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BASICS
Full Name: Vasiliy Fet
Canon: The Strain; mainly FX show w/ a lil bit of the books
Canon Synopsis: Vamp lore meets apocalyptic pandemic meets body horror for kicks meets historical/sociopolitical commentary meets Scooby-Doo gang in a bread truck; listen this show tried to be A Lot of Things
Canonpoint: Willing to play from any, but for memes and crosscanon stuff will prob default to pre-canon; that way nobody's unwittingly aboard the crazy Strain vampires train
Scene examples: one | two (CW for Holocaust and suicide mentions)
Age: 40ish
Aliases: The Russian (he's not); The Ratcatcher
Profession: Exterminator for New York City Pest Control
Nationality: USSR-born, NYC-immigrant. Moved from Ukraine to Brooklyn in his teens. Parents pretended to be Russian, having already shortened their surname from Fetrovsky to Fet (more on the surname change here)
Physical Details: 6'6" + / 200 cm and change, with a build that's leanish but still stupid bigger and broader than most ppl's. Black hair, usually cut short but with a few floppy locks; various degrees of bearded, from goatee to goaty. Eyes a v pale blue that can be quite genial or scary glarey, u pick
Voice: Nimble baritone, with an accent that's Brooklyn by way of Soviet Kyiv, or My Cousin Vinny had a baby with Boris Badenov. Fluent in English, Russian and Ukrainian
APPEARANCE
Fet's the kind of outlandishly tall you still think you're familiar with, 'cause you've heard numbers like 6'6" in sports stuff or GoT actor stats or whatever. Until you see it in person, and then it's just, what the shit. Can actually seem kinda lanky from a distance, but get closer and it'll be clear he's only proportionately long-limbed, muscled through the length of each.
Features are prominent as the rest of him: broad brow, big cheeks, toothy teeth. Grins get pegged as smug and shit-eating a lot (and sometimes they are), but mostly it's his particular facial structure making it tough for him to smile any other way. Complexion ruddy-pale without running to sunburnt, since he doesn't tend to be in a lot of direct sun; it's not where the creepy crawlies are.
Distinguishing marks include:
Tattoos
- on his back between his shoulder blades: the eagle from Poland's coat of arms
- upper right shoulder: Russian firebird in a cage
- upper left shoulder: Ukrainian tryzub (trident)
- inner right bicep: Cyrillic script; in Russian it reads WATCH OUT FOR MYSHKA (mousie)
Scars
- myriad small ones from trips in cellars, slips in sewers, fumbles with rat traps and rat teeth
- couple old, dumb welding and soldering burns on hands and arms
- some gnarly marks in his outer left thigh, where he took the brunt of a (fortunately small) botched explosives test
- scar tissue in upper lip, from miraculously not breaking his teeth on other people's fists, but busting the skin up just fine
PERSONALITY
It's an enjoyable character archetype, the cheerful killer of bad guys, the dude who does what needs to be done in a crisis (and if that's killing you before you turn into a baddie, sorry bud, nothing personal—); the one who can commit brutal acts of violence all in the service of good, and genuinely not lose sleep over it later. But what would somebody like that actually be like, in the flesh? What specific and disturbing combo of nuture-mixed-with-nature would it take to power that dude, to let him run amiable if lone-wolfish most days, but fully capable of unflinching butchery on the flip side? Would you really want to be around him, put up with his 'big and boomy but also pretty chill till you hit my slaughter-it switch' shtick, in the longterm?
Pal around with Vasiliy Fet during the vampire apocalypse, you can find out.
Outside of slaying hangtime he is generally:
Hardworking, direct, irreverent. Comfortable with crudeness, and willing to play into the frequent perception that he is crude (and dense, and uneducated: all the predictable labels he gets as an exterminator, which many observers pretend to be past these days but absolutely are not). Can be weirdly sociable and easygoing for someone who prefers to do most things alone; and it's not superficial good-naturedness, just a sincere ability to roll with other people's quirks, as long as he's guaranteed to walk away later. Neurodivergently obsessive about his interests, projects and living space; can only benignly tolerate someone else's interference in any of these up to a point.
Possessed of an absolutely goddamn goofy sense of humor.
An obstinate combative asshole, when the mood strikes.
Highly pragmatic, but not cynical. Even seems optimistic, though in fact his brand is more realism that's just overwhelmingly at peace with how ugly real can get. Yet like all the most entertaining types of realists, at his 'push comes to shove get ready for my elbow' core, Fet's kinda thoroughly full of shit. Because he's been known to go out of his way to help others; keep an eye peeled for the welfare of perfect strangers; be stupidly brave, even when it's not his own ass on the line.
