What's the worst -punk aesthetic? Steampunk, clockpunk, what?
>>97682900That’s cool tho
>>97682900OPpunk
>>97682900They're all shit, because they all deny their nature as fantasy, and pretend to be different from it.
The mutated and flanderized "just glue some gears on it" version of steampunk is easily the worst shit ever
>>97682900The problem with most punk aestheitc is after a while too many hipters and tourists think it's cool but try to change everything about it to fit their idea of it cause they don't like "this or that." Or just overdo the whole aesthetic of it making it cringe AF. They often do get the idea "less is more" you don't need gears on every part of the person cause it's steampunk. Not everything has to be neon and wires cause it's cyberpunk, the bigger "punks" often suffer this the most. Nasapunk and Raypunk often are less filled with tourists so you less likely to see them go overboard but still get that one fucker who makes a dumb piece here or there.
No -punk aesthetic is inherently good or bad. It always depends on execution.
>>97682900Marketingpunk. Its the current moba aesthtic of jamming all manner of jarring and incongruous shit together in garish and nonsensical ways to push out another quarter of noomber go up.Its tmnt mtg. Its coffeeshop dnd . Its influencer scripted 'live' games with product placement and references to other IPs. Its prideflag painting contest models. Its Gamer™ culture tossed into a blender of endless churn and consumption shat out into a bucket and called good. We got punked.
Gears are appropriate to introduce if they look like they have a legitimate use.
>>97683058pretty much. Corpos see "X-punk" as a buzzword and think if they add buzzwords together more people will buy it and noomber goes up. They don't care about the buzzwords outside of how much they think they can make out of it.
>>97683241Corpos and the morons who use the term "solarpunk".
>>97682900Steampunk is elegant when it's done right, but really, really easy to get wrong.
>>97683058That actually has a term: Corporate Memphis.
>>97683654There is only one Solarpunk for me.It's this.https://youtube.com/shorts/_7Wklo6B_so?si=qt6VResw_9dOc3b4
>>97683669This is the only one I accept as well. I want to see it realized.
>>97683671Same. Also there should be a hippiepunk (gay solarpunk) world that gets attack cause they in league with said gods. (Espeically if it's a game. Like starting level shit cause they're commie hippies, not like they be hard now.)
>>97683664I just called it fagpunk
>>97682900I like Steampunk even in the current year when done right.Not that "glue gears on it" meme.But I also think that taking a word and adding "punk" to the end of it is a failure on every English speaker. I get that language always evolves. In this case it took a wrong turn in natural linguistic evolution.
>>97682900Whatever is paired with electro swing. I think we should enslave people who listen to elecroswing both ironically and unironically.
>>97682900Cyberpunk works again. It didn't during the progressive era pre-2020. Now that so many countries are leaning into fascism, it makes sense again.Steampunk is lame and entirely based on a single novel (Difference Engine). It's never been more than a sub-genre of goth fashion. It's goth for fat people (Yeah yeah: goth is goth for fat people).Biopunk seems like it would be rad but again: there's only really been 1 stand-out, particularly good work to define it (Windup Girl).
>>97683728>Steampunk is lame and>Biopunk seems like it would be rad
>>97683705I agree but the idea was a buzzword most normie people would understand easily. Once Cyberpunk became a thing and Steampunk came after. All of the old styles changed their name to make it easier to sort out.
>>97683748I mean you missed some words, but more or less. Steampunk is just a fashion seen. And it's an icky one.
>>97683775I meant scene. Whatever.
>>97683778You have made a honest spelling mistake. It will be used against you to to push any opinion that you have as invalid. Also someone will screenshot this and uses it against you years down the line too. You could be right on everything and then pull it up and end everything right that just cause of that one mistake.
>>97683748wtf is this gif?
>>97683664That's more towards normification. I was aiming at the marketing of quirky safe nerds. Like planned breaks from flattening to recapture the slightly odd and sell them back to themselves as different but in a much more controlled way. Corporate Memphis is the other side of that, the loss of detail in general to smooth out the already bland.
>>97682900Solarpunk easily>>97682957You are gay
>>97684293Like I said before (>>97683669) Unless it's this.https://youtube.com/shorts/_7Wklo6B_so?si=qt6VResw_9dOc3b4The solarpunk you're thinking of is just Hippypunk they just trying to change the name like when people changed retard to the "speical abled."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK1gEWm4p7w
>>97682954spbp
>>97683775>seenLol. Get aloud of this idot.
>>97684470Gamepunk even.
>>97682900Fiction about political scandals should be called -gate-punk.
>>97684246This makes me think of all the packaging I threw out in the 90s that today I'd consider framing on the wall. How did we fall so far.
>>97683712Thanks for reminding me that's a thing, I actually love it lol
>>97682900Solarpunk.
>>97685450You choose products with ugly packaging. I choose products that come wrapped in wall-art. Simple as.
>>97684293>Solarpunk easilyI find your lack of big breasted women disturbing.
>>97682900Faggot punkWhen no-game fags post no-game threads on /tg/, but The Man is on their side and oppress everyone else.
>>97683728>Steampunk is [..] entirely based on [Difference Engine]You must be a special kind of retarded.>"Biopunk"And that confirms it.>>97684293>SolarpunkStill not a real genre of any kind. Literally cooked up by a retarded journalist in a blogpost, asking others to do things based on his shitty concept but refusing to contribute anything meaningful himself. Anything "Solarpunk" puts the cart before the horse by definition.
>>97683035What are you trying to call Dishonored?
>>97682900it's Fartpunk, and it STINKS!!
>>97688130Whalepunk?
Steampunk made a terrible mistake of calling itself "punk" since people started to demand it to be "punk" even when it really never was that "punk". It was mostly aesthetic movement embraced by the cosplayers and, hot take, that was never a problem. Arcanum is most brown/rust colored cogfop shit you can imagine and yet people love it. Girl Genius was literally genius for calling itself Gaslamp Fantasy instead of Steampunk since that kills the autistic wank about the meaning of "punk" on the name of the genre.Also see how everyone is parroting "just glue some gears on it" from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA even when video itself would probably be called cogfoppish nowadays.
>>97685450>How did we fall so far.>consumer market production of consumption realizes dumber customers are more profitable >visual complexity scares idiots >cycle this for a few decades selling it as minimalism that's about it really
>>97691019I just want you to know, yours is the only worthwhile post in this thread, and it is a phrase that will live with me forever.
>>97691298>Whalepunk>That's actually a thingWhat the fuck
>>97682900Worst is Eco-punkBest is Diesel-Punk
>>97693970the most subtle petrodollar shill
>>97682900most -punk is fucking horrible garbage and doesn't make sense. What's "punk" about a bunch of brass glued to your fucking hat? What the FUCK is clockpunk? I hate this "genre"
>>97682900Gachaslop aesthetic. You know the one, wispy anime characters with horns and haloes and animal bits and costumes with tons of frills and gilt and random gewgaws. Hyper busy design because they know they're selling JPEGs and won't even need to animate them beyond perhaps a mild tween.
>>97694203Just say you hate anime.
>>97693970The most BASED coal roller
>>97694217Not all anime is gachaslop thoughbeit. Indeed, highly relevant to this thread, there are animaes with steampunk, dieselpunk, solarpunk and cyberpunk aesthetics.
>>97682970It's called cogfop.
>>97688130Dishonored is a flavor of gaslamp fantasy - a Victorian world more focused on magic than technology (steampunk).
>>97694203The HoYocore aesthetic is my favorite aesthetic. I run all of my games using it unironically.If this is slop, then I am a pig, and I eat it.>wispy anime characters with horns and haloes and animal bits and costumes with tons of frills and gilt and random gewgaws. Hyper busy design because they know they're selling JPEGs and won't even need to animate them beyond perhaps a mild tween.This applies to VTuber models, too.
