Mmm, I think I had actually repressed most of that bullshit and mostly remembered the little kid in a coma.
The girl who's on a vision quest through the Dreamlands, gatecrashing Beasts' lairs, wrecking their shit, and always hoping the next jump will be the one that takes her home? Yeah, she's an awesome character concept and a legitimately cool example of how you could have Heroes not suck.
Which is why the book slipped in a suggestion that she was basically Emma Barnes before the coma, and that if the ST wanted to have her as anything more than a one-note antagonist they should "reveal" that she's actually a proto-Beast whose dream journey to sell her soul to eldritch horrors has gone way off course*, so the players can "help" her understand that she should be traumatizing mortals and slurping up the fear-juice they emit instead of protecting them.
Still, they did have a Hero who's explicitly pointed out as "one of the good ones" in one of their supplements! He's a child psychologist brought in to help with the case of a creepy little Damien Omen motherfucker who's been using his Beast powers to leave frosbitten bite wounds on other kids who annoy him.
After spending weeks trying to figure out what is even the fuck, he suddenly awakens as a "good" Hero by essentially becoming a cultist of said monster-child, to the point where when a lifelong coworker points out that the kid is showing clear signs of mental disturbance, has seriously injured other children, shows no remorse whatsoever, and needs to be committed before he kills someone?
He bludgeons her to death with a paperweight while monologuing to himself about how unspeakably evil she is for daring to impugn the honor of such a transcendent being. Then he walks off into the night to help little Damien get away with continuing to feast on his schoomates.
Wow.
The same supplement also accidentally included a Hero who is
actually a good person in the form of an aspiring journalist who was trying to raise awareness of abuse victims and cases of local corruption - and then discovered that her good friend who ran the cameras was a gibbering kraken made of celluloid and acid, who'd been using her to sniff out emotionally vulnerable people for him to feast on later. Also, he'd been keeping copies of the interviews for himself to watch, alone, so he could get off to the sight of people struggling to discuss horrible things that had happened to them. Before he sent the demon that he fed his soul to into those peoples' sleeping minds so it could aggravate & feed on their pain.
When she found out, he tried to use Beast voodoo to erase her memories of it, and when that failed, he tried to use more voodoo to turn her into his personal Renfield. She then locked the sick fuck into the college film studio and burnt it down with him inside, then did her best to move on with her life.
Until she scored an interview with a slimy Gordon Gekko motherfucker who wanted to mock her ideals while boasting about how he'd just fleeced a major bank for millions and gotten away with it, and discovered that he was a Beast, as well. Further investigation revealed that Mr. Gekko had also been using a selection of crooked orphanages to procure damaged children he could keep in his basement as a thrifty source of spare fear to snack on (and also spare flesh, occasionally), and after blowing him and his estate to Kingdom Come, she started uncovering other things going bump in the night and the people bumping back against them.
From there, she essentially became the WoD equivalent of a superhero; exposing mortal shitbags by day, coordinating teams of Hunters to take out supernatural shitbags by night, and generally being a major force for good throughout a good chunk of the East Coast.
Of course, the book acts like her killing the sick pervert freak who was
using her as a goddamn Judas goat so it could psychically attack battered housewives is an unforgivable act of cackling supervillainy, and says that she's totally just a vapid attention whore even though she uses her network to be a budget Oracle for multiple groups of people who've saved hundreds of lives between them by this point, and she doesn't start directing Hunters toward any Beast she uncovers until she has definitive proof that they've earned it.
* Because, in case you've forgotten, Beasts are people who willingly choose to have a spirit of primal fear and suffering devour their souls, and now derive power from said demonic abomination's vile hunger as it nestles within the bleeding hole where their humanity used to be.
Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen!
I continue to think the MRA/redpill movement is pretty spot-on for Heroes. A very big part of the Classical Heroic myth is that killing the monster entitles you to a reward, often the hand of the princess. People who resonate with the archetype of the hero could very well go with this morality.
The issue here is that Beasts are, to put it bluntly, a blight on the universe that any sane mind would want to see exterminated. They're lurching horrors that gleefully feed on human fear and human lives, dragging the already grim setting of nWoD further back into the Dark Ages while self-righteously declaring their predations to be "educational" and not the traumatic psychic (and often physical) assault it is. Even vampires, who are pretty much the scum of the Earth, don't try to pretend they're somehow doing the people they feed on a
favor. Meanwhile, you have Beasts banging on about how this is totally a sacred duty and that's why you're not allowed to be mad about all those hitchhikers they ate.
Further, if we're going to bring real life things like the MRA/redpill movement into this? Then we have to sit down and discuss how painfully close Beast's general ethos for its protagonists is to that sort of human ugliness.
The series describes the Beasts as poor, misunderstood nerds being picked on by the big mean jocks, but then it systematically removes any sort of moral high ground by having the Beasts be just as vicious, selfish, and narcissistic as their perceived tormentors, then describing anyone who opposes them as being the Devil incarnate, because how could anyone with even a shred of goodness oppose your perfect beautiful sparklewolf and his whimsical crusade of psychic terrorism? It's the kind of self-indulgent, grotesque sort of revenge fantasy that would be right at home on Men Going Their Own Way or a radfem forum.
Beast isn't about being the lone voice of sanity fighting a tide of alt-right shittiness, it's about being the manager at a Wal-Mart who vents his spleen on any subordinate who reminds him of that guy who totally called him a loser that one time in college, then goes home to complain online about how hard it is being such a wonderful person in a world so full of evil monsters. It goes so far into sucking off the protagonists' martyr complexes and inflaming their sense of self-righteous persecution that it makes them just as ugly and nasty as they imagine their enemies to be.
Sure, they have a tiny handful of Heroes who aren't blatantly psychotic**, but they're pretty much token efforts by the authors to try and convince people they've totally dealt with all the sliminess present in the original design doc, while most of the actual text of the book hammers home, again and again and again, that every single Hero is a sociopathic glory hound who kills Beasts because it makes his tiny dick hard and has no allies, only sycophants and meat shields. They bring it up every time Heroes are mentioned, for any reason, and it even mechanically enforces that stereotype by stating that Heroes can't have a Morality higher than 4 - just barely above the "kill people and don't give a fuck" level of inhuman monstrousness that Vampires are supposed to eventually stabilize at.
The corebook states that back in the good ol' days, Heroes were good because they didn't try to fight Beasts and instead focused on convincing the other villagers that the giant lava ogre who just ate half their cattle and unleashed the Horror within itself to scourge their dreams is totally a good dude and they should take this as a lesson in not having so much cattle. It then claims that Heroes Are Bad because they let their ego get in the way of letting the Beasts "teach lessons" to humanity (in much the same way Jason Voorhees or Hannibal Lecter "teach lessons"), and the reason there aren't any nice Heroes is because any good person who has the potential to become one recognizes that the Beasts are morally superior and should be allowed to do as they please. If the book had outright explained that all this toxic horseshit was what Beasts think, and not objective reality, I might be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but considering how halfhearted their attempts to course correct from the utterly vile rough draft they previewed are, and how earth-shatteringly fucked up that draft was?
They don't deserve it.
** Such as the guy who lives out on the coast and tries to avoid causing trouble for anyone, but when Beasts drift into his neck of the woods he can detect their presence as a horrible, neverending cacophony that just gets louder and louder and louder until all he can't even hear himself think, so his only choices are either to abandon the land his family's lived on for generations, or make the noise stop by any means necessary. His character writeup doesn't try to crowbar in "he's totally the Devil tho gais" like it does with almost every other, and the outcome is an NPC you could actually use without having to scrape too much dried dogshit off the edges!
.