What would it take to make VTM 5e not garbage?

[Username17]

I think many writers of modern fantasy believe that there are aliens buried at area 51, 9/11 was an inside job, vaccines cause autism and that the cure for cancer is lemon juice and weed.

This was particularly true for some of the writers of Mage splats. So these writers have defective reasoning faculties and it comes across in how they think the war between the Traditions and the Technocracy would play out - since they think that brave muckrakers have proof-positive that the moon landing was faked and that a conspiracy is able to suppress them.

I don't know what specific flavors of woo Bill Bridges (Mage) believes in, but I think "defective reasoning faculties" is a pretty fair assessment. Hell, we don't really talk about Rein*Heigen's (Vampire) more recent writings at all because he went full IRL conspiracy theorist and ran off to Eastern Europe to write bizarre ethno-nationalist propaganda for the nation of Georgia. Justin Achilli (nWoD) has some deeply held religious beliefs that are... not mainstream.

On the urban fantasy standpoint, I know one of the big critiques of Twilight is that Stephenie Meyer apparently didn't know shit about vampire legends, Native Americans, or non-abusive relationships and instead just wrote deeply weird unintentional parodies of those things into a Mormon sex fantasy. Most movies posit vampire secrecy so lax that some idiotic audience standins can figure out the mystery in ten minutes.

Things in an RPG have to be more robust than they are in books or TV programs. In an RPG people roll dice to determine the results of actions, so "vanishingly unlikely coincidences" are in fact actually unlikely. Further, you have people deliberately pushing at the edges of the setting, rather than just doing whatever convoluted shit is required by the plot and also being protected from seemingly inevitable consequences by having plot armor to go with.

So yeah, it would be nice if someone thought through the Masquerade a bit and wargamed out how to maintain it when some non-zero number of people didn't pay any attention to maintaining it or actively went about trying to shit on the concept. It's Urban Fantasy, after all, so you can rather stretch the limits of what conspiracies are capable of somewhat. But rising to the level of "not obviously woefully insufficient to last 24 hours" would be nice.

And yeah, having a tirade about "for certain values of secret" would go a long way. There are mega churches with twenty thousand people in them that perform "miracles" on stage on a weekly basis and I don't know or care what they get up to. Seems like there's genuinely room for large scale knowledge of certain parts of the fantasy setting, so long as no one outside the vampire conspiracy has the whole picture and secular society as a whole discriminates against people who talk about what they do think they know.

-Username17

[Longes]

The main crazy link in Mage was/is Phil "Satyros" Brucato - a practicing 'shaman' who writes blog posts about Trump's election being a black magic ritual, doesn't understand why unskilled laborerers are expendable and spends pages of Mage 20th Anniversary Edition to tell you that you can't play a Nephandi because it'd be bad for your soul and/or mean you are evil, as well as spending those pages on winning forum arguments people stopped caring about twenty years ago.

He's also a really bad writer and the fact that he keeps getting work is proof for me that he knows real magic.

[Username17]

The main crazy link in Mage was/is Phil "Satyros" Brucato - a practicing 'shaman' who writes blog posts about Trump's election being a black magic ritual, doesn't understand why unskilled laborerers are expendable and spends pages of Mage 20th Anniversary Edition to tell you that you can't play a Nephandi because it'd be bad for your soul and/or mean you are evil, as well as spending those pages on winning forum arguments people stopped caring about twenty years ago.

He's also a really bad writer and the fact that he keeps getting work is proof for me that he knows real magic.

Definitely not. I mean, I'm sure he's a nutter, but he also never fucking mattered. Phil Brucato got his start at White Wolf writing under the Black Dog imprint in 1995. Destiny's Price, Freak Legion, crap like that. He wasn't the B-team. He wasn't even the C-Team. Phil Brucato was one of the pervy fanboys that wrote commissioned works that the main teams were explicitly ashamed to have their names associated with. It's only much later that he's allowed to contribute material to Mage's Second Edition or obscure expansion books like the Cult of Ecstasy splatbook. He's not a main author on Mage: The Awakening either. In fact, he was never allowed to be a main author on any main game line. He didn't become "important" in Mage until the entire company stopped actually existing.

