Okay, apologies for the glib title, sometimes I can't resist the joke. That said-
*pulls up an edgy Sonic the Hedgehog song for talking about a nihilistic opponent*
So in the Makara and the Plain thread, I got asked some questions about the Incarnates and the Insatiable. Between the two of them, the Insatiable are easier to talk about, because for me, the big questions about the Incarnates deal more with the baked-in foundation of Beast and how it should be going forward, where as the Insatiable are, well, as noted. But before we get there, we should probably have some contextualization.
Sooo, way back when Beast was out solely by it's own little lonesome, there was many an argument about the presentation and moral/ethical position of Beasts, namely "are they assholes or are they justified somehow"-which you might have noticed I decided to just go ahead and frame as a central conflict of the game, but it's also reductive to leave it there. There are a number of reads, both simply textual and in application to several literary and gaming theory lenses, that have a lot of interesting results when you apply them to Beast that makes the answering of this "state of consensual confrontation" troublesome and hard to navigate, and often problematic.
The big thing to note about this conflict, as it relates to our subject, is that Beast in it's earlier incarnations, including the final core book, is that it hews nihilistic, a philosophy that centers and expands upon the idea that existence is meaningless, and in fact it can be argued that the entirety of the game is about nihilism and how to handle that, including abusrdism or various other forms of rejection of the philosophy*. Where this is particularly meaningful is that Beasts seems to fall in favor of nihilism, and driven towards behavior that strongly facilitates it.
Even early on, as a long time fan of the franchise, for me, this struck me as a bit of a gnawsome itch in the argument-I personally will default to fatalistic nihilism when left to auto-pilot, and I hate it, and more importantly, while there are many valuable insights that come from nihilism, it strikes me as a philosophy destined to make assholes, whether you accept the ubermnschen element of the philosophy or reject it. However true nihilism may be, a pure embrace of it seems like a setup for failures in individuals and society along the line, and a certain amount of history backs that up. It's a thing to pay dues to, never to ignore, but not a thing to simply rely on.
But it seemed like Beast was really gonna lean right and down into the nihilism, toxic outlook and resultant actions and all, and in some way, I was ready to come to terms with that for the franchise.
And then came Conquering Heroes, and with it the Insatiable, and suddenly Beast became a lot more dynamic.
For the mass of readers, the Insatiable were.....oddly digested, regardless of your final reception of the Insatiable. Even the most favorable responses to the Insatiable noted a sort of jenkiness to their presentation, and less favorable ones would call it a slap dash of the Strix, the idigam, and Prometheans without a driving idea behind the hybrid.
The big thing that was latched onto, for a lot of people and myself, was that the Insatiable were an external indictment of the absolute worst behaviors emergent from nihilism. By just feasting to feast, by giving not a fuck about others, you weren't enlightend-or, at the least, you weren't better than some of your direst opposition, an equal and opposite force to Heroism that needed some dressing down-who presented a reality you needed to dress up, because the reality otherwise is kind of terrible.
Anyways, the presentation of the Insatiable was still jenky enough it never sat nicely until The BPG's clarified what they were, at which point holy shit, it all makes sense, how did anyone miss this, it makes it a lot easier to understand them, wait, in fact why was it written like to begin with?
So, without further ado, let's get to the one easy fix:
The Insatiable do not envy Lair-they consume it.
The Insatiable are primal, foundational, elemental-and the truths that come with them is that death comes for us all, there's no control or safeguard against it. Even worlds will collapse, stars will die, space fold in on itself. There is no meaning in anything, there is no worth that lasts out, there is only reality at it's barest, hungriest, at the bottom of the world, where all of reality can be seen with starkly beautiful and terrible alacritous clarity, freeing from the muck and mud of existential need and chained only to all-embracing Thanatos.
And in this view, the diseased eye of humanity is an abberation that clearly needs correction.
The Insatiable consume Lair-the culmination of psychospiritual real estate that distinguishes humanity as an animal apart from the world-because this conception of self as separate from the the world is aberrant, wrong, defiant, hubristic, maybe disgusting, maybe foolhardy-wrong, this animal cancer is wrong. It doesn't understand itself right, it seeks to not belong.
