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[HelmsDerp]

Following up on this excellent talk of themes and metaphors, I think possibly one of the biggest opportunities the Beast corebook missed was in its dismissive treatment of Heroes. These are the people empowered to uncritically uphold Society's narrative. Any given individual Hero might not be particularly worthy of the name, but every single one should serve as a reminder of the oppressive weight of Narrative. There's a metaphysical gravity to the lazy narrative binary. Monsters are villains. They're bad and they are eventually defeated by good people. That is The Story. Heroes are scary because...

[HelmsDerp]

I think I've said it before, but one of the places Beast does work as a metaphor for any number of marginalized groups is the experience of growing up in a culture that constantly tells stories where people like you are the villains. Of hearing, over and over, in fiction and on the news, how people think you are a monster and would prefer you stop existing.

It works in that moment of choosing to actively be the 'monster' you always were. Embracing that identity despite the pain and the fear of what it means for your future, because fuck it that's still better than living a lie. ...

[HelmsDerp]

Dude, sadism has a huge media misrepresentation problem. Beast can be a great vehicle for exploring that identity, but to say it is unquestionably and unobjectionably a metaphor for BDSM is the opposite of helping.

Sadism in popular media is always a villain trait, and not a motive of the sympathetic villains either. At best sometimes you'll see a hero with a violent streak, and it's something they struggle to contain, overcome, and eventually rid themselves of.
Masochists, where they show up, are usually part of a Too Kinky For Torture joke, where the punchline is the bewildered...

[HelmsDerp]

Heroes don't count as kin, per a dev comment buried somewhere in this board, so they wouldn't trigger family resemblance.

You *might* be able to spot them with the Eye of Heaven Atavism by looking at aspirations or supernatural destiny.

[HelmsDerp]

This is something I've been meaning to respond to, but I've been working massive amounts of overtime lately and I just don't have enough brain power left over to articulate my thoughts as coherently as I want to. I'm going to try though.

I have two main points of contention. Firstly, I don't really see Beasts as necessarily having come to grips with their monstrous nature during the Devouring. There's a reason that most of the Inheritances are metaphorically and sometimes literally burnout and suicide, a fractured self forever sacrificing one of its parts to preserve the other. Beast...

[HelmsDerp]

Dopplegangers have rank, yes, but Sin Eaters also have/are a ghost that they release as part of the Oracle Haunt. The fourth dot of said Haunt specifically sends that ghost to the underworld temporarily, and is rumored to sometimes leave dopplegangers. No mechanics are given as the ghost observes but doesn't interact with anything, so I'm not sure what powering it up through clone cannibalism would even do.

[HelmsDerp]

Does anything special happen if a Sin Eater commits Ectophagia on their own Doppleganger? Presumably they gain Plasm and lose Synergy as with eating other ghosts, but what I'm wondering about is the ranking up effect from one ghost consuming another ghost of the same person. A Sin Eater's ghost doesn't use any of the normal rules and never has an applicable rank so the boring practical effect is probably "nothing", but it feels like something weird should happen.