Now it says something about Mage that its promoted fanboys appear to believe that the streets are powered by punk rock magic. That is... hard for me to process or address. But that's the kind of crazy that is attracted to Mage, not the particular brand of crazy that built Mage in the first place. You might as well claim that the main link in some facet of Shadowrun was me or AncientHistory. Obviously not, because we were promoted fanboys rather than OGs.

But more broadly, belief in various forms of the supernatural is ridiculously common.Only one in twenty five people will tell pollsters that they believe Vampires are real, but that's still thirteen million people in the United States who apparently believe that there are actual Vampires. Belief in Witchcraft is much more common, with one in four people admitting to believe that there are real Witches. Belief in Ghosts is more common still, with more than one in three professing to believe they haunt the Earth. And belief in Angels is practically ubiquitous, with almost three in four Americans claiming to believe that Angels are real things. Overall, only one person in ten is willing to tell a Pollster that they do not believe in any form of magic at all.

That is the real context of any Masquerade, and probably the key point to explaining how it works. Society pretty much behaves as if it is Marx's materialistic world, but ninety percent of people in society do not believe this to be the case. Even acknowledging the supernatural beliefs of the people around you is considered extremely rude and absolutely fucking no one expects the police to respond in any way to supernatural goings on.

Consider the dynamic of the angry street preacher cursing sodomites. He is invoking supernatural powers, levying curses on random people that would cause them to be tortured for eternity. Those magical incantations are things he clearly believes in, and if they work then he is literally setting peoples' souls on fire to burn for longer than written history has ever or will ever record. That's... super intense. That's like whoa if true. If those spells work, he is doing something way more dangerous and way more aggressive and destructive than shooting an AR-15 into the same crowd. And yet... no one does shit about it. A very large number of people believe that those invocations work and an even larger number of people believe they might work. But no one seems to think it's remotely acceptable to respond to yelled curses with lethal force. Society as a whole forces everyone to pretend that the magic isn't there even though almost everyone actually thinks it probably is.

Now when it comes to Ghosts and Witches, obviously people have very large numbers of very different ideas about how they work and what they do and so on and so forth. Clearly the people who think Witches are Satanists who bite a demonic nipple in order to have powers over fire do not mean the same thing as the people who think Witches have a power of three in order to use plant growth to predict the future. Or whatever fucking positive or negative concept of Witches whoever the fuck is talking to you today has. Since there are more than ten different radically different ideas of what Witches might be, it's clear that despite one person in four agreeing with the statement "Witches are Real" that less than 2% of people are actually right about whatever it is that Witches are if they actually do exist. That is, even if Witches do exist, there's still less than 2% of the population who believes in the kinds of Witches that there are.

That means that society just trundles along with like nearly 5 million Americans in the know about at least one form of supernatural creature, and people in general just sort of ignore them whenever they talk about what they believe. People who are Renfielded to some vampire might tell the other people at work "I have been enslaved by a Vampire. She makes me eat pineapples and then she drinks my blood." And then their co-workers say "That sounds pretty kinky. I wouldn't do stuff like that because I got saved by Jesus Christ in 2004." And that's the fucking end of the conversation. The fact that you're an actual fucking Vampire's Renfield and sometimes you come to work with bandages on your neck is politely ignored by everyone around you.

-Username17

[Longes]

Phil Brucato was the lead developer of Mage Second Edition, as well as a current lead developer of Mage 20th Anniversary Edition. He absolutely mattered for Mage development and matters even more right now. It's notable that Mage Revised edition's big changes were rolling back all of Brucato's craziness and making it more "street level". Which Brucato has now "fixed".

