Just a bit of gamefoo - character dynamics really.

[camwyn]

Ever since we had the game some three weeks ago I've been turning a few things about it over in my head. One of them is the character interaction - it's interesting to see how people who got yanked out of their respective fictions got along when plopped all together in the same one. Lord Wimsey and Dorothy got on splendidly; that was a synergistic relationship if I ever saw one. The Shadow and Sergeant Preston, on the other hand, got on about as well as the north ends of two magnets. I was talking with batyatoon about this, and this is what I wound up realizing:

"I think I have figured out exactly why the dynamic between Preston and the Shadow is so damn prickly, even before the Sergeant reads Cranston's record (and only gets stronger once he's done so). He'd never phrase it this way himself, because I don't think he knows the words or history behind it, but... Sergeant Preston dislikes Lamont Cranston because Preston is a samurai and Cranston a ronin. I have tried a few times to think of conversations between the two, as if it were for another series of comic books, and the one that keeps coming back to me features Preston looking at the other man and snapping, "Who do you serve, Mr. Cranston? Do you even know?""

Later elaboration:

"Well, the idea grew out of the fact that I told someone else who saw the sheet, "Congratulate me. I've found a way to play a paladin without a deity in the picture." Let's face it, it's hard to get more AD&D Lawful Good with characters like this... After the game I sort of thought about it for a while and realised that the paladin analogy wasn't quite right. Preston is beholden to a secular power structure by his own choice, and is part of it. Combine that with the very strict personal code of honor and you've got samurai. (Which, perhaps, goes a bit further than my other explanations for why he let Prufrock bleed; a samurai wouldn't give a quick death to an honorless foe - but then again a samurai wouldn't have been concerned with questions of whether the case could be brought to court in the first place. Anyway.)

Cranston, on the other hand, has no official place. Money, power, destructive capability, yes - but no official place, no solid identity. His whole life revolves around being the Shadow and working through other people. It's all a matter of false faces and false guises, and though he might have a code of behaviour, he has no honour. At best he's a wave man, a masterless samurai - a ronin. At worst he's a ninja, since they grew up as the efforts of the disenfranchised to protect themselves from corrupt and dangerous warlords - but ninja, being stealthy and operating outside the law, also had no honour."

*sigh* And I was so proud of finally playing a Westerner, and a mainstream one at that. Oh, well. BTW, if you're reading this and you recognize the question I see the Sergeant posing as some kind of a quote, let me know. It's not B5: Crusade, because I have never seen Crusade, but it sounds too familiar. (It's not Saruman, either. At least I hope it's not.)

Comments

[sdelmonte]

Interesting notions, but perhaps we need to hear from the other side...

For purposes of shorthand, the Shadow is Batman, only with guns an a willingness to kill. (OK, a huge difference, but not the topic now.) If you were to ask the Shadow who he serves, he would answer "justice." Not the kind of answer that washes well in the real world, where the law exists to make certain the quest for justice is not all-consuming and vengeful.

When faced with a man like Preston, the Shadow sees an officer of the law. He respects officers of the law, but assumes that any case on which his skills are needed is beyond the limitations of the law. In a different circumstance, the Shadow would show more respect for good police officers, and mounties. But not when his unique skills are needed.

Never mind that as a resident of 1930s New York, he cannot trust the law to serve the cause of justice. To him, Preston is certainly a worthty ally, a good man to have around, but not an equal, and possibly part of something less than pure.

I think that the reason that the vigilante hero appeals to many is that effort to be pure. To be untainted by even those values you strive to protect. The Shadow is his own man, defined by his own efforts - as much as Jacob Gatz becomes Jay Gatsby - and at some level he therefore looks upon Sgt. Preston, part of a system, with a strange mix of contempt, respect, and pity. Whereas I think that he would regard Lord Peter with more respect as the latter is also very much his own man, a rebel who marries who he wants, and solves mysteries and defends the crown when others of his standing can barely spell.

And honor? The Shadow believes that honor is in what you serve, and not how you serve it. He would have seen the "honorable" soldiers of the Kaiser up close in 1918, and come away quoting Falstaff. But where Falstaff's words have an ironic tone, the Shadow would mean it...

"Who has honor...he that died last Tuesday."

I do hope that if the game continues, though, that the Shadow, on a mission he simply does not understand, learns humility. As fun as the idea of playing and reinterpreting a classic hero is, I am not like him and would probably not resist seeing him brought down a peg.

[avram]

You could see Preston and the Shadow as representing two different faces of Justice. The Shadow looks at Preston and sees Justice leavened with Mercy. Preston looks at the Shadow and sees Justice sliding down the slope into Vengeance.

[batyatoon]

If you were to ask the Shadow who he serves, he would answer "justice."

"Oh really? ...If you act unjustly, does Justice come and smack you in the face? ...What's its address? Does it read the paper?"

(Paraphrasing Cmdr. S. Vimes)

[camwyn]

Interesting notions, but perhaps we need to hear from the other side...

No arguments here. Everything in my original post is, after all, coloured by the fact that I'm trying to understand the character's mindset rather than using anything particularly spun out of my own head.

For purposes of shorthand, the Shadow is Batman, only with guns an a willingness to kill.