>>97694203>>97695553There have been a few threads in the past talking about gacha game aesthetics. While it depends on the setting itself in question, it would not be a stretch to call them kitchen sink settings of a sort. Here's a thread from a few years ago.https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/81772595
>>97695601And even that thread is a little outdated, since it was before a whole bunch of companies started pushing out their own Genshin competitors. The HoYocore aesthetic is not just actual HoYo games, but also Wuthering Waves, Arknights: Endfield, and adjacent games.HoYocore, as a genre, also has a tendency to focus on characters who are deeply mystical, divine, or otherwise cosmic in nature.
>>97695657And now we've got a new wave of urban fantasy gachas, spearheaded by Neverness to Everness and Ananta.
>>97695722And even Silver Palace if you want Victorian period piece urban fantasy.
>>97695722>>97695730I think even these three games are heavily infected by HoYocore-isms.
>>97695722>>97695730To say nothing of the original Hoyoverse urban fantasy banger, Zenless Zone Zero (though that's more a dungeoncrawler while these newer games are explicitly open-world games).
>>97684246>10 miniatures>190$
Real question I probably won't get an answer to: Am I just not Portlandian enough for this or has this "cogfop steampunk renfaire" fashion trend been well dead and buried for like a decade now? Who actually goes to cons in top hats and moustaches in the big 26? To me that whole cogfop era is inextricably linked to the mid-Obama "hipster electroswing artisanal brewery twee fashion lumberjack beard oil" years of fake optimism. Already before COVID that whole aesthetic was massively dying down and it feels like the pandemic completely killed it. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong spaces but I haven't seen steampunk fashion anywhere online but on /tg/ in years. Feels like yet another symptom of this board being permanently culturally stuck in the mid 10s, with an ever wider gulf forming between the culture around the hobby as it exists out there IRL and how it is perceived by the increasingly greying beards on here.
>>97696011It's still out there, though as you say, it doesn't have the legs it used to.
The longer these aesthethics carry on and dissolve into more and more works, the more they are diluted and watered down by reddit subintelligence flesh. Compare early Cyberpunk to the trash that gets hailed as Cyberpunk today. A good example like Snow Crash was the first crack in the wall, with people genuinely recommending something so disingenuous.
>>97682957when has steampunk pretended not to be fantasy
>>97695791The most egregious mark of the HoYocore aesthetic is when simply looking at the character is insufficient to place them in the fantasy, space, or modern-day genre.Plus, you know, detached sleeves, short dresses, legs legs legs, etc.
I can’t think less of the hoyoslop audience
>>97691407The punk part is interesting though as there is an interesting dichotomy between the lower class, the wealthy entrepreneurs, and the old nobility caught in between them. On the other hand, many sci-fi works ape cyberpunk's aesthetics, but they never call themselves cyberpunk works.
>>97691019Sir, we call it brapcore nowadays
>>97696036The biggest vidya of last year heavily featued cogfop shit, wtf you on about
>>97682900Confedora in terms of its aesthetics. Cyberpunk in terms of its fans.
>>97696118The class system certainly has potential for a "punk" story but fucking NOBODY ever does anything with it.
>>97695553That's using a lot of words to say you have a foot fetish.
>>97694203It's always overdesigned and yet somehow also too safe. I don't like it.
>>97682900Cyberpunk. The cyberpunks were originally the AUTHORS not the material. It should be a genre of gritty, chain-smoking nerds trying to one up each other's short stories.
>>97694218>>97693994i'm just a humble /m/echachad, who thinks steampunk looks better if you strip out all the faggy clothing, over designed brass bullshit, and consideration of others
>>97696046You should read Snowcradh with the same level of seriousness as Marc Lerner's Et Tu, Babe?, one of the funniest novels ever written.
>>97697467>shoulder mounted field mortarClass act, chap.
>>97695544Dishonored leans heavily into technology.
>>97682900I like steampunk more as settings than apparel.
>>97697467isn't that just Dieselpunk?
>>97697467Correct, but also >>97699099
>>97695553I also hate vtuber aesthetics so that checks out. Hair accessories and animal parts as a substitute for personality.
>>97699134V-Tuber aesthetics hail as an evolution of Second Life/zOMG's early 2000s scene where everyone named themselves some variation of Sephiroth or Drizzt with angel and devil motifs galore.
>>97699315I guess the vtubers largely avoid the ubiquitous bat and bird wings because that would block more of whatever their avatar is greenscreening over.
>>97683705Finally someone said it. 5 years ago it was like a gold rush on here for faggot OPs to try to invent the next “-punk” moonpunk, solarpunk, noblepunk. It was ai slop before ai.
>>97699099>>97699110backtrace the meme arrows, and don't fucking (you) me ever again until you learn how to read without needing a GM to vomit dialog options down your throat
Punkpunk.
>>97682900>Steampunk, clockpunksame thing really, both look the same and are SHIT
>>97697400>The cyberpunks were originally the AUTHORS not the material.No.
>>97697467Damn boy he THICK boy
>>97699099Kind of. This is a genuine steam tank armed with a flamethrower. Looks pretty similar, huh?Either way, to me Steampunk and Dieselpunk already have plenty of aesthetic bleedover and the main differentiation has always been in the themes: the less prominent aristocrats are in the story and the more villainous your entrepreneurs are depicted, the closer you are to Dieselpunk over Steam.
>>97693912You best start believing in Whalers boy. Because they’re coming for you.
>>97700938fetishpunk is unironically excellent
>>97702023The Japanese figured this out in the 90s. The corporate killsquad are all hot babes in latex with gas masks. They then went on to shape cartoons, film, and games to this day. >Characters are all hot babes>This is degrading towards women and really base, showing a lack of trust in their own creative vision when they can't rely on their characters to engage the audience without T&A>Characters are all hot babes but catering to your fetish>This is awesome, stylised, and really based
>>97695553I have an unreasonable hatred for anime style head wings and I don't know why
>>97695544Magic is super rare in the Dishonoured world (outside of the occasional nightmare), it's just that the main characters are all magic infused because teleporting up buildings is cool as fuck.>>97695544Gaslamp usually doesn't have Rods of Instant Cremation on street corners. >>97701310Daudes expantion missions are the best part of that game.
>>97701310Man I love the Whalers.. They're so cool, Thomas is aesthetic as fuck
>>97702043Hers are fake.
>>97682900I would love a raypunk system. Focusing on the intimacy a shooter feels with their chosen gun, all the different types of lasers and aesthetics for them.
>>97705646>Focusing on the intimacy a shooter feels with their chosen gunsoul eater?
>>97705651Fuck, now I am seeing a Soul Eater type thing with their gun.Though in all seriousness. I would love a good raypunk system and setting. To be fair though, would love a simple "1911 like hand railgun" with some lights over the classic over the top raygun you see in most raypunk settings.
>>97682900Solarpunk.I really like the aesthetics of it, but it was seized by political nutheads and hippies and turned into shitty tool to spread communist message about equality and other fantastical concepts.
>>97682900Crust punkIt's literally looking like gross homeless mentally ill drug addicts who never bathe or change their clothes on purpose.It's just nasty.
>>97706299The idea of sustainable, environmentally friendly living can be compelling, even if it's gussied up as some form of post-post-capitalist society or an excuse to engage in cottagecore. It's the conceit that humanity finally gets its shit together and decides to save the planet, and making that work.