[Username17]

Phil Brucato was the lead developer of Mage Second Edition, as well as a current lead developer of Mage 20th Anniversary Edition. He absolutely mattered for Mage development and matters even more right now. It's notable that Mage Revised edition's big changes were rolling back all of Brucato's craziness and making it more "street level". Which Brucato has now "fixed".

Mage 20th Anniversary isn't a real thing. It never was. The entire company actually factually went out of business in 2006. It was bailed out by Icelandic videogame nerds, but went out of business again in 2012. And then it just sort of stayed out of business. Eventually the rights got sold to Swedish videogame nerds who are picking their ass making vaporware. But the bottom line is that anything done after November 2006 is only arguably White Wolf, and anything after 2012 just flat isn't White Wolf at all.

Mage 20th Anniversary was made in 2013, one year after White Wolf studios fucking closed forever. It's a fan project. No one fucking cares. It is exactly as much a new edition of Mage as Princess or Witch is. Jesus Fucking Christ.

-Username17

[Longes]

Phil Brucato was the lead developer of Mage Second Edition, as well as a current lead developer of Mage 20th Anniversary Edition. He absolutely mattered for Mage development and matters even more right now. It's notable that Mage Revised edition's big changes were rolling back all of Brucato's craziness and making it more "street level". Which Brucato has now "fixed".

Mage 20th Anniversary isn't a real thing. It never was. The entire company actually factually went out of business in 2006. It was bailed out by Icelandic videogame nerds, but went out of business again in 2012. And then it just sort of stayed out of business. Eventually the rights got sold to Swedish videogame nerds who are picking their ass making vaporware. But the bottom line is that anything done after November 2006 is only arguably White Wolf, and anything after 2012 just flat isn't White Wolf at all.

Mage 20th Anniversary was made in 2013, one year after White Wolf studios fucking closed forever. It's a fan project. No one fucking cares. It is exactly as much a new edition of Mage as Princess or Witch is. Jesus Fucking Christ.

-Username17

Who gives a shit if White Wolf studios closed? Mage20 is being sold as a Mage the Ascension product. What does the identity of the producing company have to do with anything? You might as well claim that D&D 3 was not a real D&D product because TSR closed. Paradox lets Onyx Path make and sell oWoD products. Princess and Witch are not being sold as oWoD products. Yeah, Phil Brucato is a fanboy turned writer, but that doesn't make the product illegitimate.

[Dean]

It has been mentioned that the idea of any major faction of Vampires or supernaturals not supporting the Masquerade has to be right out from day one. Still it would be good is to keep the cool rebellious themes put into the Anarchs and some Sabbat but to make it a rebellion against the Vampire society status quo, not the Masquerade itself. The rebellious and rulebreaking vampires should be trying to take down the specifics of vampire society but not the very concept of a society itself. Real world revolutionaries and rebels are rebelling against parts of their society they dislike, not trying to bring everything back to apocalyptic fighting in the streets. Even crazy extremists want things like "Sharia law imposed in Pakistan" not to destroy the idea of crops and dams so everyone dies en mass.

The idea of rulebreakers needing to put down by Vampire society is a good one but making those rulebreakers want to take down the masquerade is an absolute non-starter. The angriest tatted up Brujah you can imagine should totally want to diablerize the local Prince and have his cronies tear down the people above him who claim to rule over him. That's good for the game. But neither that Brujah or any other vamp would want to fight the masquerade itself because it's a life necessity, so while rebellion is great the point of anarchistic elements should be to disrupt the existing power structure but not to make it so there is no power structure at all.

Vampires who desire to or flirt with breaking the Masquerade should be a target for total war by basically anyone. They'd be treated by other vampires the same way rebels who wanted to dirty nuke their own country would be in in that country. They could exist but basically everyone on either side of a given conflict would agree those people are kill on sight.