Few Insatiable are gonna be able to articulate this, mind-the Consumption leaves the persona behind, after all, just driven to all-consuming, parodical need for satiation of safety and desire, destroying the sense of why these things we cling to were important at all because it's not like it'll ever be enough. Let them age long enough, maybe the "joke" will become clear over time, and they'll be able to monologue about it-but honestly, even letting humanity and their siblings conceive of this fact misses the point because this sort of heavy handed existential wrestling shouldn't even be happening.
Low scale Insatiable consume Lair as it's made manifest and important by assault Beast's hoarding of it (and attempt to eat the Heroes rendering of it, but frustratingly it's a particularly tempestuous thing to try and sink their teeth into), large scale Insatiable take their assault onto the Cave, the Omphalos, and language itself. THey're fans of Lovecraft. They either think the Dark Mother betrayed them and the Primogenitor, or that she courted the Primogenitor to correct mistakes she had made, or don't have any clue how that all works out and don't fucking care to worry about it.
And from there, everything else clicks. Schism, the need to kill as they Satiate themselves, the pressing of boundaries for things to happen beyond articulation, the fundamental relationship to the world, the relationship they have to the Begotten and how they need to understand how it doesn't fucking matter if they ever get it.
Render the world to it's truth-nothing means anything, nothing matters beyond it's immediate impact, and to attempt otherwise is to fucking miss the point.
TL;DR, they're that one asshole classmate you had who thought they were so smart by pointing out how nothing matters and justified smacking your icecream out of your hand in that you're taking things too seriously. THey were unironic fans of the Joker and other such assholes, would sit pretty on their exaltation of this vicious indifference, and would really try to tell you to just embrace the pain of living because that's what it takes to be infinite.
They speak to a fundamental truth that does not fucking matter in actually dealing with the world as it is, and will not shut the fuck up about it.
*Mummy the Curse is the other predominant gameline I would describe as being nihilistically driven, but unlike Beast, Mummy doesn't really seem interested in notions of entirely escaping (or permanently juxtapositioning under other views of reality thereof) nihilism-it's a fact of life in Mummy, where as Beast has room to rage against that dark night.
*pulls up an edgy Sonic the Hedgehog song for talking about a nihilistic opponent*
So in the Makara and the Plain thread, I got asked some questions about the Incarnates and the Insatiable. Between the two of them, the Insatiable are easier to talk about, because for me, the big questions about the Incarnates deal more with the baked-in foundation of Beast and how it should be going forward, where as the Insatiable are, well, as noted. But before we get there, we should probably have some contextualization.
Sooo, way back when Beast was out solely by it's own little lonesome, there was many an argument about the presentation and moral/ethical position of Beasts, namely "are they assholes or are they justified somehow"-which you might have noticed I decided to just go ahead and frame as a central conflict of the game, but it's also reductive to leave it there. There are a number of reads, both simply textual and in application to several literary and gaming theory lenses, that have a lot of interesting results when you apply them to Beast that makes the answering of this "state of consensual confrontation" troublesome and hard to navigate, and often problematic.
The big thing to note about this conflict, as it relates to our subject, is that Beast in it's earlier incarnations, including the final core book, is that it hews nihilistic, a philosophy that centers and expands upon the idea that existence is meaningless, and in fact it can be argued that the entirety of the game is about nihilism and how to handle that, including abusrdism or various other forms of rejection of the philosophy*. Where this is particularly meaningful is that Beasts seems to fall in favor of nihilism, and driven towards behavior that strongly facilitates it.
Even early on, as a long time fan of the franchise, for me, this struck me as a bit of a gnawsome itch in the argument-I personally will default to fatalistic nihilism when left to auto-pilot, and I hate it, and more importantly, while there are many valuable insights that come from nihilism, it strikes me as a philosophy destined to make assholes, whether you accept the ubermnschen element of the philosophy or reject it. However true nihilism may be, a pure embrace of it seems like a setup for failures in individuals and society along the line, and a certain amount of history backs that up. It's a thing to pay dues to, never to ignore, but not a thing to simply rely on.
But it seemed like Beast was really gonna lean right and down into the nihilism, toxic outlook and resultant actions and all, and in some way, I was ready to come to terms with that for the franchise.
