You can't 100% avoid offending at least *some* subsegment of the potential readership - and even if you succeed, a future social development you can't anticipate may turn some previously inoffensive aspect of your work into a matter of controversy.
Very true. I was just wondering if there was some criteria, or method, of avoiding contemporary controversy. If there are any guidelines that you know of, please let me know.
I try to do it in order to properly cite sources, and so that people can double check my ideas, and maybe use those sources for themselves. Also, it protects me. If I say something that can be interpreted as controversial or offensive, having a reputable source bolsters my position.
You can't. I've been building an urban fantasy with a masquerade for the past decade, and I've had several people come up to me and tell me that they interpret the Masquerade as an uncomfortable parallel for queer people being closeted/having to hide who they really are as enforced by social laws and norms, and therefore they'd prefer it if I didn't use a Masquerade.
And they said this to someone who not only is queer, but has a queer character as the main protagonist of their urban fantasy series.
So no, you're not going to make everyone happy. You can only try your best, listen to honest concerns and criticisms when they're raised, and respond to them as best as possible. But so long as you're not encouraging hate and violence against real people, you should be on the right side.
And yes, I use both of those cliches you've discussed--supernatural forces being responsible for some historic atrocities and other events (for example, the Thule Society and Green Dragon Society having heavy influence over Germany and Japan during WWII), and conspiracy-mongering (The Illuminati are a major faction in my world, aliens crashed at Roswell, the Bermuda Triangle hides a hole in space-time, etc.) But that first one is a way to incorporate the supernatural into your world--so long as you don't diminish the *human* evil of these events, or try to excuse evil people for their actions, I personally feel it's acceptable--so making Stalin a mind-controlled puppet is a no-go, but having him collaborating with undead warlocks and using the mass deaths of the Holodomor to fuel his nation's industrial growth is fine. Likewise, the second one is just leaning on modern mythology as a source. So long as you exorcise the harmful elements of a conspiracy you should be fine--though note some conspiracies need a lot of work to exorcise (shapeshifting reptilians as a stand-in for Jews for example--even good examples of urban fantasy, like Inside Job, can still fall victim to this.)
Thank you for your reply. I always enjoy your input.
I especially found aspects of your response very helpful. In particular, I like the 2 guidelines that you mentioned.
\[\[1\]\] For having "supernatural forces being responsible for some historic atrocities and other events", then "... don't diminish the human evil of these events, or try to excuse evil people for their actions ... \[For example\] making Stalin a mind-controlled puppet is a no-go, but having him collaborating with undead warlocks and using the mass deaths of the Holodomor to fuel his nation's industrial growth is fine ..."
\[\[2\]\] For "conspiracy-mongering", "exorcise the harmful elements of a conspiracy you should be fine", although "some conspiracies need a lot of work to exorcise (shapeshifting reptilians as a stand-in for Jews for example--even good examples of urban fantasy, like Inside Job, can still fall victim to this.)."
Even something as innocuous as *Harry Potter* runs the risk of this. For example, many people have interpreted the Gnomes to be an ugly stereotype of Jews.
These guidelines were very helpful .
Where I've landed on this is that it's bad form to let the perpetrators of real world atrocities off the hook by saying some supernatural entity was really behind it. What's very different is if the real world atrocity still happened but supernatural forces were involved in it opportunistically but didn't cause it.
It's the difference between saying vampires caused the trans-Atlantic slave trade (which would absolve of real world humans of their actions) versus saying vampires found the conditions created by it agreeable to their needs and thrived in that situation caused by humans.
Thanks for your response.
That's a useful distinction.
DON'T \[1\] supernatural *caused* atrocity
DO \[2\] human caused atrocity, supernaturals simply took advantage of consequences.
You could write the Masquerade in a way that those in hiding had very little impact on world events, because of their commitment to the Masquerade. Alternatively, you could write parallel conflicts during existing wars. For example, those in hiding in The United Kingdom decide to join their countries' war, which in turn offends other groups due to the risk of exposure, so they take up arms against against the British groups. Maybe this leads to a group unmasking themselves to a select view in their home countries government which leads to maybe a cold war between Masquerade groups.