[hyzmarca]

Phil Brucato was the lead developer of Mage Second Edition, as well as a current lead developer of Mage 20th Anniversary Edition. He absolutely mattered for Mage development and matters even more right now. It's notable that Mage Revised edition's big changes were rolling back all of Brucato's craziness and making it more "street level". Which Brucato has now "fixed".

Mage 20th Anniversary isn't a real thing. It never was. The entire company actually factually went out of business in 2006. It was bailed out by Icelandic videogame nerds, but went out of business again in 2012. And then it just sort of stayed out of business. Eventually the rights got sold to Swedish videogame nerds who are picking their ass making vaporware. But the bottom line is that anything done after November 2006 is only arguably White Wolf, and anything after 2012 just flat isn't White Wolf at all.

Mage 20th Anniversary was made in 2013, one year after White Wolf studios fucking closed forever. It's a fan project. No one fucking cares. It is exactly as much a new edition of Mage as Princess or Witch is. Jesus Fucking Christ.

-Username17

Who gives a shit if White Wolf studios closed? Mage20 is being sold as a Mage the Ascension product. What does the identity of the producing company have to do with anything? You might as well claim that D&D 3 was not a real D&D product because TSR closed. Paradox lets Onyx Path make and sell oWoD products. Princess and Witch are not being sold as oWoD products. Yeah, Phil Brucato is a fanboy turned writer, but that doesn't make the product illegitimate.

CCP was the one that licensed oWoD and nWoD to Onyx Path. That's because CCP didn't care about the tabletop market and just wanted the IP so that they could make a huge, epic, oWoD MMORPG.

Their reach exceeded their grasp on that one.


When Paradox bought the IP, they pulled Onyx Path's oWoD license as fast as the existing contracts would let them, and just left Onyx Path with the nWoD, which they renamed to Chronicles of Darkness.

This of because Paradox thinks that the nWoD is flamming garbage and just wants to develop the oWoD IP. They are right.

And while they are treating oWoD20 as a fourth edition, as shown by their naming scheme, they're basically dropping all of oWoD20's metaplot in favor of actually moving the setting forward into 2018.

They're also rewriting the rules from the ground up. Because they know that the old rules sucked, but also that no one buys Vampire for the rules.

That's really the smart thing. They know that the tabletop game is important, but it's not the money maker. It's the foundation for the rest. The real money comes from licensing and merchandising. From multimedia. From toys. From movies, television shows, from Lego playsets. Vampire at one time had that. It had television shows. It had video games. It had movie deals. And White Wolf squandered all of that. And CCP ignored all of that in favor of its vaporware. Paradox isn't setting out to make a better game, or to even appeal to fans. They're setting out to build a multimedia empire on the back of a really, really good IP that has been grossly mismanaged.

And to do that, they need to exercise control. And they do.
The only reason Mage20 exists is that paradox couldn't stop it from going to print. But Onyx path isn't going to be allowed to make more oWoD20 products beyond what they've already licensed. Instead, they're left with the shit-stick that is Chronicles, and can screw that up as much as they want because it isn't worth anything.

[Longes]

Even if all of that is true* and there will be no new Onyx Path oWoD books - so what? How does this invalidate the products which are already released by Onyx Path and are being sold as oWoD products?

*the claim seems dubious as in late 2017 Onyx Path released "Becketts Jyhad Diary" - a 560 pages long book that has nothing but Vampire fluff and metaplot in it.

[hyzmarca]

Even if all of that is true* and there will be no new Onyx Path oWoD books - so what? How does this invalidate the products which are already released by Onyx Path and are being sold as oWoD products?

*the claim seems dubious as in late 2017 Onyx Path released "Becketts Jyhad Diary" - a 560 pages long book that has nothing but Vampire fluff and metaplot in it.

The fact that those products won't have support going forward invalidates them, insomuch as a game book can be invalidated. The game police won't come to your house and arrest you for playing it, but the new books might not be compatible.

