How unusual

Yesterday, I came to an amusing realization:

Beast's Lair is an unwelcoming social environment to be sure, you've heard me raving about that before, but it actually might not even be the fault of the intolerant people here, especially when one looks at the source material for the discussions: The Nasuverse literally thrives on this kind of intolerant society. We are just the imitators.

(Do not correct my errors in TM lore here, as I am going to grossly oversimplify things and I'm also prone to exaggerating.)

So here's a quick and dirty—keyword being dirty—look at the Mage's Association

Apprentice magi and wannabes spend years of their lives studying magecraft, but they would have to be very lucky to be invited to join the Clock Tower. Yet that's the insidious thing here. In order to be recognized as anything other than a pile of filth living in some hole-in-the-wall mansion (already a very skewed view of the world, thinking of other obscenely wealthy people as peasants) you need to get an invitation to join one of these prestigious organizations, and you're expected to consider such an invitation an honor and a privilege.

Upon accepting this prestigious 'honor,' the people who invited you to join them immediately start doing everything in their power to be the sole person to discredit and shame you, fighting amongst themselves to be the strongest hyena. If you actually have something of value to them (which is likely, but will be dismissed as an exceptionally rare occurrence), they will attempt to steal it, publish it as their own work, and should you try to protest the disgusting abuse, the person who stole it from you will fault you for trusting them. Of course, if you have any way of proving they stole it from you, your burglar will attempt to have you killed. If you get the word out before Burglarmage can do that, they will drop whatever they were studying to dedicate the rest of their life to the much more worthy goal of destroying everything you care about.

Cornelius Alba graduates from the Clock Tower, gets a prestigious position, is soon to be named the head of an even more elite group therein… but all he can think about is that Touko Aozaki might be better than him, and this haunted him every second of his prestigious life until he transcends the realm of being your average everyday monumental asshole and becomes a complete psychopath.

Now, despite the fact that Touko actually was a better magus, as well as being smarter, deadlier, prettier and a better human being in general than him, she still decided to move back to her worthless backwater country at the ends of the earth, and would never have spared him another thought, malicious or otherwise, if he had just left things well enough alone. He could have became the head of Sponheim Abbey with the most fabulous hair ever seen within its walls, instead of going off and being a spiteful vindictive jackass—as mage society dictated he be—and being eaten by Azathoth-In-A-Briefcase.

I know the above is filled with inconsistencies and wrongness, but please ignore that because the point is that his worst qualities, already at the fore when he joined the Association, were nurtured there to help him become the very worst kind of person, such that had he been alive when Luvia got there, and had they ever met, the opening lines of the El-Melloi Case files would have probably have been a bit different.
As for a shorter look at another group, lets have a look at Yggdmillennia.

They were already a shifty group of people, but at least the family eventually decided to stop inbreeding and decided to let such upstanding people such as Celenik Icecoll and Sagara Hyouma (well, almost. he ran into a few…ehrm… complications *cough*Jacktheuterussniffer*cough*along the way.)

So a witch with barely repressed psychotic S&M tendencies, and a serial killer who imitates Jack the Ripper. Seems legit.
And I haven't gotten much further than those two in Apocrypha so I can't say anything else.

So these are the sorts of maniacs the mages want in their society. No wonder Waver took up smoking and barely smiles anymore. He's surrounded by assholes, and the few people he doesn't hate either clash with his racism, remind him of things he'd rather not remember, or are just insufferable.

These are the kinds of people we talk about here. No wonder some people here aren't very nice when our source material projects such evil.
The meanest people here are tame by internet comparison.

Well, now that I've gotten my entire argument wrong, bring on the flames. I'm a dragon. I can take it. Okay, I can't, my resistance is against lightning. But they'll come anyway.

Well, there is one thing I know I got right:
Cornelius Alba has fabulous hair.