The Masquerade: tired cliche or inevitable reality?

See, I'm not a big fan of the "properly prepared/informed Muggles are a serious threat to the supernatural" thing. Well, I don't mind stories where Muggles do well against supernatural beings, so long as they don't make a big to-do about it. It's when stories give this plot point a jingoistic "Humanity, Fuck Yeah!" vibe that I get annoyed. After all, the supernatural beings that humanity's triumphing over were created by the author; humans can only defeat them because the author chose to make them defeatable, so it annoys me when they act like this proves some point about how awesome humanity is.

I have bad news: we've outgrown our legends. That does prove a point. (Aside from our legends being sustained by hack writers.)

I'm not quite clear what you mean by that.

Bluntly, the idea the author can't make a point by beating them is dumb because we really, truly could beat most of our folktales and our legends. Dresden is right in that much at least.

The thing about folklore is that it's often vague and contradictory. In some stories, vampires are reanimated corpses that have to physically claw their way out of the grave; in others, they're incorporeal spirits who can just ignore physical obstacles. Odin can kill a planet-sized giant and make the Earth out of his body in one story, but get held hostage by a random dwarf in the next. Sometimes demons are monstrous soldiers who fight people in battle, but other times they're bodiless spirits who possess people and can only be driven out by exorcists. In some of the Thousand and One Nights, genies are virtually all-powerful beings who can do stuff like transport an entire building across continents in an instant, yet it also includes a story where a genie died after someone accidentally threw a date seed at him.

When adapting mythical creatures for their stories, authors need to decide what to keep, what to discard, and what to make up themselves. Depending on what they choose, you can wind up with Physical Gods or people/animals that are just kind of funny looking. Either option can work, but it doesn't prove anything either way.

edited 2nd Jul '14 11:18:47 PM by RavenWilder

In the age of nuclear weapons, if an author *doesn't* want the muggles to be a threat to his supernaturals he has to make them pretty damn powerful. And that's not always what you want to do. Not every series is supposed to be DBZ. Making all of your characters reality warpers isn't conductive to most genres of storytelling, and closes the door on way too many of an author's options in creating drama.

Having muggles be a threat to supernaturals isn't about "proving" anything. It's a justification for the masquerade, and it's acknowledging the reality that just because you can shoot a fireball at people doesn't mean that you can take on an army. Dresden files is far, far more interesting series for actually having supernaturals be smart enough to use technology, and for not falling back on a lazy portrayal of the military as being hyper-incompetent so that you can pretend that your mildly superstrong heroine is the only person that can save the world *cough* Buffy *cough*.

edited 3rd Jul '14 6:14:55 AM by Bloodsquirrel

...uh, nukes wouldnt really be effective against the supernatural.

like, you wouldnt normally use it on a single freak unless it was in a wasteland ala where the nuclear testing took place (iirc, that was the actual place a shapeshifter was nuked in dresden) and i dont think the supernatural are usually portrayed as a unified enough entity, or at the very least all gathering in one, convenient location for nuking the hell out of.

honestly, i think masquerades have more of a place during medieval periods where witchhunts are stereotypically placed, rather than in the modern day where human rights is kind of a bigger deal, you cant really maintain it given the level of technology, and a lot of people are a lot less prone to believing in what common sense tells them is implausible, let alone setting up angry mobs to hunt down whatever offended their sense of reality. and yet i see the masquerade in the modern day a lot more often than i do in the medieval periods.

edited 3rd Jul '14 3:59:59 PM by Tarsen

The problem with that is that one needs to remember legendary creatures do not need to make sense. Say, take the usual vampire, who can be killed by a stake in the heart. It's entirely within the realm of logic (as far as it can when we're talking about myth, anyway) for a vampire to be immune to everything but a well-placed stake in the chest. Hail of machine gun? Useless. Fire? Ineffective. Nuke? Not even a scratch. But stake? Well shit, that's his weakness!

Or a Demon. You can repel a demon by praying, theoretically speaking, but there is absolutely zero guarantee a nuke will do anything to him, because Demons are not creatures in the biological sense, they're ethereal monsters that tresspass any laws of logic and physics that we may have. The work on a "fable" logic, not on a biological logic.

i could see a masquerade being maintained primarily with regards to the de facto capital of the supernatural factions or whatever, because it would be a lot easier to maintain, being focused at a specific point and only really in danger when people enter and exit, or people stray too near, neither which are hard to prepare for. and of course, the reason you'd want to do that but not hide supernatural stuff itself would probably be cuz that place would count as an independant state within another country, and said country might not take too kindly to that.

still not likely to get nuked, regardless, but theres still the threat of being nagged, browbeaten or made a target of by patriots who think the supers owe them something for being allowed to build on the country's soil without the consent of the government or whatever. no matter how much of a threat the muggles actually are, diplomacy is a thing that kind of needs to be acknowledged, if only to make life easier for the supers in such a case, so its either masquerade the status of a unified group of people, or drop it entiretly and work politics.

edited 3rd Jul '14 4:15:47 PM by Tarsen

Wolf Children Ame and Yuki showed a good reason: the Disappeared Dad was wolf-man. He died in his wolf form and his wife couldn't say or do anything. Who would believe her? Even in The '90s era Japan that the anime was set in, the mother goes to great lengths to hide her children's nature.