This is true. (Unfortunately, this feeds the snotty little voice in the back of my head that cheerfully started pointing to the other characters. "Look! We've got Batman, Superman, MacGyver, Columbo, and ERRRK!", that last being the part where I strangled the voice.) I do not pretend to know anything much about the Shadow; I haven't read the books or the comics, nor have I listened to the radio show. I saw the 1994 movie, that's it. So I suppose the most you could say is that I know the Shadow entirely by reputation and writeups done by people who had heard or read the real thing.

If you were to ask the Shadow who he serves, he would answer "justice."

I expected that this would be his answer, frankly. From what little I knew of the Shadow, and from your own roleplaying, it's the only answer that I could have seen him give. Preston's answer to such a comment would likely be something about justice that proceeds from the barrel of a gun is little more than vengeance disguised as righteousness, but then again, what else could a man like him say? He's a lawman and a Canadian, and that means he's going to see it differently. He saw it differently from the very beginning. I don't know what seminal event (if any) started the Shadow on his path, so I'll use the shorthand you yourself suggested. Bruce Wayne saw his parents' murder and chose the path of highly personal justice. Preston's own father, a Mountie, was also murdered by an outlaw. Unlike Wayne, though, Preston's response was to join the Mounties young, track the killer down, and bring him before the law. It earned him his sergeant's stripes. As far as he was concerned at the time, the law had not failed him; if it had, I doubt he'd have followed in his father's footsteps.

Cranston said in your own gamepost that Preston and Wimsey 'hid behind civility and the law'. I don't know about the civility part, necessarily, but the Sergeant's feeling would most likely be that one doesn't hide behind the law as if it were a wall. One wears it and upholds it as if it were a shield, which is another matter altogether. To set a play in answer to Falstaff:

Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? (Advances on Roper) And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you-- where you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? The country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast-- man's laws, not God's-- and if you cut them down-- and you're just the man to do it-- d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Of course, this did not really help him very much when it came right down to the end game and Prufrock faced the mermaids. There was no law there that could have guided the Sergeant then, since Crown law doesn't even recognize the existence of mermaids, let alone give them legal status. Prufrock had committed not a crime but an atrocity, a matter that lay outside the Sergeant's power to handle. In the end he decided the mermaids were the equivalent of a Yukon miner's jury asked to try a man who'd stolen gold from prospectors and supplies from trailside caches, and left it at that. If the game continues, and I really hope it does, he's going to be spending a hell of a lot of time trying to catch up with his suddenly rapidly expanding horizons so that a mess like Prufrock's end doesn't catch him by surprise again. He doesn't want to go down what he sees as the Shadow's path, and the only way to avoid becoming what he sees as someone too willing to deal vengeance and name it justice is to learn what justice and truth really are.

[sdelmonte]

In some ways, we've revisited the old hero of light/hero of darkness dichotomy. It's a topic that never loses steam, as proven by the return of a monthly Superman/Batman comic this month. (Lord knows why it's not called World's Finest.)

[sdelmonte]

Don't forget, though, that PTerry's books take place in a much more believable place than the Shadow pulps. :)

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

I don't know enough about Samaurai/Ronin to comment, but I do think the diametrically opposed attitudes towards participation in societal systems are interesting. I'm restating below to make sure I'm understanding what you both are saying.

Sgt. Preston sees them as a check on the dangerous individual. You know your cause is just and pure because its impersonal, and adhering to its ethics keeps you from allowing personal motivations to cheat you into rationalizing selfishness. Essentially, the greatest threat is internal chaos, to be combated with external law.

Whereas the Shadow sees the personal as the surest check on the dangerous corruption from *outside*. A personal sense of mission can be trusted, indeed must be trusted, since otherwise its diluted at best and compromised at worst by having to give in to others in power who may or may not be either well-intentioned or correct.

In a (vastly oversimplified) way its a very Catholic/Protestant dichotomy.

Lord Peter is an odd duck in that regard. His allegiance is given to the system -- he catches criminals, aids the law, fought for his country.

But in personality he's very much an outside the law type. This is why he doesn't get on with his brother, who epitomizes the landed gentry, and identifies with the less respectable French side of his heritage. He was a spy and intelligence agent in the war, not just a regular soldier, and now he works best in a sort of grey area without a chain of command and almost no actual power, though lots of influence. He makes a career of slipping through the cracks, and one of his most notable characteristics is social mobility -- despite his severe class markings, he is able to not only get on with people of all backgrounds and understand them, but even to disguise himself as a member of another class.

Basically Lord Peter is tempermentally on the side of the Shadow, but in belief system aligned with Sgt. Preston. So he winds up being neither fish nor fowl nor good red English beefsteak.

One of the reasons this works so well for him is that he's in some ways a Peter Pan figure himself -- retaining childlike traits like curiosity and playfulness far beyond the norm for a man of his years, and not, for most of the books, having any of the normal responsibilities to constrain him.

Mer

[avram]

[...] but the Sergeant's feeling would most likely be that one doesn't hide behind the law as if it were a wall.

Justice is a wall, but not one to hide behind. It’s one you held shore up if it’s failing, because it’s a load-bearing part of the building of Civilization. (I’m not sure if Tom Swift would actually say that. It’s a geeky engineering metaphor, but it’s still too bookish for him, I think.)