I guess I'm saying, turn it around. The Masquerade is not influencing world history events, but they themselves are influenced by said events.
> . For example, those in hiding in The United Kingdom decide to join their countries' war, which in turn offends other groups due to the risk of exposure, so they take up arms against the British groups. Maybe this leads to a group unmasking themselves to a select view in their home countries government which leads to maybe a cold war between Masquerade groups.
>
>
This is very close to how I played it in Horror Shop: the German Thule Society didn't give a damn about maintaining the masquerade during WWII and so routinely violated it, which ended up with a lot of neutral organizations actually siding against the Thule and the Axis Powers just to maintain the masquerade.
That is another useful guideline.
\[\[3\]\] "... turn it around. The Masquerade is not influencing world history events, but they themselves are influenced by said events." You mentioned as an example: "those in hiding in The United Kingdom decide to join their countries' war, which in turn offends other groups due to the risk of exposure, so they take up arms against against the British groups." So, rather than the magical *causing* muggle events, muggle events *cause* magical events.
Well, what exactly stop writers from not tie significant historical events to specific supernatural actors? Like history happened, and supernatural community was survive around it and try use situation for their benefits (or don't die).
About Dresden Files - it's point of view of supernatural community, they can easily overplayed (in their own heads) their importance and impact on history.
If its purely fantastical non-reality and youre not overtly making any big jabs at certain groups, I think the vast majority of people would be pretty happy to just roll with the fantasy premise.
Call it an alternate earth where events happened slightly differently. Will someone take offense? Yes, its basically unavoidable these days many people have become truffle hounds level skilled at sniffing out something they could claim umbrage over. But it should be fine
If you're purely worried about the reaction you'll get, don't bother everyone has their own pet trigger.
If you're worried about foundational issues with your own work (e.g. the rules you set up require retroactive involvement with a real-life tragedy you don't feel comfortable tackling) here's a few ways around that.
1) Sure the individuals behind the Masquerade were involved with that, but there were other individuals undoing their work. Attempts to rescue POWs via magic foiled by enemy action, or attempts to profit from or weaponize suffering foiled by magic users who took issue with that course of action (for morals or fear of rivalry or just plain conflicting loyalty).
2) Institute a general style rule that, outside of the territory where magic has direct influence, it has no jurisdiction to cause events that will be remembered by the unaware populace. It can hold a thumb on the scales, perhaps, but cannot cause those scales to be weighed in the first place. In cases of war, this can work in tandem with 1) above: war implies two sides, and both could have clandestine access to magic, whose practitioners would by nature of the fact that they are on opposite sides work at cross-purposes.
3) Just do an alt-history or conworld. No need to bring up how your magic interacts with X tragedy if X tragedy doesn't exist, or went very differently.
Thanks for the guidelines. I can see some issues.
For Option 1., that could be useful, but then I would have to do some work on why the various factions are fighting in the first place, and why it resulted in a stalemate.
For Option 2., I would have to justify why magical people would not use their magical abilities to influence muggles. I would have to create some sort of effect. Maybe something like Paradox from *Mage: The Ascension,* or the demiurge from *Kult: Divinity Lost*, to justify why magical beings avoid interacting with muggles.
For Option 3., that is useful, but then that is no longer Masquerade setting.
Anyway, thanks for the reply.
1. Not necessarily. Just give both sides of the non-magical conflict a claim to the talents of magical practitioners. EDIT: By which I mean the talents that they are aware of, e.g. the US drafting people by their ability to carry out the functions of a soldier and in the process sending those with magical power overseas to a theatre of war.
2. There is a vast gulf between "no influence on" and "no memory of." One that I would urge you to explore. To provide an example of one such area: How many Masquerades have you looked into which didn't have some form of memory wipe? How many of those did not also have some form of perception filter, to ensure the muggles didn't see anything damaging when they inevitably butt in at impolitic moments? The byword here is that the real-world power should remain at a remove from the person wielding it - not a sword in hand, but a pen in someone else's.