>>97706299>>97707355Star Trek did it best where the eco-friendly future was built off the back of eco-terrorists getting impatient with how slow the world was in adapting to environmental concerns and starting WWIII to cull the chaff. It raises an interesting ethical dilemma lingering in the background where the only reason Earth recovered to be a paradise instead of slowly dying is because the greens decided to sacrifice a great portion of their ideals which the setting they created espouses and suffer permanent vilification in the process.
>>97706299There's no such thing as solar punk. It's a psy-op designed to keep (you) mad at things in your head.
>>97683014"Raypunk" is pure tourist because the aesthetic already had an existing name, Raygun Gothic.
>>97696011Bruh, steampunk was already dying by the time period your talking about. And it's not so much about being out of touch as it is the general muddifying of terms by producers, consumers, and commentators over the years causing definitions to expand beyond their original meaning.>>97696118>>97697094>PunkpunkLower class people trying to improve their lives through education and employment fighting against trustfund poors wrecking neighborhoods to play out their fantasy of having a hard life.
>>97707454At no point does ST ever say the eco-terrorists were even remotely correct or helpful. What pulled everyone's heads out of their asses was "Holy shit, aliens are real!"
>>97682916Fpbp
>>97691407It's called Steampunk because the genre was born from the idea that this is a cyberpunk story but in the past.
>>97702043this is not anime
>>97683014I know "NASApunk" was trussed up as a concept put forward by Todd Howard to describe Starfield, but I think Arc Raiders makes for a really good, more modern example of it, even with its post-apocalyptic flavoring. It's the idea of cassette-futurism, of the '60s-'70s era space age and a more tactile form of sci-fi compared to more sleek and holographic designs.
>>97707517Man, Raygun Gothic is such a vibe. Atomic Age fantasies about space and the future made things so colorful and with such weird attempts at sleekness.
>>97708588A lot of focus is on the post-WW2 output, but the first half-20th century Raygun Gothic stuff is pretty wild.
>>97708588Can I get some art examples of Raygun Gothic? Never heard of it until now.
>>97708967Sure, a lot of the more adventure and fantastically-oriented science fiction in the early 20th century uses the aesthetic to some degree.
>>97708967And I forgot my image.
>>97709008lmao, kino
>>97708967https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Raygun_Gothic>War of the Worlds>Buck Rogers>Flash Gordon>Star Trek>The JetsonsAmong others.
>>97709073If it's a cover of a magazine edited by Hugo Gernsback there is a 90% chance it's Raygun Gothic.
>>97682900vulvapunk
>>97707355I'm toying around with my next big setting-building exercise being a sort of skeptical solarpunk. The basic premise would be that 15 years ago, the PCs were cadre in the green anti-capitalist revolution that violently overthrew the old government and ushered in systemic change at every level of society. Means of production: seized. Corporations: dissolved. Wealth: redistributed. Fossil fuels: banned. Go down your wish-list of wet-dream progressive utopia stuff: you get all of it.And yet, despite their revolutionary hopes, the world is not perfect. The resource scarcities that weakened the old regime still exist, exacerbated by ideological constraints. Trade has broken down due to embargos from the surviving global imperialists and squabbling with other revolutionary states. A revolution that promised to share wealth with all now struggles to provide even basic necessities, worsened by a flood of climate refugees that the government seems incapable of controlling. Endless bickering factions in the Central Revolutionary Council vie to one-up each other in ideological purity, while behind the scenes power aggregates to a shadowy bureaucracy ruled by ruthless apparatchiks. The world might have more solar panels and wind turbines, greenhouses and vertical gardens, e-bikes and high-speed rail, but it has less energy, less food, and less freedom-of-travel than what came before.As a Hero of the Revolution, the PCs are entrusted with responsibility over their own small commune of this brave new world. They are the go-to fixers of the community, handling everything from complaints about the bland cafeteria food to rooting out capitalist sympathizers. They have to fight off interference from superiors, disloyalty from subordinates, and discontent from the people in their charge.
>>97702043Head wings are inherently retardedThey're never even remotely big enough to bear the weight of the animu waifu they're attached to, and even if they were she'd be bearing all that weight on her fucking neck.>b-b-but she has regular wings on her butt!THEN SHE DOESN'T NEED THE HEAD WINGS, RETARDGod I hate Darkstalkers
>>97709829>This is the most famous succubus in video games
>>97709806>Yet another grim deconstruction of solarpunk that insists the monkey's paw must curl in order to effect change for the good of the earth, assuming the changes even stick
>>97709855I mean, yeah? "Yet another" makes it sound like you've seen this a lot, but I can't think of many. My main touchpoints were New York 2140, Disco Elysium, and The Dispossessed, none of which fall too close to the main idea. A big complaint about solarpunk is that it's just an aesthetic, and that there aren't really any stories being told there.Unless you're complaining about "grim deconstructions" in general, which definitely are pretty overdone. I think it's a tough line to walk between thinking seriously about downstream consequences versus just jumping to "everything's shit because humans are shit." But I think it's worth acknowledging that major changes are messy and painful, and that well-intentioned people can disagree about substantial topics. I don't think that's just monkey's paw pessimism.
Dieselpunk is the only punk genre that has appealed to me I find the rest boring and gay
>>97711036Dieselpunk is great too. It covers the interwar period up through and shortly after the end of WWII. It bridges the gap where steampunk ends (end of WWI) and atompunk begins (post-WWII). While dieselpunk focuses on the technology enabled by the combustion engine and more robust industrialization, it often pairs with its cultural sister genre decopunk. It's not all Nazis and noir, but it does come across as a little more hard-edged at times compared to its more upbeat and whimsical older brother steampunk, even if it can still be very pulpy.
>>97709855Solarpunk is more often than not prefaced with the idea a major cataclysm needs to happen in order to get everyone in on the green program. Its major conceit that contrasts it with the colorful aesthetics it presents has always been "you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette."
>>97701026Yes. The original zines and magazine articles refer ncing the budding literary movement called the writers cyberpunks.
Burger Punk
>>97711206
>>97715308
>>97682900Solarpunk and it isn't even close.It's hard to even begin to quantify why it is so revolting as an aesthetic. Everything about it rots.It offers no critique, no message except 'good vibes'. If your work centers around solarpunk as a concept, you have nothing to say. Cyberpunk represents deteriorating society under the yoke of corporations, dieselpunk typically represents some kind of unchecked militarism. Even steampunk, itself a very mid aesthetic, has its roots in an old bygone optimism for supposed wonders of the future.What does solarpunk represent? That we can get all along? That every resource scarcity is actually just a solar panel away? Despite being called solarpunk, it has no 'punk' in its DNA. It's something a millennial in a coffee shop daydreams about.That's just covering the punk in solarpunk. What about the solar? The basis for the aesthetic is sitting around and doing gardening in your ugly fuck-ass space dome solar panel house. The aesthetic centers around this quasi-pastoral fantasy, it has nothing to say about *where* infact, all of this wonderful technology comes from.Factory workers who labor to create these solar panels are unheard of in the fantasy, that is icky. Factories aren't solarpunk, only the cottage smothered in lithium batteries is. Speaking of lithium, all those rare earth minerals that you need to make solar panels and windmills? Eww, sorry - people in mines throwing their lives and bodies away to sate demand doesn't fit into solarpunk. Remember; solarpunk is about sipping from a hot cup of tea while you have no problems and nobody is fighting. The explicit point of the aesthetic is that we are free of ugly things like 'workers' and 'factories'. Where did all of these solar panels come from then? I don't fucking know, it's a vibe bro - and that's the main critique of it. It's all vibes, no substance. It never had anything to say besides being a passe white liberal's stardew valley fantasy.Fuck solarpunk.
