#city of villains

[mutio-von-mutio]

#city of villains #city of heroes #succulent elf meat

[cellarspider]

Since I’ve been thinking about it all morning: here. A partial introduction to my favorite villain.

In the days of yore, when I was a teenager and video game hype was almost exclusively magazine-based, I saw a kid reading a copy of Game Informer.

“Hey,” said I, “could I see that for a second?”

The kid, not knowing what they were about to unleash, handed me the magazine.

I had seen this on the cover:

I had no idea what this was, but I knew that I wanted whatever it was selling.

I found out that this was an advertisement for City of Villains, an expansion to the previously-released MMO City of Heroes. I’d never played WoW with its Alliance and Horde split, so the idea was new to me. WoW also failed to present me with anything like the vibes of the newly-introduced lead villain, Lord Recluse.

Yes, they liked this art so much they did it twice, and I’m glad they did. More below the fold on why he was so appealing for a young queer kid, for those who are intrigued.

I’ll keep this focused on a single topic for now: The intensely queer vibes that Recluse acquired over the course of the game’s plot. Keep in mind that this game came out in 2004, so the actual amount of openly queer content was very minimal. However, CoH/CoV developed a reputation as an extremely queer-friendly space, with a community Pride event becoming a semi-official yearly celebration, complete with the devs showing up as major NPCs, custom assets, and spawning in unique raids that tanked everybody’s framerate. Equivalents of this have carried over past the game's tragic shutdown in 2012, with community-run servers still staging their own Pride events.

If the art above doesn’t make it clear, Recluse had a much-beloathèd archnemesis, Statesman. If the art above doesn’t make it abundantly clear, this was always an extremely fraught relationship, with a complicated backstory that became more and more tragic the deeper you got into the game lore, eventually bordering on cosmic horror. But one thing was for certain, this was Hark A Vagrant levels of obsession over a nemesis.

The game at first seemed to backstep on that: oh, it turned out, Recluse had once been villainous life partners with a woman who went by the villain name Red Widow. She died decades ago in the collateral damage of one of Recluse’s nigh apocalyptic confrontations with Statesman, and her death left him with nothing but his obsession. So sad.

And then when Statesman died in the course of the game’s plot, Recluse spiraled into depression and nihilism that was only halted when someone managed to dig Red Widow’s soul out of storage and resurrected her.

It was always deniably presented, but the implication was very much that the two were functionally equivalent emotional anchors to his psyche, and losing both of them was something he couldn’t survive.

Also, there was that one time that the game’s Valentine’s Day event was advertised with a heart split down the middle, half Statesman’s iconography and half Recluse’s, topped with a banner that read “AMOR OMNIA VINCIT”, meaning “LOVE CONQUERS ALL”.

And that’s without getting into the first tie-in book. A prequel starting at the end of the 1920s, it was a delightfully and deliberately pulpy book, which… centered around a complicated man slowly dying of lingering health problems after his exposure to mustard gas in WWI, and his very good friend, estranged from his family for unknown reasons, who’d devoted the last ten years to caring for the protagonist, and helping him seek a cure. This has carried on year after year, even though the man’s illness has made him unresponsive to the emotional needs of others, something they both know is going to culminate one day in the two parting ways.

…And then they get superpowers, and their relationship does not get any healthier from there. But what it does gain is a surprising trans metaphor as our now-antagonist slowly metamorphoses into the spidery villain I know and love.

I completely missed this back in the day. I have no idea if it was intentional. But there’s a scene where this man looks in the mirror and sees the first signs of his oncoming physical transformation, and he likes what he sees. He has no idea where he’s going, but he’s excited for it.

…And he’s started killing people who refer to him by his former name, in the most literal case of “dead naming” I’ve ever seen.

Throughout the rest of the series, Recluse is unapologetically who he is, putting him in that category of queercoded villain that doubles as a power fantasy. He’s grown physically monstrous and loves it. He has respect from everyone around him, either legitimately for his capabilities or out of fear of what he can do to those who don’t give him his due. A new demigod who is only matched by the man he’s never stopped obsessing over. He wins just as often as he loses, and often salvages something from his defeats in ways that nobody expected.

