♦ Sketchpages II ♦

I'm speeding through that animation bro, my hand is BURNING, so today I offer you some more sketchpages <3

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It's Rick's dad Rostya practice page mostly, but I've also added Rick bcuz I love him and every post needs to have him haha

Here you can also see Viktor (the bottom left guy)! He's not on the official Grimport site characters list since he technically doesn't appear in the books by face (yet... I'm thinking of maybe adding a brief scene with him in book III of the Kostrov Traces). He's Rick's uncle who died by the end of WWII and a brother to Rick's dad Rostya, and is really only mentioned by Rick in passing here and there.

Viktor was the "good older brother" in the Kapralov family. He was only a few years Rostya's senior but was, in a lot of ways, always regarded by the family as the brother who will make something of himself, while Rostya was kind of kicked to the side because he was a more rebellious wild child who basically just wanted to play and cause trouble. Viktor was very calm, very composed, intelligent, hardworking and polite, while Rostya didn't really excel in school like Viktor did and was much more cunning and manipulative than he was necessarily kind.

Resentment was present between the brothers since the earliest childhood, to a part because their parents, and a large portion of the village they were brought up in, made it VERY clear they loved Viktor and really despised Rostya. And as much as I hate the monster that he obviously became, not all of this hate was all that justified. Rostya was simply a very impatient, fidgety child who had a lot of behavioral issues that really needed attention his parents didn't know how to provide him with back in the day. He was deemed selfish and rude, but really he just craved acceptance and felt like he was always ten steps behind Viktor at all times since the very beginning of his life, doubted and ostracized just because he was much more lost in life and needed guidance to find his path.

Ofc that doesn't excuse his decision to turn this bitterness into actual supervillain behavior, and there is a lot that could be said about what exactly was wrong with him mentally to make him as utterly disgusting and horrific as he was to both Rick and Donna, but that's a post for another time.

Viktor, on the other hand, grew up to be a well respected member of his community. He was in the army and was one of the higher positioned people there, though didn't have much respect for his leaders and didn't agree with either of the wars he was involved in. He spent a lot of his time basically secretly helping civilians, no matter who they were or where they came from, which is why the nature of his death was, in a lot of ways, shrouded in secrecy, and Rick always believed he might have been ambushed by his own people at a certain point, due to his disobedience.

Viktor also deep down wanted to love his brother, he wanted to believe he was a good person, but was proven wrong enough times to take care of Rick and Donna more than Rostya ever did. He wasn't often coming to visit due to his work, but when he did, he was like a single ray of sunshine in their lives. When the second world war was just about to break out, he smuggled their parents out of USSR and brought them to Alaska to keep them safe, but when he asked Rostya to do the same for his family, Rostya utterly refused. He lied and told Viktor it was because he "isn't a coward" when in reality, he just hated Viktor so much that even the idea of having him be praised for keeping Rostya's family safe wasn't something he was willing to put up with.

Viktor kept visiting Krasnogorod nonetheless up until his death. Whenever he was able to, he would come and hang out with Rick, he would teach him German, buy him books, tell him stories from their childhood, teach him about morals... to Rick, Viktor was a father Rostya never was, and his death completely destroyed him.

It's pretty certain that Viktor is the reason Rick was so obsessed with justice later in life. He was Rostya's son in a sense that he looked quite like him and had the same, suave, manipulative charm to him, but in all ways that mattered, the love he treated his family with, his love for literature, languages and his relentless obsession with justice, it was all taught to him by Viktor., and he truly loved him and admired him for the rest of his life.