[DrPraetor]

Even if all of that is true* and there will be no new Onyx Path oWoD books - so what? How does this invalidate the products which are already released by Onyx Path and are being sold as oWoD products?

Frank is correct that we don't know what ratio of bleach to colloidal silver he was taking when he died last year (too soon?), but the "defective mental faculties" were clearly in evidence during https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Wieck 's tenure as the author of the original Mage.

So, if the question is, "why does the original Mage line have seemingly nonsensical views on how the mages hide from sleepers?", then it doesn't matter how crazy people were who came later, because the defective reasoning was baked into the setting from the get-go.

That the setting attracted writers who really believe in Chaos Magick or whatever is not a surprise, but this is not dispositive for responsibility in making the setting ill-conceived in the first place.

[maglag]

And while they are treating oWoD20 as a fourth edition, as shown by their naming scheme, they're basically dropping all of oWoD20's metaplot in favor of actually moving the setting forward into 2018.

They're also rewriting the rules from the ground up. Because they know that the old rules sucked, but also that no one buys Vampire for the rules.

That's really the smart thing. They know that the tabletop game is important, but it's not the money maker. It's the foundation for the rest. The real money comes from licensing and merchandising. From multimedia. From toys. From movies, television shows, from Lego playsets. Vampire at one time had that.

World of Darkness Vampire had a Lego playset? I demand link/pic!

[Prak]

Totally not WoD, but there was legitimately a Universal Monsters With Serial Numbers Scratched Off, Sorta Lego line-

[Username17]

Who gives a shit if White Wolf studios closed? Mage20 is being sold as a Mage the Ascension product.

So what?

OSR books are being sold as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons products. Again, so what? Janky fan products made years after the actual company closed its doors and the game line was officially discontinued are not reflective of the people whomade it, but of the people who wouldn't let it go.

We actually have an exact end point for Mage. It's the point where Bill Bridges wrote that weird essay about how it was the end of the Mage game line, but you could still have magick in your hearts or something. That was the literal actual end of Mage. Anything made by other people working for other companies just has to be evaluated as its own thing. A thing obviously influenced by the original Mage, but definitely not part of the original work.

This isn't like Vampire, where the fires of the content forges at CCP slowly died and things just stopped coming out as a gradual thing but no one made a specific decision to end the game line or make a new one while the company downsized into non-existence. Mage, like Wraith before it, fucking ended. It's over. Bill Bridges, the main guy on the line after Stewart Wieck went on the other things and the actual face of Mage, fucking said it was over. The company producing it said it was over. The game line ended. It is past tense.



So it might be interesting to talk about the specific craziness of Stewart Wieck or Bill Bridges as regards how or why Mage: The Ascension is weird and dumb in the specific way it is weird and dumb. The insanity and personal habits of the promoted fanboys who came later after gravitating to the thing that Bridges and Wieck made is only indicative of how crazy the product actually was. Although even that doesn't say much. As previously noted, one person in twenty five believes Vampires are real, and one person in three believes that there are IRL Ghosts. Apparently one person in two believes at least one conspiracy theory in spite of being presented with conclusive evidence that it is false.

The simple horrible reality is that you deal with people who have one flavor or another of crazy belief all the time, and that absolutely every multi-author creative project has people who are crazy in at least one way. Most of those peoples' specific crazy beliefs don't come up in casual conversation or detract from the work. But it turns out that most of the time you spot something that isn't quite right in a movie or a book or a TV show or something it's because someone involved actually was a fucking nut and their freak flag just got in the way of the lens a bit.

• That weird shit about phasers being unable to melt steel girders in Star Trek: Into Darkness? That's there because there's a script writer who is a fucking 9/11 Troofer and thinks that there's actually something super significant about the melting point of steel.
• That weird shit in the Incredibles about how the villains' plan is to undermine the specialness of great people? That's because the director is actually a Randroid and thinks that mediocre men are trying to steal his objectivist personal oeuvre.