Implicitly trusting of his personal moral compass. And if it directs him to aid his fellow beings in a way that seems at odds with his talent for killing them, it's no less a driver.
SKILLS & INTERESTS
Pest control. Vasiliy knows a lot about vermin and how to vanquish them. This is not just a result of his official employment as an exterminator, but a lifelong interest in critters that can infiltrate and overwhelm human dwellings. While he specializes in Rattus norvegicus (he's not career-ambitious enough to be appointed NYC's rat czar, but in terms of knowledge alone he's on par with any worth-their-salt urban rodentologist) he's also well-versed in other "nuisance" mammals, insects, etc. Pretty much all your standard creepy-crawlies. His fascination with pest animals began as a child, when he started exploring dilapidated buildings and inevitably seeing examples where the pests won out long before the worst structural damage had been done. Which ties neatly in with some other areas of expertise –
Urban exploration and Architecture. Fet will tell you he was into urbex before the hipsters got a hold of it. Much of his childhood was spent discovering all the abandoned and/or ruined Soviet construction that cities like Kyiv, Kharkiv, Saint Petersburg and Moscow had to offer. His father Alexei was a civil engineer by trade, but his first love was pure architecture, and he often brought Vasya along during his travels to sites throughout the USSR. The elder Fet also planned for his son to become a professional architect in his stead, so the bulk of young Vasiliy's considerable education was devoted to that end. Yet he retained an interest in the disrepair of buildings, versus their design, that only increased with his family's relocation to a city with countless neglected and subterranean spaces: New York.
Explosives. The first time Vas watched controlled building implosion at work as a boy, while accompanying Alexei to some new project, he was hooked.* The process of a structure's obliteration intrigued him as much as its creation, and the inherent danger appealed directly to nascent makings of an adrenaline junkie. In his subsequent years still in Ukraine, and rubbing elbows with – to put it lightly – "the wrong crowd," kid-Fet seized every possible opportunity to experiment with stuff that goes boom. After moving to the States, he grew much more careful about maintaining this hobby. But he still willingly risks bodily harm (and rampant legal troubles) to engage in the weird super sketchy world of recreational blasting.
*The Strain implies that Fet's obsession with blowing shit up is rooted in pest control's use of pyrotechnics to disperse wild animals without injuring them. From what I've gathered, the type of explosives employed for this purpose wouldn't typically be at the top of an urban exterminator's arsenal. So my headcanon is that Fet became a bombophile way before the pest control aspect would have been a factor for him.
Firearms and Fighting. wip!
BACKGROUND
Pre-canon: Vasiliy was born in Soviet Ukraine to Alexei and Olena Fet. Alexei changed his surname from Fetrovsky to Fet years before Vasily's birth. This was mainly an attempt to escape any connection with his own father, a Holocaust collaborator; although Alexei chose the name "Fet" specifically because he thought it sounded American, and had always planned to move his young family to the United States.
In the USSR Alexei's status as an engineer afforded him a measure of success and prestige, so that even during the Cold War he was able to forge connections with American companies, learn English and ensure it was taught to his wife and son. Sometime before Ukrainian independence, Alexei moved the family to Brooklyn, New York. Once emigrated he accepted a professorship in engineering, and generally claimed to be Russian, publicly disavowing his Ukrainian heritage for decades.
Vasiliy's upbringing was a relatively strict one, beholden to Alexei's plan for his son to acquire an excellent education and become an architect in America. The boy was bright and eager to learn, at least where certain subjects were concerned. Yet he gravitated as much to physical exercise as to his favorite books, with a rambunctious, at times theatrical streak which the reserved Alexei was particularly ill-equipped to handle; and he managed to get into trouble, frivolous and serious alike. Though Vasya himself was often away at boarding school, his group of neighborhood ne'er-do-wells included the children of arms-dealers. By the age of nine he was using Tokarevs for target practice on lemonade bottles. By the age of twelve his best friend, an older Polish boy named Jan, was killed by another group's stray bullets. Despite this tragedy, Vasiliy maintained an interest in firearms and explosives which followed him into adulthood.
As a teenager in Brooklyn, Vasiliy simultaneously seemed to "settle down," on the surface appearing less likely to seek out the city's roughest areas; and also to become somewhat less of a dedicated student. Still, he managed to test exceptionally well throughout high school, earned a scholarship and even completed college courses. On track to receive a bachelor's degree and a grant to study architecture at Cornell, he abruptly dropped out, informing his father he'd be working full-time at the pest control company which had constituted his after-school job. Needless to say, this did not go over well with Alexei. The two fought ferociously, and Vas was kicked out of the house. Over the next twenty years, he and Alexei would only speak in person again a handful of times.
wip!
