Wiki Showcase: The Path of the Beautiful Fool

The second of the three Paths of Dark Communion I originally created, the Beautiful Fool was inspired primarily by the Archetype of the Fortunate Sun from "the Magic of Stories" from Pyramid #3/13 and by the concept of "Anima" and "Animus."  You can check it out here.

Designing the Path of the Beautiful Fool

If you gather together the obvious inspirations for the Path of the Beautiful Fool, it looks rather eclectic: the sexy dancer, the party animal, the succubus, the anima/animus and the fortunate son, but I think you can find some clear threads running through them.

For Dark Communion, I needed each path to reflect how "wicked cool" Dark Communion was.  Sure, it was quote-unquote "evil," but I'm aiming for the sort of "evil" that teenagers like: sex, drugs and rock and roll.  It's swaggering violence, getting away with sinful things, and being awesome, while possibly playing a cost.  I went in this direction because it fits the aesthetic of the Sith quite well, because that exemplifies what the Id is very much about, and because it's something I can see players drawn towards more than mustache twirling villainy.

The Beautiful Fool is ultimately the path of the party girl and getting away with it.  It's the path of sneaking out of your house to get to a party full of drugs, sleeping with all the boys and making no commitments.  It's the siren call of nightclubs, booze, strippers and fast cars and the freedom they seem to entail.  Of course, the path has real dangers, though you have to be a little perceptive of the natural consequences of these things, such as addiction or pregnancy, but it also has ways to bypass that.

I also needed a path to slot in the "slave dancer" into, as that's such a ubiquitous trope in space opera, though it must be said that the Path of the Beautiful Fool is a terrible path for a slave, as it promotes freedom, something I've emphasized.  Someone who follows the path might be drop-dead gorgeous and very tempting, but you can't own her.  She'll always find a way to escape. Part of this approach towards "the sexy character" is this Jungian idea of anima and animus, which I find fascinating: the masculine perception/ideal of the feminine, and the feminine perception/ideal of the masculine.  That is, the girl in the porn videos and that guy in the romance novels, rather than the girl in the romance novels or the guy in the action movies.  Those who follow the path, in a sense, lose their original connection to their gender, and gain a twisted, "objectified" version of their gender.  They go from being "women" to "What men want from women" and from "men" to "What women want from men."  You don't have to explore it overly much, but I thought it was an interesting concept.

The second half of the theme is the fool, the person who defies authority to do dumb things.  The "dumb things" comes naturally from all the drugs and alcohol and staying out later than your parents told you too, but the Beautiful Fool revels in a sort of "Fool's wisdom." The character carries out the dumbest stuff, but turns out to be right.  This is the archetype of the Fortunate Son, but I also drew inspiration from The Peasant's Wise Daughter, which is full of examples of a girl who refuses to stay within the bounds of commonly accepted wisdom.  Thus, I based a lot of the milestones on the Peasant's Wise Daughter and on films like the Hangover or Dude Where's My Car: stories of characters who do dumb things and end up on grand, wild adventures as a result, which I think is the core of the path: you sneak out after dark to go to a party, and adventure happens, often wild, chaotic adventure, with the Beautiful Fool as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl shouting "Whee!' the whole way.

The path tends to be fantastically corrosive to traditional morality.  It represents the victory one can gain in rebellion against social mores.  It is anti-chastity, anti-modesty, anti-temperance, and it succeeds because of these things. The Avatars of the Beautiful Fool act as an example of what successes one can gain by casting off moral restrictions.  It casts those who enforce these rules in the role of anti-fun busy-bodies, and entices others to join them on the path.  The price of those who follow is often the addictions and sexual consequences that put those moral rules there in the first place, but the Avatar herself can usually avoid these problems.

As with all paths, I chose gender more to be illustrative of the text. In a space opera, we know we want the "sexy dancing girl" character, so this trope gets a feminine title, but it's really not bound to a single gender.  That's something I often say, but this goes double for the Beautiful Fool.  "She" is inspired by the male "Fortunate Son" and the male stars of various comedy films   A male "Beautiful Fool" is the rakish rogue with a lopsided grin, who stinks of rum, and is here to whisk the lady off on some ill-conceived adventure that will surely work out this time, the sort of man her father always warned her about.

The Path of the Beautiful Fool has been codified in divine form as "Midra Sefeline," the free dancer, by the Divine Masks.  She is the goddess of the slave that frees herself, whether freeing herself from literal slavery, or the slavery of morality.