by Charles Phipps » Wed May 14, 2008 5:12 am
OOC: This is unlike my other write-ups is not an attempt to do a canon White Knight variant but just a different take on him. Thus, please ignore some of the more outrageous history of White Knight for this one.
IC:
White Knight
Daniel Foreman is pretty much hated by everyone else in Freedom City. He's an embarrassment to the city and going in to beat the livings snot out of him is a right of passage amongst new Freeport superheroes. Almost every superhero in Freeport seems to take Daniel Foreman's existence as a personal affront to their dignity and its really not hard to see why.
You see, Daniel Foreman is a superhero too.
Actually, the Freedom League is quick to correct that Daniel Foreman is a vigilante. He has no support from the city and certainly none from right thinking superheroes. He's an enemy of the superheroes of Freedom City and a person that deserves to be quickly locked up for his hate driven violence as soon as possible. Lady Liberty has a particular loathing for the man and makes it a point to assault him in both her guises (the later through legal case work to make his life more difficult).
Freedom City's superpowered criminals and some citizens, particularly those rescued by him, are somewhat less likely to pigeon hole him under this label.
Oh, don't get it wrong. Daniel Foreman is a foaming mouth racist. He wears the hood of the Ku Klux Klan and listening to him is like listening to a litany of the most ignorant speech imaginable about everything from Arabs to Zionism in A-Z order. About the only thing that Daniel Foreman has going for him is that he doesn't deny the Holocaust and thinks the Nazis had to be stopped, mostly because Daniel considers Germans to qualify as foreign scum.
Also, Daniel Foreman makes a specific effort to target the mostly Black and Hispanic homes amongst the Fens. What Daniel Foreman considers fighting crime, others are quick to label as a hate crime. The problem is that Daniel does have limits and rules that everyone is ashamed does rank him slightly above the murderous terrorist most people want to portray him as.
For one, Daniel Foreman genuinely does target criminals. At least, he certainly tries to and only rarely makes mistakes. His targets are almost all minorities but he waits until they've actually committed a crime before moving in to beat them within an inch of their life. The reports that he actually has burned down innocent people's homes and attempted to slaughter entire districts is just the result of bad journalism or other villains blaming their crimes on him (including some Hate groups trying to draw attention away from themselves).
Next, Daniel Foreman is no friend to supervillains. The Terminus Invasion had Daniel smacking around Omega's minions to save the city and he's also tangled with some of the genuine supervillains in the land (many who are appalled by him for their own reasons). White Knight has won no acclaim in these encounters because he usually loses badly to them. The one time he actually captured Maestro, well, let's just say the papers focused on the fact that Basil Fatherton is Jewish.
Daniel considers himself the patron of Freedom City and frankly has a rather plucky personality when you get right down to it. Only a boundless optimist and idealist could have not learned ANYTHING despite the sheer amount of disgust, loathing, and regular beatings that are regularly delivered down upon him. He's fully of the mind he's just wrongfully persecuted and takes a perverse pride in his 'martyrdom' in the court of public opinion.
It's probably too late for Daniel Foreman to be anything other than he is. As Freeport vigilantes go, he's probably a lot better than Silencer and Warden for the amount of horrors that he inflicts on criminals. Shockingly, White Knight has actually even saved lives of hated minorities on occasion, usually from accidents or other minorities. Most of these individuals are hesitant to publicly praise a man running around in a Klan outfit.
Daniel hates minorities but its the kind of hate that does not necessarilly lend itself to wanting to see them DESTROYED, just kept in whatever separatist world that Daniel envisions as his paradise. This is a point that is lost on a lot of people.
Then again, can you really blame them for missing it when he's delivering a royal smack down on Johnny Rocket for leading a 'perverse' and 'immoral lifestyle' with some assumptions about worse sexual deviancy to boot?
Despite the emotional reaction to Daniel's attire and words, there's also practical reasons to keep opposing him. As the Jonny Rocket example above displays, Daniel isn't exactly objective when it comes to certain groups. Even when Daniel does some small measure of good in the world, its outweighed by the fact that the White Knight is hardly the sharpest tool in the shed to begin with and that's dangerous with the power of a demigod. His world view is not just ignorant, its also DANGEROUS in its mistaken assumptions.
The White Knight, left to his own devices, is not that much worse than many Iron Age 'heroes' while just setting a horrible example for kids. However, the White Knight is all too eager to believe that certain groups are committing crimes and can be easilly mislead to attacking them for it. Most of these cases, thankfully just end up in brief bouts of assault. Its enough to definitely warrant the man being put behind bars, however.
Worse, some groups note that White Knight is fairly good at distracting people from more subtle dangers. Taurus, for example, has found it prudent to reveal horrible conspiracies by innocent Jewish scientists and massive criminal plots by blacks 'obviously connected to former Soviet Union operations' whenever he wants to move material without the Freedom League looking too closely into it.
Last edited by
Charles Phipps on Wed May 14, 2008 5:24 pm, edited 3 times in total.
) So, the interaction can be very straightforward and a little boring. I try to use those moments to inject a little play-acting and make it a little more interesting.
