Hubris, the New AV

This Hubris guy sounds powerful, he nearly destroyed us all, then made us all forget it ever happened.

I believe you are onto something when you consider googles definition of hubris

"Excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis."

Sounds like Captain Castillo

Also, is that a hint that the Praetorian Nemeis was/is female?

I was thinking a Grav Controller, because the proverb is that Hubris goes before a fall.

Frankly, he kind of is.

(Mods, feel free to delete this message entirely if it bothers you. As a Hellenic Reconstructionist, I'm prone to going overboard on this subject. I'll try to keep it under control, but if I inadvertently stray across the line, just delete the post.)

One of the fundamental problems in post-Socratic philosophy was wrestling with the fact that the Greek gods who were responsible for rewarding virtue and punishing vice were, themselves, legendarily not very nice people, people who engaged in lives of horrific public vice. The conclusion the post-Socratics came to was that this was per-se prima facie proof that the gods were "the lies of the poets," that nothing like the gods ever really existed, and this was part and parcel of the general drift towards monotheism at the time.

Now, here's what this has to do with hubris: the operational definition of hubris, the crime against the gods that the gods punished the most consistently and most cruelly, was claiming to be as good as any god, or better than any god, at anything. Get caught doing it even once, and the god who caught you doing it would kill you if you were lucky, make you suffer for a lifetime in all probability, and if they were feeling especially cranky, make you suffer for all eternity. Why? Because you are not a god. Blood, not ichor, runs in your veins; you do not daily dine on ambrosia and drink nectar. Why does this matter? Your actions have consequences that don't apply to the gods, because you don't regenerate from any wound, you aren't immune to any disease, you will freeze and starve and die if deprived of all of your property -- and, more importantly, that's true of the people around you. If you get the people around you sick, they'll die; if you cripple them, they're crippled for life; if you rob them, they may never recover. That's why there are different moral codes for how gods behave among themselves than how humans behave among themselves, and the gods were on eternal vigilance to keep humans from thinking it would be okay for them to act like the gods do.

What's this got to do with City of Heroes: Going Rogue? Simple: Tyrant, like Statesman, and Lord Recluse, and a handful of others are not beings like us, and Tyrant worries quite a bit that because he's lent them some of the Well's power, mere 50(+4) superheroes are starting to think of themselves as gods like him. And they're not, at least not as far as he's concerned, and as an amateur classics scholar (that is, after all, how he found The Well of the Furies), he worries that humans who start thinking of themselves as gods but who aren't, really, fully divine, are likely to wreck themselves, wreck society around them. So he, like his divine predecessors, thinks that hubris is the worst sin imaginable.

But that's my secondary

I'm sure there must be a Titan out there somewhere who can lend a hand to humans against Tyrant

I think this whole thing (and not just the part I quoted above) is pretty awesome! Thanks for that perspective, InfamousBrad!

But I'm 50+8...am I not entitled to my hubris?

Is that a hint Hubris may be a future LORE pet?!

i21 leaks all aroun'!

Okay, Beast. You can have YOUR hubris. But noone else. Happy?

Fascinating question, isn't it?

In the first mission of the Mender Ramiel arc, our characters are powered-up to a degree that can only be called "omnipotent," to the point where even a mastermind's minions are immune to damage from multiple incarnates at once.

What would the morality of beings who lived like that, and who mostly only lived around other people who were like that, be like? A world where if you stole all of somebody's stuff, maimed them, and left them stranded on a frozen hillside so that it took them days and days of misery before they got to safety, it would all be a rollicking good joke, and if they complained, people would tell them to stop being a big baby about it, it's not like you don't have tens of thousands or millions of years to get over it and learn to appreciate the humor?

And what would it be like to live alongside those beings, during a collapse of civilization, knowing that they were the only hope of civilization being rebuilt, the only ones restoring the technological infrastructure of civilization, the only ones imposing law of any kind? Especially if you knew, in most places, that they insisted that their help for you was conditional on accepting their divine/human descendants, and those descendants' descendants, as our hereditary rulers for all time, because somehow that one drop of ichor in their blood, that one trace of divine DNA in there hypothetically somehow, made them better suited to rule us than we could possibly be? That's what it was like living among gods; and I think that at times, like in the issue 19 Ray Cooling arc "Bad People, Good Intentions," City of Heroes comes close to portraying that.

Let's face it: a world with superheroes and supervillains in it would REALLY BITE if you weren't one of them.

Agreed. In a world populated with extraordinary beings whose decisions affect the very universe, everyday people are often no more than hapless bystanders.

That being said, the morality of heroes and villains is always up in the air. Would they be callous or empathic? Would their morality change as they received more power?

Very interesting questions to think about, and for some of you who roleplay your characters this might be an interesting bit of character development to flesh out.

Kinda that good cop to bad cop to crooked politician thing going on there eh?

I feel like nothing would practically change my morality given those circumstances. I think I'd pretty much just do whatever I wanted, like a Rogue or Vigilante. Depending on what side of the bed I wake up on, yeh know? Keep 'em on their toes.

Who can shove aside a Huge body-type Tank on the sidwealk without even breaking their stride

Not all of them, no

Never seen Statesman rob a bank?