It's a pro-slavery steampunk setting

>Making a -punk setting being pro-slavery

Way to miss the fucking point.

Make it about the punk again.

You are not wearing a top hat. You are wearing a flat cap and a shit load of dirt.

You are overthrowing those with the top hats.

Yes I realize the pic isn't a flat cap.

>Slavery
Acceptable

>Steampunk
The absolute worst theme that exists

You're not fixing steampunk, there is no fixing it. You are only spoiling slavery.

It will introduce a set of inner tensions which will sustain the world and its possibilities. The best settings inculcate conflict by their very existence.

I find the idea of "fixing" a setting defined by aesthetics to be weird. Steampunk can have any kind of internal themes, just so long as it fits the anachronistic fantasy vibe.

What if the "punks" are edgy slavers fighting the straight-laced anti-exploitation Man. It's all about the attitude right?

nah true slavery is best served for other settings

now the conflict between employee and employer, that's perfect

> Fuck you man, telling me I can't own people and shit. You're not my mom! I'll do whatever the fuck I want!

The problem with steampunk is that it's just an aesthetic. There's no themes or cultural zeitgeist to it, it's just "let's put some cogs and gearwheels on to Victorian dress".

Corsets and OP's image are hot as hell though.

>It's all about the attitude right?

Spoken like a total poseur.

problem is that half the people think its an aesthetic and half the people consider it a true genre

would help if everyone started say, talking about the actual works as victorian retro-science fiction or something but right now its a bit confusing

and if approached in the later way it can provide very interesting settings and thematics

Hey, nothing wrong with Gor when it's seen through the right lens.

>The Steapunk genre was born when atheists attempted to imagine an industrial revolution without religion.

a telescope post-nuclear annihilation of the entire setting?

What have you got against real men and real women?

Translation: everything's better when you're high!

If the world is pro slavery that works fine. As long as the -punks aren't everything works

Considering that industrialization was what lead to the decline of slavery, it wouldn't make much sense for an even more industrial 19th century to be pro-slavery.

nothing, that's why I'm advocating introducing the creatures of Gor to a good ol' napalm bath

The Priest Kings would have something to say about that. Enjoy the life of servitude!

If it's a real genre then what it's about? What are the key themes? What's the seminal work of steampunk?

slavery and the industrial revolution cannot exist together

slaves are expensiev, you must feed and clothe and house and train them to do what you want. buying a person who will inevitably be made useless by the dangerous machines of the industrial revolution is pointless and wasteful.

It is much cheaper to simply hire them for pennies a day, just enough for them to feed themselves, so that you can replace them immediately if they get mashed by your spinning jenny

And yet, that key period when Industrialism arose coincided with the enslavement of the peasant class. These unlucky ones were forced into the factories where they toiled until death.

>slaves are expensiev, you must feed and clothe and house and train them to do what you want

steampunk is (surpise) fairly similar to cyberpunk in that its retrofuturism focusing on the conflicts between low and high class aided by the chosen technological limitation or divergence

only difference is cyberpunk diverges in the 80's while steampunk diverges in the 1880's

But there wasn't slavery in Victorian Britain, OP. But that's irrelevant.

Social anachronisms have nothing to do with why steampunk is boring. The problem with steampunk is that it's never steamPUNK. It's always steamlord. Or steamgentry. Steamfop.

It's about rich twats in tophats covered in brass when it should be about all the soot-covered street-rats under their feet.

Right now, Steampunk is like if Cyberpunk was about the megacorp board room and investors who live in the 101st floor penthouse instead of the sweaty hackers, sim junkies and other low-lifes that live between the cracks in society.

THAT is why Steampunk sucks.

Okay sure, so what's the Neuromancer of steampunk? The Bladerunner?

the only good story to tell in Gor is when the USA introduces it to some good ol' American Freedom

That's a rather broad definition of slavery, user.

