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Oct. 14th, 2016 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelav[ see this post for explanation & the masterlist of this meta series ]
Vau was now a statue of self-control. Etain said he always seemed utterly calm in the Force, even when he was shoving a vibroblade down someone’s gullet. Zey looked none the wiser. - True Colors
Control is a word that I’ve used a lot in these posts.
There’s a reason why.
the words’ serene’ ‘detached’ 'cold’ ‘calm’ (and similar descriptive words in that quadrant) appear so often in the books that i’m frankly surprised it’s not a running fandom joke that that Vau has All The Chill™‚ (’defrosting’ tho) (ty izzy :P) Thankfully - unlike some series - we have a handy no-shit way to see the character’s exact mental landscape, fairly untainted by biases: through the Jedi and what they sense in each of the characters.
Let’s get a few solid impressions of Vau, just because we can (and sources are gr8):
And the absence of malice and tension had been … ice- cold, calm, utterly detached Walon Vau. - Triple Zero
Vau was all brutality and expedience, as clear an example of the dark side for a Jedi as any she could imagine. And yet there was a total absence of conscious malice in him. She should have sensed anger and murderous intent, but Vau was just filled with … nothing. No, not nothing: he was actually calm and benign. He thought he was doing good work. And she saw her supposed Jedi ideal in him - motivated not by anger or fear, but by what she thought was right. - Triple Zero
Vau felt like a pool of utter cold calm, almost a Jedi Master’s footprint in the Force. […] Had it not been for Vau’s rifle and the strill’s savage teeth, the pair might have felt like a peaceful man and his happy child. - Triple Zero
Zey clasped his hands in front of him in that Jedi way, looking slightly sideways at Vau.
“Trying to sense any dark side in me, General?” Vau asked.
“You don’t feel remotely dark. Quite serene, actually.”
“I’ve been told that before, and that should set off your warning bells, jetii. Your senses need recalibrating. None of you can feel darkness right under your noses.” - Order 66
(absolutely irreverent/unrelated sidenote: oh man do i love villain-coded characters who flat out gleefully acknowledge that’s their lot in life - its so much more interesting how they got to that perception rather than just being in denial all along or not caring. I JUST …. )
>> Control as Image
Vau evidently has a mastery-level control of his own thoughts and emotions - enough that even in several high stress situations where he knows people are peeking into his mind, he’s able to contain that shit. That kind of control speaks of either intensive training, or a mildly alarming obsession (or both).
We also see it in his appearance as well - meticulous control as image and presenting a specific vibe.
Amusingly, one of his more humorous traits - the vanity - comes from this tendency.
Several times we see specific mentions to his state of dress and how precise it is – ('looked ill at ease outside of armor or formal uniform’ from Delta), and hair (’This is /not/ my style’ he complains when buzz-cutting his hair for undercover operations while rescuing Jikla), even down to the style armor - solid color, intimidating stark black at that, something that Kal even comments on at the end of TripZero.
(As any character designer worth their salt will tell you, people do respond to image more than we’d like to admit. He knows this, and tailors it accordingly.)
SO.
We’ve established that control is at minimum, a big fucking deal™ to Vau - let’s quickly break down some reasons why:
- Self control for combat survival
Self control, of course, in his line of business is a very good thing. You have to have nerves of steel if you’re behind enemy lines, to commit to a plan of action and escape - especially when you’ve got the threat of being a POW hanging over your head. (I doubt that the forces that he was up against paid much attention to the SW equivalent of the Geneva Conventions.) This would likely go even double since you know the man would be concerned about Mird, who’s always at his side.
- Learned control (from childhood)
High-wealth families (we’re talking near-royalty wealth) has its own set of very strict social rules - there’s been a number of interesting studies on classisim and stark behavioral traits that even kids start picking up on if they’re in that life. These rules would be drilled into even regardless if his abusive father was in the picture or not. He was, though - which compounded the iron necessity of understanding control from speech, posture, pain tolerance, to memorizing all the social rules, all the way to to control of emotion as abusers tend to feed off of obvious displays of weakness. (More on this in a sec.)
- Learned control (from interrogation training)
interrogation is practically the art of control itself - at its essence, you’re making people give up information that they wouldn’t otherwise. It’s about quickly analyzing what crude category of mental behavior and patterns your captive follows most, testing/exploiting that like a thief would test windows of houses before a break-in, knowing what patterns the captive will respond to best (whether it’s a friendly face, threat of pain, or actual pain/disorientation and then ‘talk time’ .*) - and then committing to it with a confidence that others have no choice to follow. He’s frighteningly good at manipulation and figuring out weak points to people’s minds. No doubt he was good at cold reading people beforehand and adjusting responses to that - but this certainly exacerbated (and honed) those tendencies.
- Control as a way of wielding power and authority (and a common pathway for his cruelty/sadism)
I’m sure we’ve all heard the 'power corrupts /absolute power corrupts absolutely’ line - and this is especially obvious during the Kamino years. One scene that particularly (almost jarringly) sticks out is the flashback where Ordo relates how Vau sicc’d Mird - a predator that knowingly has the inclination to eat human flesh - on him. When he was~4-6yrs biologically, no less. It’s a shockingly brutal, obvious display of control and spite that almost seems out of character … unless if you read between the lines and realize there was no social checks and balances on the cuy’val dar - they well and truly had absolute power.
