-witted, hyper-focused, a little psychotic, and a secret softie.
I love his machiavellian ass but he deserved a much more engaging story than this, and honestly, a more worthy opponent.
The classic trope of two best friends committing a terrible deed and devolving into mortal enemies on opposing sides of law/nature/religion/love has been done countless times.
It's a well-worn style of storytelling and there's a simple reason why it keeps getting churned out:
All of those idiots are obviously in love.
(Except Peter and Lesley, they're platonic and I'm fine with it now. Beverley made me fine with it)
And what do we love reading more than two protagonists at war whilst making googly eyes at each other across the battlefield?
Nothing, we love nothing more than that, it's the best.
I want to believe that there's more. That we could be more. Hell, we could be heroes.
Victor's chest tightened when he looked at Eli's unchanging face in the newspaper photograph. It was disconcerting; all he had of Eli was a mental picture, a decade old, and yet it lined uo perfectly, like duplicate slides, with the one on the page. It was the same face in every technical way... and yet it wasn't. The years had worn on Victor in more obvious ways hardening him, but they hadn't left Eli untouched. He didn't appear a day older, but the arrogant smile he'd often flashed in college had given way to something crueler. Like that mask he'd worn for so long had finally fallen off, and this was what lurked behind it.
And Victor, who was so good at picking things apart, at understanding how they worked, how he worked, looked at the photo, and felt... conflicted.
The moment I inched open the spine of this book, I knew it was a love story dressed up as revenge.
I could feel it, taste it.
Every page is an oozing love letter, secreting obsession and scented with madness.
The shape and detail of their hands, the shift of air when their emotions veer minimally off centre, the exact curvature of the sacred place where neck meets shoulder, the way they look when murder's in mind.
They know each other intimately, fixate on those specifics, and feed on each other to fuel their obsession.
...what fascinated Victor the most was the fact that something about Eli was decidedly wrong. He was like one of those pictures full of small errors, the kind you could only pick out by searching the image from every angle, and even then, a few always slipped by. On the surface, Eli seemed perfectly normal, but now and then Victor would catch a crack, a sideways glance, a moment when his roommate's face and his words, his look and his meaning, would not line up. Those fleeting slices fascinated Victor. It was like watching two people, one hiding in the other's skin. And their skin was always too dry, on the verge of cracking and showing the color of the thing beneath.
Victor Vale and Eli Ever.
Two best friends in love with the same girl *insert snort of disbelief*, two scientists playing God, two idiots creating chaos when really they should be kissing.
All the while set in dark academia and Gotham-esque vigilantism.
An experiment in youthful hubris, god complexes worn like crowns, exit stage left pursued by the grim reaper.
It's all very dramatic, very Shakespearean; a romantic tragedy akin to Shelley, Lucifer and God eternally at war.
The perfect witches' brew for murder, mayhem and revenge.
And it should have been perfect, it felt perfect but... missing something.
Something vital.
The tension and build up were perfectly executed; cut with flashbacks from the past, the almost present, and the very much now, we're given acute insight to how Victor and Eli went from best friends to mortal enemies. We're given their origin story.
Every "hero" and every "villain" has one, and their's isn't all that special or different, honestly.
They fucked up and saw the outcome differently.
"A note for your thesis," [Victor] said as his friend lay there, gasping. "You thought our powers were somehow a reflection of our nature. God playing with mirrors, but you're wrong. It's not about God. It's about us. The way we think. The thought that's strong enough to keep us alive. To bring us back. You want to know how I know?" He turned his attention to the table, looking for something new and sharp. "Because all I could think about when I was dying was the pain." He cranked the dial up in his mind, and let the room fill with Eli's screams. "And how badly I wanted to make it stop."
Victor turned the dial down again, and heard Eli's screams fade as he reached the table.
"No, no, I don't think so. Not entirely. Something's wrong, missing, gone. Can't you feel it? I can," said Eli, and he actually sounded scared. Victor was disappointed. He'd hoped that maybe Eli felt it, too, this calm, but apparently he felt something else entirely.
"Maybe you're right," said Victor. He was willing to admit that he felt different. "But if I'm missing something, then so are you. Life is about compromises. Or did you think because you put yourself in God's hands that He would make you all you were and more?"
"He did," growled Eli, pulling the trigger.
This time he didn't miss. Victor felt the impact, and looked down at the hole in his shirt, glad he'd bothered to turn his pain off. He touched the spot and his finger came away red. Distantly, he knew this was a bad place to be shot.
Victor sighed, looking up. "That's a little self-righteous, don't you think?"
Eli took a step closer. The wound in his stomach had already healed, and the color was back in his face. Victor knew he needed to keep talking.
"Admit it," he said, "you feel different, too. Death takes something with it. What did it take from you?"
Eli lifted the gun again. "My fear."
Victor managed a dark smile. Eli's hands were shaking, and his jaw was clenched. "I still see fear."
"I'm not afraid," said Eli. "I'm just sorry."
He fired again.