While a person too poor to afford to quit their job may by sorta bound to their employer, it's not like sweat-shop workers are bought and sold on the open market. Their still legally free persons with rights and shit.

I'll agree it doesn't have a particularly good set of works, after all its one of the few genres where a soddin videogame is one of the better examples (Arcanum)
but that doesn't dismiss it entirely. After all you could similarly dismiss cyberpunk by comparing it to several older and more respected genres which have a vast number of superior novels.

>what's the Neuromancer of steampunk?
I'd wager some of Jules Verne works.

>it's not like sweat-shop workers are bought and sold on the open market

Medieval feudal serfs weren't bought and sold on the open market. Nor were children born into slavery in the Americas for that matter.

Slavery as phenomenon is multifarious and demands a sufficiently broad definition.

I know "this" Ingrid is bad form on Veeky Forums' but this.

well that's the problem
does Jules Verne count as steampunk or not.
A defining aspect of steampunk is the retro-futurism while at the times Verne wrote his novels they were most decidedly regular old science fiction.

What have you got against living according to the biotruths of human gender?

The difference between cyberpunk and steampunk is that cyberpunk is real. It tapped into a real feeling of discontent and fear of the future. The conflict between technology and society, the rights of the small being crushed by the big.

Steampunk has none of that. You can't retroactively rebel against the Industrial revolution and Victorian imperialism.

At the end of day cyberpunk means something. It was a real phenomena. Steampunk is just brass and tophats.

Are you fucking retarded?

That's a pretty solid choice, but there's not a lot of the punk part going on. Though Nemo fits the protagonist role pretty snugly

Playing the people stuck working in the boiler room of one of those fantastic airships and mounting a rebellion against your callous titled superiors sounds fairly interesting, actually.

cyberpunk is starting to get outdated as well
already works like Neuromancer have to be read in the mindset of the 80's rather than our current mindset.
Sure the concept of rebellion against the system is still valid but given its a core concept of both cyberpunk and steampunk I wouldn't say it somehow validates one genre while invalidating another.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to be the rich bad guys in either steampunk or cyberpunk. The problem is cogfops ignore the existence of the rats instead of exploiting them like they should. The real people ignore them I mean, characters disregarding them because they aren't worth thinking about is fine.

Ever hung out with punks? Half of them don't know shit about politics and don't care. They're just trying to make a point about how much they hate people.

If steampunk is defined as "cyberpunk but Victorian" then it has no real identity.

especially because its a lot more realistic than cyberpunk
a single or a few hackers have never done anything relevant
however the workers of the 19th century uniting is a very well documented phenomena with a lot of tragic tales.

I agree with you but I also think that you could write a steampunk novel and use cyberpunk themes and it would still work just as well. Though maybe that lends to your argument in that steam punk can never be more than a type of cyberpunk

>Steampunk is just brass and tophats.
Steampunk was all about Weird Science more than punk-ness. There's no real Punk in Steampunk, the name was there just because people like calling things blah-punk to ape cyberpunk.

...

its defined as class conflict in victorian (retro-futurism)
you only choose to describe it as such in your post because you have heavy bias towards steampunk

furthermore I question the validity of equating a genre's worth to its current relevance on Veeky Forums of all places, unless you want to be consistent and dismiss the entire fantasy genre as well.

So can we all agree that steampunk should have stopped after Perdido Street Station?

I don't see them as being subdivisions
a major separation between the 2 is that while cyberpunk is still science fiction, steampunk is fantasy

Then you're nit a slave. You're a factory worker. You don't need slavery for that, just research into early Communism, early union attempts, early anarchism, etc.

I don't think I've ever played a game in a steampunk setting and the more I think about it the stupider it is.

There is nothing to define the setting but goggles and airships which can go in any other setting.

Look outside of the West to the populous countries full of desperate, down-trodden poor. Nations like India and China where automation is almost non-existent compared to industry in Western states. Jobs that take a few skilled workers and some complex machinery in the USA instead require dozens of dumb laborers, some basic equipment and a few taskmasters to direct them in the East.