>>97682900>The worstSolar Punk>BestAtom Punk>>97683035Execution certainly matters, but some "punks" are more inherently appealing than others, I just don't see something like stone punk doing well compared to steam punk even. >>97715511What does solarpunk represent?Solar panels+Miazaki slop.>Factory workers who labor to create these solar panels are unheard of in the fantasyThey are probably just a decentralized Eco-friendly non hierarchical worker collective comprised entirely of queers.
>>97709839I think Devilman started head wings as a trend in Japanese media, personally I don't mind it as long as I can see the wings moving, preferably during flight. If it's just there like a head piece why does it have to be a part of your body?
>>97696085Same. It's the asian version of corposlop.
>>97715511I actually like the look just fine. It's no dieselpunk, but it's okay. Implicit within the punk genres is rebelling against some sort of authority, so I choose to see it as rebelling against a faux bucolic HR regime using extreme violence and excessive amounts of smog producing machinery because the idea of a violent revolt against the eloi (who presumably say "that's not cool, man" and to put away my toxic vibes while deducting my social credit) with an f 250 and AR15 is hilarious in my imagination. Sort of like how steam and dieselpunk tend to have some sort of sleek macguffin as the central plot device to create contrast against the harsh lines of the aesthetic, the main character finds some kind of kel tec and just starts going postal against the softly repressive lameness of millennial scolding. Like, you're the one guy that's choosing to be annoyed at the gentle tyranny of a society determined to liquidate itself. You, as the main character refused to get sterilized and get the brain chip inserted. As a time out, you're sent to the old city to think about social good until you come crawling back, but you find one of the last FALs. Because the legitimacy of the society relies on soft power, you have to fight through riot foam drones and swarms of shamers that legitimately do not understand violence anymore until you make it to the pedo cabal that keeps everyone as children and promotes free love so they escape stigma.
>>97715832That's a little excessive. You could've just said you don't like the implied lukewarm nature of solarpunk. I would imagine the implied conflict of solarpunk is to push the green revolution, and that means taking down the corpos killing the planet and refusing to change.
>>97716617In every other punk setting, it seems like the currently available tech is actually what is taken for granted. Why push what's already there and freely available?I dont think that's too far, I think it's not too far enough.
>>97715832>>97716617The problem with solarpunk is that it's a typically right-wing assumed lifestyle married to a typically left-wing assumed aesthetic. If you're showing bucolic homesteads that are self-sufficient in food, water, and power it comes with a very tradlife assumption. That dichotomy means that no-one really commits to it because they don't want to be labelled as belonging to an opposed outgroup.
>>97719512Well, that or it's "all problems are solved because skyscrapers have bushes on them now!"
>>97720249Hence my fevered post about shooting foam drones with an ar15
>>97715511Solarpunk does have something to say, it's just repackaged from the Futurism of the 20s and 30s which would eventually inspire fascism. Your average Solarpunk backdrop like in Always Coming Home or Monk and Robot is beat for beat the plot of Things to Come where a cataclysmic war will destroy the plebeians holding back societal progress who happen to be whatever political ideology the writer doesn't like, followed by the enlightened ubermensch survivors who are survivors because they're enlightened, now unfettered by the chains of the past rebuilding the world in their ecologically-friendly image while appreciating the newfound ease of management now that the shit they have to manage and the outside variables existing to disrupt them have been severely curtailed. And they'll tell you night and day about how it's a terrible thing all those people died a long time ago while without fail choosing to hit the crowd of people versus the one with the trolley.
>>97682900i liked this interpretation of steampunk. i think if it is just an aesthetic it is completely useless. there has to be a world tied to it that is more than just a themepark.don't even know a comprehensive list of all punk aesthetics but just tacking punk onto something dies not make sense.really do not like this riot/wotc league, mtg, dnd aesthetic that these two have been brewing over the last few years.
>>97723278Using the themes of the era is indeed delving deeper into steampunk than merely taking the most surface aesthetics and just being a cosplayer. There's plenty to explore.>Rise of the middle class, new money/entrepreneuers vs. old money/nobility>Cities exploding in size>Labor rights/conflicts>Tesla vs. Edison-esque conflict of genius>First attempts at automation>New forms of communication makes organizing seditious acts easier>Exploration leads to expansion - find some new land, and start the race to claim it, colonize it and keep rivals from getting a foothold
>>97706303I feel personally attacked
steampunks fine. I guess minimalist punk is my pet peeve, I suppose.
>>97707517>t. doesn't know Raypunk
>>97682900Just plain old punk is total garbage
>>97682900They're all pretty bad.But the truth is, "Steampunk" is the only one with a truly coherent schema.All the others are just callow adoptions of that errant suffix, and with each iteration of the chain of custody, said suffix means less and less.A bit like academic subjects appended with the word "Studies".
>>97700961The best webcomic ever to grace the Internet.
>>97726928That can be chalked up to steampunk and cyberpunk being the two biggest -punk scenes by a country mile, and every other genre being much smaller by comparison. That doesn't mean there isn't merit to those other genres or that there aren't works you can't apply to them.
>>97682900Solarpunk because of the hypocrisy of calling yourself punk for believing what billionaires want you to.
>>97728982"Cyberpunk" is just Dystopian sci-fi with "Punk rock" aesthetics.Arguably it's the only example that deserves the suffix, but I still loathe it on principle, since most "-punk" genres have nothing Punk about them, visually or philosophically.So the word comes to be shorthand for "This was made by a stupid person".
for me it's all about raypunk/decopunk/raygun gothic/dieselpunk. anything with an aesthetic generally falling between 1900 and 1960. lately i've really been getting into old pulp fiction. the shadow, the spider, doc savage, etc. it's good stuff. sky captain and the world of tomorrow is kind of my ideal right now.
>>97683712>hates electroswingNgmi
>>97709829It's so she can fly back home if she gets decapitated.
>>97732857>raypunkbased
>>97732676The alternative is calling a genre "-core", but that's already being used by other things.
>>97732857The defining work of decopunk is the movie Metropolis (1927). I've been meaning to get to it.
>>97733558>Cybercorethat would be a good system name
>>97709829
>>97732857Sky captain was an aggressively mediocre movie with an aesthetic that stands head and shoulders above everything. It was crimson skies if written by a middle schooler.
>>97733570What about C-3P0's mom now?
>>97733644it's a prime case of "you tried." great ideas, a grand, well-realized aesthetic, all wrapped up in a half-baked plot with wooden characters and technology that just wasn't quite ready for a project like that.
>>97682900Why are there two gattling guns on his fucking goggles? There's so many lenses on them too its beyond fuckin retarded! and the filter on the mask has no system to go to!the pistol has no trigger, no magazine, no cylinder, is it a breach action with a simple hammer and striking pin system?I hate THIS specific aesthetic of Steam Punk,its pure reddit/tumblr shittery.
>>97733631>>97709829I agree,Canards are GAY!
>>97683035What are some good examples of the different punks versus the bad ones then?
>>97733558I hate this "My subgenre is so niche it needs it's own name"People used to say shit like "This is a story about a pizza delivery ninja trying to stop an oil tycoon from unleashing the "Nam-Shub of Enki" - a mesopotamian mind-virus dug up on cuneiform tablets, with this weird subplot about an Aleut biker who wants to destroy America with his motorcycle sidecar nuke rigged to his own heart monitor"I mean, shit, why people gotta try and reinvent the wheel?Substance damnit!Substance!Fuck the marketing!
>>97736073Mankind is ingrained to find patterns.
>>97735947AI-coded reply.
>>97736088But also, to rip them up when we are thoroughly bored of seeing them play out!
>>97729523>billionaires>not wanting to roll coal foreverGood laugh lad.
>>97736798Pretty much. Anything that can be exploited now is better for the bottom line than spending time to develop for the future.Basically, any Captain Planet episode should service as a solarpunk plotline.
