It was so fucking hilarious, I am still having trouble imagining what the hell they thought when they wrote Beast, what was the design vision? What was the entire fucking idea behind it?
"The players at the table shift uncomfortably."
Beast: the Primordial
There seems to have been lots of ideas behind it, but the two core ones seem to have been "You're a bullied outcast, but you're special and can take revenge on your tormentors" and "you play women and other minorities harassed by MRAs and GamerGate".
The first is escapist fantasy in the true and tried White Wolf 90's vein. You're
special. People bully you, but you have lots of fancy powers you can use to get revenge on the bullies. Pure, juvenile revenge fantasies. It's not necessarily bad; escapist revenge fantasies have their place and serve a purpose, but it's not a very deep concept. It raises some ethical questions that few-if-any attempts are made to answer, and ultimately it's one-note; you'll show them, you'll show them all, and then you showed them. The end.
The second was made clear from several comments by McFarland, and the way the principle antagonist of the setting was presented. Beasts are monsters, so they're being hunted by
GastonHeroes. Heroes are people who hunt Beasts, but they're emphatically not Hunters. They are, to a man, self-aggrandizing jerks more interested in glory than actually protecting people from Beasts. Why are they self-aggrandizing, narcissistic jerks? Because the book says so[1]. They're also monomaniacally obsessed with killing Beasts, viewing them as a categorical enemy. Why are they all genocidal? Because the book says so[1]. A preview passage released before the Kickstarter all but explicitly compared them to MRAs; they are unpleasant, hateful, and obsessed with keeping the Beasts down.
I'll need to detour a bit here to provide some context. When the Kickstarter was released with it's full-text preview, more was revealed about Beasts. They were jerks.
Petty jerks. Petty, murderous, abusive jerks. They got power back from being abusive dicks to people. It was obviously intended as a form of social transgressiveness; you're a
homosexualBeast and that means you do things some people don't like. It was just that... well... Beasts got power from murdering people. From terrorising them. Several example characters performed acts of child abuse. One of the example characters is an old lady who attacks a teenager for stealing candy at Halloween. She sneaks into his house, poisons the candy he stole, strangles him with her hands when he's disabled by the poison, and then continues to terrorise him with supernatural nightmares for weeks.
Maybe not
every Beast was a murderous child abuser[2], but it painted a rather clear picture. Beasts were like vampires, only less rape-metaphor and more actual rape[3]. It was therefore somewhat difficult to see what was supposed to be so bad about the Heroes. They were people who risked their own lives to kill some rather horrible monsters. Perhaps they sometimes killed a Beast that hadn't harmed anyone, but that made them no worse than Hunters; certainly not monomaniacally obsessed narcissists comparable to the Men's Rights Activist movement. The worst elements of the Heroes seemed tacked on; they were evil for the sake of being evil, to discredit and undermine any positive sides they might have. This received a storm of criticism.
To which McFarland responded among other things
'And, I note, once again Heroes smash their way in here and are all like "not all Heroes!" and "what about the Heroes?"', comparing anyone who felt that Heroes were unfairly maligned by the writing to Men's Rights Activists. If you don't like Beast,
you hate women.
There's another sample character in Beast, Jo:
Jo doesn't tower over her prey — she's short, but she's all muscle. She enjoys letting other people challenge her, especially men. The challenge isn't always or even usually physical. Sometimes they try to test her knowledge on topics they think she shouldn't understand, or try to explain things to her that it's obvious she knows. She destroys them; she knows what they know and she pokes holes in their beliefs and their facts, showing them sides of the topic they never considered. Secretly, though, she relishes the rare times when a man gets so mad he tries to touch her, because then she can beat him in a way that leaves no room for argument.
See? She embodies feminism! She's being mansplained at, but she's she's smart and can destroy any argument against her! She's so good at arguing that nobody can ever best her, and they're always forced to see her side of it. And sometimes men get angry enough to try to hit her, and then she gets to beat the crap out of them, which just proves how superior she is. (Because that's what feminism is about. Beating men up to prove you're better than them - not the validity of your arguments or anything...)
Eukie shudders
Beast: the Primordial. The violent power-fantasies of feminists and the LGBT, where you get to beat up Men's Rights Activists and Gamergate, who hate you because you're better than them. As a lesbian transwoman feminist, McFarland,
please stop helping.
(In the revised draft, the old lady poisoned a teenage
jock, and she strangled him with a plastic bag, instead of her own hands. Much better.)
[1] They're also supernaturally compelled to become Heroes, yet also
eeeeeeevil for being psychologically inclined to hate Beasts categorically.
[2] Out the 45 example X and Y-splat characters, over a third commit murder or abuse. Over half of them commit murder, abuse, property damage, or theft.
[3] Actual rape is not a crime described anywhere in the book. Which is fine. But the implications are still there. Beasts are supernaturally compelled to child abuse and murder. They get a kick from abusing and tormenting others; they're already serial killers and sadistic psychopaths - it's not a far leap to make that they're also serial rapists.
P.S: Did I mention the Beast that kills people for not tipping?
