Is anybody around who played DOS mercnet back in the day? I was [CCC] Ian. I miss my old buds! Those were great times. I loved the leagues, NBT, MACL. So many many, many hours doing C1 lag shooting practice. I played with KE or KH (whichever one VAM was in charge of) for a while in 1.1 on windows.
Where are you guys at? Are we still alive?
I’ve been thinking about Hathaway’s psychology after Char’s Counterattack, and I think his whole Mafty persona is partly built out of unresolved Quess trauma.
In CCA, Hathaway is basically the powerless kid in the room. He’s infatuated with Quess, but Quess runs off with Char. And Char isn’t just some random rival. He’s the dangerous, mysterious, ideological revolutionary figure who knows how to pull someone like Quess into his orbit.
Then years later, in Hathaway’s Flash, Hathaway is suddenly acting like that kind of man himself. He has the politics, the grand historical talk, the detached revolutionary attitude, the danger, the charisma, the whole “I’m operating above normal society” thing. It feels very Char-coded.
My read is that Hathaway didn’t just become Mafty because of pure ideology. The ideology is real, but it also gives him a way to turn guilt, jealousy, shame, and humiliation into something noble. Instead of being the kid who lost Quess and then killed Chan in the fallout, he gets to become the masked revolutionary who matters to history.
That’s also why the Gigi dynamic feels important. Gigi isn’t just “the new girl.” She feels like a replay of the Quess wound. She’s strange, perceptive, hard to pin down, and drawn toward powerful men. With Quess, Hathaway was the boy watching helplessly while she moved toward Char. With Gigi, Hathaway gets to be the dangerous revolutionary she notices.
And the fact that Quess still appears in his mind makes it pretty clear he never really processed any of this. He’s still haunted by that moment. He just built an entire political identity around it.
So I don’t think Hathaway’s politics are fake. That would be too simple. But I do think Mafty is partly Hathaway trying to become the kind of man he thought Quess chose over him.