Your history is challenged if all you took from reading Mark Rein-Hagen’s version of the game is ‘trenchcoats and katanas’. You are making the error of assuming that this was how ‘the vast majority of people played VtM’. The term ‘trenchcoats and katanas’ was lampooning how the intent of the game was lost on certain groups from the 1st edition onwards - it is literally a parody of how the game was intended to be played. The ‘personal horror’ motif, however, was written on the cover and discussed within it. Body horror was always implicit in the game too, while the flesh crafting Tzimisce was already well established. The game incorporates all sorts of horror.
Justin Achilli, when he took over, went to some lengths to express what the was trying to do, but his job as director was to steer the game through changes - whether yourself or others appreciate it or not. If I was taking over, I’d be steering it away from 'trenchcoats and katanas' too. Your attribution to his motivations are your own perspective - not historical fact.
You seem confused by what "historical fact" means. You also seem strangely confused about what "literally" and "parody" mean.
Achilli was extremely clear about his motivations, and you're actually agreeing with everything I said now, rather than contradicting any of it as you did previously. All you're adding is that you think he was right to do what he did, and giving a very specific and rather shallow justification. Which is exactly the problem with Revised.
My point is pretty simple, and is "historical fact" (let's not get into how that's a oxymoron, but whatever). Justin Achilli decided to make significant changes to the lore (and possibly mechanics, I forget), of VtM, as soon as he got in charge of it, in order to "purify" the game of people "playing it the wrong way". You seem to think that sort of purification is cool, and justify it, I get it. Some people did. I was unimpressed myself. The specific groups he outlined his dislike of were people who played it as "superheroes with fangs" or "trenchcoats and katanas"-style, and people who played it as if vampires were sort of more "romance-novel" than Nosferatu. The latter of which is of course hilarious given VtM emerged from what were quasi-romance-novels, and that most of the most successful vampire stuff has sort of circled the romance novel space (especially post-VtM!).
No, "trenchcoats and katanas" was not "literally a parody". It was neither of those things (not literal, and not a parody). It was a derogatory
phrase some people used to sneer at an extremely common way that VtM was played, and it was very broadly used. Basically any VtM game that didn't focus almost exclusively on:
1) How much it sucked to be a vampire.
or
2) That combined with largely violence-free intrigue.
Could potentially be described as "trenchcoats and katanas" or "superheroes with fangs" (again, irony here given that could apply to a lot of popular vampire stuff in pop-culture).
Essentially it was an exclusionary move, designed to reject modes of play that, quite frankly, not only did no harm to VtM, but sold an awful lot of copies. Sure, sell it as a game of personal horror, but don't pretend that's all it is, not when you're going to bring out massive books full of combat stuff, or spend far more time and energy on vampire powers and deep lore than on how much it sucks to be a vampire (which actually gets kind of short shrift for a game supposedly about this - don't even get me started on Paths vs Humanity).
As an aside, I literally never came across an actual game of VtM, online or off, that could not be described, albeit sometimes rather unfairly as "trenchcoats and katanas", "superheroes with fangs", or "romance-novel" (or worse, basically just ERP). I played in one, which, if you maybe took like four sessions out of the dozens (admittedly they were in a row), you could have said it was just "personal horror", but that's it. This idea that "personal horror" - particularly body horror (which has little to do with and predates any real mention of the Tzmisces) - was the main mode of VtM play in the 1990s seems to me impossible to sustain. It also very clearly wasn't how the LARP was played either.
To put it another way - it seems like Justin Achilli wanted VtM to only be about the Louis of the world, but most players were playing Lestat, Nick Knight, or Blade.
EDIT - Just realized you might be REALLY REALLY CONFUSED about trenchcoats and katanas, esp. if you weren't around in the 1990s. Do you think I'm referring to the RPG called "Katanas and Trenchcoats"?
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Which IS "literally a parody", so your comment would make more sense there. If so, okay, no, I'm talking about the phrase that RPG is referring to, which dates back to the 1990s (hence it being a 1990s RPG). The phrase "trenchcoats and katanas" is a derisory one as I said, designed to denigrate people who have vampires who are too cool and too heavily armed (there is, amusing, an episode of True Blood which basically devolves into this, what with Vampire Erik having a rocket launcher whilst wearing an all-black outfit and so on).