One, the potential for greatness, the other, a mistake to be crossed out.
A villain? A hero? Vice versa?
Classic dichotomy.
What makes Victor and Eli more interesting than your average nemeses is that Schwab acknowledges and questions the stark black and whiteness of good vs evil.
What is good? What is evil?
Can you be villainous but with better intentions than someone deemed a hero who uses their faith as a weapon?
Does having powers automatically allow you to pass judgement on those moralistic decisions?
What gives you the right?
Power? Faith? Revenge?
It's a question that's always at the centre of any battle: what makes my cause more worthy than yours? If I believe in it, doesn't that mean I'm right? If we both believe, then who's more worthy?
Is Eli's crusade to eradicate the ExtraOrdinaries of the world justified because they're unnatural and often dangerous, or is that simply genocide?
I'm team genocide's bad, let's not do it, but does that necessarily mean I'm correct?
Who makes that choice?
What if in the end my morality clouded my judgement of a very real and very dangerous threat?
Would it be more moral to eradicate them to save more?
One of those philosophical ouroboros questions you could talk yourself in circles about until the end of time and not find a conclusive answer because good and evil truly aren't that simple.
Victor and Eli aren't that simple.
By all accounts Victor's the bad guy; he's got blood on his hands, he does bad things and feels very little remorse for them, but that isn't the entirety of him.
I wouldn't even really call him evil, morally grey at best.
Truly evil people don't pick up runaways in the pouring rain, feed them, clothe them, and protect them with only a slight agenda on the side.
Morally grey, remember?
But Victor's relationship to people is one of the clearest signs of his humanity, evidence that he's not the corrupted shade of his former self in the wake of his resurrection - the exact opposite to what Eli believes.
His relationship with Sydney as a pseudo-father-type is so blessedly sweet without meaning to be that it felt more important in the end than his revenge against Eli.
(I was watching Arcane: League of Legends at the same time and my surrogate criminal daddy feels were seriously out of control)
"Sydney, look at me." He rested his hands on the car roof and leaned in. "No one is going to hurt you. Do you know why?" She shook her head, and Victor smiled. "Because I'll hurt them first."
The thing that kept him alive for ten years, kept him sharp and motivated was thwarted the minute a pre-teen necromancer stepped into his car, shortly followed by a resurrected dog with a heart of fucking gold.
Sydney ran.
[...]
She knew exactly where she was going.
Serena hadn't told Sydney to go home. She hadn't told her to run away. She'd told her to go somewhere safe. And over the course of the last week, safe had ceased to be a place for Sydney, and he become a person.
Specifically, safe had become Victor.
He stood no chance.
Did it stop him going after Eli? No. Did it change his priorities? Not really. Did he make space in his plan to make sure those in his orbit were safe and protected? Yes, he did.
Something Eli never does.
Between the two of them, Eli, the hero, is the most cutthroat (also the boring one). Orchestrating EO crimes, manipulating them into situations to justify him "cleansing" the world of the unnatural and coming out a saviour.
Believing he is that saviour because he has faith on his side, because even though he's an EO himself, God tasked him with this duty, therefore it's righteous and not murdery at all.
EOs are wrong, and I am an EO, so I must be wrong. It was the simplest of equations, but it wasn't right. Somehow, it wasn't right. He knew in his heart with strange and simple certainty that EOs were wrong. That they shouldn't exist. But he felt with equal certainty that he wasn't wrong, not in the same way. Different, yes, undeniably different, but not wrong. He thought back to what he'd said in the stairwell. The words had spilled out on their own.
But its a trade, Professor, with God or the devil...
Could that be the difference? He'd seen a demon wearing his best friend's skin, but Eli didn't feel like there was any evil in himself. If anything, he felt hands, strong and steady, guiding him when he pulled the trigger, when he snapped Lyne's neck, when he didn't run from Stell. Those moments of peace, of certainty, they felt like faith.
Honestly, who sounds like the villain?
A little revenge is a small notch from the soul, genocide is unforgivable.
"It's why I let you stay," said Victor. "Why I liked you. All that charm on the outside, all that evil inside. There was a monster under there, long before you died."
"I'm not a monster," growled Eli as he dug one of the bullets out of his shoulder, and dropped the bloodied metal to the floor. "I am God's―" But Victor was already there, burying a switchblade in Eli's chest. He punctured a lung, he could tell by the gasp. Victor's mouth twitched, face patient but knuckles white around the blade's grip.
"Enough," said Victor. Behind his eyes, the dial turned up. Eli screamed. "You aren't some avenging angel, Eli," he said. "You're not blessed, or divine, or burdened. You're a science experiment,"
Victor pulled the knife out. Eli went down on one knee.
"You don't understand," gasped Eli. "No one understands."
"When no one understands, that's usually a good sign that you're wrong."
And this, thisssss is why these two are fascinating and why I wish we'd been able to spend more time with them together.
Even though the staging for this story is beautifully ordered in its complexity - we meet our protagonists, we witness them defy the laws of nature, we watch them wrenched in opposition - it unfortunately felt like too little too late.