>>97685166A political scandal involving fiction is called punkgate?
I don't DISLIKE Steampunk, but it feels like all steampunk has to look like the same Victorian England style.
>>97711206Yeah that image about sums up Chicago.
>>97739403What about the one where Hitler with a Fu Manchu mogs Captain Planet?
>>97732857You gotta watch pic related, it's dated but free on youtube.
>>97739456You know the Wild West is also in the same time window, right? In fact, "Wild West steampunk" has a name:Cattlepunk.
>>97739486Damn I should have scrolled slightly higher
>>97682900Steampunk could be cool of it were practical. A real steam punk setting would be humid and hot, and any engineer would be wearing full protective gear like a workshop jumpsuit.
>>97739494Dieselpunk is steampunk that takes it to its logical conclusion.
>>97736798How is Bill Gates benefitting from coal?
>>97739473Do what now?
>>97682900>someone once made something interesting in a visually and narratively coherent way based on historic science fiction>"oh cool, I dig the look">idiot randomly rivets a bunch of incoherent brass and gears on a dinner jacket and calls it an aestheticI hate theatre kids.
>>97741011There’s an episode where they go back in time to stop a villain from giving nuclear weapons to the Nazis, and Captain Planet runs across Hitler (who has a Fu Manchu because apparently the mustache was the problematic part of Hitler.)Anyway, Hitler gives Captain Planet an aneurysm. Really funny scene.
>>97712126Solarpunk land- and cityscapes are always lacking in crowds.
>>97739585You're really naive if you think he doesn't have very large investments in the industry. All it takes is a single web search. It's a source of money and it's a source of a lot of money. If you're a capitalists, you'd be stupid not to be cozy with the fossil fuel industry.
>>97683654Did someone say chest-mounted "Twin Drive" system?
>>97739494Alternatively, real steampunk would be humid and hot but everyone is still in overalls and flat caps because workplace health and safety has not been accepted by the mainstream scientific community yet.
>>97741766Kino episode, that hit me hard as a kid. A dude SO evil he causes psychic damage to a hero of nature just by existing. Rad stuff.
>>97696118That's the point, its not punk because nobody ever does jack shit with it except maybe frostpunk. There is no inherent social commentary like in cyberpunk media because the cogfop aesthetic that everyone cosplays as would belong to thr upper class that they hate. It wouldn't be M'buku the native guide with a clockwork tophat it'd be le ebil colonizers and entrepreneurs and dying off nobility.Gaslamp fantasy is purely used as set dressing because nobody is capable of making a genuine high tech, low life setting/story using it with the right balance of condemnation, humor, and acceptance of utility because doing so would require either pointing out that they like to dress up as "the bad guys" or depicting the savage barbarians as evil which is fundamentally opposed to their politics
>>97709829They symbolize divinity like a halo or crown
>>97715511Funniest to me about it is that the one "solarpunk" story that actually exists was made by that bitch who wrote Stay Still Stay Silent after she converted about social credit scores, about being quietly yet publicly unpersoned in a nice, happy, pretty society for reading a bible.
>>97701026Yes. Cyberpunks was a name for the science fiction writers of the 80's who were tired of the hopeful future shit like Star Trek and wanted a return to the dystopian sets that warned about contemporary lifestyles. In the 80's corporate dickriding and hapless consumerism were at an all time high while digital electronics were rapidly evolving and so they wrote stories about where that kind of culture would lead. Because they rebelled against the hopeful future mainstream shit and wrote stories about digitally overwhelmed futures they were called cyberpunks.
>>97748941>Gaslamp fantasy is purely used as set dressing because nobody is capable of making a genuine high tech, low life setting/story using itDishonoured is the exception that proves the rule here.
>>97750071Shall we gather for whiskey and cigars tonight?
>>97753156Chances are good.
>>97715511"Solarpunk" only really works if it is the "Utopia" the elites live in contrasting the dystopic cities the lower classes live and work in to support their Utopic lifestyle.
>>97753291That's just cyberpunk with extra steps, when you put it like that. Part of the conceit of solarpunk is that the green revolution benefits everyone. Everyone is leading cleaner, more wholesome lives than when people were killing the planet.
>>97753308Then it's not punk, simple as.
>>97753308>Part of the conceit of solarpunk is that the green revolution benefits everyone.And that is the "Solarpunk" fantasy. In truth, Solarpunk is and has always been a form of Utopian idealization that is only called "-punk" because it's proponents want to be perceived as heroic rebels.A true "Solarpunk" story try to illustrate the possible human, social and environmental costs and requirement need to maintain and build a Solar Utopia just like how true Cyberpunk went into the possible costs of building and maintaining a Cyber Utopia.
>>97753291>>97753389I think Solarpunk is ass. But there are still some good solarpunk dystopia stories. Like that TNG episode where aliens want to execute Wesley Crusher for stepping on a flower, or maybe even Logan's Run, where they all live in a clean idealic utopia except they're sectioned off from the real world and don't have any real human rights
>>97753457>Like that TNG episode where aliens want to execute Wesley Crusher for stepping on a flowerI like how the conflict of the episode was just trying to find a solution that didn't upset their traditions, and the resolution was just going "fuck this, fuck the prime directive, we're not letting you do that, bye."
>>97753457Those are some pretty good examples of what I'm talking about. Solarpunk works best as a beautiful vainer over a rotting dystopia. If someone ever made a live action or animated version of "Those who walk away from Omelas" I'd want Omelas to use a Solarpunk design.
>>97753627Hengsha from Deus Ex: Human Revolution comes to mind. We only see a brief glimpse of the upper layer, but it was Solarpunk af.
>>97697642>replying to an anon that thinks Hiro Protagonist, the epic katanaman watered down cyberpunkJust ignore retards, better for everyone that way. Yes, even the retard
>>97753627I wouldn't really call that a "rotting core" as much as an infantilization of society/humanity. The child does not question, they simply obey. So there is no need to hide the fucked up aspects of society. They are simply accepted as laws of nature. I will say, I think a setting like that does kind of innately elevate players above most of the NPCs in a natural way, as free thinkers that don't just accept what they're told. So it's kind of an interesting RP. But the aesthetics are lame, the NPCs that are lame, and I guarantee that any story you try to write in this setting will also be fucking lame
>>97753627The issue is that the core dystopia has to be something that one of the other punk settings doesn't already cover well enough and that just basically amounts to shit like surveillance states and social credit and eugenics Basically the evils that quietly oppress everyone would have to be things that the very people who push the solar punk aesthetic actually like and endorse (so long as they're the ones at the controls) and modern midwits are incapable of demonizing things they endorse as a cautionary tale since that results in a loss of face
>>97682900Solarpunk. It's basically utopian third-worldism. Liberal fever dream where everyone is brown and retarded but things are somehow better than ever.
>>97682900Punk itself, which has nothing to do with the literary punks.
>>97748941>and dying off nobility.That's kind of what makes Steampunk interesting and different from cog-studded Cyberpunk though though, the nobility can be played as either a boot-lick to the corrupt entrepreneurs supplanting it in a last bid for maintaining relevancy, or the last vanguard holding back the tide of modernity and all its evils for a lower class it feels heightened levels of noblesse oblige toward, putting pressure on the punks who would want to see their downfall to ask "is this really what you want?"It's the Proclamation of the Republic, embellished in bronze.
>>97754542To me what separates Solar Punk from Cyber is the Malthusian subtext that seems common in the settings that use its moniker; it doesn't need mass surveillance to keep the population under control because the population was already culled to a controllable level generations ago, perhaps with some eugenics thrown in to force those peskier parts of human nature from disrupting the carefully-curtailed garden.