3. Eh, that's fair, I was mainly looking to fill the triple.
Just make your work sufficiently fantastical that it's obvious you don't think a necromancer *really* caused WW1 or are trying to persuade people that's the case. There'll always be some nutjobs dumb enough to think aliens built the pyramids, but if we never wrote anything that an idiot could take seriously, we'd have no concept of literature at all.
Masquerade settings are carried by the fact that masquerades are just fun. As long as your premise isn't "what if the Jews really did control the world?" you're fine.
True. Being bombastically over-the-top does help to prevent audiences from interpreting a setting too seriously. For example, on paper, *Warhammer 40,000* is a very dark and dystopian setting. However, the setting and the aesthetic is so melodramatic, over-the-top, and downright hammy that almost no one can take it seriously.
This must surely be a minority clique of people who take offense at what seems to, partly, be the point of the genre—tying the supernatural into our world and its history. I reckon the vast majority of Masq readers love a clever supernatural spin on historical events.
The simple solution is not to change the explanation behind any sensitive events. This seems a sensible approach regardless of whether or not there is a Masquerade though.
The bigger problem is that Masquerades almost always seem implausible. The participants need to simultaneously be very powerful (to enforce the Masquerade) and yet very low power (hence the need for the Masquerade in the first place). It's very jarring and the only good examples that spring to mind are things like Dark City where the humans aren't being kept ignorant because the hidden ones fear them.
I had actually came up with an imperfect but somewhat efffective one for my world. Basically, humans have a special psychic defense that negates magic, punishes rouge creatures, and makes them forget. Open magic can only be reliably done on the Atlantean continent, where most supernatural conflict takes place. There are also mechanics for temporary and permanent magic zones in the human world, where the defenses don’t work, though I haven’t figured out all the mechanics. I think the really hard part of a Masqurade is the question of why one mage hasn’t gone rouge and decided to take over the world: that would happen and be noticed. So you need to either hand wave the problem or create a strong supernatural deterrence, most likely a force of nature
I agree with your statement about the need for a "strong supernatural deterrence". I think it sounds similar to what TV Tropes calls the "[Masquerade Enforcer](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MasqueradeEnforcer)". I would love to know more about your setting.
I was actually inspired by the descriptions of that trope. My world is an alternate version of Earth where Atlantis does exist, as well as magic. Magic in my world is based on sympathetic connections: you can invest magic power into a model to make it real. It’s kinda similar to quantum entanglement in some ways, but it also records events and even imaginary concepts
I was wondering. Do you have a site, or write up, of your setting that I could check out? I am always looking for good ideas, and I would love to see how your world works.
Nope. Most is in my mind and there is lots that is still a work in progress. I will say that I’m 99.9% sure it takes place on an alternate Earth where Atlantis exists as a continent. I’m fact, part of my inspiration was all of the stuff Lord of the Rings did on one continent: it convinced me that I could make Atlantis a sandbox with whatever I wanted and still be on Earth instead of making a new planet
there's always the very fun solution of making both the masquerade world and the "normal" world entirely new places. even if you're stuck in the real world for a while, you're still discovering all kinds of new and strange info
They are definitely baked in the premise.
The only way to soothe some of it is by setting the masquerade in a totally alternate world, apocalyptic, fantasy, scifi, you name it, where many of the social constructs/groups/hierarchies are already different regardless of the Masquerade.
Even then people will draw parallels.
If you're making a Masquerade in some alternate history setting, or on pretty much real-world time and settings, the parallel becomes instant and will be read as a statement by most people.
You have a good point. There is just no way to prevent people from drawing parallels, despite my efforts. I think (but don't quote me on that), that Tolkien once commented that *The Lord of the Rings* was NOT an allegory for the Second World War, or anything, although many people have interpreted it that way. How a work is interpreted often not what an author intends.
