deadite

Wiki! Also, a quick few things that the wiki doesn't mention or expand on:

The island's plants have evolved to be heavily psychotropic. One particular breed of plant growing in the jungle causes extreme aggression in animals and humans exposed to it. People who stay away from the jungle (Willis, the natives, Jason Brody's friends, and Hoyt's privateers) are nowhere near as vicious as the Rakyat, Vaas' pirates, and Jason himself. On a few separate instances, Willis references how the jungle "makes people crazy".

Vaas and Citra were not originally from Rook Island, or at least Vaas wasn't; either they came to the islands and Citra changed her name to fit Rakyat culture, or she was conceived on the island - she's listed as his half-sister, and her listed nationality doesn't match his.

In the bad ending, after Citra stabs Jason, she mentions him "taking the place of the coward Vaas". Taking that and his comments about her into account - ("Are you enjoying my sister's company? Huh? She's gonna make a warrior out of you? You are so fucked, Jason.") ("Citra gave you that ink, my sister gave you that ink, huh? [...] You think that makes you like me, huh?") ("There was a time I would do anything for my sister, I mean the first time I ever killed was for my sister... Not enough for her, no, no, no, no, no, please.") - she had originally been grooming him for the role, likely contributing to his eventual mental breakdown. He eventually fled, fell into drugs, and made contact with Hoyt Volker.

Despite having been cast out of the Rakyat, Vaas wears a very Rakyat-looking necklace throughout the whole game, and the cloth wrapped around his arm is in the general area where a tatau would have started.

" Do not vacation here. "

Vaas Montenegro is the product of good drugs and a bad sister. He's also completely insane. The three are probably connected.

Until Jason Brody arrives, Vaas has the entire northern half of Rook Island in a stranglehold. Leading throngs of bloodthirsty and largely deranged pirates, he runs his and Volker's human trafficking and drug sales as the face of the operation: the locals are terrified of him, his own men are afraid of what he might do, and the people he sells are largely powerless to stop him. He's been given an entire island to play with however he wants, and through terror, has managed to keep it. It's an incredible accomplishment for just one man.

This works because, again, he is completely insane.

Driven mad by the island's potent (largely mind-altering) drugs and the machinations of his sister, Vaas more or less has the personality type of a rabid dog - he's mercurial at best, wildly unpredictable at worst, and prone to incredible shows of violence and cruelty whenever he particularly feels like it. Which is, like, super often. And there's absolutely no way to predict what might trigger his temper, either; something he finds funny one moment will drive him to screaming rage the next, and something that people expect will piss him off - people escaping his prison camp, hostages telling him to fuck off, and being shot at - he might just find funny. Or might not. The only constant triggers are being disrespected, crying and begging, and anything relating to his sister, and even the first two have a little wiggle room. Vaas is deeply unhinged while still considering himself the only truly sane guy around - "The world is on a diagonal. I am the balancing point," he says during Jason's hallucination, his tone of voice strained, and curtailing his insanity monologue with "And it's not like I am fucking crazy" - and the people who work with him walk on eggshells, not wanting to end up the next head in the sand.

You know, because torture, Vaas' number one hobby. He shows a horrifying enthusiasm for coming up with new and creative ways to torment his victims, approaching it almost playfully - like putting a bucket over Christopher Mintz-Plasse's head and throwing lit fireworks under it, or playing a fishbowl like a drum while the man (the same man) under it is screaming and covered in spiders. Other times he's viciously cruel, shocking someone with a car battery or feeding them their cooked friend. (Again, same guy.) Of the field of people buried to their chin in sand outside his camp, many have had all their teeth forcibly pulled. He's a sadistic fuck, basically, and totally unrepentant. It doesn't even matter if he likes you.

It's actually going to be way, way worse if he likes you, because then he'll take care to keep you alive for a while to torture you more, because you're such great company. "I am a big fan. I have seen most of your movies, even the shitty ones," he tells Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and he really does mean it - he likes the guy, he's thrilled to have an actor he recognizes on his island, and he's really looking forward to torturing the guy a lot. Everyone he's disinterested in he disposes of quickly, but his buddies are gonna stick around until he gets bored with them. So like, two or three weeks.