And so on. Do these little bits of crazy detract from works? Oh hell yes they do! Sometimes the little bits of crazy just make things more entertaining or just a bit weirder. But yes, mostly these bits where the crazy creeps in make things less enjoyable.

Anyway, as to what this has to do with Rebooting Vampire it's pretty simple: No one "owns" the concepts of Vampire. Right now, a Swedish videogame company owns several Trademarks associated with proper names that were used in Vampire: the Masquerade or Vampire: the Requiem. That's it. The actual line of the Vampire RPG is dead and has been dead for years. Anyone making a new RPG about Vampires today is doing exactly that: making a new RPG. And if you want to sell it for money you have to avoid using those trademarks or get a license agreement with Paradox to do so. But here's the thing: even within that context, they don't actually own very much.

• "Vampire: the Masquerade" is a registered trademark. You can't call your game "Vampire: the Masquerade." But you can call it "Vampire: Anything Else" and you're legally fine. They don't own calling the concept "Masquerade" in-world, although obviously you could call it "Vow of Silence" or something instead if that's what you wanted to do.
• "Changeling: the Dreaming" is an unregistered trademark. You could possibly actually challenge them on that point because Changeling: the Dreaming was not registered and also fell out of use. You don't care, but even their ownership of the exact proper name of the game line "Changeling: the Dreaming" is challengeable.
• "All characters, names, places, and text herin are copyrighted by White Wolf Publishing Inc." Here's the thing: that's wrong. Copyright Protection Not Available for Names, Titles, or Short Phrases. Back when White Wolf existed, they claimed copyright on names such as "Tremere" and "Ravnos." That doesn't exist. Those things aren't subject to copyright. The specific descriptions of the Tremere are and were copyrighted, but you can write your own wizard vampires and call them "Clan Tremere" and you're in the clear. They own the (unregistereed) trademark to making a book called "Clanbook Tremere" but they do not own the copyright (or anything else) on the actual name "Tremere."

So there's every reason to believe that whatever edition of Vampire that Paradox eventually shits out (if they ever do) will be objectively terrible. But there's also not much reason to care. They don't own your teenage rebellion, they just own a couple of frankly pretty meaningless copyrights. The fact that you could write a better Vampire Role Playing Game means that you probably should. And there's no reason to treat that version as any more or less legitimate than whatever crap the Swedes make.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

That weird shit in the Incredibles about how the villains' plan is to undermine the specialness of great people? That's because the director is actually a Randroid and thinks that mediocre men are trying to steal his objectivist personal oeuvre.

Wait, really? Like, is that from an interview or something? Because I've heard this interpretation of the Incredibles before, and it's a really bad interpretation. The Incredibles is about a family of gifted people using their talents to protect the world pro-bono from a corporate executive egomaniac who built his fortune from nothing using only his own brilliance, but was corrupted by his petty vendetta from a minor childhood betrayal. Both Syndrome's corporation and the insurance company Bob works for are portrayed as purely villainous, in either a life-threatening or petty way (respectively). The government spook is portrayed as generally helpful and friendly even as he's limited by the directives of his agency in how much he can help the Parr family, and likewise the citizens suing various government entities over super hero damages are portrayed as unreasonable and also petty.

Like, I'm willing to believe that the director wanted to make Objectivist propaganda and failed because he's bad at propaganda, but it's not the reading of the story that jumps out at you unless you're cherry-picking a handful of specific scenes.

[Mord]

Wait, really? Like, is that from an interview or something? Because I've heard this interpretation of the Incredibles before, and it's a really bad interpretation. The Incredibles is about a family of gifted people using their talents to protect the world pro-bono from a corporate executive egomaniac who built his fortune from nothing using only his own brilliance, but was corrupted by his petty vendetta from a minor childhood betrayal. Both Syndrome's corporation and the insurance company Bob works for are portrayed as purely villainous, in either a life-threatening or petty way (respectively). The government spook is portrayed as generally helpful and friendly even as he's limited by the directives of his agency in how much he can help the Parr family, and likewise the citizens suing various government entities over super hero damages are portrayed as unreasonable and also petty.

