#VTNiL | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jaydawnsin · 1 year

Text

10/19/2022

I want to write something in response to a comment I got on Vanity, Thy Name is Leo, but I don’t wanna publish it yet cause there’s spoilers for what I intend to do with the story, so this is a scheduled post. I want so badly to respond but responding would ruin the surprises I have in store for this fic, that I’m assuming is now complete as of the posting of this post. I hope it’s complete, it’ll be about 3 months before this post is published xD

This is not a call to witch hunt this person, in fact I'm glad they left this comment cause it made me really deep dive into the motivations for why the characters in VTNiL act the way they do and it was honestly a really nice comment overall. The comment was, and I'm paraphrasing heavily here, "I wonder why Leo is so vain in your story when, in canon, he's really not."

To answer this question, I'm gonna go into the features of First Person Perspective. Stick with me here, I have my reasons and it’ll make sense soon.

First Person is a way of writing a story where you’re basically in someone's head for the duration of the story, chapter, etc. You see what they see, you experience what they experience, and the only information you have is the information that that character has. This is important.

The pros of this are that you know exactly what the character is thinking and the view you get of the story is very personal. It makes it easy to feel an emotional attachment to the story because the character is invested in their own life for obvious reasons.

The cons are that you only know what that character knows. If that character has a bias or preconceived notion about something or someone, or if they don’t have all the facts, which they almost never do, you will experience that bias, that lack of information, and maybe assume that you have all of the facts when you really don’t.

Fan fiction is mainly written in 3rd person in my experience, as someone who’s been reading fan fiction for fifteen years and reads thousands of words almost every day. We’re very used to getting a holistic view of the plot, which has its perks, but we don’t get that in 1st so you may not realize that a character is an unreliable narrator until the perspective shifts to a very different one.

Why is this important? Well, let's look at how VTNiL starts. The opening line is "Leon is the most vain person I know." This is true. Donnie doesn’t have a lot of friends, so Leo, from Donnie's perspective, with his love of things relating to self expression and self care, is actually be extremely vain in Donnie's opinion.

But here's the thing. The first line of the story, the entire first chapter even, is dripping in a distorted perspective of Leo's character. Leo looks vain in comparison to what Donnie values because Donnie doesn’t care about his appearance all that much.

If we were going to look at this from a holistic POV, here are the facts:

- Leo does care about his appearance, but he only takes like 30-45 mins to get ready, not the hours that Donnie says, not because Donnie's lying, but because Donnie is Leo's brother and he's bound to find Leo doing something that he doesn’t see much value in as frustrating and time consuming, especially when it stops them from doing what he needs to do to get ready for school, something Donnie cares very much about. It's an exaggeration based off of frustration, something that people do all of the time.

- Leo also hasn’t filled the entire bathroom full of cosmetics. He has a few items that he needs and likes, but Donnie sees it as a lot because he doesn’t care for this type of thing.

- Lastly, Leo caring about his appearance isn’t rooted in self love or a feeling that he’s more attractive than others, it’s rooted in his lack of self worth. Leo only gets praise and attention for his looks. He’s intelligent, but when you sit him next to Donnie, they outshine him. He’s strong, but Raph is a hulk of a dude so in comparison, he looks like a twig. He’s creative, but Mikey is the artist of the family. Leo’s charismatic and attractive and people flock to him because of this, but his appearance isn’t something he necessarily worked for, in his opinion. It’s not a talent, it’s just his face. Never mind that it does take talent to put together outfits and makeup that look cohesive, that styling his hair to look so nice is an actual skill that he needed to learn, compared to his siblings, he feels over shadowed.

