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Old 01-31-2018, 01:07 PM   #11
Icelander
 
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Default Re: Super Villians 60s Style

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Originally Posted by tshiggins View Post
How much social consciousness or social criticism do you plan to include? For instance, a character called "White Knight" might perpetrate horrific atrocities, but if he was from a Southern U.S. state in the 1960s, he might consider himself a hero, and even enjoy considerable popular support -- at least, locally.
In the 60s?

From what I can tell, in the real world, there were vanishingly few cases of documented lynchings in the United States after WWII. As in, fewer than the number of people killed by vending machines. From 1951-1959, the Tuskegee Institute recorded four acts, one in 1951 and three in 1955. Basically, the odds of being the victim of racically motivated mob violence was two orders of magnitude less in the Depression Era than it was during the actual heyday of lynchings, the Reconstruction Era, and by the 1950s, lynchings were too rare to be measurable as fractions of their previous rates.

By the 1960s, there were still murders motivated by racial intolerance and culture wars, but these were a miniscule fraction of the overall murder rate and didn't bear any real resemblence to what most people think about when they hear lynching. They were more likely to be shootings from ambush, not really distinguishable from acts of political violence in Europe in the same era. And the victims killed due to political and cultural tribalism in the 1960s were of several ethnicities.

Sectarian violence is a real problem in the world, of course. But for all the attention it gets in movies, Southern white mob violence and lynchings against African-Americans seems to have become much rarer even in the Depression Era and declined steadily from then on, lynchings having by WWII become much less common than deaths by terrorism in the modern West, which in itself is a vanishingly small threat statistically.

This is not to say that the death of even one person is acceptable, but I think it's important not to over-dramatize the past as some parade of horors we enlightened moderns have risen above. People have been awful, wonderful, apathetic and passionate, ignorant and sublime, pretty much in every era. And we tend to exeggerate the difference when we look back into history.

A socially realistic character from a Southern state in the 1960s might say things, might even believe things, that aren't acceptable today. But as for perpreting actual, real life atrocities, it's about as likely as the old lady today who complains about illegal immigrants who don't speak English serving her food actually going on a killing spree at a Walmart parking lot.

Yeah, the statistically insignificant aberrations are the ones who get all the headlines, but today or half a century ago, the vast majority of people don't actually support real atrocities against the social groups they denigrate as part of their standard discourse.
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Last edited by Icelander; 01-31-2018 at 01:12 PM.
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Old 01-31-2018, 02:30 PM   #12
sir_pudding
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Default Re: Super Villians 60s Style

Malcom X never levitated a city into space and Wallace never built an army of giant racist robots either, presumably the medium expects a certain amount of exaggeration.
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Old 01-31-2018, 02:58 PM   #13
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Default Re: Super Villians 60s Style

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Malcom X never levitated a city into space and Wallace never built an army of giant racist robots either, presumably the medium expects a certain amount of exaggeration.
Icelander can correct me if I am wrong, but I understood his point to be contesting the idea that this theoretical "White Knight" character would not enjoy any significant amount of support in the South, because while people may have believed, talked, and voted for certain things, the kind of stuff we'd associate with being an out-and-out villain were no longer popular, perhaps not even really tolerated.

Now, making this character not a villain at all, or only a villain in that he has views we find detestable, but he never pulls a Magneto and acts on such views, merely espouses them, and is constantly performing clearly heroic acts... that sounds like a really good challenge for the players, and oddly suitable for grounding things in reality. Granted, it also does not sound like the typical X-Men villain of that era. I haven't read that much of early X-Men, but they didn't strike me as being that nuanced.
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Old 01-31-2018, 03:22 PM   #14
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Default Re: Super Villians 60s Style

A super racist super would probably split the difference and just be overzealous in attacking non-white "criminals" and heroes.
Rioters, technically illegal demonstrators and protesters, and those protecting such people would be his targets.
That would muddy the public's perception enough for my suspension of disbelief at least.
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Old 01-31-2018, 03:37 PM   #15
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Default Re: Super Villians 60s Style

I think that an interesting counter story for a White Knight would be an albino African American super from the Deep South driven to commit terrorism acts against the US government (and other percieved racist organizations) due to its tolerance of the Jim Crow South. While public lynchings were rare, there are people committing racist murders and getting away with it now in the USA (the murder of nonwhite victims, especially poor female nonwhite victims, is rarely taken seriously in the South). The phenomena was orders of magnitude worse in the 1960s, with black men disappearing everyday in some of the larger communities during times of racial strife.
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Old 01-31-2018, 05:14 PM   #16
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Default Re: Super Villians 60s Style