In parts of the US, wolves or wolf-hybrids are illegal. Many are put down by animal control. In rural parts of the US, a shapesifter would get the Burn the Witch! treatment. That's not to mention Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc. That's just in the US.

edited 3rd Jul '14 8:00:19 PM by TairaMai

x5 Again, I don't have a problem with stories that go, "Yeah, humanity can kick the supernatural's ass." What annoys me are stories that go, "Yeah! Humanity can kick the supernatural's ass!" It's all in the presentation.

As for Buffy, that show never really went in for realistic world building. Right from the start, it asks us to accept that a small town high school could be the site of dozens of unsolved murders, yet keep functioning just like any other American high school. And it only gets more implausible from there.

Getting back to the masquerade thing, Buffy's approach was to just play the whole thing for laughs. The writers were well aware that the Extra-Strength Masquerade needed to keep the supernatural a secret was ridiculous, and they never tried to pretend otherwise. But since Buffy was at least half a comedy and frequently trafficked in ridiculous premises, that wasn't really an issue.

edited 3rd Jul '14 8:08:26 PM by RavenWilder

Good point. There is a bit of MST3K Mantra: "This is an action/drama/horror/fantasy/COMEDY".

And I don't have a problem with that. Make fun of people dismissing a masquerade breech as a viral prank. Or a vampire-ninja with a blog. Camp done right is fun. Supernatural, Buffy, even the Marvel films put laughs in with the scares. They showed that, to paraphrase Willy Wonka: "A little camp, now and then, is cherished by the wisest men."

Don't insult the audience. Just because A Wizard Did It doesn't mean he has to give the audience the finger when waving his hands.

edited 3rd Jul '14 9:21:33 PM by TairaMai

I like Vampire The Requiem as an approach, especially Blood and Smoke.

To put it bluntly, the Masquerade is not about keeping the supernatural under wraps. Nope, it's about keeping the supernatural under protection. Humanity, as a species, is the Magnificent Bastard of the natural world, having quickly turned ourselves into the most apex of apex predators simply though wits, stubbornness, and the ability to push very long and very hard.

If you are, say, a vampire with any degree of self-awareness, you'll quickly realize that you're one of the apex predators in this scenario, and if your prey knows who you are and what your weakness is, you might as well get a nice tan right then and there, it might be less painful.

How is this different from Humanity, Fuck Yeah? Well, for one, it's grayer - the monster who preys upon humans just wants to survive and survive free, whilst his prey wants the same exact thing. For another though, the Masquerade...isn't actually all that overpowering. The monsters don't care if you know their species exists, they care about whether or not you know that these people, specifically, are monsters, or their weaknesses. Ask yourself what the universal-but-nothing-concrete awareness does to human culture and history, and play with the trope a little.

For example, a demon may come to drop the act because she's sure the human friend she's talking to wouldn't betray and kill her, hence it's largely pointless to keep the ruse and all the emotional trauma associated with it. That human becomes either a friend to other demons, a threat, or both, as even if the demon was right about the human's trustworthiness, she's now a security risk because she might guess at demonic weaknesses from the way her friend acts, and that makes her a potential asset to any hunters sick of demons manipulating others into tragedies because they need emotion to survive, and it's simply easier and more reliable to provoke negative ones via tragedies and murders and the like.

The key to making a good dramatic Masquerade is to realize nothing exists in a vacuum. The constant act affects the actors if they are like humans in any way, and the humans are smart enough to realize there's something going on, but they just can't quite see the whole picture. Embrace that frustration and paranoia, show how different the world is because of it.

Nukes wouldn't help much against the supernatural in most stories. Most supernaturals live in regular cities, they just keep a low profile. What are you gonna do, nuke your own cities to kill a few monsters? Only if they were the most extreme of threats. And even then, supernaturals are pretty far spread out and the chances of getting every single one is slim. So a genocidal campaign with nukes might wipe out supernaturals, but you'd wipe out a good portion of humanity too.

one of the easiest masquerades I find to uphold is small scale. When only a few people are capable of magic, suddenly it's a bit more realistic that they might want to keep a tight lip on it.