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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 1265191" data-attributes="member: 3887">Tony Soprano may deserve the chair, but Gandolfini certainly deserves an Emmy [or more Emmy's]...I think its pretty easy to explain why people enjoy a good Mafia story. And the neat thing is, their appeal works on multiple levels.First off, who in their heart of hearts doesn't wish they were above the rules that govern polite society for time to time. Who hasn't been cut off on the highway and fantasized about following the jerk to a rest stop, whacking him, and depositing the body in a large, Mob-owned trash recepticle?So the primary appeal is power-fantasy. Pure id. The same reason people respond to Conan [the Cimmerian, not O'Brien]. I think it should be easy for a gamer to sympathize with this.And like RPG's, Mafia narratives are governed by rules. They usually provide a clear context for such antisocial actions. In Mafia fictions, there is a level of honor among thieves. And this fiction serves to both defang them as societal threats --hey, only the bad, compromised people get whacked--, and enoble them, particularly since their actions are often contrasted against those of equally criminal corrupt police, who hypocritcally betray the public trust. Then there's the Mafia as empowerment angle. The Godfather series plays with this one big time. Good people come to America and face disenfranchisement, discrimination, a lack of economic mobility, so they resort to whatever means neccessary to achieve the American dream. This particular thread runs through American fictions from The Great Gatsby to Scarface. And in the end they're always tradegies; it never works out, you end up dead in your pool or coked to high heaven and shot into a million pieces. No matter how much a valorization of criminals goes on, these stories end up as pretty cut-and-dry morality plays.Then there's Tony... the Everybadman. People like him so much because its so easy to identify with him, with his weakness, his endless capacity for rationalization and self-deception that gets him through the day. They treat the obscene violence he's capable of as metaphor, which is the whole point.</blockquote>

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