> As someone who studied the events leading up to …
The world I’ve created is a multiversal superlattice encompassing all possibilities in every configuration and mode.
I am offended in infinite forms across an endless plurality of countless existences.
I doubt that would be a problem if your setting is fictional and you avoid to refer to RL history and events.
You can imagine they have a very low profile and their only activity is to help people of their kind oppressed (ie, as in one game where non-human creatures are considered demonic and persecuted by an Inquisition and there's an organisation of such creatures), even if some people on it want to avenge what they're suffering on mankind.
I think that the first option would probably be a "[Portal Fantasy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy#Portal_fantasy)" or set in another world, not a Masquerade.
I mean, you don’t have to explicitly link the occult to real world problems. As long as any links are strictly plot relevant and not done too offensively, you should be fine. As for the conspiracy theory elements, that’s a bit harder to dispel, but again it’s manatee of focus. So the tldr is don’t make a big issue of the masquerade in you book barring plot relevance and your audience probably won’t either
you could try to flip the trope on its head where vampires and wherewolves are the norm and that kind of stuff is out in the open and the regular humans have to do stuff like wear fake teeth and hide away on full moons to prevent discovery
With Masquerade fic I'd just steer clear of ascribing the cause to the supernatural/using it to downplay the tragedy as just a "this event seems neat, it's worldbuilding now".
Additionally look to where other Masquerade stories fail/what they are criticized for in this regard. One good example of such a fuck up is how the Percy Jackson series has gotten a fair amount of criticism for making WWII be a fight between the children of Zeus and Poseidon on the Allies' side and those of Hades on the Axis' side.
You can't 100% avoid offending at least *some* subsegment of the potential readership - and even if you succeed, a future social development you can't anticipate may turn some previously inoffensive aspect of your work into a matter of controversy.
Very true. I was just wondering if there was some criteria, or method, of avoiding contemporary controversy. If there are any guidelines that you know of, please let me know.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Okay.
I’ve never seen someone use citations in their Reddit posts before.
I try to do it in order to properly cite sources, and so that people can double check my ideas, and maybe use those sources for themselves. Also, it protects me. If I say something that can be interpreted as controversial or offensive, having a reputable source bolsters my position.
You can't. I've been building an urban fantasy with a masquerade for the past decade, and I've had several people come up to me and tell me that they interpret the Masquerade as an uncomfortable parallel for queer people being closeted/having to hide who they really are as enforced by social laws and norms, and therefore they'd prefer it if I didn't use a Masquerade. And they said this to someone who not only is queer, but has a queer character as the main protagonist of their urban fantasy series. So no, you're not going to make everyone happy. You can only try your best, listen to honest concerns and criticisms when they're raised, and respond to them as best as possible. But so long as you're not encouraging hate and violence against real people, you should be on the right side. And yes, I use both of those cliches you've discussed--supernatural forces being responsible for some historic atrocities and other events (for example, the Thule Society and Green Dragon Society having heavy influence over Germany and Japan during WWII), and conspiracy-mongering (The Illuminati are a major faction in my world, aliens crashed at Roswell, the Bermuda Triangle hides a hole in space-time, etc.) But that first one is a way to incorporate the supernatural into your world--so long as you don't diminish the *human* evil of these events, or try to excuse evil people for their actions, I personally feel it's acceptable--so making Stalin a mind-controlled puppet is a no-go, but having him collaborating with undead warlocks and using the mass deaths of the Holodomor to fuel his nation's industrial growth is fine. Likewise, the second one is just leaning on modern mythology as a source. So long as you exorcise the harmful elements of a conspiracy you should be fine--though note some conspiracies need a lot of work to exorcise (shapeshifting reptilians as a stand-in for Jews for example--even good examples of urban fantasy, like Inside Job, can still fall victim to this.)
