Intro
From our class assignment this week, we were asked to imagine cities as person by using some descriptions that our classmates wrote about certain places/cities. I came late to class that day so I couldn't have a chance to describe my own place/city so I just created a "person" based from one of my classmate's description.
Some of the few description given that I decided to develop on were:
- Developed small town
- Hot / Sunlight
- Palm trees
- Famous won ton mee
- Old train station
From this description, I created a some sort of villa (?) on top of a bottle to show a modern and new building. Meanwhile, on the front side, I drew modern buildings and old buildings to visualise the developed small town, a sun for the hot sunlight, a railroad for the old train station and some wavy lines for the famous won ton mee. Since the overall imagery gave off some very villa and holiday vibes, I decided to add a small pool of water at the bottom and palm trees to add on to the hot / sunlight description.
Overall, it was quite an interesting assignment which really got my mind working more than usual. Thus, after this class assignment, we were asked to analyse any character of our choice and break it down into a few parts.
Character Analysis: Vaas Montenegro
For my character analysis, I decided to choose a character from the popular game franchise Far Cry 3 which is an open world first shooter game and is set on a fictional Indonesian island called Rook Island.
I chose this character as I had recently finished the game and out of all the characters, he was one of the more complex and well-written character in the game. Thus, he became my first choice for this assignment and before I start, I would like to say this analization do contain spoilers and I apologize for that should anyone that's reading this would ever be interested in playing this game.
Background
Set in a fictional Indonesian island called Rook Island, Vaas Montenegro is a pirate gang leader and is the secondary antagonist for Far Cry 3. He is considered as the main antagonist for the first half of the game as our main character, Jason Brody, was directly involved with him on numerous events leading up to his death.
Vaas is not only a pirate gang leader but he is also the Second-in-Command for the main antagonist- Hoyt Volker. Hoyt is a maniacal "businessman" who trafficked both slaves and drugs around the world and in some way or another, some of the drugs that he sold ended up at Vaas and he soon became addicted to it. His addiction to drugs lead him to establish contact with Hoyt and this caused him to become Hoyt's Second-in-Command as Hoyt saw some potential in his violent and unpredictable personality as a way to help him grow his illegal buisness. From this encounter, Vaas soon started helping Hoyt with his business by planting marijuana fields on the island all the while kidnapping and selling locals on Rook Island into slavery until his death.
Before he became a pirate leader and started his reign of terror on the island, he was a member of the local island tribe called The Rakyat and was the brother of the tribe's leader, Citra. Thus, making his betrayal towards the tribe and the island natives all the more hard hitting and explains the reason as to why the Rakyat warriors and natives despises him.
Appearance and Personality
Now that we got some background information about him, lets get into his appearance and personality.
From the pictures above, Vaas appears as a "rough" looking character who carries numerous cuts and scars that are visible on his head and forehead. These details speaks for itself as it immediately shows him as a person who gets into rough and rowdy situations way too often and the long scar trailing from his eyebrows to his head proves just that.
The visible dark circles around his eyes also adds onto the rough effect and in a way, could be related to him being mentally deranged as I do think someone who is deeply mentally disturbed in the head won't be getting too much sleep compared to a normal person.
As for his hairstyle, he dons a Mohawk hairstyle and I personally think it suits his character as people tend to view those with a Mohawk as wild and rebellious. Although in this case, he leans more towards the violent and sadistic side rather than the wild and rebellious side.
In terms of his clothing choices as shown in the picture below, his outfit is quite simple as he only wears a red tank-top and jeans alongside some accessories such as a necklace, bracelets and a gun holster- for his weapon of choice which seems to be a handgun.
If we were to look more into his outfit, we can see bandages that are basically wrapped around all of his fingers. Why? To me personally I think it is to add some grip and cushioning when he's aiming a gun as I can imagine that a gun's handle can be quite rough to the hands. Or maybe because it could be him just covering up cuts and bruises on his hands. Or it could just be a fashion choice. Who knows. But I like to think of it as the first reasoning.
Looking into his physical build, he is considered to be quite slender but muscular and toned. His physical build is easily explained as he grew up on an island that is covered with lush jungles and is constantly doing physical and rough work due to his line of work.
Personality wise, Vaas Montenegro has been described by some characters in the game as a violent, insane, unpredictable, psychotic, sadistic, mentally unstable, prideful and remorseless character. This behaviour of his is very on point as to how he acts in the game that his official tittle by the game creators during the game first few introductory trailers was The Psychopath.
Players are first introduced to Vaas in beginning of the game when the main character Jason and his brother Grant Brody was held captive by him in a cage. He was deliberately taunting the two of them and instilling fear into them by telling them that he has already shot one of their friends. He also explained that they're "helpless" as they're in his territory and they can't escape from him.
