Question for all RPers!

Well the recent 'hate' thrown by the general public in a Unionverse event towards heroes, which admittedly appears to have been caused by an demon of some kind, has got me wondering.

City of Heroes really doesn't have any general 'hatred' towards those of a super powered/highly trained nature. I suppose this would come from saving America and later the world (Brass Monday and the first Rikti invasion, now we're fighting through the second), is there anyone out there who has their character face any kind of superpowered hatred, even in backstory?

In the Unionverse we have Humanity First, a villain group who hate mutants and super powers in general, which makes them fairly unique even as an NPC villain group because
Humanity First have no other player villains to actually call on because most player villains would never agree to their goals, even the tech ones. Plus, you know, hating ALL super powered people is likely to lead to a large group of villains kicking your face in while the heroes look the other way.

Anyway...enough rambling, so answer the above question, repeated again incase my ramblings distracted you, does anyone have their character face any kind of super powered hated in their backstory?

Well, aside from the obligatory Malta character...Generally no. It's a bit of an unexploited plot coupon within the CoH/V universe, really. The only threats present that seem to be based around their hatred of superhumans as a group specifically would be Malta and the Sky Raiders. Everybody else is fine to faff around and lob fireballs at everything.

Which makes a certain amount of sense, when you think about it. The sky raiders are a group which, canonically in the Silver Mantis strike force, get beaten on so much by super-powered individuals that they are barely hanging on to their status as a villain group. Malta, naturally, is world-wide shadow-power along with the likes of Nemesis and the Council. Malta is backed by a vast conspiracy, has thousands of front companies, endless financial backing, access to unique technological assets, etcetera. I hypothesize that Malta would NOT exist without the staggering amount of support it has, because otherwise it would be wiped out by PO'd supers.

Super-powered individuals are prone to trash people who hate super-powered individuals. That's human nature right there, sadly. The point I'm trying to make being: Any groups established on the principle of hating/hunting/enslaving/etcetera super-humans is very quickly going to be curbstomped. The Sky Raiders have backing from NEMESIS, and even so they are still on the verge of collapsing - Hating super-humans is probably the only thing more dangerous than living side-by-side with them.

And then you have to get around to the big question: Why WOULD you hate people gifted with super-human abilities? In the Rogue Isles, villains abuse their powers to commit crime, but again, that is sadly an inevitable result of human nature. You can't blame them because they have powers, you can only blame them for being morally broke. And if you hate them simply because they're "superior" or "better" than you, then that automatically implies that the hatred stems from a massive ego or personality disorder. And if you hate them because they have more natural "rights," than you do? Feel free to learn martial arts and get the very same rights.

In the end, hating super-humans for being super-humans is a rather nonsensical, suicidal, and quite frankly STUPID disposition. From a logical perspective, there is no reason to hate them. There's plenty of reasons to be jealous of them, to envy them, to want to control or contain them, but hate them? Hating them is like hating the sun because some day it will inevitably explode and reduce Earth to its base atomic components - That is, pointless and silly.

There is probably a bit more problem being an alien than generally being a super. The Rikti technically aren't aliens, but they look it and they are engaged in a touch of global invasion. Doesn't make them popular and there are still those anti-alien posters dotted around the city.

I think, these days, people have largely dropped the Marvelesque plots regarding people fearing/hating mutants and other similar entities because they don't really exist in the setting. Zortel recently caused some level of outrage when one of her characters lost his girlfriend due to prejudiced parents; not prejudiced against his mutant powers, but instead against his skin colour. Wow, mutants facing real-world problems... I suspect that's really a more interesting and likely problem than groups of irrational meta-haters.

And to answer the original question... no, none of my characters has had that kind of issue. If I wanted to play a Marvel mutant, I'd have played... oh, dang, they canned that MMO.

Hmm i think in the CoXverse there is to many and to wide a range of "powered" for any Hate faction to find a focus ... in the X-men ( talking films here as most will have seen them ) all the Powered are mutants , and a clear divison between them and us is possible ....In Spiderman ..the anit-spidey faction has a single clear target ...

In the CoXverse there is such a range of Powered to hate them all would be like saying ..i do not like sport ..except snooker . ..and water polo ...well hang on what about swiming ..is that a sport if you do it on your holidays or to stop your self drowning ..

However , saying to Hate the Powered is Stupidnot a reason to prevent such hate , a person is smart , people are very very stupid ..as history shows us over and over again .
If you can find a focus you can direct peoples attention . Label the Powered as Demonic , or Communist or racial impure , or supporters of the wrong football team ..and you can start building the hate .


