I was watching a show where one of the heroes had his grandmother show up, and he didn’t want her to know he was a superhero but was worried she would recognize him even through his costume. What did he do? Pretend to be a girl while in his “hero” persona! And it struck me that A) that was really funny as a one-off event, and B) a closeted-transgender Janus whose hero persona is the gender they identify as could make a really interesting character.
Speaking of the Janus, what exactly does it mean to “affirm either your hero or secret identity”?
I read it as meaning that you take some sort of action that shows you’re embracing one side of your duality more than the other.
We started up a new Masks campaign this week and Alan Scott is pretty much playing the Janus described in B). 🙂
For the question, I’ll point you to pages 93-111 in the core rulebook. They’re full of insight into what the playbooks are about, how to play them and explanatory details for some of their moves, and absolutely everyone should read through ’em.
But because I’m lovely, here’s the relevant bit from that section for the Janus affirmation:
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For The Mask, affirming your secret or masked identity means doing something that firmly plants you in that role. Leaving your teammates to go save your sister might affirm you as your secret identity, even while you’re still wearing your mask. Doing the opposite, going off to fight the Blue Hydra instead of rescuing your sister from the Centipede, might affirm you in your masked role. Affirming your identity should always be a meaningful choice or action in the fiction, something with ramifications — good or bad — moving forward.
–Matt Morton Truly lovely! I don’t have the full rulebook yet, only the demo playbook PDFs, so hopefully once I get my hands on the real thing I can stop asking so many obvious questions.
It’ll be $14 very well spent.
The full text has all kinds of “here’s what this shit means” stuff. It’s VERY useful.
As Matt mentioned, the Masks character I’m playing right now it Trans–though unlike in your example, He presents as his preferred gender both in and out of the mask.
My take on the Janus is that on both the masked and unmasked identities are “true” identities. So I intentionally avoided a character whose secret identity still presented as their assigned birth gender. I think that’s a cool character concept, but it maybe takes a little bit more nuance than I, a cisgender person with relatively little experience with trans matters, am necessarily going to bring to the table.