The push and pull between players' and writers' ideas as to how factions and game mechanics in Vampire: The Masquerade should function, is a neat comment on dehumanization.
Mind you, I fully understand the reasons for the recent changes White Wolf -and it's publisher, Paradox Interactive- made to those concepts.
The Sabbat, as a faction, are awkward to work with, because they actively flout two of the game's core mechanics: Humanity and Masquerade. And wanting to avoid the discussion of how Kindred fuck minus Blush of Life is also an understandable move. I mean, I get it. Who wants to fuck a cold clammy dead body? I sure don't.
I'd fuck a vampire, though. And that's a reanimated corpse too, isn't it? It's just pretending to be alive. Imitating the motions and speech of a living person so it can manipulate and exploit you and your body and those of everyone you love. And that fear has never manifested in real life, right?
So, I'm a trans woman. I'm counted among a category of people essentialized as some monstrous existential threat that has to be contained and eliminated to 'protect the children'. It happens with Jews, it happens with Black folks, it happens to gay people, and it happens to trans people now, too, because humans never learn anything.
And excuse you, but I would never sink my fangs into anyone that isn't at least twenty years of age. I have standards.
But vampires are different, right? They're parasites, exploiting other people to survive and producing nothing of value of their own! It's kind of sad, really. They're not even really alive. It's practically a mercy to kill them, right?
So, I'm also disabled.
I trust that I don't have to go on about this. Vampires are part of a wide bestiary of creatures -monsters to robots to aliens- who attract a kind of people who, themselves, are dehumanized. Denied the dignity of 'real' people or, at least, implied that they should be.
A fundamental mechanic in Vampire: The Masquerade is Humanity. You are a monster that is struggling against the monstrosity inside of you, clinging to whatever shred of the life you lived before to avoid degenerating into a nigh-mindless creature called a Wight.
There are no upsides to having lower Humanity: As it declines, your character will struggle to mimic mortal activities like eating, drinking, having sex; even tasks like handwriting become more difficult as the Beast eats away at all parts of your consciousness not immediately tied to feeding and survival (I am now imagining an EATEOT spin-off depicting a vampire slowly losing their Humanity).
But there are vampires who don't walk the Path of Humanity, who have found other ways to fend off the Beast. Paths of Enlightenment, practiced by one of the three major vampire factions: The Sabbat.
I know a few people of the otherkin persuasion who are attracted to the concept of the Sabbat specifically because the faction rejects Humanity. They're not human: The Kine would reject and seek to kill them if they revealed themselves. Why wouldn't you reject Humanity, when Humanity did it first?
By the way, my pronouns are she/her, but I'm keeping it/its in a cupboard somewhere in case I need it.
Don't get it crossed like being Sabbat was some progressive and liberatory option the writers wrote out: Most of the Sabbat Paths are a means for them to justify killing and torturing whoever and whenever they want.
Honestly, if this setting were even 0.2% more realistic, the Sabbat would've burned itself out centuries ago. These motherfuckers are having bimonthly murder orgies in Montreal and no one's figured that out? I dunno, maybe that's normal for Montreal, I've never been.
Anyway. Uh, I had a point to make here, I think.
The design of Vampire: The Masquerade continues to centre Humanity as a core mechanic, and I suspect that will continue for a while. It is a great mechanic and concept: After all, when you're denied personhood, it's a natural thing to want to take it back.
But, I dunno, maybe it could be good to have stories in the setting about reevaluating what it means to be human without having to hang out with a guy whose chairs won't stop screaming.
Obviously, using walking corpses that drink human blood as an analogue for a minority group is a bit of a fraught idea, and I don't expect the writers to change course too soon. Probably better to leave those ideas in the hands of players wanting to write a homebrew timeline. Maybe a... post-Masquerade AU, huh?
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