Slavery could totally exist in a steampunk setting that replicates those near-dystopian environments, just not in the same format that it did in the USA around the civil war.

>Stop telling me I can't tell other people what to do!

a fairly well defined part of slavery is ownership of a person
you start to get lax with that definition and you may as well get rid of the term entirely

I love all the people on here cunting all over the place about "steampunk" despite the vast majority having never read anything in a steampunk setting, never played a steampunk-themes game, and at best they played Arcanum for awhile one time.
This is so clearly one of those "rampant Veeky Forums problems" that more or less Veeky Forums rants about but in ACTUAL life is basically totally irrelevant to what happens to folks because they don't live on Veeky Forums.

Not saying steampunk or good or bad, just saying that /tg's/ head is so far up it's own ass about it and other things that it genuinely cannot smell or taste the difference between it's own shit and real food anymore.

This.

The real 18th-19th Century was so much more interesting than the gears upon cogs upon steam gauges upon clocks upon brass tubing upon springs upon monocles upon moustaches upon a top hat with nothing underneath it that is what "Steampunk" has become today.

What steampunk should be, is a "Weird History"-type setting. Just the real history, but with extra, low-fantasy things that "weren't recorded in the history books" or somesuch.

Look at at this crazy steampunk pistol in the pic. Totally fantasy-based, and impossible in reali- OH fuck guess what? It's a real fucking thing that was sold in gun stores in the 1800s.
youtube.com/watch?v=y-N1MRFnByQ
(ignore cheesy intro)

I mean, who does Romantic-Victorian-era style better than the people who invented it?

Wrap it up in a bow and a pretty name. Give it an extensive contract with more clauses than most people care to read and call it 'indentured servitude.'

As long as it boils down to involuntary servitude in horrific conditions, it does the job of slavery.

>As long as it boils down to involuntary servitude in horrific conditions, it does the job of slavery.

Except IRL we have many examples of voluntary servitude in quite pleasant conditions that were still slavery.

so basically: do what Jules Verne did

after all something like say the Nautilus would fit your "real life history but with low fantasy elements". The submarine wouldn't work, but it feels like it could have.

I'll correct myself then.

It does the job of slavery according to mainstream Western perceptions of slavery.

>Make it about the punk again.
>muh punk
>muh punk
>MUH PUNK

WHY ARE YOU ALL SUCH FUCKING RETARDS

IN THE ORIGINAL CYBERPUNK YOU COULD PLAY A FUCKING CORPORATE ENFORCER, A REPORTER, OR EVEN A GODDAMNED EXECUTIVE

YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE A FUCKING STREET LEVEL MOHAWK FOR IT TO BE 'X'-PUNK

REEEEEEEEEEEEEE

>If it's a real genre then what it's about? What are the key themes? What's the seminal work of steampunk?

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Time Machine
The War in the Air
Master of the World
Journey to the Center of the Earth

Jules Verne is science fiction, not steampunk

>the seminal works of steampunk are classic sci-fi adventure novels

Wow you're fucking retarded.

yeh thats the problem
he's not a steampunk writer but many of his books are the perfect examples of what steampunk could and should be

Oh look, it's retarded

>The War in the Air

My nigga

>Jules Verne is science fiction, not steampunk
>>the seminal works of steampunk are classic sci-fi adventure novels
Yes, exactly you mongs. Steampunk is classical industrial era sci-fi. It is the extrapolation of a rapidly industrializing and advancing world set against the ethical, social, and practical issues mankinds growing influence over the world causes. It is born both of the uncertainty in human wisdom and the pride in human ingenuity.

20,000 leagues under the sea alone deals with war, environmentalism, and colonialism.

Get Fucked.

