Here's the very first page:
This is David's world, the rest of you plebs just live in it.
The teaser fiction involves two girls heading to a really bad part of town and stabbing a big fat guy in a suit multiple times with silver knives, because he's a vampire. The app on their phone pays them $1500 bucks for this. I get the feeling that David isn't very good with subtlety. Or writing fiction, for that matter.
It goes downhill from there.
This is such a perfect metaphor for every Twitter warrior like David: Fighting pretend battles to make their lives feel meaningful.
Okay fine. On one hand, I get it. The economy tanked ten years ago and the (disproportionally white and male) people responsible got a slap on the wrist, while everyone else lost their jobs and their savings. But on the other hand, that was ten years ago. Life moved on.
People like David really need there to be some vast conspiracy of monsters to blame for making the world an awful place, because the alternative, that they went six figures into debt for a liberal arts degree that gave them no useful skills, and are still social misfits at the age of thirty, is worse. Your fault for your shitty situation isn't 100% you, but it sure ain't 0% you either.
David can't decide if the monsters are metaphors for society's evils or people who are the victims of society's evils. Yet at the same time, while monsters are responsible for individual acts of evil, it's still the right-wing rich people who are the actual villains, but we're going to kill the monsters anyway instead of making a real difference. So yeah, typical Twitter warrior.
Let's see what he cites as his inspiration: anti-capitalist bullshit where even he admits the bad guys are strawmen caricatures. And nice editing there, leaving a stray quotation mark.
Five bucks says David is another sex pest like Holden Shearer and Matt McFarlane.
Yeah, this is about what I expected.
@PancakesPancakesPancakes wasn't kidding about the layout being fuckawful. David's sense of style is perpetually stuck in the 80s.
Have you filled out your social justice bingo card yet?
That game was Beast. You know, the one written by your rapey buddy Matt McFarlane? Never a good idea to throw shade on a former employer, David. This is why no one will hire you.
The system is bog-standard Fate, peppered with David's fuck-awful writing, so I'm not going to deal with it. Let's skip ahead to what he considers to be monsters.
What a fucking surprise. Sorcerers in this game are apparently some metaphor for privilege being used to gather power and wealth for yourself, except when they're not.
Though not all of the enemies listed as targets are caricatures of the enemies of Twitter Social Justice. Some are just in messed-up situations with varying degrees of humanity left in them, but they gotta die anyway so the PCs can afford rent next month. Most people would use this as a way to add nuance to the hunt, but not David. You know what you call someone who kills without remorse because they view their victims as not really people so it's not their fault? Sociopaths. This is a game about sociopaths for hire. Best case scenario, monsters who hunt other monsters, but it's okay because they're poor and queer! No wonder David got on so well with Matt.
I... what? Okay, apparently there are lizard people out there. I'm not sure what they are supposed to represent. Reading too deeply into this hurts my brain.
David fills up an entire 24 pages on the subject of poverty culture. Go to Reddit if you want to read this whiny bullshit, it's the exact same thing.
Okay, now we're getting into something a bit more interesting. the iHunt app is owned by a shady bazillionaire who owns the biggest and most valuable mansion in town and is fairly ruthless about getting rid of competing monster-hunting franchises, despite the app operating at a massive loss. The app is also itself very crooked in the same way that PayPal is crooked. This suggests that there's some kind of conspiracy behind the scenes, though David doesn't give an official answer, in his gratingly smug way of writing. It could be interesting, but to David, it's just another layer in how the world fucks over the poor.
In conclusion, iHunt is r/LateStageCapitalism that thinks it's a game. It's one man's unhinged attempt to scream about how awful the world is while simultaneously making the world even more awful by becoming a contract killer--but it's okay, because your contracts are secretly monsters. No one ever wins, they just die a little faster for dumb reasons. It's also David's big 'fuck you' to White Wolf and Onyx Path, in that he shits all over them and their aesthetic. And he still can't seem to draw the casual link between his own misery and his shitty attitude.
www.bleedingcool.com
