Friendly faces…

Visual Evil 101 is to never show the faces of your badguys. That’s why Stormtroopers had those helmets — it’s a dehumanizing effect. Not only is it more intimidating, you feel less of a twinge when the hero starts killing them off en masse. Hell even changing someone’s eyes has a distancing effect… remember in the animated movie Aladdin when the Genie comes under the control of the bad guy? His pupils disappear. When he breaks that control and becomes friendly again, his eyeballs once again become fully functional.

Anyhow I kind of went over this before when discussing the Huachucas. Yes, it’s easy and effective to keep your baddies in shadow and/or behind masks. Yes, we continue to do so with the mysterious Exec. But now in addition to the Huachucas, we’ve gone ahead and given some faces to the people operating the Cambots. Part of that was as a way to sneak in further fulfillment of high-level Kickstarter rewards, but I also felt it was about time to stop being so mysterious about at least some aspects of the company.

After all, one of our themes has always been the mundanity of the bizarre, of people becoming jaded to everyday occurrences that would seem insane to us. Visual Evil 101 keeps all the cambot operators away from the eyes of both characters and audience, but the advanced class is the one that shows the faces, and shows people who might not be so different than you and I — but their empathy still seems as deadened as one of those faceless servants of the Empire. They’re not gunning down the Jawas or unarmed moisture farmers, but they might very well film it happening and be thinking of nothing more than when their shift ends.

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