Probably the origin of Steampunks obsession with Airships.

its pretty interesting how the real purpose of the nautilus was an almost terrifyingly accurate portrayal of their use in future wars

Holy fuck you genuinely are retarded aren't you?

sci-fi adventure novels dealing with the current themes=/=steampunk

Explain to me the steam or the punk aspects of Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I missed all the social implications of rapidly advancing technology when they were discovering dinosaurs under fucking Icelandic volcanoes.

If you want more modern examples that aren't H.G. Wells or Jules Verne, there are several works by Michael Moorcock. Warlord of the Air, The Land Leviathan, and The Steel Tsar.

Non Moorcock works include Infernal Devices, Morlock Night, and The Difference Engine

These books contain more of the more 'modern' and well known Steam-Punk nonsense - impractical machines, futurism paired with social anachronism, pollution, technology gone mad, airships, industrialized war, etc.

>Steampunk is like if Cyberpunk was about the megacorp board room and investors who live in the 101st floor penthouse
I'd play it.

So what we've discovered in this thread is that steampunk is either "cyberpunk but in the past" in which case it's literally just an aesthetic or that it's just classic sci-fi novels.

>nothing underneath it
Don't forget the dystopian societies and conspiracies, those are important part of steampunk settings too

One of the major themes of steam punk was that anything was becoming possible, and the world rapidly shrinking. Myth becomes history, fiction becomes fact. Journey to the Centre of the Earth was about individuals challenging the status quo of scientific knowledge and what was 'possible'. Traveling to the centre of the earth was absurd, both in reality and in the stories fiction. But the novel supposed it was possible, and what implications that might have, and what the adventurers might encounter along the way.

Proto-Steam Punk were all speculative fiction adventure stories, supposing what MIGHT be possible in a short amount of time.

See
You're not really making a great case for steampunk being a real, unique genre.

given cyberpunk is just dystopian fiction in the 80's I fail to see how that's a valid criticism

So, classic science fiction?

>"cyberpunk but in the past" in which case it's literally just an aesthetic

But cyberpunk is more than an aesthetic, it has themes of oppression and trying to live in the cracks of a decaying society without being eaten by the machine. That's what makes it a genre instead of just an aesthetic, and it's what steampunk, with very few exceptions, lacks.

read

That's my point exactly. Cyberpunk means something specific.

If all steampunk is, is taking everything that makes cyberpunk, cyberpunk but sets it in the 19th century then what is there to steampunk itself but an aesthetic.

cyberpunk is nothing but the 80's taking a shot at dystopian fiction
if steampunk is an aesthetic, then so is cyberpunk

Classical science fiction forms the foundation for steam punk the same way classical epics did for fantasy. Like with fantasy, the latter day genre specific works are contextualized imitations or influenced works of the original product. Steampunk is the attempt to capture the spirit, themes, and aesthetic of classical speculative fiction when viewed through a modern lense. Monkey see monkey do, that is why victorian aesthetics and industrial era technology plays such a strong role in steampunk

The difference is while cyberpunk tries to tackle post modern issues like digital burnout, urban decay and ennui, Steampunk is still hitting the classical issues of suffrage, sexism, racism, classism, colonization and industrialization.

Stop spewing your retardation on my screen please.

alright where is the 1984 or brave new world of cyberpunk?
how do you justify it as a genre when its just some screens and and neon taped to an existing genre?

Okay let's say we buy that. Show me some examples and try to avoid just posting classic works of science fiction.

Neuromancer, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Robocop. These all major cyberpunk works that existed at the same time of the cyberpunk movement and genre.

You can't claim steampunk is a real current thing and than post adventure novels from the 19th century.

>1984 or brave new world of cyberpunk?
Matrix.

See

>aesthetic of classical speculative fiction when viewed through a modern lense.

Corsets, goggles, and cogs, of course

Desu senpai the matrix lacks a lot of cyberpunks traditional themes and is more of a Messianic tale with cyberpunk wallpaper