Mayhem is a super-tough MMA fighter anarchist. He’s very into Anarchy. If you have a friend who is really into anarchy (and/or MMA), we’ve got the premade character for them!
Joaquin Krikorian was born to Melissa Krikorian and Alexandar Keith in Slab City in 2093. Melissa was a programmer and musician, and Alexandar was a busker, traditional story-teller, mime, and philosophy professor at Reed College.
Joaquin’s family split their time between Portland and Tijuana for most of his childhood. In 2108, when he was 15, Melissa’s band was eager to see and perform on Mars, and at the same time the Reed Philosophy Department was looking for professor to visit and attend a philosophy conference. They invited Joaquin, but he preferred to stay with family friends in Los Angeles. He spent this time dating, and getting to know himself and the land of Southern California. He delighted in sports from a young age (a passion that would be hard to satisfy during a trip to Mars) and began to get increasingly active in martial arts, along with meditation and psionic mental discipline training.
In 2111 Joaquin got his endurance upgrade mod, and a year later got a brain trauma resistance mod. Joaquin reunified with his mother when she returned that year, though she returned without Alexandar, who stayed on Mars for another Martian year. By 2113 Joaquin was 20 and starting to compete seriously in mixed martial arts when he wasn’t doing Ayahuasca with his girlfriend Nahr. Mayhem (as he’d come to be known in the ring and out) and Nahr then accompanied Melissa on a musical tour of Patagonia, continuing to fight and love and expand his mind, both with books and also with drugs.
Alexandar returned to Earth in 2114. The family made Portland their home base for the next few years. Over this time, Mayhem got his short-duration athletics boost mod and his armored skin mod. Mayhem got more active in social organizing with the Oregon Anarchist Party. In 2117 Mayhem and Nahr adopted a young Canaan dog named Poodle.
In 2119 Mayhem followed Nahr back to Los Angeles for her to join a prestigious documentary film production collective. Mayhem decided to try serving their community as a protector, but after a few months with the LA Protector League there was a mutual agreement that it wasn’t a great fit. Now he serves as a protector with the more ideologically aligned Free Protector Network.
What sources of inspiration did you draw on for this character?
A bit of a combination of influences.
I wanted to create diversity in the characters in both their abilities and personalities. This character was supposed to be a tank and a fighter. I don’t think most people expect to play for combat, but I don’t want to omit that possibility completely, so I made an MMA fighter who has been augmented for durability.
Then I think the MMA association made me think of a certain kind of radical. The black bloc types. That’s not my crowd, but again, I don’t want all the characters to just model my values. From there, I just kind of let the character develop. He’s got skin like a rhino, and is completely passionate about non-hierarchical anarchocommunism and progressivism and moving society forward and developing his own body and mind to their fullest. He became a protector with the mainstream network of citizen protectors, but quickly left because he found them restrictive, and joined a more radical network of protectors.
I think he’s a charitable interpretation of what I think of as the kind of person who listens to Joe Rogan and votes for Bernie Sanders in the primary even though they are to Bernie’s left, but will not vote for any Democrat to the right of Sanders on principle no matter the cost.
I’m not sure if that’s too controversial, but basically I wanted a fighter who was so far left he kind of freaked even me out. In a good way. I think – importantly – this is someone with wild ideas and a good heart.
To add a bit more, I kept thinking of a friend who is the Socialist Rifle Association. And I imagine them and people like them sitting down to play, and saying, ‘That’s it? That’s your grand vision of a better world a hundred years from now??’
And I wanted to make sure that the truly radical among us had a genuine avatar among the premade characters.
I like this - both the ambition and the character. I suspect his description as written falls a bit short of some SRA and Black Block types, but it also doesn’t preclude a fairly radical alignment.
I always say that if something falls short, I look forward to what more creative minds than my own replace it with.
I hope to see anarchists interpret this game to match their own aspirations.
