Behold, I am Queen Bullshit, explainer of hours of introspective superhero drama!

I play in MASKS, which is a teenage superheroes game, sort of like Teen Titans/Young Justice. It takes place in Halcyon City, superhero capital of the world, somewhere in the northeast US. This character is one of my very favorite I’ve ever played. I’ve been blessed with really talented fellow players and a killer GM. Our adventures haven’t just been fun, they’ve also been thought-provoking and really emotionally resonant.

Adam Spinelli, better known as “Atom Splitter,” used to be a normal kid. He was into comic books, space exploration, and pitching for his high school baseball team. Raised by a loving but workaholic father (played by Tony Shaloub) he’d spend his nights working as a janitor with his dad’s small time sanitation company.

One night, he was sweeping the Halcyon Mass Array and… uh, definitely did not decide to sneak inside at night. Due to a malfunction, he was blasted with cosmic rays. To his surprise, he didn’t get cancer, but developed incredible cosmic powers. (For stats-heads, he’s a Nova.)

To a kid who grew up lower-middle-class, a gig like this was a godsend! You couldn’t BUY advertising like this. Adam has sorr of a young Darryl Hall/Joey Wheeler thing going on, with an Akira-style blue jumpsuit with Spinelli and Sons Sanitation displayed proudly on the back. He can fly and throw a shitload of power around. Sometimes, he’ll throw fuckin’ baseballs imbued with cosmic energy.

Beyond the kitschy fun superhero stuff, I’ve honestly been blessed to have such awesome fellow players and GM, because we’ve had a lot of emotionally resonant and surprisingly dark (in a good way, not an edgy way) stuff go on. One of the big themes of the campaign has been the way that superheroing intersects with capitalism. One of Adam’s teammates is Dante (formerly Flame Lad) a delinquent Bostonian who was financially exploited by his parents pretty much from birth, and who maintains close ties with his Irish uncle’s bar for retired villains.

Adam, despite everything that’s happened, fundamentally loves and believes in being a superhero, even as he’s found himself increasingly at odds with the structures that govern it (the hypertrillionaire Rutherford family, the shadowy government agency AEGIS, the prison system.)

Dante, meanwhile, has been stuck living as a superhero for so long that, even as he rebels against his family, he increasingly views it as “just a job” and is far more willing to go through the motions, even if it prevents actual justice or mercy.

Both of them, however, are very, very public heroes, without secret identities. Adam is fundamentally terrified of the power he wields and the way it destroyed most of his pre-hero friendships. Dante is struggling with Catholicism, years of being raised by absentee parents, and the fact he’s… uh, definitely not as heterosexual as he thinks he is.

Round that party out with two amazing outsiders to the mostly-human world (and also great nonbinary rep):

Redwood, a plantperson from a druidic order of tree-beings called the Watchers, trying to navigate their way through centuries of tradition nurturing the earth, caught between their responsibilities to the forest and their desire to live in the wider world. They’ve got a stolon of steel when it comes to protecting their seed-sibling Magnolia.

Scribe, a biblically accurate angel who may actually be a demon, a shapeshifting little bastard whose initial training for life on earth was decades of TV radio signals caught over the centuries-long journey aboard their sentient spaceship, Ship. They literally snuck us into a bureaucratic office of Heaven once, which was very distressing for Dante the Irish Catholic.

I’m a transfemme, and honestly, Adam is very important to me as a meditation on the masculinity I was raised with for years–how it can manifest in a wholesome way and how it can be toxic. Adam is, essentially, a conventionally attractive white kid. He’s got “face” written all over him, and was a natural pick for team lead. His natural instinct is to dominate the conversation, especially when he feels there’s an ethical question at stake. He’s always trying to thread the needle and find a solution which achieves justice, keeps furure consequences off their back, and lets them all more or less be able to sleep soundly at night. And yeah, he usually does come up with a really good idea. But his own sense of moral crusadership can have a spiteful streak: After arguing with Scribe over something incredibly unethical they wanted to do, and Scribe refusing to say they wouldn’t, Adam straight up resorted to blasting at them to get them to agree. He couldn’t convince them, so he just went with blunt force, because isn’t that what superheroes do? Try and talk out a problem, then pummel it if you can’t?

Adam is someone who–as part of growing up, both as a hero and a person–needs to learn to restrain his desire to be in the driver’s seat all the time, to wield the power and social privilege he has in a way that is considerate towards others. When he finally does see an excuse to let loose–a morally justified target to take out his anger on, because “Hey, asshole, we can’t DO that”, he does so with a whole lot of spite. He can absolutely be a big old bully when he doesn’t watch himself.

In other words, it’s the experience I had as “the really smart kid” in school–all that aptitude, all those expectations, an entire background chorus subtly saying that, no, you’re the one who deserves to speak the most, you’re the one who’s always right, don’t worry about making time and space for other people to speak.

I’ve grown out of the belief that I’m a guy, but there’s a whole lot of baggage there that doesn’t just evaporate when you start taking estrogen.

Playing Adam, I think, is somewhat therapeutic in helping me sweep out the cobwebs of that version of myself.

Gang Beasts is ludicrous fun! Flailing around, grabbing your little clayboy opponent and yeeting them off the side of a lighthouse will never not be fun. Definitely best played with a controller, though.