And then came Conquering Heroes, and with it the Insatiable, and suddenly Beast became a lot more dynamic.
For the mass of readers, the Insatiable were.....oddly digested, regardless of your final reception of the Insatiable. Even the most favorable responses to the Insatiable noted a sort of jenkiness to their presentation, and less favorable ones would call it a slap dash of the Strix, the idigam, and Prometheans without a driving idea behind the hybrid.
The big thing that was latched onto, for a lot of people and myself, was that the Insatiable were an external indictment of the absolute worst behaviors emergent from nihilism. By just feasting to feast, by giving not a fuck about others, you weren't enlightend-or, at the least, you weren't better than some of your direst opposition, an equal and opposite force to Heroism that needed some dressing down-who presented a reality you needed to dress up, because the reality otherwise is kind of terrible.
Anyways, the presentation of the Insatiable was still jenky enough it never sat nicely until The BPG's clarified what they were, at which point holy shit, it all makes sense, how did anyone miss this, it makes it a lot easier to understand them, wait, in fact why was it written like to begin with?
So, without further ado, let's get to the one easy fix:
The Insatiable do not envy Lair-they consume it.
The Insatiable are primal, foundational, elemental-and the truths that come with them is that death comes for us all, there's no control or safeguard against it. Even worlds will collapse, stars will die, space fold in on itself. There is no meaning in anything, there is no worth that lasts out, there is only reality at it's barest, hungriest, at the bottom of the world, where all of reality can be seen with starkly beautiful and terrible alacritous clarity, freeing from the muck and mud of existential need and chained only to all-embracing Thanatos.
And in this view, the diseased eye of humanity is an abberation that clearly needs correction.
The Insatiable consume Lair-the culmination of psychospiritual real estate that distinguishes humanity as an animal apart from the world-because this conception of self as separate from the the world is aberrant, wrong, defiant, hubristic, maybe disgusting, maybe foolhardy-wrong, this animal cancer is wrong. It doesn't understand itself right, it seeks to not belong.
Few Insatiable are gonna be able to articulate this, mind-the Consumption leaves the persona behind, after all, just driven to all-consuming, parodical need for satiation of safety and desire, destroying the sense of why these things we cling to were important at all because it's not like it'll ever be enough. Let them age long enough, maybe the "joke" will become clear over time, and they'll be able to monologue about it-but honestly, even letting humanity and their siblings conceive of this fact misses the point because this sort of heavy handed existential wrestling shouldn't even be happening.
Low scale Insatiable consume Lair as it's made manifest and important by assault Beast's hoarding of it (and attempt to eat the Heroes rendering of it, but frustratingly it's a particularly tempestuous thing to try and sink their teeth into), large scale Insatiable take their assault onto the Cave, the Omphalos, and language itself. THey're fans of Lovecraft. They either think the Dark Mother betrayed them and the Primogenitor, or that she courted the Primogenitor to correct mistakes she had made, or don't have any clue how that all works out and don't fucking care to worry about it.
And from there, everything else clicks. Schism, the need to kill as they Satiate themselves, the pressing of boundaries for things to happen beyond articulation, the fundamental relationship to the world, the relationship they have to the Begotten and how they need to understand how it doesn't fucking matter if they ever get it.
Render the world to it's truth-nothing means anything, nothing matters beyond it's immediate impact, and to attempt otherwise is to fucking miss the point.
TL;DR, they're that one asshole classmate you had who thought they were so smart by pointing out how nothing matters and justified smacking your icecream out of your hand in that you're taking things too seriously. THey were unironic fans of the Joker and other such assholes, would sit pretty on their exaltation of this vicious indifference, and would really try to tell you to just embrace the pain of living because that's what it takes to be infinite.
They speak to a fundamental truth that does not fucking matter in actually dealing with the world as it is, and will not shut the fuck up about it.
*Mummy the Curse is the other predominant gameline I would describe as being nihilistically driven, but unlike Beast, Mummy doesn't really seem interested in notions of entirely escaping (or permanently juxtapositioning under other views of reality thereof) nihilism-it's a fact of life in Mummy, where as Beast has room to rage against that dark night.
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