>>97760132Just sounds like a gross WEF-approved future that's had any possibility for "Punk" aka, "rebellion" raped starved and beaten out of it already.The process of -getting to- that point would make an infinitely more interesting setting, because that's where all the conflict is.
>>97682900Western themed Sci fi aka horsepunk
>>97735568>he doesn't rock dual 6mm Flobert rotary cannons in his eyewear>>97739487Weird West shows up far, far more often than cowpunk.>>97748941>>97750071Read The Difference Engine.
>>97761008>Read The Difference Engine.NTA, but much like with how Blade Runner/Ghost in the Shell are defining works of Cyberpunk about working to maintain the dystopian system, so too is the Difference Engine. After the first part with Sam Houston it becomes this whole plot about stopping Luddite Anarchists and the ending is when a Navy Ironclad bombards their secret meeting which lets the protagonists have a fairly happy ending.Which I mostly bring up to counter the point I have seen on and off that -punk games must be about fighting a system. Sometimes we want to play the cool Detectives.
>>97760132>it doesn't need mass surveillanceIt will have it regardless of necessity because the powers that be will never give up any lead on the reins. The entire point of getting the population to controllable levels means controlling them, and selectively removing them from the nice, happy parts of society means scrutinizing their every moveThe only difference is that they don't need CCTV cameras everywhere, the people themselves will buy their surveillance devices and rat on each other
>>97682970Agreed. Steampunk can be nice or used in interesting ways when it isn’t that. Unfortunately it’s also really easy to glue gears on shit.
>>97707609Faggot post bitchass post? So it seems, anon, so it seems.
>>97711206>It's not all Nazis and noirWhat . . . what else is there in dieselpunk? You better not fucking tell me it's some fucking gay shit like faggot niggers in speakeasies rising up against white supremacy and colonialism.
>>97761309I mean, it could be. But it could also be Crimson Skies or The Magnificent Kotobuki. It could be a play on any of the pulp heroes/adventures rising out of the era.
>>97723880Your crust status? Permanently busted.
>>97761309>>97761316
>>97761309They literally aren't Nazis in Jin-Roh. The July 20 Plot succeeded and Germany became Weimar again.
>>97761336I know.
>>97761096>Blade Runner/Ghost in the ShellThanks, anon. Now we're going to get that one autist showing up and throwing a bitch fit about how GitS isn't really cyberpunk
>>97761576Standalone Complex is post-cyberpunk but the movies are firmly cyberpunk
>>97723770Oh hey, a higher resolution of this picture.
>>97761714He also did this one. Make of it what you will.
>>97708967>>97709073>Raygun GothicDo you dweebs really?That's early 20th Century pulp scifi.
>>97723770Steampunk comes directly from The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It was a strong counterculture punk (antisocial and anti-authoritarian) story where a large steam powered computer played a central role.People latched on to the aesthetic and not to the deeper themes and philosophies of it.
>>97762312Oh, and it was set during a fictional period of unrest in London in the late 1800s.
>>97708967
>>97683712How do you enslave someone both ironically *and* unironically?
>>97763265you got dangling participle'd
>>97762325IT WAS THE MID 1800S YOU FOOL
>>97762271I didn't name it. I just work with what I'm given. As a previous post said, it's an exploration of Atomic Age sci-fi and images of the future. When explored today, it's its own form of retrofuturism.
>>97683728I should reread Windup Girl. It’s been years but I really liked it.
>>97683014Is Nasapunk what, 60’s Space Age aesthetics?
>>97765304According to Google,>Nasapunk is a design aesthetic blending grounded, functional 1960s-70s NASA technology with futuristic space travel, famously defining the game Starfield. It prioritizes practical, analog engineering—buttons, dials, and bulky suits—over sleek, digital, or, in some cases, fantastical "cyberpunk" tropes. The aesthetic emphasizes "function over fashion," evoking a sense of wonder and realism in space exploration.So yes, put bluntly, it's the aesthetic of the '60s-'70s space age. Starfield tries to claim "NASApunk," but as mentioned in >>97708561, Arc Raiders works really well, even if it's a post-apocalyptic spin on it.
>>97765304>>97765722
>>97706299That was literally the whole fucking point of it from its inception. It was a deliberate coinage within a political manifesto.
>>97715511>>97715832The idea behind Solarpunk is that the rebellion is us, right here and now, daring to dream of a better world, and in so doing, help to bring it into existence. Yes, you may well ask how the world came to be so utopian, and how the logistics of it work. I'd say it invites that sort of question. But to respond to it by saying it is necessarily actually shit and it should focus on some sort of reactionary rebellion against totalitarian hippies forcing sustainable power and peace and love upon the world is just missing the point entirely and falling into shallow regurgitation of the sort of pessimistic attitude towards speculative fiction that Solarpunk explicitly exists to criticise. It's not more deep or interesting or subversive to imagine the worst outcome. As for all vibes, no substance - yeah, that's every punk since Steampunk and even then Cyberpunk rarely does any better. >>97719512There's nothing inherently right-wing about being self-sufficient, either.
>>97769580>The idea behind Solarpunk is that the rebellion is us, right here and now, daring to dream of a better world, and in so doing, help to bring it into existence. Yes, you may well ask how the world came to be so utopian, and how the logistics of it work. I'd say it invites that sort of question. >But to respond to it by saying it is necessarily actually shit and it should focus on some sort of reactionary rebellion against totalitarian hippies forcing sustainable power and peace and love upon the world is just missing the point entirely and falling into shallow regurgitation of the sort of pessimistic attitude towards speculative fiction that Solarpunk explicitly exists to criticise. It's not more deep or interesting or subversive to imagine the worst outcome.That's the thought I've had for a while. The people in this thread against solarpunk insist that there has to be some sort of catch to the whole scenario, that there is no such thing as a true (green) utopia, that the happy ending is fake and could very well be worse than what we started with. I suppose the easiest answer would be "because utopias are boring and leave no room for adventures," and that's a valid concern. But there has to be something worth taking at face value, rather than the belief that the whole scenario/genre is bullshit and thus that there must be a dark side to the genre to justify its existence.
>>97685166I'd get behind some -gate-punk. West Wing but in a universe that isn't guided by Aaron Sorkin's 90's era liberal idealism.Players are all genuinely terrible people who are clinging to power within the uniparty or are civil servants of some sort. Game follows their various schemes to either support or replace their political masters.For added darkness I'd make them giving the proles the illusion of choice and stability genuinely the better option than allowing the unwashed rabble a vote.
>>97715511You're so close of seeing the point of Solarpunk yet so far at the same time. The point of Solarpunk is building a fictional bridge between utopia (a world where humans coexist and thrive with nature) and the real, current world. >Where is the punk?The very existence of the concept is "punk" or "rebellious" as a sibling term that I prefer to use in this case. The very idea of Solarpunk is rebellious against the current state of the world, where the highly-sought-after "balance" between humans and Earth is quite lacking yet.>What about "Solar"The word "Solar" is mostly referring to the use of clean energies, resonating with its utopic goals of "balance" with nature and technology.As I would like to put it, Solarpunk reminds of the "Frutiger Aero" aesthetic/artistic theme, specially about a phrase that seems to be describe it very well:"The future we were promised"And I like it.I don't know why people here on 4chan are dogpiling on it, but maybe optimists are not so popular in a cynical-leaning, doom-poisoned place/group of people.
>>97772436There is a fair amount of overlap between the ideas of solarpunk and the themes of Frutiger Aero, even if the latter has seemingly corporate origins.
