Random Never Stop Blowing Up thoughts:
Jacob Wysocki making his Dome debut in this campaign is so correct I'm pretty sure he spawned in there like a video game character as soon as they came up with it.
I'm fascinated by how everyone has glommed onto the transness of Ally playing a man playing a woman - because there's something there about how movies give us the images that make up our fantasies, and how in 80s action movies those images were overwhelmingly of men who were often so 'roided up their performances inadvertently bordered on drag.
And it's not just Russell Feeld transforming into Jennifer Drips - Paula Donvalson is Jack Manhattan; Liv Skyler is Kingskin, and Usha Rao is G13, who's not just a boy, but a white one.
In fact, all of the "movie characters" are white, except maybe the Vin Diesel-alike, and the only one who's a woman is a sexy catsuit action lady. (Not quite waifish enough for Luc Besson, but of course Russell lists La Femme Nikita as one of his favorite films.) Weird coincidence? Or something else?
Usha's video store membership card listed 2018's 102 Not Out as one of her favorite movies, so I'm inferring that the campaign's "real life" setting is contemporary. Which means that aside from maaaaybe Paula and Andy, the characters probably aren't Gen Xers who grew up on those 80s oiled bicep movies.
All of the expys are from outside the genre, too: Greg Stocks is James Bond, Kingskin is...Kingpin, Vic Ethanol is Dom Toretto, G13 is Mr. Robot, Jennifer Drips is Psylocke (or one of 50 other catsuit characters), and Jack Manhattan is John McClane.
(Yes, Die Hard came out in 1988, but it was considered a landmark precisely because McClane wasn't a bodybuilding superhuman like the protagonists who would have starred in the VHS's film. He doesn't belong there any more than the others.)
So I guess what I'm thinking is: There's something here in the way the PCs and the characters their expys reference span several generations, even as they're all trapped in a highly time-specific subgenre. Something in how our imaginations change with the material provided to feed them. All of these stories are talking to each other - in between bumps of cocaine and explosions, of course.