(There’s other reasons why I would take a gander as to why that happened - and I’ll go into this later (general resentment, and spite against Kal being two big ones) - but yeesh.)
- Control as a coping mechanism ( to repress grief/anger/loss of agency)
Learned in childhood, it was - as mentioned before - a handy tool to pick up after Galidraan left him in tatters. This mental control was the #1 coping mechanism that he kept coming back to - so much that it became an emotional crutch and part and parcel of what makes him tick and move forward. Excruciatingly necessary to lock up the guilt, the rage, the grief and the loss and to resume functioning in the immediate years - it’s the one fail-safe when confronted by stresses.
( … to say the man has 'control issues’ is putting it mildly.)
There’s a cluster of the above reasons that I find interesting though, so let me put it another way -
>> BECOMING THE MASK
Vau, at his core, is a pretty textbook case of becoming the mask.
As mentioned specifically in the blurb about his childhood, Vau was essentially trained as a child to be what others wanted him to be (by putting on a socially acceptable mask of aloof wit and charm), and learned very early on the usefulness of said mask that could get him what he wanted (or needed, to survive). When Vau concealed displays of weakness, of pain and of failure - he was more or less left alone.
If he didn’t - let’s just say his own childhood has more similarity with Delta’s than one would expect.
As life went on, he forgot how to operate without ever taking it off (so to speak), and thusly started disconnecting from his actual emotional needs. His trust in other people suffered. His overall attitude towards humanity - already dim to begin with - remained barely above contempt. And so Vau ultimately found himself trapped in a vicious cycle of being afraid to trust others with potential emotional weakness - which simply further reinforced that social isolation.
(There’s a reason why I’ve always thought of him as the loneliest of the cast. )
Too many of his offhand-comments are simply venting that repressed emotion in a socially acceptable way. Here’s one -
Vau wandered out to join the inspection. “He’ll go like Jango.” Mird tiptoed around them, leaving remarkably misleading footprints.
“The first bereavement knocks the guts out of him, and then the next one turns him into something frightening, and all the anger gets swallowed and recycled into long-term retribution. But don’t worry. It kept Jango going on a slave ship all those years, and it’ll keep Kal alive, too. It’s a Mando thing- long memory, short fuse, big revenge.” - Order 66
He’s not talking only about Kal. Not for one moment.
Another:
Vau looked back over his shoulder, a rather splendid pearl-inlaid blaster shimmering in his holster. “I’m going for the casual but menacing look. Glad I pulled it off…”
“It’s the Arakyd special, Walon. Says more about you than credits ever can.” The gangster look was less conspicuous here than full Mandalorian armor. […] “Looks rather expensive.”
“Another bauble from the Vau deposit box. My great-grandfather is said to have shot a servant with it for serving his caf too hot.”
Skirata almost went for the bait. “You’re just saying that to make me mad, aren’t you?”
Vau’s expression was unreadable. “You know I’d never do such a thing.”
Mereel put a restraining hand on Skirata’s shoulder as he overtook him. The terrible thing about Vau and his family was that it was perfectly possible.- True Colors
>> FEAR: LOSING THAT CONTROL
On the flip side of the coin of obsessive need for control - we have his biggest fear. Whether it’s losing self-control or control over events that pertain to him and his own - we see it both ways.
Now I will say that, generally (this is a very loose generally), he doesn’t really care about control over others. His leash on the commandos tightened on Kamino, yes - but then, remarkably, in comparison to Kal who is a bona fide king of social control - Vau is shockingly hands-off regarding the commandos doing their own thing during the war. (Implied ’You can stay with the empire or with us, it’s your choice’, Vau checking up on Scorch after the attack on the base and being extraordinarily accepting there, him arguing for Darman to be aware of Etain’s pregnancy enough to make his own choice, etc.)
(Individual choice - the chance for free will - is way more important to him than you’d think.)
However, when the mask does crack - is also right when control is yanked from underneath him.
And the mask usually cracks with a bang.
- The confrontation in TripZero with Atin? -> Atin pushing back at his authority unexpectedly.
- The clawing realization about Jango’s plans all along? -> Loosing control at his own quest for revenge and being able to lay a stinging blow on the Jedi.
- When Kal recruits Scout and Kina Ha - two very massive security breaches that Kal handwaves for emotional reasons? -> Kal violating Vau’s unspoken boundary of keeping that haven safe.
- When he spots Priest and Reau too close to Kyrimout? -> Seeing Death Watch ~ghosts from the past~ suddenly violate that ‘we were supposed to be safe here’ mental boundary.
After every one of those, there’s a blowup of some kind. The kind of blowup that’s clearly a reaction to wanting to grab events by the tail and wrest them back in how they were supposed to be.
Otherwise? Ice-king mentality to the max.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that a thread of that fear goes all the way back into refusing to admit that he’s become his father, in some ways. All the confrontations with Atin - and their whole arc - is a living testament to that.
.
And yet, at the end of the day, suppressing feelings only goes so far.
As much as he tries to pointedly ignore any inconvenient emotions - and/or replace them with moral codes or other emotional crutches - all of this will still be a thorn in his side … unless there is deliberate time spent on starting down the path of acknowledgement and acceptance.
Hard, and maybe too late for some - but not impossible.
.
* on interrogation: most of it is psychological, and way way more than ‘lop off a finger or two, then we talk’. really, by the time that you’re having to commit to an action of violence (and physical violation), you’ve already screwed up.
