Roleplaying Tropes: Last of My Kind

[The Futureman]

The planet is dying, a great age come tumbling to its end. Wise elders that foresaw this eventuality decide they will not go quietly into darkness. A ship, fit for one, a child swaddled in the symbol of his dying race, and cast among the shoals of stars to find a new home, to carry on the name of his people...

 

The Last of Their Kind is a classic, best known as the origin of Superman, but naturally, it's got tons more examples, some magic, some mundane.

 

What do you think of this well-worn setup? How would you RP it? What about it intrigues or annoys you?

[FrauleinMental]

It's a fairly common trope in the superhero genre, because it allows you to have unique beings.  You get Superman without also having to have a generation ship loaded with an entire population of Kryptonian refugees.  One could argue Batman also follows this trope, even though he's human, since he's the last of his family.  Wonder Woman also plays with this trope with her recent backstory of being the last of the Greek Gods.

 

It's a frequent trope in RPGs as well, because it's easy to make a character without the "weaknesses" of family if you kill off the family in backstory.

 

It's potentially a lonely trope, which makes it an easy trap for edgelords.  Avoiding the trap almost invariably requires the building of some connection to another person:  Superman has the Kents, Batman has Alfred, WW has the Amazons (in some stories, at least).  Frequently those personal connections help define The Last of Their Kind in ways Their Kind could not.

[Bastille Boy]

The glorious machines were everywhere, once. Their warm clickety-clack filled every office and every newsroom as strong, well-trained fingers produced memos, letters, columns, and stories. And stories! Every novelist, playwright, and screenwriter had one of these machines. A carbon copy required real carbon, back then. The machines were built to last, but even the best machines require maintenance. A small army of modest but highly specialized mechanics lubricated the machines and the commerce and creativity they enabled.

 

Then came the quiet killers. The new devices accepted words with a faint tap-tap-tap, producing nothing solid and real, only a stream of bits, first on a "floppy disk," then in "the cloud." Like the ephemeral documents they produced, the new machines were temporary, intended to be replaced after five years, maybe ten. A new army arose with the machines. They called themselves "IT." Without spilling a drop of blood, the new army vanquished its aging foes. The old writing machines were relegated to landfills, museums, and the windows of a few fashionable cafes...to be seen, not heard.

 

One stalwart from the ancient army remains. His repair shop stands open, its unprofitable operations sustained by the proceeds of a closed-end fund (another unlikely survivor of a bygone era). He carries with him the memories of a time of great newspapers and great novels. He is...

 

Typewriter Repair Man

Edited February 11, 2021 by Bastille Boy

[The Batman]

What about the bad guy forced to be a hero because of a curse, cursed item or because of a traumatic event that caused him/her/it to re evaluate their life?

[Latex]

The Origin of Superman is also the origin of General Zod who I think is one of the best "Villains" of all time, it's an example of how this trope can define several characters that are drastically different and still interesting.

 

You could argue any Hero or Villain from Praetoria is in the same vein, a dying dimension/world that has technology far above that of Primal Earth.

[The Batman]

And there's also the Legacy Hero, someone who is carrying on a noble tradition.  The Phantom, the Ghost who walks is an example of this.

[Sovera]

Being unique is a great way to amp up the power of the character. One ninja alone is a master of both martial and mystical arts. One Green Lantern alone is a demi god who keeps the peace in a whole quadrant. One kryptionan beats up full fledged gods.

 

When there are many sharing the same power set the power goes down -drastically-. Green Lantern corps are usually defeated in one go, ninjas are fodder when an army, a crowd of kryptonians are killed no problem.

 

Derailing a bit superman is one of those tropes where plot armor is extensively used. When they bring in other kryptonians instead of them being demi gods they get killed or defeated with barely much effort. Makes us think what makes ours so special. Even supergirl in her book is easily thrown around, though I accept that, alien or not, they mirror our biology close enough that the female of the species has less power than the male and thus she struggles more.

 

Derailing some more it's something I'd like to see portrayed in the comics a bit more. Batman able to afford to beat people with pure brawn, while the female members of his Bat-family relying more on the smoke grenades and other gadgets to make up for biology. Instead of just turning them into female versions of Bats who punch and kick with never a nod to the differences between man and woman.

[Take One]

On 2/10/2021 at 8:06 PM, FrauleinMental said:

You get Superman without also having to have a generation ship loaded with an entire population of Kryptonian refugees

That sounds like the seed of a great story, however.

Superman lands, becomes a hero, joins humanity, enjoys life on Earth.

Decades later: the ship of Kryptonian refugees arrive.

Conflict ensues.

[FrauleinMental]

1 hour ago, Take One said:

That sounds like the seed of a great story, however.

Superman lands, becomes a hero, joins humanity, enjoys life on Earth.

Decades later: the ship of Kryptonian refugees arrive.

Conflict ensues.

That kinda happened in Man of Steel (maybe not refugees, but I don't recall seeing a whole lot about the incoming fleet/ship).  Marvel played with it a while back with the whole New Asgard storyline (and they're laying groundwork for it now in MCU).