Like, I'm willing to believe that the director wanted to make Objectivist propaganda and failed because he's bad at propaganda, but it's not the reading of the story that jumps out at you unless you're cherry-picking a handful of specific scenes.

Yes, the Incredibles are a family of Übermenschen who protect the world even though the world is manifestly unworthy of their protection. Syndrome is a usurper of super-power whose every action is villainous and petty, and his ultimate goal of distributing super power to the masses is depicted as being explicitly villainous with the sinister delivery of the line "if everyone is super, no one is." Everything bad that Syndrome does - murdering supers, unleashing the deathball on the city, shooting down the plane with Bob's kids on it - reinforces that he is an evil man and you should regard everything he wants and works for as evil, including and especially the equality between Übermenschen and muggles that he wants to bring about.

The government agent is friendly and helpful to the Übermenschen in spite of what his government and constituency want him to do and that is why he is a good guy. People who side with (serve) the Übermenschen are good guys, people who demand accountability of or attempt to exercise authority over the Übermenschen are bad guys.

Like, Bob Parr threw his boss through fourteen walls and put him in a body cast. The boss guy was a dick, but that's attempted murder. The movie totally glosses over this - it is OK that Bob nearly killed a man, because Bob is an Übermensch and the little man was a little man trying to exercise authority over an Übermensch, and now we feel sorry for Bob losing his job and having to move because he nearly killed a man in a fit of pique. Holy shit dude!

Syndrome being a "self-made super" doesn't mean that The Incredibles has an egalitarian streak, because the movie paints Syndrome as completely and totally evil - the act of a muggle seizing power that doesn't belong to him is an evil act by an evil person with evil consequences.

In the framework of Incredibles morality, the best thing you could possibly say about Syndrome is that he is in fact a super, his power being Super-Science. In that case it's not a story about a mere mortal being punished for trying to steal fire from Olympus, but rather a war among the gods.

[Chamomile]

My claim isn't that Incredibles has an egalitarian streak because Syndrome is a self-made super. It's that Incredibles serves as atrocious Objectivist propaganda because the guy who uses his natural talents to go into business and make billions of dollars while pursuing exclusively his own selfish desires is unequivocally the villain. He only intends to release his technology to the wider world after he's too old to soak in the prestige of being the only one with access to it for as long as he was young enough to fight crime. Yeah, the best thing you can say about Syndrome is that he's accomplished a lot with his talents, and in Objectivist morality that makes him the good guy. In the Incredibles, it makes him a callous sociopath who laughs about killing the children of his enemies.

The heroes, meanwhile, are former government agents who want to help people out of the goodness of their hearts (the idea of making super heroing into a private business is never even brought up, nor is the idea that supers should stop caring about the well-being of the muggles), and subverting the abusive bureaucracy of a corporation as well as directly combating the maniacal schemes of a corporate super villain are both presented as a legitimate means of doing so. Bob's character flaw is that he tries to subvert the government mandate against hero work. It's portrayed as childish and reckless compared to Frozone's (recently acquired) more calm maturity and it's the weakness Syndrome uses to bait him into furthering an evil scheme. The boss is critically injured after showing contempt for the well-being of others, and we are meant to understand that Bob's reaction was foolish, but also understandable, and understandable specifically because he was driven by moral outrage at the bosses' total lack of concern for other human beings. It's a fair point that potentially fatally injuring someone over that is an extreme overreaction that the movie glosses over, but it's really bizarre to read this as the boss being punished for trying to exert authority over Bob rather than for having a total lack of concern for his fellow human beings. In both cases that exercising that authority is portrayed as wrong, it's because Bob is helping the helpless while his boss wants him to be focused on making profits for shareholders. That's closing in on an anti-capitalist theme.