>>97761096Cyberpunk in the public consciousness, or at least in the gamesphere, has always been heavily influenced by Cyberpunk (the rpg) to an outsized extent. Neuromancer is about a bunch of corporate consultants and gig workers and Gibson's other works and short stories indicate an extensive middle class. I would wager that if you categorized the economic and social status of protagonists of cyberpunk literature from the late 70s-mid-80s the majority of them would fall under "personally disaffected but willfully part of the system.">>97762271Yes, we really do use a term from 45 years ago created to describe particular visual stylings within 20th century pulp scifi.
>>97769580Hence the use of "assumed.">>97769699>>97772436The problem is by your definition it's the equivalent of "close your eyes and imagine yourself rich." By itself it's just an idle fantasy.Bucolic settings exist to provide contrast within a narrative, whether as the place they're protecting, the one they're trying to return to, the one they're trying to escape from, or the one they're trying to escape to. You have to ground solarpunk in a context otherwise it's just landscape art. Solarpunk without something negative within or without is a setting for games whose conflicts are not adventurous in nature; it's the setting for a farming sim or city builder not a ttrpg. And that's okay.
>>97772436No you stupid fuck, exactly what you are describing is why it is a vapid aesthetic.It is nothing but wish fulfillment. It's utopian. It has nothing to say itself, all it does is wink at the viewer and go 'huh, don't you wish you lived here?'. There is no struggle within itself, the war is won.>The word "Solar" is mostly referring to the use of clean energies, resonating with its utopic goals of "balance" with nature and technology.It's funny that you say this because I directly addressed how this aspect of it is one of the most troubling aspects of the aesthetic as a whole. How can this world be in 'balance' when the clean energy that it relies upon has its foundations in industrial processes that oppress and harm the environment? One requires a suspension of disbelief and go 'LA LA LA LA' when thinking about where all these lithium batteries come from, or what lives the workers live producing them or obtaining the raw resources.There is nothing optimistic about solarpunk, it's something to close your eyes and go 'aaahhh... fuck... I wish I had more solar panels....'
>>97736073Snowcrash?
>>97765722Why not go full hard-sci fi at that point?
>>97782020Starfield uses it for a space opera, and Arc Raiders uses it for a post-apocalyptic multiplayer shooter (planet devastated by disaster, the rich left to space, everyone else thrived on the surface, the rich are sending robots back to the planet to reclaim it from the plebs, the earthbound fight back). It depends on how hard you want to be about it.
>>97782136I'd call Arc Raiders casset futurism, not nasa punkSidenote but damn that game got aweful art direction
>>97782313Cassette futurism has a lot of overlap with NASApunk, so that's fair. Cassette futurism is characterized as the retrofuturist tech aesthetic of the '70s-late '90s. TV Tropes says:>A technological aesthetic reminiscent of mid-1970s to late 1990s tech (regardless of the real-time setting of the media) as codified by early microcomputers like the Altair 8800 and the IBM Personal Computer, late Cold War era technology, the iconic imagery of the mid to late space race, or the post-Cold War "end of history" period in The '90s, which was characterized by a fascination with virtual reality technologies (such as helmets) and 2D computer animation.
>>97773468>By itself it's just an idle fantasy.It's a WIBNI, a Wouldn't It Be Nice If...
>>97761336Aren't the main PoV gasmask guys people who would had been Nazis that were told they get to continue to be jackboots as long as they behave? They are Nazis that aren't allowed to call themselves Nazis.
>>97769580As previously stated in the thread, Solarpunk is a retread on Futurism. Dieselpunk exists in direct opposition to Futurism, and judging by the other anons in the thread seems to be the most popular type of 'punk on /tg/, so naturally it's going to be viewed with revulsion.
>>97772436"Why does my setting claiming to be utopian while omitting the existence of certain undesirables get flak from associating itself with settings about undesirables fighting for their right to exist?"
>>97774590No you see, the big evil corporation that manufactured all the solar panels and exploited the workers got wiped out in the aftermath World War III/The Rapture/Covid 2, leaving the meek behind to inherit the panels they manufactured to further their just society without any blood on their own hands.It's a media-illiterate version of CATastrophe.
>>97682900Isnt this inherently a matter of personal taste with no objective criteria to measure against?Personally I'm a fan of normiepunk. To be so unremarkable that it becomes in itself remarkable. I currently rock C&A straight cut jeans, puma sneakers, a white dress shirt of middling quality and a dark blue generic vest as a casual fit example. To upgrade to professional, I wear a navy blazer instead of the vest and $60 black dress shoes. I also drive a dark blue ford focus wagon as a second owner, live in my country's most median house and my hobbies are watching sportsball and "good food" (i.e. whatever tiktok trend was hip 3 months ago).
>>97682900I think that kind of aesthetic is stupid looking, it makes me think i could yank ONE cable from that suit and everything will fall apart and be completely useless
>>97784308>Isnt this inherently a matter of personal taste with no objective criteria to measure against?True, but it's an opportunity to examine whatever genre/aesthetic interests you and see what merits or demerits it has.
>>97784153Because the images everyone is seeing associated with solarpunk is the end goal. We're not there yet, and we have to fight to get there. That's the punk part - to rebel against the systems preventing the people from saving the planet and preserving it for generations to come. Whether you want to set your story during or after the struggle is your call.
>>97784646at best that's a cheap copout for having a setting which failed to make any interesting narratives and at worst its yet another subversive tactic used by keyboard "revolutionaries" to lie and distort the actual end result of their putridity and ignorance
Why does solarpunk have more defenders than steampunk?
>>97788607As a self-avowed Steampunk enjoyer, I can only guess it's due to the latter having been around for long enough to be established regardless of arguments over quality. No matter what internet pedants may say, I will always have Frostpunk and Forgotten Futures and a thousand other fun things in the Steampunk sphere to enjoy. Whereas Solarpunk exists more as an idea, which is easier to challenge. It is much harder to find anything which is definitively Solarpunk or even to agree on what it involves outside of paintings of white buildings and plants.Although I should say that SimCity 2014 is a good candidate if you've tried their future-mode DLC. The build space provided may have been tiny and the game might pale next to Skylines but seeing a clean fusion plant come online for the first time warmed my heart back then.
>>97682900Everything past cyberpunk is just retards slapping the word punk onto another word and hoping it becomes popular because of that.
>>97788607Steam punk isn’t good on its own but it’s a decent addition to a setting.
>>97788607What >>97788942 said. Steampunk and cyberpunk are far more established genres than any other and have myriad works to their name, so there's no point arguing the merits towards their continued existence. Solarpunk, moreso than many other genres, is much less stable and is thus more likely to be approached with a critical eye.
>>97788942How would you define steampunk, as a list of must read titles?
So....What would Memepunk look like?
>>977886071. steampunk is popular enough to generate contrarians, and 4chan has always been inherently contrarian2. "solarpunk" plays towards gender-communist ideals of a post-capitalist anime kumbaya wonderland, and so the types who believe that All Art Is Political feel morally obliged to defend itMy guess anyway.
>>97790051>Anything from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells (created during the era, before the genre was codified)>Infernal Devices (K.W. Jeter)>The Anubis Gates (Tim Powers)>The Difference Engine (William Gibson and Bruce Sterling)Whether or not you consider these "must-reads" is one thing, but these are considered among the most foundational works of the genre.
>>97790126>2. "solarpunk" plays towards gender-communist ideals of a post-capitalist anime kumbaya wonderland, and so the types who believe that All Art Is Political feel morally obliged to defend itI read it as being more generically futurist than communist and closer to fascism on 'that' spectrum, dressed in the trappings of progressivism to divert suspicion away from the fact it typically begins, and relies on the assumption of a "Things to Come"-esque mass-culling of society that is very un-progressive in nature.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CScyJcVSp0gThis video basically explains my thought process on the premise.
