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Trinity Continuum Reboots Aberrant For The Better
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<blockquote data-quote="Azuresun" data-source="post: 8352855" data-attributes="member: 7022312"><p>Divis Mal and the Teragen are....a really interesting failure of storytelling to me. Mal was a fascinating character* and an interesting antagonist.....who was ruined by the writer falling much too in love with his own creation and declaring him objectively Right even when his philosophy had holes you could drive a truck through, and giving him a power level of literally "you lose times infinity". And things like Project Proteus were the usual White Wolf "twist" of "smear dung on everyone and call it morally grey" that was getting very predictable.</p><p></p><p>Aberrant is possibly the pinnacle of early-2000's White Wolf. A story that was on some HARD rails because the outcome had been determined by a different game line, the collectible metaplot fad, absurdly overpowered Elders designed to keep uppity PC's in line (such as the infamous module where the PC's are there to watch Yet Another Evil Superman and Hot Dr Manhattan have a super-brawl and cannot intervene in any way), the fetishisation of intelligence making someone an infalliable chessmaster, and trying to frame "everything you do will inevitably turn to crap" as being deep mature storytelling rather than nihilistic tedium. And it's gloriously dated, with expies of the Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin (sorry, I mean the Face and Lance "Stone Badass" Stryker) smacktalking each other.</p><p></p><p>It does sound like the flaws are being acknowledged, and I've been interested in doing a "day one" supers game for a while, so I'm definitely interested in this.</p><p></p><p>*</p><p>[spoiler=Divis Mal]</p><p>There was a thread on rpg.net that had a really interesting breakdown of Mal's arc and his fundamental tragedy. I'll try to summarise it.</p><p></p><p>Michael Donaghal starts off as being both a genius and a gay man in the 1920's. This convinces him of two things--those who are different will face persecution, and those who are superior will inevitably be lonely. Even when he's transformed by the Hammersmith experiment and takes the alias of Dr Primoris alongside other people with extraordinary powers, he's still notably above his peers, and that feeling of isolation is not helped by his unrequited love for the only man he considers close to his intellectual equal.</p><p></p><p>The Aeon Society collapses, and Primoris heads off to his Fortress of Solitude. And over time, he decides that if he can't find peers, he'll trigger the creation of them. Thus the first novas come to be. But this is the first shock that Mal experiences--their experiences of suddenly being elevated above the common herd are not the ones of isolation and rejection that Mal had come to believe was inevitable. They're mostly regarded as heroes and celebrities, people love them! Rather than looking beyond humankind, they're embracing it, whether as heroes or villains!</p><p></p><p>That prompts the Null Manifesto, a rambling treatise that John Galt would be proud of, about how novas are a superior species to humans and cannot be constrained by human laws. This, by the way, is terribly ironic. Mal did not gain his powers because he "deserved" them or had any innate superiority, he got them through blind chance. If he'd been in bed with the flu on the day of the Hammersmith experiment, the world would never have heard of Dr Primoris, and he'd have lived and died as an unusually smart human. A better path might be to find a way to elevate all of humankind, but when you just want a few pals who are on your level, that's not a priority. A more cynical function of the Manifesto is to aggravate the divide between humans and Novas, hastening the inevitable (to Mal) process where they shed these silly mortal connections and embrace their inner divinity.</p><p></p><p>And once again, most of the novas get the wrong end of the wrong stick. Some of them simply use the Manifesto as an excuse to be every tedious twerp you've met on the internet who considers "sheeple" a cutting insult, some use it as licence to commit crimes, and others miss the point entirely and start to worship Mal as their creator rather than aspiring to be his equal. And Mal is still quietly fuming that they Just Don't Get It, and he doesn't feel any closer to his dream of finally having people on his level, to overcome that insurmoutable (to him) gap between the clever and stupid, between the superior and inferior.</p><p></p><p>And the painful irony of Mal is that he'll never create the posthuman society / Cool Kids Clubhouse he dreams of. At best, he'll create several fractious alien demigods who agree on nothing, have no common cause and probably can't even communicate. He's the proof that his own cause is doomed, having become too inhuman and isolated to effectively convey his own vision to others, despite his super-intelligence. He'll be far lonelier among his perfect society than he ever was among baseline humans.