Captain Hypatia in Fortnite: Einzigartiger Skin mit brutaler historischer Hommage.

Fortnite’s Latest Level Up Pack Pays Homage to a Brutal Historical Murder

Fortnite released its latest Level Up Pack this week, and it’s a bit unusual. The skin included in this season’s pack is named Captain Hypatia – she’s a spaceship captain. Like all skins in the Level Up Packs, Hypatia has an alternate “Armored” style that differs greatly from its main style. This alternative style takes this pretty standard lady and turns her into an extremely cool cyborg, with arms and legs that are not physically connected to her torso but held by some kind of red energy. See below.

This arm-and-leg thing is particularly interesting when taken in connection with her name. Throughout history, there has been only one truly notable person named Hypatia: a Greek philosopher and astronomer who lived in Alexandria, Egypt in the late 4th and early 5th centuries and was the first mathematician about whom we have significant historical records. That’s the main reason she’s famous – but the second biggest reason for her fame is the way she was brutally murdered by a mob of Christians and literally torn to pieces.

In the 1,600 years since Hypatia of Alexandria lived, there have been other things named Hypatia. Pretty much all of them, however, are named after this woman, and those that aren’t are almost certainly named after things that were named after Hypatia of Alexandria. This fact has probably helped preserve her legacy, because there simply were no other Hypatias that were famous and could steal her name’s thunder.

The story goes that most of the time, Hypatia enjoyed a certain degree of peace between the scientific and Christian institutions in Alexandria. For three decades, a man named Theophilus was Bishop of Alexandria – then an appearance on the level of pope – and he obviously cared enough about maintaining the peace that he had good relationships with Hypatia and her ilk. So they had some kind of oligarchy running.

But Theophilus died in 412, and there was a power struggle between his nephew Cyril and a man named Timotheus to replace him as bishop. Cyril won and continued his victory in the normal Game of Thrones way: by pursuing anyone who liked Timothy and anyone he deemed not on his side, like Jews. And since Hypatia and the rest of the scientists obviously didn’t belong to his religious faction, he went after her too. But she was too popular to send her into exile or murder her directly, so Cyril spent the next few years slandering her until a man named Peter incited a revolt whose main focus was on Hypatia.

The mob dragged Hypatia out of her carriage as she was driving home, and they brought her to a prominent church, where they stripped her of all her clothes and brutally cut her to pieces with ceramic shards. But they weren’t done yet. After that show, they took her arms and legs out of the city and burned them. That may seem exaggerated (because it clearly is!), but that was pretty much just a traditional Alexandrian political murder. The distant past was a bad time to be alive, honestly.

Now that you know this terrible story, let’s take another look at Captain Hypatia in Fortnite.

Her cosmetic set is the Luminary Explorer set, which makes sense for a spaceship captain – a luminary explorer would just be someone who explores space because astronomically speaking, a luminary is a star. But luminary has another meaning: a famous wise person. Which certainly describes Hypatia of Alexandria – an ancient reference has been translated to call her a “shining child of reason.”

Similarly, two celestial bodies (an asteroid and a planet in the Iona Draconis solar system) and a crater on the moon were named after Hypatia, so there are some synergies with the Luminary Explorer concept there as well.

Then you have the arm-and-leg thing. In the alternate style, they are no longer attached to her body – much like Hypatia’s arms and legs were no longer attached to her body after the mob of Christians was finished with her.

To conclude this flavor text: “No ship. No crew. Just an unstoppable spirit.” Now that she has transcended her physical body, she floats through space in this new cyberpunk form without even using a ship? This person died.

This skin delves several layers deep into metaphors. It’s kind of nice – most new skins don’t come bundled with an interesting conversation starter. Hopefully, we’ll see more of this kind in the future.

To learn more about Hypatia, there are plenty of books specifically about her, as well as tons of more comprehensive histories that give her story significant space. My recommendation, however, is The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey, who spends a chapter contextualizing Hypatia’s life and death as part of the larger conflict between Christianity and the ancient scientific establishment in the centuries before the Middle Ages.

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Source: GameSpot.