Full Name: Vasiliy Fet
Canon: The Strain; mainly FX show w/ a lil bit of the books
Canon Synopsis: Vamp lore meets apocalyptic pandemic meets body horror for kicks meets historical/sociopolitical commentary meets Scooby-Doo gang in a bread truck; listen this show tried to be A Lot of Things
Canonpoint: Willing to play from any, but for memes and crosscanon stuff will prob default to pre-canon; that way nobody's unwittingly aboard the crazy Strain vampires train
Scene examples: one | two (CW for Holocaust and suicide mentions)
Age: 40ish
Aliases: The Russian (he's not); The Ratcatcher
Profession: Exterminator for New York City Pest Control
Nationality: USSR-born, NYC-immigrant. Moved from Ukraine to Brooklyn in his teens. Parents pretended to be Russian, having already shortened their surname from Fetrovsky to Fet (more on the surname change here)
Physical Details: 6'6" + / 200 cm and change, with a build that's leanish but still stupid bigger and broader than most ppl's. Black hair, usually cut short but with a few floppy locks; various degrees of bearded, from goatee to goaty. Eyes a v pale blue that can be quite genial or scary glarey, u pick
Voice: Nimble baritone, with an accent that's Brooklyn by way of Soviet Kyiv, or My Cousin Vinny had a baby with Boris Badenov. Fluent in English, Russian and Ukrainian
APPEARANCE
Fet's the kind of outlandishly tall you still think you're familiar with, 'cause you've heard numbers like 6'6" in sports stuff or GoT actor stats or whatever. Until you see it in person, and then it's just, what the shit. Can actually seem kinda lanky from a distance, but get closer and it'll be clear he's only proportionately long-limbed, muscled through the length of each.
Features are prominent as the rest of him: broad brow, big cheeks, toothy teeth. Grins get pegged as smug and shit-eating a lot (and sometimes they are), but mostly it's his particular facial structure making it tough for him to smile any other way. Complexion ruddy-pale without running to sunburnt, since he doesn't tend to be in a lot of direct sun; it's not where the creepy crawlies are.
Distinguishing marks include:
Tattoos
- on his back between his shoulder blades: the eagle from Poland's coat of arms
- upper right shoulder: Russian firebird in a cage
- upper left shoulder: Ukrainian tryzub (trident)
- inner right bicep: Cyrillic script; in Russian it reads WATCH OUT FOR MYSHKA (mousie)
Scars
- myriad small ones from trips in cellars, slips in sewers, fumbles with rat traps and rat teeth
- couple old, dumb welding and soldering burns on hands and arms
- some gnarly marks in his outer left thigh, where he took the brunt of a (fortunately small) botched explosives test
- scar tissue in upper lip, from miraculously not breaking his teeth on other people's fists, but busting the skin up just fine
PERSONALITY
It's an enjoyable character archetype, the cheerful killer of bad guys, the dude who does what needs to be done in a crisis (and if that's killing you before you turn into a baddie, sorry bud, nothing personal—); the one who can commit brutal acts of violence all in the service of good, and genuinely not lose sleep over it later. But what would somebody like that actually be like, in the flesh? What specific and disturbing combo of nuture-mixed-with-nature would it take to power that dude, to let him run amiable if lone-wolfish most days, but fully capable of unflinching butchery on the flip side? Would you really want to be around him, put up with his 'big and boomy but also pretty chill till you hit my slaughter-it switch' shtick, in the longterm?
Pal around with Vasiliy Fet during the vampire apocalypse, you can find out.
Outside of slaying hangtime he is generally:
Hardworking, direct, irreverent. Comfortable with crudeness, and willing to play into the frequent perception that he is crude (and dense, and uneducated: all the predictable labels he gets as an exterminator, which many observers pretend to be past these days but absolutely are not). Can be weirdly sociable and easygoing for someone who prefers to do most things alone; and it's not superficial good-naturedness, just a sincere ability to roll with other people's quirks, as long as he's guaranteed to walk away later. Neurodivergently obsessive about his interests, projects and living space; can only benignly tolerate someone else's interference in any of these up to a point.
Possessed of an absolutely goddamn goofy sense of humor.
An obstinate combative asshole, when the mood strikes.
Highly pragmatic, but not cynical. Even seems optimistic, though in fact his brand is more realism that's just overwhelmingly at peace with how ugly real can get. Yet like all the most entertaining types of realists, at his 'push comes to shove get ready for my elbow' core, Fet's kinda thoroughly full of shit. Because he's been known to go out of his way to help others; keep an eye peeled for the welfare of perfect strangers; be stupidly brave, even when it's not his own ass on the line.