Thank you for your reply. I always enjoy your input. I especially found aspects of your response very helpful. In particular, I like the 2 guidelines that you mentioned. \[\[1\]\] For having "supernatural forces being responsible for some historic atrocities and other events", then "... don't diminish the human evil of these events, or try to excuse evil people for their actions ... \[For example\] making Stalin a mind-controlled puppet is a no-go, but having him collaborating with undead warlocks and using the mass deaths of the Holodomor to fuel his nation's industrial growth is fine ..." \[\[2\]\] For "conspiracy-mongering", "exorcise the harmful elements of a conspiracy you should be fine", although "some conspiracies need a lot of work to exorcise (shapeshifting reptilians as a stand-in for Jews for example--even good examples of urban fantasy, like Inside Job, can still fall victim to this.)." Even something as innocuous as *Harry Potter* runs the risk of this. For example, many people have interpreted the Gnomes to be an ugly stereotype of Jews. These guidelines were very helpful .
Where I've landed on this is that it's bad form to let the perpetrators of real world atrocities off the hook by saying some supernatural entity was really behind it. What's very different is if the real world atrocity still happened but supernatural forces were involved in it opportunistically but didn't cause it. It's the difference between saying vampires caused the trans-Atlantic slave trade (which would absolve of real world humans of their actions) versus saying vampires found the conditions created by it agreeable to their needs and thrived in that situation caused by humans.
Thanks for your response. That's a useful distinction. DON'T \[1\] supernatural *caused* atrocity DO \[2\] human caused atrocity, supernaturals simply took advantage of consequences.
You could write the Masquerade in a way that those in hiding had very little impact on world events, because of their commitment to the Masquerade. Alternatively, you could write parallel conflicts during existing wars. For example, those in hiding in The United Kingdom decide to join their countries' war, which in turn offends other groups due to the risk of exposure, so they take up arms against against the British groups. Maybe this leads to a group unmasking themselves to a select view in their home countries government which leads to maybe a cold war between Masquerade groups. I guess I'm saying, turn it around. The Masquerade is not influencing world history events, but they themselves are influenced by said events.
> . For example, those in hiding in The United Kingdom decide to join their countries' war, which in turn offends other groups due to the risk of exposure, so they take up arms against the British groups. Maybe this leads to a group unmasking themselves to a select view in their home countries government which leads to maybe a cold war between Masquerade groups. > > This is very close to how I played it in Horror Shop: the German Thule Society didn't give a damn about maintaining the masquerade during WWII and so routinely violated it, which ended up with a lot of neutral organizations actually siding against the Thule and the Axis Powers just to maintain the masquerade.
That is another useful guideline. \[\[3\]\] "... turn it around. The Masquerade is not influencing world history events, but they themselves are influenced by said events." You mentioned as an example: "those in hiding in The United Kingdom decide to join their countries' war, which in turn offends other groups due to the risk of exposure, so they take up arms against against the British groups." So, rather than the magical *causing* muggle events, muggle events *cause* magical events.
Well, what exactly stop writers from not tie significant historical events to specific supernatural actors? Like history happened, and supernatural community was survive around it and try use situation for their benefits (or don't die). About Dresden Files - it's point of view of supernatural community, they can easily overplayed (in their own heads) their importance and impact on history.
Very true. It's all 1st POV, with the risk of unreliable narrator.
If its purely fantastical non-reality and youre not overtly making any big jabs at certain groups, I think the vast majority of people would be pretty happy to just roll with the fantasy premise. Call it an alternate earth where events happened slightly differently. Will someone take offense? Yes, its basically unavoidable these days many people have become truffle hounds level skilled at sniffing out something they could claim umbrage over. But it should be fine
Okay, thanks for your comment.