" Don't cry! Okay? Do not beg. The choices you have made in your life have brought you here. "

Despite all of this, Vaas has his good points - he's respectful towards his men, never harming or getting overly nasty with any of them even when they fuck up or interrupt what he's doing. He might keep them all in line with fear, but it's obvious that Vaas is smart enough not to abuse the AK-47 toting psychopaths at his back. Before blowing a man up with a rocket launcher, he looks to the guys at his back: "Hermano, back up a little, it's gonna blow up. Back up." It doesn't hurt that Vaas' men routinely get absolutely hammered, smoke meth at their leisure, and carry around nudie mags when they're not out killing people. He's respectful to Hoyt even when Hoyt is screaming at him, so he's controlled enough not to bite the hand that feeds him. Because he's crazy-but-manageable with his men, they trust him, follow him without question.

"You're my bitch," he tells Grant in the prison camp. "I rule this fucking kingdom."

Whether he's considering the nature of insanity or whether or not all men can truly be considered brothers - the former to Jason before he pushes him and the cinderblock he's tied to into a cenote, the latter in the middle of a showdown with a guy holding an AK-47 - Vaas is surprisingly thoughtful, even if his philosophies tend to have that "batshit insane" flavor to them. He's also much smarter than he looks; Vaas has honed guerilla warfare to an art and regularly constructs plans that successfully put Jason at his complete mercy, whether it means ambushing him from a decoy truck or just plain stabbing him when he comes around the corner.

He's also really good at talking his victims into pants-shitting terror, breaking them by using only his words and promises of what's coming. So, you know. There's that.

" Carlos! Get some water! Bring the batteries, the spiders, everything! "

Bizarrely, he shows genuine remorse when he kills somebody he didn't want to kill yet. During his torture show, Vaas alternates horrific pain with little shows of kindness, moving Christopher Mintz-Plasse into a shadier part of the beach when he thinks Chris is getting too hot, picking a spider off his face (though he came back with bigger spiders later), and setting a nice floral arrangement to Chris' cannibal dinner. When he finally realizes Chris has no pulse, Vaas panics, desperately trying to revive him via mouth-to-mouth, and getting genuinely choked up when he realizes Chris is gone. He tortures his darlings, sure, but he doesn't want them to die until he says they can. His voice actually cracks when a pirate interrupts his grieving to report about the skydivers on the island.

He immediately buries Chris and forgets about him. His attention span is short and, hey, dude's dead, time to find someone else to fuck with. Tourists.

" Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is? "

Jason Brody is the guy he's killed about four times now, and it all started when he got involved with Citra. Despite leaving her, killing her people, and wanting to kill her, Vaas did love his sister above all else at some point - so seeing some out-of-nowhere white boy taking his place still stings. Before getting the tatau, Vaas regards him in the same deranged, playful way he deals with all his victims - afterwards, he's wholly predatory, trying again and again to kill him and his friends in increasingly extravagant and awful ways. "Snow White" is the rock in his boot, the thorn in his side.

Gradually, he begins to see shades of himself in Brody, who begins slipping into bloodthirsty madness the longer he spends on the island. ("And that's what Citra does to you, right? She turns you fuckers into rats and now I have to deal with the rodent problem. But... that's what brothers are good for, right?") After sticking him with a syringe full of ball-tripping hallucinogens, Vaas points out that Jason is becoming a bloodthirsty, drug-addled maniac addicted to the thrill of killing - just like him. Just like Citra wanted.

("Jason. She's gonna make a warrior out of you. We are so fucked, Jason.")

" McLovin! Is! Here! "

He also watches and references movies. A lot. Considering there's probably nothing else to do on the island but kill people, drink, and watch bootleg DVDs, it makes sense. In a psychotic modern day pirate kind of way.

