About Paragon -- A Quote

[Bob Schroeck]

Paragon City isn't a safe place.  Its streets are cluttered with purse snatchers, drug dealers, gangs, homeless mutants, zombies and air pirates.  Nearly half of its neighborhoods have been leveled by cataclysms, natural and otherwise.  Hardly a month can go by before it's invaded by interdimensional shock troops or giant snowmen, and a day cannot pass without the mayor being kidnapped by ninjas.  Either due to its malfunctioning nuclear reactor or the daily plots to poison the city's water supply the median IQ in Paragon is slightly higher than that of warm Jello.  Which is probably why even though all its ills are indicative of deep social and economic problems, rather than demanding international disaster relief or even more sensibly leaving the place to the monsters and moving to somewhere more peaceful (like Sudan or the West Bank), the citizenry have decided to combat their problems by legalizing vigilantism. 
-- Memoirs of an Urban Vigilante, February 2005

-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Matrix Dragon]

I've always worked on the belief that the in-game Paragon is a somewhat exaggerated version of the 'real' Paragon. Atlas Park doesn't have Hellions mugging people every single five meters in the open street, for example. On top of that however, there's the fact that things like the Rikti War was a global conflict, which I suspect left most of the planet in a somewhat battered condition. It's not an outright Crapsack World, but it certainly shows the scars more then the Marvel and DC Universes.