Back to the OP question ..yes i have a Toon with backstory elements of being hated .. a obvious Mutant .

Worst I've seen happen to my chars, either through a backstory or inflicted on by another player was when Korny's Not-Unreal-Malcolm conspiracy theorist found out Molly ran part of Longstaff WarTech. Even then it was a "Whoops, gotta go!" moment and an isolated break-in at Longstaff towers.

I did have one of my mutant chars get her nose broken by a mundane once, but that was for the sake of a little comedy, and it wasn't because she was a mutant.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ravenswing And to answer the original question... no, none of my characters has had that kind of issue. If I wanted to play a Marvel mutant, I'd have played... oh, dang, they canned that MMO.

A new developer started it anew, if I remember correctly.

Still, as much as I'm starting to like the Marvel universe, it baffles me all to hell and makes me think X-Men should have been its own self-contained universe or something. Why the fear and hatred against mutants if you're not going to spit on the rest of superhumanity with it, huh?

Bigotry is why Ellie's in Paragon City. Her own father threw her out the family home after she became bonded to her Kheldian symbionte, calling her a "Fithly alien bodysnatcher". It didn't help much that he's also a homophobe as well as a xenophobe.

She's had a LITTLE bigotry in Paragon... Mostly from Vanguard, thanks to her partial alien nature, but nothing serious. Just dirty looks and a little name calling; she ignores it, most of the time.

I do get an undercurrent of ill will twoards aliens alright, what with the "Earth for Humans" posters all over the place.

As the creator of the afore mentioned Humanity First in the original post I figure I'm kind of obligated to atleast post some sort of opinion on this discussion.

First off the question was actually

Quote:

does anyone have their character face any kind of super powered hated in their backstory?

, but it has since turned into a "Can there be any hatred towards superpowered individuals?" thread. personally I have no issue with this slight deviation as to me it's a logical evolution of the discussion started by Doc Mechano.

Quote:

In the end, hating super-humans for being super-humans is a rather nonsensical, suicidal, and quite frankly STUPID disposition. From a logical perspective, there is no reason to hate them. There's plenty of reasons to be jealous of them, to envy them, to want to control or contain them, but hate them?

I actually think jealousy and envy are logical reasons someone might hate somebody. Even if you might not feel that extremes of envy could blossom into full blown hatred I am pretty certain everybody can agree there are countless examples of truly horrific deeds committed through jealousy.

Quote:

I think, these days, people have largely dropped the Marvelesque plots regarding people fearing/hating mutants and other similar entities because they don't really exist in the setting.

Actually there is a lot of stuff that doesn't really exist in the setting, but since when has that stopped roleplayers creativity? I think one of the main reasons people don't do many of these plots is because it is damn hard to do them in a way other roleplayers can accept with real credibility.

My creation Humanity First has ben involved with several, and also instigated a few of these types of plot. The reason I highlighted "instigated" is because I fully accept the majority of the people in the CoX universe don't have any issues with super powered beings, but that doesn't mean there isn't forces out there willing to manipulate public opinion into thinking otherwise. In fact this manipulation of public opinion through acts of subterfuge, terrorism, etc is one of the primary objectives of Humanity First.

Quote:

Any groups established on the principle of hating/hunting/enslaving/etcetera super-humans is very quickly going to be curbstomped......Hating super-humans is probably the only thing more dangerous than living side-by-side with them.

I suppose this depends on how threatened indivduals are by such groups. If the Sky Raiders are on the verge of collapse, Malta more tied up with mercenary affairs, and my own Humanity First being merely considered occassionally dangerous crackpots then it's fair to say they are not really high priority targets on most supers hit lists.

Quote:

However , saying to Hate the Powered is Stupidnot a reason to prevent such hate , a person is smart , people are very very stupid ..as history shows us over and over again . If you can find a focus you can direct peoples attention . Label the Powered as Demonic , or Communist or racial impure , or supporters of the wrong football team ..and you can start building the hate .

Very strong point here, and again a policy adopted by Humanity First.

Quote:

irrational meta-haters

Who says the bad guys have to be rational?

Quote:

Why the fear and hatred against mutants if you're not going to spit on the rest of superhumanity with it, huh?

That's why Humanity First are equal opportunities bigots! If you don't fit their definition of normal human then you are fair game as far as they are concerned.

So what im saying is just because it's not prevailent in CoX lore it does not mean that it does not exist. Oh and in answering the OP... yeah I have characters affected, especially since I'm behind a lot of it

P.S. Mechano, I will get on with that other forum plot thing soonish... honest!