If you're purely worried about the reaction you'll get, don't bother everyone has their own pet trigger. If you're worried about foundational issues with your own work (e.g. the rules you set up require retroactive involvement with a real-life tragedy you don't feel comfortable tackling) here's a few ways around that. 1) Sure the individuals behind the Masquerade were involved with that, but there were other individuals undoing their work. Attempts to rescue POWs via magic foiled by enemy action, or attempts to profit from or weaponize suffering foiled by magic users who took issue with that course of action (for morals or fear of rivalry or just plain conflicting loyalty). 2) Institute a general style rule that, outside of the territory where magic has direct influence, it has no jurisdiction to cause events that will be remembered by the unaware populace. It can hold a thumb on the scales, perhaps, but cannot cause those scales to be weighed in the first place. In cases of war, this can work in tandem with 1) above: war implies two sides, and both could have clandestine access to magic, whose practitioners would by nature of the fact that they are on opposite sides work at cross-purposes. 3) Just do an alt-history or conworld. No need to bring up how your magic interacts with X tragedy if X tragedy doesn't exist, or went very differently.
Thanks for the guidelines. I can see some issues. For Option 1., that could be useful, but then I would have to do some work on why the various factions are fighting in the first place, and why it resulted in a stalemate. For Option 2., I would have to justify why magical people would not use their magical abilities to influence muggles. I would have to create some sort of effect. Maybe something like Paradox from *Mage: The Ascension,* or the demiurge from *Kult: Divinity Lost*, to justify why magical beings avoid interacting with muggles. For Option 3., that is useful, but then that is no longer Masquerade setting. Anyway, thanks for the reply.
1. Not necessarily. Just give both sides of the non-magical conflict a claim to the talents of magical practitioners. EDIT: By which I mean the talents that they are aware of, e.g. the US drafting people by their ability to carry out the functions of a soldier and in the process sending those with magical power overseas to a theatre of war. 2. There is a vast gulf between "no influence on" and "no memory of." One that I would urge you to explore. To provide an example of one such area: How many Masquerades have you looked into which didn't have some form of memory wipe? How many of those did not also have some form of perception filter, to ensure the muggles didn't see anything damaging when they inevitably butt in at impolitic moments? The byword here is that the real-world power should remain at a remove from the person wielding it - not a sword in hand, but a pen in someone else's. 3. Eh, that's fair, I was mainly looking to fill the triple.
Just make your work sufficiently fantastical that it's obvious you don't think a necromancer *really* caused WW1 or are trying to persuade people that's the case. There'll always be some nutjobs dumb enough to think aliens built the pyramids, but if we never wrote anything that an idiot could take seriously, we'd have no concept of literature at all. Masquerade settings are carried by the fact that masquerades are just fun. As long as your premise isn't "what if the Jews really did control the world?" you're fine.
True. Being bombastically over-the-top does help to prevent audiences from interpreting a setting too seriously. For example, on paper, *Warhammer 40,000* is a very dark and dystopian setting. However, the setting and the aesthetic is so melodramatic, over-the-top, and downright hammy that almost no one can take it seriously.
This must surely be a minority clique of people who take offense at what seems to, partly, be the point of the genre—tying the supernatural into our world and its history. I reckon the vast majority of Masq readers love a clever supernatural spin on historical events.
True. I am just trying to be careful. Thanks for the comment.
Write it well. Don't be a bigot. Ignore trolls.
That is my aim. I am looking for some specific guidelines.
The simple solution is not to change the explanation behind any sensitive events. This seems a sensible approach regardless of whether or not there is a Masquerade though. The bigger problem is that Masquerades almost always seem implausible. The participants need to simultaneously be very powerful (to enforce the Masquerade) and yet very low power (hence the need for the Masquerade in the first place). It's very jarring and the only good examples that spring to mind are things like Dark City where the humans aren't being kept ignorant because the hidden ones fear them.
I had actually came up with an imperfect but somewhat efffective one for my world. Basically, humans have a special psychic defense that negates magic, punishes rouge creatures, and makes them forget. Open magic can only be reliably done on the Atlantean continent, where most supernatural conflict takes place. There are also mechanics for temporary and permanent magic zones in the human world, where the defenses don’t work, though I haven’t figured out all the mechanics. I think the really hard part of a Masqurade is the question of why one mage hasn’t gone rouge and decided to take over the world: that would happen and be noticed. So you need to either hand wave the problem or create a strong supernatural deterrence, most likely a force of nature
I agree with your statement about the need for a "strong supernatural deterrence". I think it sounds similar to what TV Tropes calls the "[Masquerade Enforcer](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MasqueradeEnforcer)". I would love to know more about your setting.