>>97719512I think that's my own problem with it IMO. It's a compromise of viewpoints that somehow ends up taking the least savory aspects of both to leave something bland and so inoffensive as to be irritating, not at all helped by the insistence it's meant to be utopian. Solarpunk is the grubhub ad as a setting.
>>97790051Yeah, what>>97791056saidIf you have a tolerance for some soapboxing Micheal Moorcock's Nomad of the Timestreams is also alright, although I would recommend stopping the second book once you get to the America section.
>>97682954>master shinobi
>>97788607Gas Prices.
>>97788607Retards virtue signaling and occasionally honest people doing their damnedest to salvage a dishonest concept
steampunk, not because there's anything wrong with it, but because too many steampunk writers refuse to engage with the things that make it a "punk" genre
I think the punk-demanders are the worst part of this entire conversation. Just accept that "-punk" is a suffix used to indicate an aesthetic dominated by a certain technology. Most cyberpunk isn't really that punk, and even less so steampunk or dieselpunk. Just like people call any medieval-ish setting "fantasy," people will call any near-future urban setting "cyberpunk," regardless of the type of story they're telling. The meanings of words are determined by usage, not by etymology. It's especially stupid in a thread where the OP specifically asked about aesthetics.
>>97782363Cassette Futurism is closer to the late 60s through the early 00s. Before that and you're not really using cassettes and after that high speed digital transfer takes over.>>97783971>Dieselpunk exists in direct opposition to FuturismNo it fucking doesn't. Most dieselpunk works fully embrace the Futurist aesthetic and mentality.
>>97774590The wrong kind of -punk is just wallowing in the vibes it gives instead of trying to focus on how things would work in practice. The most classic case of midwit intellectualism is pointing at a problem and saying it exists, without offering solutions.Solarpunk offers an actual suggestion of "this is what to strive for", which can be much more conducive to finding solutions. Also, focusing on the unsustainability of current technology has you not seeing the forest from the trees. Surely the setting relies on some kind of new technologies and practices that are in balance with nature. That is not physically impossible.That being said, I don't think it's within human nature to accept a compromised life like that. In practice other -punks are probably a lot better, but If a solarpunk setting addressed the philosophical/human nature issues in some way, it would have a LOT to say.
What's the aesthetic of D&D players and Pathfinder players hating each other all the time like they are Catholics vs Protestants in the 16th century? Religiouswar-core?
>>97783971>Dieselpunk exists in direct opposition to Futurism???
>>97798511I don't see an ounce of Y2K in cassette futurism. Like that writeup says, the furthest you could stretch cassette futurism is to include end-of-the-millenium VR, the last stretches of that technology before the Oculus Rift was prototyped in 2010.
>>97798511> Most dieselpunk works fully embrace the Futurist aesthetic and mentality.Futurists themselves (eg, Nazis, Blackshirts and Soviets) are without fail the main antagonists and the thing your punks are rebelling against, with the latter "sometimes" getting a pass in the context of fighting the former.The only times that futurists aren't depicted as antagonistic or some level of insane are Howard Hughes, H.G. Wells, and maybe Tesla so long as he isn't allowed to spout his political opinions.
>>97684246>10 miniatureslol we're already down from that
>>97782363>the post-Cold War "end of history" period in The '90s, which was characterized by a fascination with virtual reality technologies (such as helmets) and 2D computer animationMeaning this is part of the extent of what computers are capable of in cassette futurism.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXfbdjW1eushttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIaSroTbgts
>>97801160>Futurists are Nazis and commies except for the ones that aren't but they don't count!You're conflating shared ideological points as copied ideologies and ignoring the broader social trends and philosophies of the era that influenced everyone. The commies are actually one of the least Futurist ideologies as labor theory of value and Soviet policy prioritize worker participation over efficiency. >>97800837Are you talking about Y2K the aesthetic or the early 00s in terms of actual hardware? Because if you're talking about the latter you're cutting out the last gen of actual cassettes and cartridge memory.
>>97682900None of them. Modern, completely regular government architecture is worse than the most tasteless and retarded gimmick aesthetic ever conceived.These buildings (which you paid for, and make no mistake this is in every country) are deliberately designed to demoralize you and crush your soul. They were engineered by communists as a way to dismantle the concept of beauty in the host population. By forcing you to pay to produce shit colored, ugly, disgusting unaesthetic buildings so that your dysgenic obese overlords can rule you from them, they essentially condition you to be a slave.In a just world, every person responsible for the creation of these abominations would be subjected to a lifetime of ceaseless torment at the hands of State appointed torturers. They would be addicted to opiods, stuffed into sensory deprivation tanks pumped full of hallucinogenic drugs and electricuted at random intervals, kept in a state of sleepless withdrawal for weeks until there is nothing left but gibbering hysterical wrecks, and then they would be slowly, lovingly rehabilitated and treated until they are almost fully recovered--and then stuffed back into the chamber and tortured again. This would be repeated until they commit suicide during one of their brief periods of rehabilitation, at which point their skulls will be collected and stacked in a pyramid on the bulldozed ruins of the disgusting structures they helped to create.
>>97801731Weird attempt at a hijack, but go off, king.
>>97801679>Are you talking about Y2K the aesthetic or the early 00s in terms of actual hardware?The aesthetic, mostly, but you're right that cassettes were hanging on by a thread by the turn of the millenium.
>>97801780I mean it's post 300, is it really a hijacking if you wait for the ship to hit the iceberg?
>>97801797I think certain elements of the Y2K aesthetic fit even if the overall aesthetic doesn't but aesthetic trends are a little tricky given their nebulous nature. A lot of the Y2k aesthetic shows up by the mid-90s which in turn has its origins with 80s design experimentation.
>>97801160While it's true dieselpunk protags from the most commonly-known media are guys like Indiana Jones and BJ Blackowitz that are fundamentally traditionalists working to fight back the tide of impulsive hot-heads but you also have the Rocketeer that is literally funded by Hughes to smack Nazis out of the skies. For /tg/ examples Crimson Skies is the goto setting is all about being an aggressive sky pirate and the Krauts are still Imperial Germany and still itching for WWII, and Konflict 47' where the futurists on both sides of the Maginot Line are accelerating by making dubious pacts of outsiders aside from Japan, who are depicted as borderline crazy cannibals for not directly abusing the eldritch rifts.
>>97801731I think brutalism still falls under the purview of Dieselpunk. Though it's proponents will tell you it was made to spite the fascists' obsession with classical architecture, look me in the eye and tell me it wasn't based off the wartime construction of Germany and Italy
>>97802365Brutalism is from the '50s-'70s, part of the post-war reconstruction. That's a little outside dieselpunk's window, which - need I remind you - loves art deco.
>>97802680Proto-brutalism had its beginnings in the 30s into the 40s with buildings like the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, the Auschwitz prison (particularly the distinct fence), and German flak towers whose design features would all serve the basis of what is generically called "totalitarian architecture" that the 50s' contributions would continue mostly from the Soviets before the UK codified it into the form we know today.You see works like TNO (both the HoI and Wolfenstein version) use it because it's an easy shorthand for "villain lair" in contrast to the racy excitement art deco wants to evoke.
>>97802721Proto-Brutalism is Futurist. >>97802365It was inspired by Italian Futurism used by the Italian Fascists specifically.
Good thread, folks. Lots of genuinely good discussion and introduction of ideas.
One last video for the road. Since the thread started with steampunk, may as well end with it (or at least something in its ballpark).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2h1Mtcn9VQ
>>97802680Nah, dieselpunk can easily take design cues from the 20s through the 60s.
And hey, if you want a new decopunk video game, a new RPG just dropped.https://store.steampowered.com/app/1836560/Aether__Iron/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA9Fr-9VPMk
