Reflection: Eyes on Elysium
If Isadora was meant to balance Grey’s sensibilities, Callie exists to exacerbate the worst in him.
People who know me know well that I don’t tolerate bullies or manipulators well. I don’t like being made to feel like I’m being coerced into doing something, especially if I don’t understand the why behind what I’m doing. Call it a quirk of my neurodivergence, or call it stubbornness, either would be appropriate, and Callie, like all Ventrue, was brought into the world with a level of entitlement.
If you’re not familiar with the game, Ventrue are the “blue bloods” of society. Those who are of a “higher class” and act like it. Callie, as Marcus’ childer, has an even greater dose of that entitlement, though I would never be so lazy as to make her so two-dimensional. There’s more to her than you or Grey knows right now, but for first impressions her current behavior is enough to show her role in the story well. As the story is meant to circle around Grey and his development (especially at this point) as a means of therapeutic activity for me, it wouldn’t serve me not to include something so antagonistic.
Marcus, while an antagonist for Grey in this story, is too great a problem for Grey to deal with and too powerful for him to continually mouth off to. Natalia allows him to get away with a lot, but there is a limit. Just as I can mouth off about all the bullies and manipulators in the real world that are causing so many problems (government, oligarchs, bought and sold ‘news’ networks, the list goes on and on), but I can’t really do anything about them. Just like Grey, if I were to spend all my time verbally attacking or sparring with them, I would eventually look like a petulant child or become the kind of person no one wants to be around. I’ll take a few shots here and there, but eventually I need to go about my day and move on.
Callie, on the other hand, represents that issue on a much smaller scale. Much how the Defenders want to take care of crime on the street level and leave the more cosmic threats to the Avengers, Grey needs to learn to focus on what’s in front of him rather than get too lost in the grander ideas and issues that permeate his thoughts. Callie represents those closer to home issues, things that may be annoying to deal with, but can be dealt with. And, as you may suspect, can be dealt with in a way beyond the utter destruction of either the problem or the self.
What would it take to solve the problems of the world? I can list off a few things: Remove criminals from the government, get money out of politics, make hoarding wealth to the point of creating poverty not only illegal but impossible… and I cannot do any of those things. If you haven’t seen the Mighty Nein, there’s a great line from a character, Fjord, where he tells another character, Beau, that she wasn’t the cause of the war because she “can’t do anything alone.” What sounds like an insult is profound. We can neither save the world nor destroy it by ourselves. We need to band together for that. We need each other in order to make anything better, while those in power have each other and are able to make things infinitely worse.
Neither I nor Grey have gotten to the point where we’re able to lean on others in the way we need to in order to actually do anything. And while Diego has given him the first taste of friendship he’s had in a while and Isadora is able to balance him and help him understand the blind spots in his own self, Callie stands as probably one of the most important members of this coterie because she challenges him. She is his adversary if not his enemy. We can all be blind to our strengths and weaknesses, so we need a nurturing hand in order to direct us, but Callie is that alternate world view that we don’t just not see, but actively avoid looking at. I have a tendency to look at the world in terms of black and white, right and wrong, but history shows us that nothing is ever that simple and clean.
I read something the other night, and it’s stuck with me: “If you are easily offended, you are easily manipulated.” It’s not hard to get me to raise my hackles. Show me injustice, show me cruelty, show me people in power abusing those below them and you will have motivated me against something. Callie is of the clan of “blue bloods,” she is a representation of hierarchy and the class war, and she is everything that I as a person have learned to, and chosen to, hate.
But hatred without context is just as pathetic as any kind of ism-based reason for hating. While I still firmly believe that there is no such thing as a moral billionaire, while I still believe that no one should be above the law (or be allowed to make laws in such a way that they are exempting themselves from them), and while I firmly stand by my belief that the scales of justice in this world are horribly misaligned, Callie represents those that are born into the world differently from me, but not in the way that I have learned to pity or support. No one in that world chose to be born into it, and perhaps there are those within it that, while not good, are not evil. Perhaps there are some that are just trying to survive the cruelty of it just as much as the rest of us.
And imagine what welcoming those people onto our team would be like. What knowledge they could possess, what weaknesses they could help us exploit, and what changes they could help make if they were willing to allow the ivory tower to collapse in hopes of building a better landscape.