" That's not what your mother said when I was fucking her in your dad's laundry room! "

Vaas is, overall, a shit. Citra and Hoyt and a literal truckload of crazy tropical island amphetamines might have helped it along, but no, really, he's just a completely shitty person in every possible way.

And he loves it.

☠ sadistic
☠ charismatic
☠ unpredictable
☠ loyal (to his allies/men)
☠ violent
☠ clever
☠ animalistic
☠ good-humored (if black-humored........)
☠ psychotic
☠ fearless

"You see that, hermano?" Vaas gestures towards his chest with his butcher knife, indicating the drying bloodstain across his front. "You see that shit?"

The man he currently has tied up with electrical cord nods, stuttering some sort of answer. His home is small, quaint, only mildly unkempt. Vaas sits across the back of the couch, kicking his legs to sate the itch to move, jitter, stalk the place some more, anything. The only reason he doesn't is because ignoring company is fucking rude, and look, he's not rude, see?

"You know what it means?"

"I - please, you can have anything you want--"

"Stop." Vaas scratches at his head with the flat of the knife, eyes drifting. The man keeps babbling, though, and it isn't long before it starts to piss him off. Every blubbered word itches like the jungle ants that like to drop on you from trees, sometimes, just to fuck with you. He hates those. He hates whimpering. Blood in his ears, a twinge in his jaw, the fucker just won't stop--

"I have money! Is it money? Please don't, pl--"

Vaas lunges, closing the distance in an instant. The flat of his palm muffles the man's scream, keeps him in place while he flinches away from the knife, now embedded in the drywall a half inch from his head.

"Shut the fuck up!" Vaas is screaming in the guy's face now, throat burning, spit flecking the back of his hand. "Shut the fuck up! Okay? Okay?" He reins it in, even if his thumb is still digging into the soft spot behind the fucker's jaw. "Shut the fuck up, have some fucking dignity."

A breath. His head spins and he can still hear the blood in his ears, but the guy's quit his sniveling, at least. Vaas rocks back onto his heels, pulling the knife out with a chik that has the guy jumping.

"You think your papa would be proud of you right now, amigo? Some little pussy-boy like you now, pissing your pants? I can smell it." He gives the guy a good slap in the side of the head to make sure he's paying attention, rising to his feet again, bouncing on his heels. Fuck, he's keyed up. He needs to move.

"What," he continues, gesturing towards the bloodstain, "does it mean? You know? Do you?"

The guy shakes his head, eyes like saucers.

"It means I should be fuckin' dead, amigo. Shuffled off the mortal fucking coil, yeah? Get it?" He hunkers down to the man's level again, crouched like an animal, wearing a completely out of place smile. He wags his finger. "But hey... hey. That's not what happened, is it?" He spreads his arms wide, punctuating the words with beating his chest. There are thin cuts across the chest, four of them. "Alive! And! Fucking! Well!"

Of course, the man mimics Vaas' elation, though that isn't the right word for it. It's more like he feels just a little bit of it himself, sapping it off him like a leech, tittering a secondhand laugh as Vaas sits cross-legged. The weak tend to do that, aping his emotions, trying to suck up. That's fine though, it's cute. Like a three-legged dog. Weird and pathetic, but cute.

"So, because I am... miraculously alive, and because I feel - I'm feeling a connection here, do you feel that? I mean me and you got something here, yeah?" He taps the man's chest, then his own. The guy nods frantically, and Vaas smiles wide. "Because of that, you are going to have a very lucky day today, my friend. Questions. You answer them correctly, I will--" He makes a fluttering gesture. "--go away. You answer them wrong? You lie to me?"

He stabs the knife between the man's legs. This scream isn't muffled, but it's short enough that Vaas lets it go.

"I will hunt you down - wherever you go, I will find you and make a fucking pair of shoes out of you."

Vaas meets his eyes steadily, settling back, leaving the knife where it is.

"It's like Jeopardy. It's gonna be fun, amigo."