[TwoDee]

So I went back and forth on how much of my bias I wanted to showcase on this topic, because in a lot of cases where I've encountered 'Last Of My Kinds' it's kind of a yellow flag for me, because of that necessary separation from the established canon of the world with a concept that necessitates the character be an outsider.  One of the wonderful things about City of Heroes is that it's kind of a hodgepodge, kitchen-sink setting and you don't necessarily need to be beholden to the game lore to write a compelling character.  There's bandwidth there for endless varieties of space aliens, or alternate-dimension humans, or whatever, and you can exist in harmony with the roleplayers who lean on more 'established' lore as equally valid parts of our collective fanon.

 

But something that is built-in to the Last Of My Kind, as a subset of Characters From Another World, is that they need to come packaged with a whole world and setting all to themselves, which won't have readymade touchstones for other characters to immediately vibe with.  At its best, that gives the player a ton to work with and improvise regarding fleshing out how the Last Of My Kind's alien culture informs them and leads to dramatic or humorous disconnects with the world of Primal Earth, but at its worst, it means that you're giving other players homework to read your original fiction to even understand the character they're interacting with.  It's a 'lonely' trope, as indicated by other commenters above, but it's also a 'selfish' trope, because it creates a barrier of entry to interact with you that isn't true in the inverse with more grounded characters with a basic set of assumptions like "is human, with human perceptions" or "is from St. Martial, a zone in the game that we see and can draw context from."

 

Last Of My Kinds - and all 'canon aliens' - can easily verge into the territory that Grym lampoons in the Shining Stars arc, where he constantly drops completely opaque references to things from his world and his culture that clearly have profound meaning to him and precisely him and absolutely no value to other characters: "Silver Aura Chords," the Order of "Grims," the "Sacred Blade of Terrinael," the "Gressalian Tournament" et al.  And that's not engaging behavior conducive to good RP, which is why Grym is a parodical character.  In a player-to-player setting, basically the only reasonable response to such a thing is "hey Grym, I don't know what the Sacred Blade of Terrinael is so I don't understand what you're talking about, could you please explain that to me?" and then, assuming Grym were a player character, he'd self-indulgently rattle off five pages of original fiction he had waiting in a Word document for that moment that he could manipulate another player into asking about it.

 

Then you combine that with the element of extreme tragedy common to all Last Of My Kinds, which is similar in that it proscribes a certain set of responses.  Hyperbolic tragedy is nothing strange in superhero comics, but in an RP setting, it's kind of hard to bounce off of 'everyone I ever knew is DEAD' with anything other than 'shit that sucks, I'm sorry dude.'  It's not really a character trait that invites reflection, confrontation, or yes-anding; it's just a Horrible Thing that is all said and done that nobody else can effect in any tangible way, but that still demands to be acknowledged and sympathized with due to the sheer magnitude of its horribleness.

 

And that's kind of why I say I get a 'yellow flag' from Last Of My Kinds.  It's not a red flag, in that I don't immediately go 'that's a bad RPer,' but it's a very valuable tool in the utility belt of a hypothetical RPer who wants to monopolize attention and not offer much attention in return.  I've seen good Last Of My Kinds and bad Last of My Kinds, but the Last Of My Kind is an archetype that is uniquely suited to facilitating selfish RP just because of the social dynamics involved in reflecting on that character from the outside.

Edited March 10, 2021 by TwoDee
said something that came off as kind of xenophobic and reframed it

[Haijinx]

On 2/12/2021 at 5:09 PM, Latex said:

The Origin of Superman is also the origin of General Zod who I think is one of the best "Villains" of all time, it's an example of how this trope can define several characters that are drastically different and still interesting.

 

You could argue any Hero or Villain from Praetoria is in the same vein, a dying dimension/world that has technology far above that of Primal Earth.

Yeah Superman isn't really the last of his kind >.< 

 

Kryptonians everywhere!  

 

[Haijinx]

On 3/4/2021 at 6:20 AM, Sovera said:

Being unique is a great way to amp up the power of the character. One ninja alone is a master of both martial and mystical arts. One Green Lantern alone is a demi god who keeps the peace in a whole quadrant. One kryptionan beats up full fledged gods.

 

When there are many sharing the same power set the power goes down -drastically-. Green Lantern corps are usually defeated in one go, ninjas are fodder when an army, a crowd of kryptonians are killed no problem.

 

Derailing a bit superman is one of those tropes where plot armor is extensively used. When they bring in other kryptonians instead of them being demi gods they get killed or defeated with barely much effort. Makes us think what makes ours so special. Even supergirl in her book is easily thrown around, though I accept that, alien or not, they mirror our biology close enough that the female of the species has less power than the male and thus she struggles more.

 

Derailing some more it's something I'd like to see portrayed in the comics a bit more. Batman able to afford to beat people with pure brawn, while the female members of his Bat-family relying more on the smoke grenades and other gadgets to make up for biology. Instead of just turning them into female versions of Bats who punch and kick with never a nod to the differences between man and woman.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu