The Masquerade: tired cliche or inevitable reality?

How exactly do you think humanity would react to discovering that the laws of physics, which control the function of the technology we are dependent on to survive and keeps our lungs on the INSIDE of our bodies, were completely wrong as a model of reality? What if the laws of physics were defined by consensus? What if they changed over time, or at the whim of capricious alien beings? Et cetera. What then?

That's not even going into the frightening applications of even Potter-style magic, much less the reality-warping horror of CCP's Mage: The Awakening franchise.

edited 31st Mar '12 7:16:31 PM by Zenoseiya

Awesomeness Ensues.

I'm thinking more along the lines of this:

"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

edited 31st Mar '12 7:35:51 PM by Zenoseiya

Here is another example: http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_177_if-old-wives-tales-turned-out-to-be-true_p19/#16

Another thing that I love about Lovecraft: The innate understanding that The Magic Comes Back is a really scary trope.

We live every day with the power to kill each other. Magic, like guns, can only speed up the process. It is due to the power of society that we haven't killed each other yet, and I think society would hold even if magic existed.

edited 31st Mar '12 10:30:38 PM by feotakahari

That depends strongly upon how we define magic here, or to what extent the world is altered by it.

Way I see it, a Masquerade about the existence of the supernatural is only plausible if supernatural powers themselves are involved in the cover-up. Like this one novel I read about homeless people living in some sort of paranormal underground, and for some reason entering this hidden world instantly erases all memories and physical records of your existence from the world above.

That being said, who ever said a Masquerade has to be realistic? I personally enjoy it when improbability of keeping such things secret is played up for comedic effect.

If magic can lead individuals to have nuke-level power, then there might be societal survival value in a Masquerade; it only takes one insane Person of Mass Destruction sorcerer to seriously mess things up.

It seems like the only way The Masquerade would work is if there were consistently semi-reveals that were always shown to be hoaxes to the public/science/government. That way, if something does go awry in the masquerade, the first thing in their mind would be hoax.

Of course you're going to get believers in such a situation, but nobody believes believers, so they're not really a liability.

Also:

Ahahahaha

edited 1st Apr '12 8:37:32 AM by ohsointocats

I think that's an inherently troublesome view, though, since the major issues facing a masquerade are always issues of a very mundane nature, usually having more to do with bodies on the street and the limitations of a human mind's ability to process information than with being able to erase people's memories or teleport.

I think it also matters how many people are involved in the masquerade. If there's a dozen vampires in North America, I think they can keep it underground fairly well. Hundreds or thousands? Rather harder.

Whoever said this is clearly a sympathetic organism, and worthy of praise.

I'm not quite getting you here. What exactly is the "troublesome" part?

While the problems a masquerade faces usually come from mundane things, there's such a plethora of mundane things your cover-up abilities would have to be superhuman.

Again, it's issues that having superpowers generally won't help with. (Or will actually make more difficult despite in theory helping if you're Multiple Man.) Bodies on the street to hear things and respond to possible breaches, and the limits of the ability to process incoming information that might or might not bear on the matter you wish to keep contained. Things that require you to throw money and people and organization at the problem, not heat vision or being a vampire.

If your superpowers are good enough to manage a Masquerade that well, then you probably don't actually need the Masquerade and could manage disclosure even better.

edited 3rd Apr '12 6:30:57 PM by Night

That last bit is a very good point: If you've got the powers to make people think that you don't exist (and/or don't have any powers), surely you've got the powers to make people not try to round you up and exterminate you.

That's honestly the only kind of Masquerade that makes sense. Like in Bibliography, there are vampires and werewolves and all kinds of shit walking around in broad daylight, but normal people just can't see them for what they are. If there's something about their appearance that can be ignored, it is (harpies are more or less people with wings and funny shaped feet; Unawakened people just don't see those things). It has to come to a point where someone has to want to Awaken you, or something is going on that cannot be rationalized away.

edited 3rd Apr '12 8:27:58 PM by SalFishFin

Of course, that kind of thing poses a problem of its own as far as origins go.

Not really, no. I figure something like this happened a couple of times with different people, who became the first Pages (That's what magic users are called). After that, it was just up to them to make more Pages.

The people being hidden by a masquerade aren't necessarily the ones enforcing it, though. I've seen several stories where there's no one actually trying to keep the masquerade up; what keeps people from noticing the paranormal's existence is more like a natural force. In some cases that force may have been put into play by a paranormal being, but the one who created it isn't necessarily around anymore.

At that point, though, it's just an enormous hand wave and you may as well not bother with a justification at all.

The problem I have with the "Masquerade" is that humanity, as whole, is not stupid. I can buy a conspiracy to keep certain important information secret from the public (Basically, MIB-type conspiracy) because that exists in Real Life...but actual scientific/military/information experts not knowing anything about an entire subculture/ecosystem that exists under their noses (Harry-Potter-type)? That I don't buy. Human beings are not idiots and tend to notice patterns—or, barring that, they tend to notice the lack of patterns.

For reference, I was doing a story which essentially takes place during the second generation following mankind's first contact with an alien species. However, one of the big reveals later in the story is that the alien species in question worship another alien species which is actually responsible for all of their technology and advancement.

After I sat down and thought about it, I realized there was no way humanity (or the elite thereof) wouldn't have figured that out already. There would be too many clues, such as the aliens having no actual record of their scientific progress, there being no relevant scientific areas of study to explain how they came to even think of such advanced technology. Eventually, mankind would come to notice things like that and be able to make some reasonable educated guesses. So I shifted my Foreshadowing from making that a "reveal" more into something that the audience could totally figure out if they were paying even the slightest bit of attention.

edited 4th Apr '12 6:27:17 AM by KingZeal

It could be a Hand Wave. However, it could also be a plot point if a character's trying to disrupt the masquerade-enforcing effect, or if, let's say, someone is killed by a vampire, comes back as a vampire themselves, but is unable to convince their friends and family that they're not still dead.

I might as well mention the recurrent claim that an Extra-Strength Masquerade is plausible because African tribesmen were literally incapable of seeing European explorers' ships offshore until they landed. (I have never seen a source for this claim, and I highly suspect it to be bullshit along the lines of 90% of Your Brain, but you might as well use it if you don't have a better justification.)

I...really doubt that to be at all valid.