#currently reworking some shit in worldbuilding but Tris won't change much I don't think

[roxaeri]

please tell me about your trash vamp tristan -candy pop anon

Alright buckle in coz I'mma tell y'all about my shitty vampire pretending to be a human pretending to be a shitty vamp. Tristan is the manifestation of a dumpster fire—and if there is a dumpster on fire it was most likely his doing.

((LONG POST IS LONG. I’MMA INFODUMP ABOUT MY SON.))

I believe I have a post or two that has dialogue from him, in which he’s not his usual self. He’s got some profound wisdom hidden in him somewhere, and some repressed sad from his life, usually buried down until he connects with literally anyone on a deeper level than: “Tris, why the fuck is there a skeleton in your cupboard?”

I'mma come back to Profound Wisdom and Repressed Sad later because let me first get y'all to the subject of Tristan’s cupboard skeleton.

Now, when I say trash vamp I mean that he’s not really a good guy. Like, he’s not evil, but he’s not good either. He’s a mess whose day job ((night job, considering he’s a nocturnal vamp)) is being a Certified Spook. It’s in his job description to cause just enough chaos that the supernatural is plausible in case anyone fucks up their cover, but still make it easy for the supernatural to be denied or debunked by humans. He maintains that stupidly specific balance.

Shitty Vamp = he’s got a lot of debilitating, stereotypical vampire traits that makes it super hard for him to do his job when the sun’s out

His cover is he’s a human from Ireland ((which is true, he was born in Ireland who knows how long ago)) but he’s pretending to be a stereotypical vampire from Romania ((half true due to him first being stationed in Romania due to his eldest adopted brother)).

So, technically he’s a supernatural government worker. But, again, he’s a fucking mess. There’s shit he’s repressed, or has been helped in repressing. There’s a lot of advantages to being adopted into a magic family. But there’s also a lot of disadvantages to being adopted into a magic family that descends from a hell realm.

So’s, he wasn’t raised with the best morals, and with some abstract-ish laws from a realm that birthed The Boogeyman and The Big Bad Wolf and Death’s Daughter and the Mother of Shadows. But he was also able to complete all requirements from two foreign governments and their realms to be able to have the job he does. So even if he doesn’t have the best morals—depending on your own standards, honestly—Tristan does adhere to local laws. Mostly.

Which brings us to Cupboard Skeleton aka F??? aka Frederick aka Tristan-doesn’t-remember-the-guys-name-other-than-it-starts-with-F-and-he-was-an-ass-in-life-so-Frederick-it-is

Frederick McCupboardSkeleton is the skeleton that someone—Tristan doesn’t remember if it was him or not—shoved into his cupboard in between all the cereal boxes and liquor bottles. He has slowly become a cursed skeleton since his death. Tristan’s a vampire, he doesn’t have the power or magic to banish an angry spirit or seal non-human bones to trap him. But he can contain him and keep an eye on him until he figures out who this guy was and why he (Tristan) was involved with his death (Tristan assumes). Thus he’s cursed and Tristan doesn’t keep him all in one piece.

So if ya spot Tristan anywhere outside his apartment or his eldest brother’s house, you can assume that there’s a skull in his bag and that it’s Frederick and you’d be goddamn right. They’re a pair until Tristan figures shit out OR Frederick enacts whatever revenge plot(s) he’s got stewing in his skull.

Tristan’s the one that’s usually shit on publicly and openly out of his brothers.

Ji’s the eldest and raised them all. He the one you truly have to look out for but no one’s gonna say shit to his face or even in his general direction. He’s That Guy. He’s old magic and hellfire. He’s got a reputation older than human civilization.

Isidore is biologically Ji’s little brother. Just basically runs Ji’s Estate, acts like an assistant, keeps tabs on Tristan whenever he’s home and will watch Frederick’s skull. Because he’s actually a witch that can deal with restless spirits. Not as intense as any of his brothers or his mother. The Calm One.

And the youngest is Luca. He’s a werewolf. No one truly knows if he was born that way or infected or born from infected parents. His origins are as unknown as Tristan’s. Luca was practically a baby when their mother brought him home. Just as traumatized and repressing just as much as his vamp brother. But Luca is Dealing with it, because he’s the Most Responsible of the four. Some-fuckin-how. (Izzy’s The Calm One, but don’t think he won’t go off the rails. You just won’t know until it’s too late.)

Luca works as head of personal security for the Song Siblings—who go between all the realms really. But they’re usually on Earth working with humans so he’s the closest to Tristan—also closest in age. Luca sees most of the shit Tristan ends up doing. He’s the first to point out Frederick’s bones to Tristan, actually.

But as much as he shit-talks Tristan’s bad habits—mainly mixing up the milk bottles and blood bottles and liquor bottles in his fridge when the vamp is having cereal in his presence because Luca can smell all the things—he does it out of concern. Tristan isn’t indestructible, and even as a vampire, the amount of alcohol and cigarettes he goes through a day has to be doing something to his body. Also the sugar in his favorite cereals can’t be mixing well with the blood Tristan actually has to consume to sustain himself. If sugar affects the being that blood came from, it’s probably doing even more shitty things to his brother. He’s the one that will fight you then and there if he catches you. (Ji causes paranoia because what the fuck is he up to and wHEN, and no one ever suspects Izzy until After the Fact.) ((You just can’t shit on Tristan just to shit on him.))