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Originally Posted by Otaku View Post
Now, making this character not a villain at all, or only a villain in that he has views we find detestable, but he never pulls a Magneto and acts on such views, merely espouses them, and is constantly performing clearly heroic acts... that sounds like a really good challenge for the players, and oddly suitable for grounding things in reality. Granted, it also does not sound like the typical X-Men villain of that era. I haven't read that much of early X-Men, but they didn't strike me as being that nuanced.
A lot closer to William Stryker from God Loves, Man Kills, but that was an 80’s book. 60’s characters were a lot more black and white (no pun intended), even in magazines that liked to use shades of grey. There are a few early FF and Spiderman villains who aren’t “evil” and are instead misunderstood, but most are mustache twirlers.
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Old 01-31-2018, 05:53 PM   #17
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Default Re: Super Villians 60s Style

Flower Power - Precog and Omen visions. In the Purple Hayes cast.

Poppi Fields - Can cause sleep. In the Purple Hayes cast.

May Tripper - Induces hallucinations. In the Purples Hayes cast.
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Old 01-31-2018, 07:39 PM   #18
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Default Re: Super Villians 60s Style

The Stripper

A female psychopath with the ability to telekinetically flay the skin from her victims in public while they are alive. When she escapes, she mounts the preserved skins on wire models in a twisted parody of their life and leaves them for her victim's family to find. She specifically targets conservative male politicians and is wanted for the sadistic murders of conservative male politicians throughout the world.

The Stripper is suspected to kill only for money and seems to avoid harming innocents, as she wants witnesses to her crimes, but she will not hesitate to flay male police officers if they try to apprehend her. Strangely enough, she will avoid harming women and children, and has been captured by female police officers when her only way of escape would have been to kill them, though she always manages to escape when transfered to male police officers. Her telekinetic powers are immune to any conventional countermeasures and she has killed a dozen powered folk with supernatural countermeasures without difficulty.
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Old 01-31-2018, 07:48 PM   #19
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Default Re: Super Villians 60s Style

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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
The Stripper

A female psychopath with the ability to telekinetically flay the skin from her victims in public while they are alive. When she escapes, she mounts the preserved skins on wire models in a twisted parody of their life and leaves them for her victim's family to find. She specifically targets conservative male politicians and is wanted for the sadistic murders of conservative male politicians throughout the world.

The Stripper is suspected to kill only for money and seems to avoid harming innocents, as she wants witnesses to her crimes, but she will not hesitate to flay male police officers if they try to apprehend her. Strangely enough, she will avoid harming women and children, and has been captured by female police officers when her only way of escape would have been to kill them, though she always manages to escape when transfered to male police officers. Her telekinetic powers are immune to any conventional countermeasures and she has killed a dozen powered folk with supernatural countermeasures without difficulty.
Way too dark age.
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Old 01-31-2018, 08:11 PM   #20
Otaku
 
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Default Re: Super Villians 60s Style

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Originally Posted by Culture20 View Post
A lot closer to William Stryker from God Loves, Man Kills, but that was an 80’s book. 60’s characters were a lot more black and white (no pun intended), even in magazines that liked to use shades of grey. There are a few early FF and Spiderman villains who aren’t “evil” and are instead misunderstood, but most are mustache twirlers.
Yes, what tshiggins proposed is closer to Stryker. The thing is, you quoted from my post, where I was advocating that at worst he be depicted like Flyndaran suggested

Quote:
Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
A super racist super would probably split the difference and just be overzealous in attacking non-white "criminals" and heroes.
Rioters, technically illegal demonstrators and protesters, and those protecting such people would be his targets.
That would muddy the public's perception enough for my suspension of disbelief at least.
In a weird way, that might be the best way to handle villains for this era; characters that weren't intended to seem villainous at the time, but in hindsight are pretty questionable.

I mean, look at the X-Men themselves. If I told you a wealthy white man outside of New York had created a school for "his kind", a school from which he recruits his own paramilitary strike force because he doesn't trust the government to handle the affairs of "his kind"... sounds creepy, doesn't it?
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