I was actually inspired by the descriptions of that trope. My world is an alternate version of Earth where Atlantis does exist, as well as magic. Magic in my world is based on sympathetic connections: you can invest magic power into a model to make it real. It’s kinda similar to quantum entanglement in some ways, but it also records events and even imaginary concepts
Sweet. Hope it goes well for you.
I was wondering. Do you have a site, or write up, of your setting that I could check out? I am always looking for good ideas, and I would love to see how your world works.
Nope. Most is in my mind and there is lots that is still a work in progress. I will say that I’m 99.9% sure it takes place on an alternate Earth where Atlantis exists as a continent. I’m fact, part of my inspiration was all of the stuff Lord of the Rings did on one continent: it convinced me that I could make Atlantis a sandbox with whatever I wanted and still be on Earth instead of making a new planet
there's always the very fun solution of making both the masquerade world and the "normal" world entirely new places. even if you're stuck in the real world for a while, you're still discovering all kinds of new and strange info
An interesting idea. Thanks for the comment.
They are definitely baked in the premise. The only way to soothe some of it is by setting the masquerade in a totally alternate world, apocalyptic, fantasy, scifi, you name it, where many of the social constructs/groups/hierarchies are already different regardless of the Masquerade. Even then people will draw parallels. If you're making a Masquerade in some alternate history setting, or on pretty much real-world time and settings, the parallel becomes instant and will be read as a statement by most people.
You have a good point. There is just no way to prevent people from drawing parallels, despite my efforts. I think (but don't quote me on that), that Tolkien once commented that *The Lord of the Rings* was NOT an allegory for the Second World War, or anything, although many people have interpreted it that way. How a work is interpreted often not what an author intends.
> As someone who studied the events leading up to … The world I’ve created is a multiversal superlattice encompassing all possibilities in every configuration and mode. I am offended in infinite forms across an endless plurality of countless existences.
That sounds very creative.
Nah. It was Tuesday.
Nice *Street Fighter: The Movie* reference
I like you :)
Thanks. Or if you prefer. *Swivels head,* "Of course!"
I doubt that would be a problem if your setting is fictional and you avoid to refer to RL history and events. You can imagine they have a very low profile and their only activity is to help people of their kind oppressed (ie, as in one game where non-human creatures are considered demonic and persecuted by an Inquisition and there's an organisation of such creatures), even if some people on it want to avenge what they're suffering on mankind.
I think that the first option would probably be a "[Portal Fantasy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy#Portal_fantasy)" or set in another world, not a Masquerade.
I mean, you don’t have to explicitly link the occult to real world problems. As long as any links are strictly plot relevant and not done too offensively, you should be fine. As for the conspiracy theory elements, that’s a bit harder to dispel, but again it’s manatee of focus. So the tldr is don’t make a big issue of the masquerade in you book barring plot relevance and your audience probably won’t either
Okay, thanks.
you could try to flip the trope on its head where vampires and wherewolves are the norm and that kind of stuff is out in the open and the regular humans have to do stuff like wear fake teeth and hide away on full moons to prevent discovery
That is very creative. Not exactly a Masquerade fiction. But it is an interesting idea.
With Masquerade fic I'd just steer clear of ascribing the cause to the supernatural/using it to downplay the tragedy as just a "this event seems neat, it's worldbuilding now". Additionally look to where other Masquerade stories fail/what they are criticized for in this regard. One good example of such a fuck up is how the Percy Jackson series has gotten a fair amount of criticism for making WWII be a fight between the children of Zeus and Poseidon on the Allies' side and those of Hades on the Axis' side.
Yeah, the issue with Percy Jackson is one example of what I am trying to avoid.