Implicitly trusting of his personal moral compass. And if it directs him to aid his fellow beings in a way that seems at odds with his talent for killing them, it's no less a driver.
SKILLS & INTERESTS
Pest control. Vasiliy knows a lot about vermin and how to vanquish them. This is not just a result of his official employment as an exterminator, but a lifelong interest in critters that can infiltrate and overwhelm human dwellings. While he specializes in Rattus norvegicus (he's not career-ambitious enough to be appointed NYC's rat czar, but in terms of knowledge alone he's on par with any worth-their-salt urban rodentologist) he's also well-versed in other "nuisance" mammals, insects, etc. Pretty much all your standard creepy-crawlies. His fascination with pest animals began as a child, when he started exploring dilapidated buildings and inevitably seeing examples where the pests won out long before the worst structural damage had been done. Which ties neatly in with some other areas of expertise –
Urban exploration and Architecture. Fet will tell you he was into urbex before the hipsters got a hold of it. Much of his childhood was spent discovering all the abandoned and/or ruined Soviet construction that cities like Kyiv, Kharkiv, Saint Petersburg and Moscow had to offer. His father Alexei was a civil engineer by trade, but his first love was pure architecture, and he often brought Vasya along during his travels to sites throughout the USSR. The elder Fet also planned for his son to become a professional architect in his stead, so the bulk of young Vasiliy's considerable education was devoted to that end. Yet he retained an interest in the disrepair of buildings, versus their design, that only increased with his family's relocation to a city with countless neglected and subterranean spaces: New York.
Explosives. The first time Vas watched controlled building implosion at work as a boy, while accompanying Alexei to some new project, he was hooked.* The process of a structure's obliteration intrigued him as much as its creation, and the inherent danger appealed directly to nascent makings of an adrenaline junkie. In his subsequent years still in Ukraine, and rubbing elbows with – to put it lightly – "the wrong crowd," kid-Fet seized every possible opportunity to experiment with stuff that goes boom. After moving to the States, he grew much more careful about maintaining this hobby. But he still willingly risks bodily harm (and rampant legal troubles) to engage in the weird super sketchy world of recreational blasting.
*The Strain implies that Fet's obsession with blowing shit up is rooted in pest control's use of pyrotechnics to disperse wild animals without injuring them. From what I've gathered, the type of explosives employed for this purpose wouldn't typically be at the top of an urban exterminator's arsenal. So my headcanon is that Fet became a bombophile way before the pest control aspect would have been a factor for him.
Firearms and Fighting. wip!
BACKGROUND
Pre-canon: Vasiliy was born in Soviet Ukraine to Alexei and Olena Fet. Alexei changed his surname from Fetrovsky to Fet years before Vasily's birth. This was mainly an attempt to escape any connection with his own father, a Holocaust collaborator; although Alexei chose the name "Fet" specifically because he thought it sounded American, and had always planned to move his young family to the United States.
In the USSR Alexei's status as an engineer afforded him a measure of success and prestige, so that even during the Cold War he was able to forge connections with American companies, learn English and ensure it was taught to his wife and son. Sometime before Ukrainian independence, Alexei moved the family to Brooklyn, New York. Once emigrated he accepted a professorship in engineering, and generally claimed to be Russian, publicly disavowing his Ukrainian heritage for decades.
Vasiliy's upbringing was a relatively strict one, beholden to Alexei's plan for his son to acquire an excellent education and become an architect in America. The boy was bright and eager to learn, at least where certain subjects were concerned. Yet he gravitated as much to physical exercise as to his favorite books, with a rambunctious, at times theatrical streak which the reserved Alexei was particularly ill-equipped to handle; and he managed to get into trouble, frivolous and serious alike. Though Vasya himself was often away at boarding school, his group of neighborhood ne'er-do-wells included the children of arms-dealers. By the age of nine he was using Tokarevs for target practice on lemonade bottles. By the age of twelve his best friend, an older Polish boy named Jan, was killed by another group's stray bullets. Despite this tragedy, Vasiliy maintained an interest in firearms and explosives which followed him into adulthood.
As a teenager in Brooklyn, Vasiliy simultaneously seemed to "settle down," on the surface appearing less likely to seek out the city's roughest areas; and also to become somewhat less of a dedicated student. Still, he managed to test exceptionally well throughout high school, earned a scholarship and even completed college courses. On track to receive a bachelor's degree and a grant to study architecture at Cornell, he abruptly dropped out, informing his father he'd be working full-time at the pest control company which had constituted his after-school job. Needless to say, this did not go over well with Alexei. The two fought ferociously, and Vas was kicked out of the house. Over the next twenty years, he and Alexei would only speak in person again a handful of times.
wip!