It's why I'm looking forward to the attack on Dr Mechano's factory/Hospital.

Up until now Humanity First have only really gone up against heroes or the slightly less villainous of villains (Big Lunk et al were more mercenaries and not mad scientist who are more than willing to smash someones face in if they upset him).

When they do attack the factory they're in for a nasty shock when Mechano is quite at home smashing in faces with Foehammer (his Sledgehammer) or ripping out peoples throats with his cybernetics...not to mention unleashing his secret project in the first battlefield test...dun dun duuuuunn.

As mentioned, Metahuman hate is irrational and when directed at the wrong people, downright crazy...but then most hate groups aren't very sane in the first place either.

Let’s look at this from real-world telescopes a second. Logically, with super-men come super-fights, super-villains and super-destruction. That alone is enough reason for people to hate superpowers, as most do with nuclear weapons here in the real world. As for mutants, real world mutates are often grotesque and deformed, not like the glamour of Wolverine and other X-men. But where Marvel did get it spot on is that real world mutants are feared, ridiculed, studied and harassed. The lucky ones make the circus, some get magazine coverage, some even make it big on television. Real mutants are considered freaks; they are generally avoided like the plague here in Western society and in the Third World, killed at birth. They are so often seen as 'undesirable' and as a burden, a liability to humanity, as the elderly are similarly thought to be, that most of them hide away. What if their attitude towards normal people changed?

Some people hate the elderly; there are even people who hate kids, pets, women and vice-versa. On top of that you have hate from petty differences like race, faith, skin colour, sexual orientation, social class, intelligence quotient, political ideals, lifestyles, fashion, it goes on forever. With all that in mind, you only have to imagine a whole peoples of grotesque or awesome freaks now running around the place. It would be scary, alien even. Some would surely find it demonic, some weird, others wonderful. Suddenly the idea of anti-mutant and/or anti-metahuman hate in the CoX/V universe and others starts to make more sense.

In direct response to the original post, my character Dragonfly is quite the opposite. She's a good example of a crime-fighter with mixed feelings and hated tolerance against the metahuman and mutant populace in Paragon City and the greater world. She is all about the superiority of human perfection through physical and moral training. She sees biological (Sister Psyche or Malaise) and scientific (Dr. Vahzilok or Synapse) mutants as undesirable inferiors, abominations of the natural human physiology. But weapons and gadgets of Technological or Magical origins are understandable to her. Alternatively, sort of like John Jonah Jameson, my NPC PPD detective Lieutenant Hicks just hates all supers because "they cause [him] super problems". Hope this helps.


.

I don't actively RP, but I do tend to come up with fairly extensive backgrounds for my characters, and I have toyed with the idea a bit.

Basically, in my own personal imagining of the CoH universe, a decade or so after the end of WWII some US heroes discovered hidden in south america a rogue ex-nazi mad scientist and his experiment to breed a new race of supersoldiers by combining human and animal traits.

It basically started out as an excuse to have part-animal characters, but I got to thinking - if you have a population of obviously animalistic beings, brought back to live in the US in the late 50s/early 60s, might they not face some prejudice? If many had been labeled 'subhuman' due merely to having dark skin, how much more so would beings who actually did look 'subhuman' be denigrated? I decided that these people had faced harassment and racism, and as a result tended even today to live in relatively isolated communities of mostly their own kind.

For those of us who never lived through those eras, it's easy to not realize just how ingrained racist views were (and in many ways, still are). When here there's still so much hatred based on things as mundane as skin color, I could easily see the hatred being much more virulent if the bigoted had actual physical differences to point at. It's irrational as heck, but nobody ever said human beings were rational.

I wouldn't imagine it rising to the level of out-and-out violence, at least not very often, because (as has been pointed out) that'd be a rather dangerous pastime. But I could easily see harassment, exclusion, and general hostility towards those who could be perceived as 'different', especially earlier in the CoH history.

I too am glad Cryptic didn't set up the game world that way. Marvel essentially lost control of the whole thing in the end, and it ended up with them having to virtually destroy the mutantverse... :/

I wholeheartedly agree. Cryptic didn't include such a story/topic as it would overcomplicate their world and could easily spiral out of control. Racial hatred vs mutants or whatever else mixed with MMOs = bad idea! Especially when people have considerably varying views on what is acceptable and what isn't. The whole Rikti and Vanguard idea was enough CoX canon wise.

Also, the only hatred in Inago's backstory came from his Uncle's jealousy. He wanted Inny's powers so he could relive his glory days.