[UA] Your Alex Abel.

[Kevin Mowery]

----------
> From: Michael D. Mearls 97 <Michael.D.Mearls.97 at Alum.Dartmouth.ORG>
> To: UA at purpletape.cs.uchicago.edu
> Subject: Re: [UA] Your Alex Abel.
> Date: Monday, February 22, 1999 9:22 AM
> I get the feeling that Alex in my game is much more slimy than in other
> peoples'. Maybe it's just my in-born distrust of large organizations and
> authority shining through, but in my game TNI and Abel are people best
not
> messed with. Abel, as I see him, is the kind of guy that would convince
you
> that you hate your own mother and then deliver a heart wrenching lecture
to you
> about how you shouldn't hate her, she had no other option, it was all in
your
> best interest, etc.

	In my games, I can sympathize with Alex Abel.  (I'm a big believer that no
villain should be 100% unsympathetic--and I'm not sure that Abel's the
villain.)  Here's a guy who's *brilliant*.  Anything he's ever set out to
do, he's done.  Sometimes it took a lot of hard work, sometimes it didn't. 
He's seen the world's problems, and knows what it would take to fix them. 
The problem, as Abel sees it, is that most people aren't smart enough,
educated enough, ambitious enough, and just don't care enough to make the
world a better place.  Left to everyone else, the world goes to hell in a
handbasket just a bit faster every time it incarnates.
	So the obvious solution: Abel knows what's best, so Abel runs the show. 
People wouldn't be as free in a world run by Alex Abel, but they'd be safe,
equal, comfortable, and more or less happy.  That's Abel's plan anyway.  He
sees himself as a classical philosopher-king.
	The problem is that Abel's stuck in the mode of *taking* what he wants. 
If you trade in crime and assassination to ascend, you're not going to
ascend to a beneficial archetype.  Abel figures that he'll ascend to the
Alex Abel archetype, and be just the same person he is on earth in the
statosphere.  When he has *real* power, then he'll start acting for the
benefit of everyone.
	But that's not necessarily the way it works.  Alex Abel as archetype would
be an archetype that embodied Abel's life, not his goals. 

> 
> - M. Mearls

Kevin "Professor Bobo" Mowery _____________________ profbobo at io.com
"The entire dismemberment of Vash Gar reveals an ignorance of anatomy so 
deep that I begin to question whether the author does, indeed, have a
body."
                       --ratmm's Norb on the "Seven Stars MSTing"
     **See the "Seven Stars MSTing" at http://www.io.com/~profbobo **