Also, the government agent's actual directives and liberty to make decisions on behalf of his agency are unclear. When he offers to relocate Bob again, it's not obvious whether he's subverting his agency's orders or mandate or if he's just making a judgement call within his authority, knowing that he's putting a squeeze on his agency's resources to do so.

The theme of the Incredibles is that some people are inherently much more gifted than others, but it's also that those gifts should be used to benefit the weak and helpless and not for personal aggrandizement or profit. The one particular scene where Syndrome menacingly vows to one day make superpowers egalitarian is definitely weird, which is why I'm open to the idea that someone on the team was slipping an Objectivist moment in (provided there's some kind of outside evidence of this), but outside of that moment the movie repeatedly vilifies the concept of using your gifts selfishly.

[Prak]

So, basically, "Objectivists are shitty at writing propaganda for their own contradictory bullshit philosophy?"

News at 11.

[Chamomile]

Having conceded that the Incredibles isn't good at being Objectivist propaganda, what exactly is your evidence that it was intended to be?

[hyzmarca]

You can find articles where Brad Bird says that he's not an Objectivist, and people are reading way too much into it.

[Whipstitch]

I'm not completely convinced Brad Bird is a Randroid--if so he's comparatively subtle about it by Goodkind standards*--but I would argue that either way his pet creative obsession held back The Incredibles a bit but elevated Ratatouille. Bird made back-to-back movies about freakishly talented individuals who feel like they're being held down to some degree but only one of the films has stakes that consistently feel appropriate to the dilemma being described. Aside from the health code violations Remy isn't really a danger to anyone and nobody in Ratatouille is really a villain--Anton Ego is a pompous gatekeeper but at the end of the day he is presented as a human being who can be won over rather than a weird straw man nobody will mourn once they're sucked into a jet engine. Ratatouille rarely if ever overtaxes its central premise and is really satisfying as a result.

By contrast The Incredibles has life and death stakes but I don't really consider that a strength considering how thin they stretch the whole "They keep coming up with new ways to celebrate mediocrity" and "When everyone is special, no one will be" ideas. I mean, okay, sure, I get it: the writer-director is upset about everyone in the youth soccer team getting a trophy at a minimum and may lean Randroid. But pillorying that stuff often feels kinda weird and beside the point when you've got someone murdering people with death bots. Misguided egalitarianism isn't the real problem so time spent blatantly harping on it sometimes feels like a weird digression in an otherwise well-crafted movie.

*Okay, I don't really consider that indicative of anything, I just like shitting on Goodkind all day, every day.

[Chamomile]

Even with the health code violations, Remy actually does make sure his rat buddies are properly cleaned and hygienic before getting them to work in the kitchen. I don't know if that would actually work in real life, but within the fiction the health code violation boils down to movie France being racist against rats.

[Prak]

Yeah, within the world of Ratatouille, rats are sapient and they wash their hands before doing any food prep in a restaurant. Technically, Ratatouille, the character, would be a health code violation just for being in the restaurant at all, but in the pre-climax phase, he's just sitting on whatsisname's head under his hat, and not actively presenting a food risk.

[Wiseman]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R8GtrKtrZ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3JhT9tBzLw

The scenes with the insurance ceo. Notably, Bob isn's angry because a "muggle" is trying to exert authority over him, but that upon witnessing a man being mugged, his biggest worry is that he might have to help him, in addition to thwarting his efforts to try and help people who clearly deserve it. And him loosing his temper and assaulting his boss, however cathartic, is clearly shown to be a bad thing.

[ArmorClassZero]

And VTM Bloodlines (the video game) also does this as well. You're created, your Sire is destroyed, and the rest of the Vampire world, who is present at the time of the local Prince deciding NOT to execute you on the spot (since you were illegally created), collectively shrug and say, "Not my problem," and "Good luck out there, kiddo!" except for Smiling Jack and Nines Rodriguez, two Anarchs.