Justifications #5
For Topic: https://forums.greaterthangames.com/t/the-letters-page-episode-5-discussion-citizen-dawn
This is probably going to be the longest Justification I ever post, or at least the longest for quite some time. Citizen Dawn is one of my favorite characters in the game, and even more than with characters I like more, she’s the one that I feel the most passionately about certain aspects of the characters, to the point that I kinda want to fight C&A over ownership of her, because there are certain aspects of her backstory which I feel as though I understand better than they do. (Many authors occasionally speak about a character having “told” them something they didn’t other realize, as though the character exists somewhere outside of the author’s brain and the author is merely discovering rather than inventing the truth about that character; if there’s any truth to that concept at all, then I make the claim that I have “discovered” certain “facts” about Dawn Cohen which C&A have not. I don’t think C&A would dispute me that this is at least possible, since they have invoked the “the character told us to do this” concept at least once in Letters Page history; I’ll point it out when we get there.)
The most singular aspect of the Citizen Dawn story as it’s told in this episode is the part where Dawn holds up a city council, demanding all of their gold, and then kills them all anyway after they give in to her demands. This treacherous act is probably the single most vile thing Dawn has ever done, since if the councilors had realized she was going to kill them anyway, they could have at least refused to turn the treasury over, forcing her to go track it down herself. I want Dawn to be a character who has some degree of integrity, and her ability to go back on her own deal here demonstrates the opposite. What really bothers me about it though, even more than the murdering and the deal-breaking, is the fact that she bothers to explain why she’s killing them before she kills them. This is a pretty obvious case of the character talking to the reader, and thus it comes across as a form of “as you know”, since if Dawn thinks the non-powered are so worthless, she wouldn’t even bother to tell them why she was killing them, she’d simply do so. Therefore, if I was writing for an animated show or something, I would definitely rewrite this scene heavily, perhaps to make her let the councilors go as per the terms of her hostage situation, but more likely to have her display her contempt for them more blatantly by killing them without a word of acknowledgement as soon as she sees the gold. (Also, while C&A describe this as a pretty old story where the killing happens off-panel, I would want to go full Xtremiverse on the death scenes; there wouldn’t be any blood since all the wounds are instantly cauterized, but I would have her do things like slicing heads off with a fingertip laser, or firing a full-power blast which reduces the victim to a charred skeleton.) Probably, what I would do is mix the two outcomes, by having her say “Very well, as we agreed, I won’t kill you. But since you are worthless un-powered sheep, you deserve no compassion from me. Therefore, I leave you with your lives, and nothing else.” And she brutally maims them all in a nonlethal but utterly horrific way, such as burning all the skin off their faces or amputating all of their limbs. (This would be far more work than just disintegrating them, but I think it’d be worth her taking that level of effort, in order for her to be a more Lawful Evil kind of character, rather than a complete ax-crazy monster. There are surprisingly few of these “faustian Devil” kinds of villains in SOTM, even though they are a comic book staple.)
The fact that the Sunrise story ends with Visionary taking out Citizen Dawn with a Mind Spike has always kind of bothered me; while Mind Spike is the most direct-damage-dealing card in Visionary’s deck, it doesn’t compare very well to the damage output of your average hero, and it certainly doesn’t strike me as being the card that single-handedly demolishes a villain who previously seemed nigh-invulnerable. I’d like it a lot more for this purpose if it did damage equal to the cards in Visionary’s hand, or something of that nature; even making it into a Brain Burn which somehow allows redirecting the self-damage to another target would fit better for this narrative purpose. But since we’re forced to accept the Mind Spike as being the felling blow, it makes me wonder about how Dawn felt after she woke up back in her volcano citadel and had to be informed of the failure of their attack. In particular, I’m looking ahead to the Citizens’ Imperative era, where Citizen Hammer and Anvil go out hunting for Visionary. We’re told canonically that the main reason to seek her out is because she’s so incredibly powerful, but I can’t help but think that part of the motivation is Dawn’s desire for revenge, or at least a desire to gain control over someone who once bested her.
A very interesting one-off comment, dropped very casually during the question about Ra’s “sun-off” with Dawn: “Ra thinks of Dawn as this era’s mad conqueror, as if he hasn’t seen dozens of those over the aeons”. I really, really want to see an entire episode talking about the original Ancient Egyptian Ra having a career spanning a couple thousand years, as one Egyptian dynasty after another rose and fell around him, where he battled all manner of figures which may or may not have appeared in the mythology that has come down to us since that time.
There are probably more comments I could add here, but I’m going to have to call it good enough for today, as I can only stand to sit and listen to the same podcast episode over and over so many times, before I have to move on to the next one. (This is one of the reasons why I protested over the mods telling me to start posting all of my Justifications in a single thread, rather than in the original Letters Page discussion topics. Because I have to have everything in order here, once I post Justifications #6, I can’t just post a sequel to #4 anymore; I’ll have to do something like editing my additional commentary into this post, then putting a link in the end of the post telling people who may have already read through the thread that Post #5 has been updated on sucha-sucha date. It would have been far better if every response I had to Episode 5 had been allowed to go in the episode 5 thread, even if it has been inactive for years. But clearly the mods don’t care how much their rules are inconveniencing me, so until I gain the power necessary to crush them utterly and seize their authority as my own, I guess I’m stuck doing things their way.)
As a footnote, I think I said this before somewhere, but in response to the bit at the end talking about dice, my bet is that the people who default to thinking of something other than a d6 or a d20 are thinking about a d10, because they are players of the White Wolf series of roleplaying games, of which the best-known is Vampire the Masquerade; all of those games rely exclusively on d10s.