He is terrible. And he is wonderful.

#city of villains #lord recluse #I have so many more thoughts #and the canon is so wild and engages on metatextual themes so thoroughly that it really deserves more analysis #just in general #but for now #this will do

[disneyboot]

#disney #disney lost legends #city of villains #horsetail hollow #mirrorverse #dark ascension series #dynamite entertainment #camp lil' vills #disney princesses #disney speedstorm

[snepril]

One of the first video games I ever played was City of Heroes, a superhero MMORPG. It was a big part of my childhood, and I was pretty upset when it shut down in 2012. So were the developers, it turns out - so much so that someone leaked the source code! It went public a few years ago, and nowadays there are a bunch of fan-run servers out there.

Thing is, NCSoft (the publisher) never actually acknowledged the leaks, so all those servers were operating in a legal gray area - until today! City of Heroes: Homecoming, the largest fan server by far, just announced an official licensing agreement with NCSoft, which is really dang cool. I never imagined I'd get to play CoH again, and even when it came back I assumed it'd get squashed by legal stuff sooner or later. The fact that CoH is now officially back is mind-blowing!

#Still pissed at NCSoft though #Corporate law is bullshit but I'm glad my favorite game is safe #city of heroes #City of villains #city of heroes homecoming

[emeraude-coh]

Weaver Black, the Invulnerability/Super Strength Tanker who aims to overthrow Lord Recluse and rule Arachnos.

#city of heroes #city of heroes rebirth #coh #city of villains #cov #tanker #virtual photography #coh screenshots

[3psboyd]

Back on my bullshit.

#city of heroes #city of villains

[atlaspark]

#city of heroes #city of villains #city of heroes: homecoming #city of heroes homecoming #coh homecoming #coh #cov #cox

[kieraoona]

Just took a trip down nostalgia lane. Found an old MMO, which is now free to play called City of Villains/City of Heroes.

The original game servers were shut down, so if you had previous characters, you can't play using the same file. However, you can always re-make your original character. If anyone is out there who did play on the Villains side, I was a member of the "The Hive" guild. We all made Bee characters.

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/ - just follow the installation instructions, and login instructions, and you're good to go.

The server I've signed my character onto was Indomitable.

If anyone sees Zomm-Bee flying around, that's me

There's also a lot of customization

Oh, did I also forget to mention to play is FREE?!

Below is a pic of my re-made character for this server.

#city of villains #city of heroes #mmo #game #free to play

[dragonbornarchitect]

The Mastermind, a new DnD Class!

Good morning all! Been a minute since I posted here, but I've developed a new class for Dungeons and Dragons, based on keeping a group of pets around yourself at all times. This class is based on the Mastermind archetype in the City of Heroes MMO, and you'll recognize a lot of the abilities contained within if you're a player.

#dnd #dnd classes #homebrew #dnd 5e homebrew #dungeons and dragons #dnd homebrew #city of heroes #city of villains #mmo #mmorpg #mmo dnd #writing prompt

[koro-from-ivalice]

My Crabspider takes the name from my very first character ever. In my story, he tried to overcome Arachnos and failed, intergrated even. He lost.

#city of heroes #city of villains #coh #cov

[mutio-von-mutio]

:3 cheesed to meet you

#city of heroes #city of villains #illusion/martial assault dominator

[cellarspider]

Thanks to my rambling this weekend, I am overflowing with love for an MMO that hasn’t been in development since 2012, because goddamn the worldbuilding for the setting of City of Heroes and City of Villains was just superb.

Do you want an MMO that begins as a pastiche of superhero comics that lovingly, cheekily engages with its source material, building up a cohesive world where the fantastical stuff feels unexpectedly real and grounded in the society, more so than most of the comics it's inspired by? Do you want that, and then to watch it slowly, gently tip its backstory into existential, cosmic horror via genre critique?

I'm in no way kidding! More below the cut.

Well, part one of more, because there's a lot to unpack here.

A lot of new superhero continuities these days treats its central premise as an anomaly. For the most popular example, the MCU treats public knowledge of superheroes as something that started with Captain America in WWII. Before his exploits, the fantastical aspects of the setting were forgotten about and hidden from the world. The DCEU begins similarly with Wonder Woman in WWI, a member of a mythic society forgotten by time.

