Question: I've noticed a distinct trend with Aztlanti Scions being a little nuts. Ranging from Sangria's emotionless killing to Kettila's permanently childlike demeanor, the Aztec kids seem a little off. I wanna know if this is just a trend for your Aztlanti players, or if normal stable Scions are practically a pipe dream for the Aztecs.
Our two Aztec all-stars do seem to be giving everyone else a bad name. Both of them are deeply broken people, born missing certain key ingredients in their brain chemistries that would have allowed them to do things like care about other people or not grow hysterical at the prospect of being alone. Kettila has a full-blown Peter Pan complex with a strong streak of abandonment issues, and Sangria is a true psychopath with no conception of other people as even existing other than as objects in her path.
But not everybody has to be Sangria and Kettila! It's totally possible to have an Aztec with a fairly normal outlook on life, as long as you build the character that way. We've actually got a few ourselves; Carlos was pretty much a normal kid, if a little too emo for his own good, and while the infamous Jay Ortiz may roll with the crime lords, he doesn't have any irreparable psychiatric problems other than sometimes being kind of an asshole. Being more normal might, for many players, actually be more interesting; there's more meat to dig into when you're struggling with ancient expectations versus modern morals and the demands of your normal life versus your new savage gods than there might be for someone like Sangria who just follows orders and doesn't have to mess with a lot of moral conflict.
Being bananas is not something the Aztecs have a monopoly on in our games, though; you only have to look at folks like Colin, Saki or Seamus to see that. A more poignant question, I think, is not whether Aztecs can ever be normal but whether any Scion can ever be normal, given their particular circumstances. Many cultures have a definite theme of divinity provoking madness merely by existing, sometimes destructively and sometimes in more productive ways (such as Dionysus' divination, for example). When you're a normal human, and then your perceptions of the entire world and your very self are unassailably destroyed, how many people would really come out the other side without some amount of strangeness creeping into their personalities? How many children, born with the seed of godhood in them, are going to be truly "normal" from the beginning anyway? And that's not even considering the phenomenal pressure on all sides from gods who want you to do things, gods who want you to not do those things, gods who hate you for no reason that you can do anything about, and Titans who want to kill you, kill your family, destroy everything you know and corrupt your mind.
Of course, characters can be "normal", or at least more human than the cold-blooded murderers like Seamus or the wild-eyed madmen like Colin. But people who manage to keep it all together, the Geoff Mathesons and Sora Satos of the world, are probably pretty rare. A certain disconnect with the rest of the world is not so much a feature of Aztecs (though I'm sure it helps when it comes to bloodletting) as it is a feature of divinity.
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