</p><p>[/spoiler]</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Azuresun, post: 8352855, member: 7022312"] Divis Mal and the Teragen are....a really interesting failure of storytelling to me. Mal was a fascinating character* and an interesting antagonist.....who was ruined by the writer falling much too in love with his own creation and declaring him objectively Right even when his philosophy had holes you could drive a truck through, and giving him a power level of literally "you lose times infinity". And things like Project Proteus were the usual White Wolf "twist" of "smear dung on everyone and call it morally grey" that was getting very predictable. Aberrant is possibly the pinnacle of early-2000's White Wolf. A story that was on some HARD rails because the outcome had been determined by a different game line, the collectible metaplot fad, absurdly overpowered Elders designed to keep uppity PC's in line (such as the infamous module where the PC's are there to watch Yet Another Evil Superman and Hot Dr Manhattan have a super-brawl and cannot intervene in any way), the fetishisation of intelligence making someone an infalliable chessmaster, and trying to frame "everything you do will inevitably turn to crap" as being deep mature storytelling rather than nihilistic tedium. And it's gloriously dated, with expies of the Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin (sorry, I mean the Face and Lance "Stone Badass" Stryker) smacktalking each other. It does sound like the flaws are being acknowledged, and I've been interested in doing a "day one" supers game for a while, so I'm definitely interested in this. * [spoiler=Divis Mal] There was a thread on rpg.net that had a really interesting breakdown of Mal's arc and his fundamental tragedy. I'll try to summarise it. Michael Donaghal starts off as being both a genius and a gay man in the 1920's. This convinces him of two things--those who are different will face persecution, and those who are superior will inevitably be lonely. Even when he's transformed by the Hammersmith experiment and takes the alias of Dr Primoris alongside other people with extraordinary powers, he's still notably above his peers, and that feeling of isolation is not helped by his unrequited love for the only man he considers close to his intellectual equal. The Aeon Society collapses, and Primoris heads off to his Fortress of Solitude. And over time, he decides that if he can't find peers, he'll trigger the creation of them. Thus the first novas come to be. But this is the first shock that Mal experiences--their experiences of suddenly being elevated above the common herd are not the ones of isolation and rejection that Mal had come to believe was inevitable. They're mostly regarded as heroes and celebrities, people love them! Rather than looking beyond humankind, they're embracing it, whether as heroes or villains! That prompts the Null Manifesto, a rambling treatise that John Galt would be proud of, about how novas are a superior species to humans and cannot be constrained by human laws. This, by the way, is terribly ironic. Mal did not gain his powers because he "deserved" them or had any innate superiority, he got them through blind chance. If he'd been in bed with the flu on the day of the Hammersmith experiment, the world would never have heard of Dr Primoris, and he'd have lived and died as an unusually smart human. A better path might be to find a way to elevate all of humankind, but when you just want a few pals who are on your level, that's not a priority. A more cynical function of the Manifesto is to aggravate the divide between humans and Novas, hastening the inevitable (to Mal) process where they shed these silly mortal connections and embrace their inner divinity. And once again, most of the novas get the wrong end of the wrong stick. Some of them simply use the Manifesto as an excuse to be every tedious twerp you've met on the internet who considers "sheeple" a cutting insult, some use it as licence to commit crimes, and others miss the point entirely and start to worship Mal as their creator rather than aspiring to be his equal. And Mal is still quietly fuming that they Just Don't Get It, and he doesn't feel any closer to his dream of finally having people on his level, to overcome that insurmoutable (to him) gap between the clever and stupid, between the superior and inferior. And the painful irony of Mal is that he'll never create the posthuman society / Cool Kids Clubhouse he dreams of. At best, he'll create several fractious alien demigods who agree on nothing, have no common cause and probably can't even communicate. He's the proof that his own cause is doomed, having become too inhuman and isolated to effectively convey his own vision to others, despite his super-intelligence. He'll be far lonelier among his perfect society than he ever was among baseline humans. [/spoiler] [/QUOTE]
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