We spend the entire book switching between the past and the present, Eli and Victor fucking up and becoming their present selves, and then flipping back to the ever-rising crescendo of their collision in the present.
It's a breathless ride and compelling to the end but when we do come to that end, it felt as though there should have been more time to experience Victor and Eli's current relationship, when the dénouement finally descends.
Their ferocity, their affection, their ruthlessness.
After learning their history, their present is over in a flash, a few chapters of subterfuge, game-playing, and inevitable betrayal.
And it wasn't enough.
It wasn't enough time to gauge whether their hatred could be assuaged by simply being physically back together, to see if Eli was capable of killing the one ExtraOrdinary he had a hand in making, to finally know if Victor could follow through with his revenge.
Whether they could kill each other and live with it.
Eli was like a thorn beneath Victor's skin, and it hurt. He could turn off every nerve in his body, but Victor couldn't do a damned thing about the twinge he felt when he thought of Cardale. The worst part of going numb was that it took away everything but this, the smothering need to hurt, to break, to kill, pouring over him like a thick blanket of syrup until he panicked and brought the physical sensations back.
Now that he was so close, the thorn seemed to burrow deeper. What was Eli doing here in Merit? Ten years was a long time. A decade could shape a man, change everything about him. It had changed Victor. What about Eli? Who had he become?
He fidgeted under the sudden urge to burn the photo, to shred it, as if damaging the paper could somehow cause damage to Eli, too, which of course ti couldn't. Nothing could. So he sat down, and set the page aside, beyond arm's reach so he wouldn't tempted to ruin it.
The paper called Eli a hero.
The word made Victor laugh. Not just because it was absurd, but because it posed a question. If Eli really was a hero, and Victor meant to stop him, did that make him a villain?
He took a long sip of his drink, tipped his head back against the couch, and decided he could live with that.
A few chapters couldn't possibly answer these questions, and it would have been completely different if they'd reunited before the finale.
We would have had a whole Will and Hannibal murder nuzzle situation.
But instead we were given a quite perfunctory end with no real answers to these questions.
Which again wouldn't have bothered me but it seems as though the next in the series introduces a whole new EO character? With nefarious intentions towards Victor and Eli?
I don't know, colour me curmudgeonly, but I kinda just want to hang out with my superhuman boys and watch them realise their love for each other, and possibly inject Eli with some personality other than genocidal twat?
With their beloved daughter, Sydney, and Uncle Mitch of course.
...
Why did my brain not realise until now the comparisons between Hannibal and Vicious.
Two men on two sides of the law equally doing terrible shit.
Eli even tried to murder Sydney, and Victor took her in!
This is never leaving my head.
I can't unsee it.
Excuse me while I maul the next book with unnecessary comparisons and an unhealthy amount of feels.
If you've watched Hannibal you'll get where my head's at right now.
...beneath her hands a heartbeat fluttered, as Victor Vale opened his eyes, and smiled.
...
Yeah, you wish you were inside my head right now.
Ps. This infantile boss move has been stuck in my head since I finished.
Stell handed Eli a plastic bag. Inside was a crumpled piece of paper. He withdrew the paper and unfolded it gingerly.
It was a stick-figure drawing. Two people holding hands. A thin man in black and a girl, half his height with short hair, and wide eyes. The stick-girl's head was cocked slightly, and a small red spot marked her arm. Three similar spots, no bigger than periods, dotted the stick-man's chest. The stick-man's mouth was nothing more than a faint grim line.
Beneath the drawing ran a single sentence: I made a friend.
Victor.
Victor Vale, you're a petulant genius and I fucking adore you.
(Imagine him all in black and more... revenge-y looking)
Now, look at this adorable fanart by chem_doodles:
FYI: any HP art found on this blog is never in support of the author and her bigoted agenda.
All art shown is in support of the fans and the fan artists who were fucked over by a piece of shit human who wrote something we loved and ruined it by being herself.
*frantically searches piles of unordered books for copy of the first volume of the manga which hasn't been read yet because you're a damn, dirty fool!*
'Being kind to Guillermo has been pretty easy, and fun i may say.. don't tell him I said that.' MY FIRST WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS FANART?? yeah fellas!! this has been very hard to draw because I used a pretty different reference this time!#wwdits#nandorxguillermo#fanartpic.twitter.com/PZdPR51qb9
Someone would have to pre-smash it because only a soulless creature could destroy this!
.............................................
Creepy movie trailers to delight my spooky heart:
I'm so absurdly excited over this.
Stop-motion is probably my favourite form of animation, the aesthetics of it, the amount of skill, work, time and care that goes into it, but then you make it creepy and psychologically fucked up?
Morning Doodle: " 'The monster is me and I am the monster.' And if Nikolai didn’t laugh at it, he was fairly sure he’d go mad." Leigh Bardugo's King of Scars CH 6 pic.twitter.com/8Ltoo5Ebdr
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