Tristan got fucked up by his birth family, and then by being raised in an environment where he only had one source of sustenance and it was heavily laced with things that are addictive to vampires. Addictive in ways it fucked him up even more. Namely magic, but There’s More. It’s a Big Concern for everyone who knows, because ya can’t exactly synthesize that shit. There’s More changes anyone who’s exposed to it long enough, and Tristan’s been eating it since he was a babby vamp. He doesn’t have much choice but to live off it and he absolutely hates it.

Tristan has that habit of trying to kill something inside him he can’t see or remember. He’s picked up the habit of eating junk food that’s almost pure sugar, smoking, drinking anything. He’s a fucking neon sign of reasons why preternatural mental health is A Thing they should be researching more. But also the poster boy of: We should be taking a vampire’s physical health more seriously than Just-Feed-Them-Blood.

But catch Tristan passing on some profound wisdom to school kids and anyone that reminds him of Luca. Partly because he feels like a shitty brother so here kid have some advice. Also because Ji won’t let Tristan suspend too much time with either of his kids, even with Ji’s son being 20-something now. Like, he gets it, and he’s not proud of it being that, but he’s not really changing because he has Luca and the Song Siblings. He has his friends in Louisiana. He’s buddies with Willy Shakes--

Now I’m spewing all this bullshit because a lot of it comes from a story I scrapped where Luca’s a teenager and Ji has the one kid and you meet the Song Siblings before they’re ever—Celebrities, I guess??

Because Tristan was worse. He was the brother you absolutely hated. There, you had the rest of the brothers who followed the law and then Tristan who was headed towards a Dead End. But when it came down to it, he was there for Luca. Because he was the only one there. Tristan risked himself for this baby werewolf and his friends.

And that’s where my tag in that one post comes in. Where it ties in with my dialogue posts.

It has to do with Tristan watching sad scared little witch Celia Song growing up confident-in-herself Song Seonmi.

Tristan has a habit of flirting with everything, mainly dating ghosts so far, so he has no fucking clue when she got under his skin. And as much as Luca tells him to back off his friend (and boss) he really can’t be mad that Tristan dropped The Worst of his habits to keep seeing her. Because the first time she walked out of his life completely was a disaster until Tristan figured out that she would keep disappearing before he ever reached her again so long as he was being a complete bastard. Because when she left she took her brother and his own with her. And he really didn’t want to go back to living on lockdown with Ji—or worse, with his mother in the hell-realm. Isolation does shit to you.

So the Tristan you see in the story is a better off vamp than the one from Alex and Celia’s story. That was. . . Bad. As in that story probably won’t ever see the light of day because I cried every time I sat down to write that Tristan. Like, maybe I’ll incorporate bits and pieces into other stories, and most of the TrisMi growth is written in their interactions. But I just can’t do it, yo. I love my trash vamp because there’s hope to him and just watching the change in him as he grows in the background of everyone else’s stories. I can’t write him being an Absolute Asshole.

What sealed the deal was when I wrote about Tristan losing control because of There’s More in his diet and Seonmi—still going by Celia at that point—does her damned best to try and snap him out of it. Like, my girl had hope in him and didn’t give up so I couldn’t either. Now here we are.

Tristan is as On Brand as I’ll ever be. Horrible Past, Trauma, Found Family, Walking Shitpost, Angst, and Hope. He don’t really know what he’s doing but he’s still going.

I mean yeah, I can get real deep about Tristan as a moment’s notice—i.e. this whole post because I’ve been in my feels tonight. Like, Tristan will do a bunch of shit to comfort himself. Dumpster fires. Speaking at preternatural schools (like cryptid academy I brainstormed with @ladymaliwan). Setting out food and drinks for Frederick’s skull because he feels awkward leaving none for the skull when he has his own.

Catch Tristan smokin cigs with the skull in a dumpster, both wearing sunglasses. Find trash vamp poppin out like Oscar the Grouch for advice. It’s not always good or profound, but he always got something. But also save him—because he’s sensitive to the sun as a ginger nocturnal vamp raised in a dark hell-realm, later an cold fog realm where a sun doesn’t really exist. Toss him in your trunk or a body bag to help him get home.

Dear lord, I can keep going and dump everything about him but this is long as it is. He’s one of my oldest characters. I created him before Isidore and Luca, but not too long after Ji and their mother—and Ji and their mom are fucking old. As in I’m finding scraps of paper where they’re mentioned. But it’s also telling that I’ve written Tristan on my blog more than any of my other OC’s for an original story.

#roxawrites #candy pop anon #tristan æfentid #song seonmi #luca æfentid #isidore æfentid #jianael æfentid #frederick mccupboardskeleton #listen I'll reblog this later at a more decent hour but currently the godless hours of 3am just feels right #also because i can't schedule an ask anymore?? #but I can't write tags on asks on desktop anymore either??? #i have such a large cast of characters that i gush about to friends #currently reworking some shit in worldbuilding but Tris won't change much I don't think #at least not as drastically that I'll scrap the story again and leave it at vague mentions #ladymaliwan #your tag since I mentioned cryptid pta story that I joked about tossing Tristan in once upon a time #also for adoring my trash vamp as much as i do #when the formatting gets fucked up after editing between devices because of the fuckin tags h el p