At first, Earth in City of Heroes seemed to go with a very similar premise, though it predates any of those movies: Superpowers were unknown to the general public until the early 1930s, when some people suddenly began gaining incredible new abilities, and mythical critters not seen since ancient times made themselves known.

But that’s just the basic sales pitch. As you dug into the setting and City of Villains expanded the lore, perspective shifted into something entertainingly stranger.

Everyone knew about Nemesis, the clockwork robot-making mastermind who'd terrorized Paragon City from the early 1930s, just when superheroes were first appearing on the scene. Turns out he was an immortal Prussian nobleman born who first went on an automaton-backed crime spree in 1820s, seemingly died when the British Navy bombarded his headquarters in Malta, then reappeared in the 1860s to supply the Confederate Army with mechanical cavalry until General Sherman shelled his mountaintop base on his march to North Carolina. Nobody was ever able to replicate what the did, and with his (apparent) death, he was no longer relevant after 1865. As of the 1930s, anyone who wasn’t a history buff had forgotten about him.

And sure, everyone knew there was an underground city of evil wizards, dead for long eons until they rose again to take human sacrifices from the surface world of Rhode Island (I’m still not over that). But actually, they were active in London during the Victorian mysticism craze, then moved their operations back to their homeland of subeterranean Rhode Island with the outbreak of World War I. They made the news across the continent. They got outlawed in multiple countries. They were a big deal, until the war took the attention off of them.

Hell, one of the people who fought all these weirdos was a random teenager who'd just... always been able to teleport and turn invisible, even prior to the '30s. He wasn't even a main character or anything! His parents knew, and tried to convince him to go get training. Teleportation training. Like y'do, with your socially awkward, teleporting kid.

This setting never actually had a mundane world that was unaware of the fantastical. The fantastical was normal. The arrival of superpowers in 1930 wasn’t a hard fork between history as we know it and theirs, or a reveal of some secret world that rational minds had long denied. It was just a dramatic escalation of what had already been happening, that everyone knew about. Armies of the 1800s had to develop anti-robot tactics. Alastair Crowley publicly dissed an actual wizard cult because they were dangerous competition. Parents worried over the mental health of their superpowered teens. That was normal.

The sheer numbers of fantastical events that started happening after 1930 were not normal. Or at least, not at first. People slowly adjusted over decades, as more and more young people grew up in a world that had always been that way.  

What nobody realized at that point was how the new normal bordered on a state of cosmic horror.

And that’s where the setting really starts interrogating its inspirations.

#city of heroes #city of villains #my love for this setting is unbounded #and it honestly deserves more attention and analysis for how it engaged with the genre #it ranged from joyously fluffy nonsense to deeply disquieting introspection and all they way back around to hootingly funny bullshit #I definitely have more rambles coming on this because I CANNOT BE STOPPED

[disneyboot]

#disney villains #disney villains' revenge #mickey's house of villains #once upon a halloween #serena valentino #descendants #villainous #twisted wonderland #disney chills #city of villains #dark ascension series #dynamite entertainment #camp lil' vills #yes the last one is real

[devileaterjaek]

#gaming #city of villains #mmo #mmorpg #pc #pc gaming

[emeraude-coh]

Betwixt, a Vigilante whose dream was always to be a mage. Sadly, she doesn't have much aptitude for magic... but she is a gifted engineer. As they say, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic!

#she's a dominator #gravity control/energy assault #she's not level 50 yet #i've got to play her more... #city of heroes #city of heroes rebirth #coh #city of villains #cov #virtual photography

[kmkibble75]

Another of my City of Heroes characters, the energy/energy blaster Bolty Betty. She was designed as an homage to the Silver Age comic heroes, which is why she's cheesing it up a little bit. Her stilettos definitely go against my usual rules regarding heroes and practical clothing, but she pretty much hovers or flies everywhere, so she got an exemption.

#city of heroes #city of villains #digital art #digital drawing #superhero #league of disgruntled gentlemen