So to answer the question posed by my lovely reader, why does this version of Leo obsess over his appearance when in canon he doesn't? The answer is that he isn’t obsessed with his appearance. He’s obsessed with other people’s opinion of him and that’s intrinsically tied to his appearance in this AU, but if his intelligence was the thing getting him attention, he would put a lot of effort into studying because this boy is starved for affection. Splinter isn’t the best father, he’s not gonna show up a whole lot in this story from what I remember of my outline, and his absence is a statement in and of itself. Splinter is not there for his sons emotional well being. Raph is basically the parent of his siblings, but he’s only a year or two older than Leo. He’s not gonna get everything right and the emotional neglect a child experiences from early on in life is hard to heal. If someone is starved for affection the way these boys are in this au, they’re gonna do what they need to do to get it. Raph becomes protective of his siblings, Mikey finds friends at school through his love of art, and Donnie has online friends that he spends time with but Donnie also tends to be avoidant of people. Leo went the opposite way and let everyone’s opinion of him affect his self worth and that’s not healthy.

Going back to the point I was trying to make, I felt like it was important to overemphasis how much Leo works on his appearance because when Leo doesn’t spend as much time on his appearance as usual, Donnie notices and that is the important part. Donnie doesn’t see their brother as someone that is starved for affection, he sees his brother as a sort of peacock. Very showy, loud, and colorful. Attention grabbing, not attention seeking. They have a very surface level understanding of Leo’s motivations.

The important part of that chapter was that this is the moment that Donnie, a person who by all accounts is not great at understanding people and emotions, someone who also doesn’t understand Leo as a person because their view points of the world are so different, notices that Leo is acting different. Leo’s been acting different for months at this point, but this is the point where the least likely person to noticed does take notice. That is what I want the focus to be on, because Leo as a character is not very open about how he truly feels. He hides behind his different masks, deflects constantly, and never seems to take anything seriously and if you catch a glimpse of genuine emotion, it’s either because he did it on purpose or because his mask is slipping. You as the reader didn’t have enough information yet because this was only the first chapter and you’ve only read Donnie’s perspective as of the writing of this post.

By all accounts, the assumption most readers will probably make is that I as a writer don’t understand Leo as a character, not that I’m distorting Donnie’s perspective. To be completely fair, the former is the more likely option than the latter so I understand the natural inclination.

By the way, the title of the story is also a cheeky little joke. It’s titled like that because it’s the first thing the reader is told about Leo and the first thing I told you about Leo is a statement that is fundamentally incorrect about his character. It’s a trait that’s important to his character in this AU that will be explored as I continue to write the story, but it’s exaggerated and biased. This story is a lesson in realizing that we don’t always know what’s going on in other people’s lives and our view of those around us is fundamentally imperfect and biased, even when it’s someone that we should, by all accounts, be very close to. It’s something I, as an actual person in real life, have had to learn the hard way and it’s something I try to remind myself of frequently.

This isn’t to say that the commenter is dumb for not noticing these very small details and coming to the intended conclusion, btw. I could tell that they were already questioning what was happening in the story and it made me so excited to see someone contemplating what I intended to happen! It shows an investment in something that I created and I think that’s absolutely fantastic.

We as fan fiction readers and writers are used to overloading and being overloaded by entirely too many details, which I’m not knocking. I love highly detailed stories, I eat that shit up, but when a story doesn’t do that, it’s hard for us to realize how much depth is intended with the details that we do get, especially when it’s only around 1,000 words at first. A fan fic reader may be reading upwards of 30k words a night, if they’re anything like me at least, and 1,100 words is a tiny amount to try to read into when I haven’t given ya’ll a whole lot to work with. That being said, just about everything I include has a purpose. Raph noticing that April’s at a restaurant in chapter two, for example, is a subtle way of hinting that Leo probably isn’t with her and that she’s busy with her family so she can’t help them look for Leo right now. It’s a way of telling you that information without actually telling you.

So to end this off, thank you for the comment @obsessingoverthisandthat. It was the first comment I got on VTNiL and while I absolutely adore reading all of the other comments, this particular one had me sitting for hours thinking about this question and fundamentally changed the direction I decided to take this story.

#VTNiL #rottmnt #rottmnt leo #ao3 fanfic

13 notes · View notes