As Jason and Grant escaped from the cage, they reached to a midpoint where they were discussing further escape plans when Grant was suddenly shot in the chest by Vaas. Jason was given the chance to escape by Vaas while he taunts him by telling him that its futile to outrun him and his men as the forest will swallow him first.
This scene displays his prideful behaviour subtly since he has an upper-hand against Jason due to his extensive knowledge regarding jungle survival and the amount of power him and his men holds, but it also shows his unpredictability as he could've just shot Jason right there and then. Maybe him giving Jason a head-start is considered an entertainment to him as he wants to watch Jason's failure in escaping him but it also introduces us to his constant unpredictability.
More of his erratic personality can be seen in numerous events and one of it was during a specific scene where Jason was tricked during a rescue mission. In the mission, Jason was told to stop a truck that supposedly contained kidnapped Rakyat warriors whereas in reality, it was merely a decoy by Vaas to capture and kill Jason as he was the only one in the truck.
During a cut scene after Jason was knocked out by Vaas when he opened the truck door, Vaas gave Jason what is considered as an iconic Insanity Monologue. While it is clear that he can be mentally deranged at times and there are clear hints of him being a Psychopath, his monologue is considered remarkable as it shows that he still has hints of a clear mind as he's able to form a complex narration instead of merely reciting a famous saying. (Websell, 2018)
Continuing on, his psychopathic personality may or may notbeen awoken when he did his first kill for his sister, Citra. He explained how she thought his ways may have been too brutal, thus making his sister turn away from him. Her rejection implicates that she is one of the reason as to why he went into insanity.
He also enjoys torturing people even in their final moments as in the monologue scene, players are able to see Rakyat warriors being chained to their feet onto some heavy cinder blocks before being thrown into the lake to drown, before pushing the main character into the lake as well. This shows his lack of remorse as he could easily kill the people that he has considered to be his family at one point of his life.
However, the final and most fitting example of his overall personality can be seen in a promotional video for Far Cry 3 titled as The Far Cry Experience. This event is set 3 a few days before the event of Far Cry 3 and it shows celebrity Christopher Mintz-Plasse and his camera men Barry being captured and tortured to death by Vaas as they were making a survival-promotional video for Far Cry 3. While it is worth to note that The Far Cry Experience is live-action, the actor who of Vaas- who is also the voice actor for the character, did a notable job in playing Vaas as he was able to capture the character's personality perfectly.
In the video, Vaas sadistic nature is shown multiple time when he made a captive called Jeniffer choose which one of the two men held hostage deserved to live as he guided her with shooting the gun. While she was hesitant, Vaas made her pull the trigger by putting his hand on hers and shoot both men while teasing her saying she was greedy for shooting both men instead of one as ordered. Jeniffer, traumatised and crying was bought away into his camp. It isn't shown but it is implied that she was tortured as well when we see a shot of her being tied up along with Barry. He also showed no remorse when he blew Barry up with a rocket launcher and he even told Barry to stop shouting for his life as his shouting was "distracting him."
After the scene with Jeniffer and Barry, his endless torture continued for days as he moves onto Christopher and has him buried into the sand while exposing only his head. Some of his torture method includes covering Christopher's head with a glass jar with spiders, setting off firecrackers in his face and shocking him with a car battery. All the while he broadcast this event using a camera and asking viewers to vote for his fate weather he was to live or die. In the end scene, Vaas told Christopher that the viewers surprisingly voted for him to live and as he was talking to Christopher, he noticed that he wasn't responding and told him to wake up as he had played "dead" a few times in the past few days.
As he realized Christopher wasn't playing dead and he was indeed dead, us- the viewers- gets a glimpse of his other side as he actually tried to revive Christopher by giving him mouth-to-mouth resurrection, twice. As he failed to revive him, Vaas can be seen genuinely mourning for his death. Although while he was mourning, his men informed him that 6 more people has arrived on the island which made him jump back to his feet and proceeded to "greet" them.
This shows how unpredictable he can be as he seems to jump from one emotion to another very quickly- especially for an emotion as strong as grief. Although this might be due to him being mentally unstable or he just has a very short attention span, but overall, it just shows how complex and unpredictable he is as a character since he doesn't necessarily fit into the one-dimensional antagonist mold. He can be violent and mentally deranged in one scene yet shows some remorse or conscious towards his actions in another scene- which isn't very typical of a character like him.
Conclusion
Overall, Vaas Montenegro is a complex and interesting antagonist character because as I said earlier, he doesn't have a one-dimensional antagonist personality. I personally think that Ubisoft did a great job in developing his character because instead of being a plain and boring character that you had to kill, us as the players actually got to know the way he thinks and his very much messed up reasoning as to why he acts so irrationally violent and sadistic.
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