RIFTS? Never heard of it…
(Just kidding. Sound off here with a post if RIFTS is your jam, you filthy casuals…)
For those who don’t know, RIFTS was the game that was such a hit in the 90’s that it kept Palladium on life support for the next twenty-five D&D-dominated years, and was even optioned for a movie (and then discarded into development hell as a cashed-in bargaining chip in their strategy to get a better price for the rights to the Transformers franchise. But still, a Hollywood movie! That’s never worked out horribly for the RPG in the past except for every single other time it’s happened…)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
YAAAS!
In all seriousness, this is who Glitter Boys are to me; the other dedicated robot pilots in the core game are either RPA-Elite fascists or Headhunter cyborgs. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the body-horror in RIFTS, and the essense of the Glitter Boy is that their armor is strong enough to keep their bodies and their souls from being ruined by the world (fun bit of trivia; the game was originally going to be centered on GBs and called “Boomers” before copyright issues forced a name change…)
P.S. I don’t care what’s canon; a woman who pilots the armor is a “Glitter Boi,” end of story.
I need to reread the source book. I don’t remember any body horror, but my standards have changed as I age.
It’s a subtle theme throughout RIFTS; as a kid, it didn’t read to me as body horror, although I did feel bad for poor Frommalaine (who couldn’t even die). I just thought it was the authors’ way of making ultra-cool cybernetics and bionics less appealing to psychics and wizards. I was young (and able-bodied) back then; now that I’m getting long in the tooth and the gradual failure of my own body is more of a lived experience, I can’t imagine wanting to willingly undergo something like bionic conversion (except as needed to prolong life).
In part because of RIFTS, I was big into transhumanism until pretty recently. As I’ve come to (the personal) conclusion that stuff like robot bodies, mind uploading, and technological singularity are just new versions of the same myths, rationalizations, and wishful thinking peddled by old religion, I’ve come to appreciate the stodgy “bio-chauvanism” of RIFTS over trendy Eclipse-Phase-style transhumanism. That’s not to say I don’t like or want AI and cyborgs and such; I just have more sympathy their estrangement from baseline humanity, and a greater appreciation of the same than I had as a teenager who hated my body.