Unappreciated Aesthetics Thread

OH BOY IT'S A GENERIC SPACE EMPIRE WITH BLANDLY FUTRISTIC TECH!

What are some underused and under-appreciated "aesthetics" in fiction

> inb4
I am aware "asthetic" is a meme term

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Western.

Post-Apocalyptic settings where, instead of everything being blown to a hellish desolate wasteland, nature is reclaiming everything. This is my biggest setting-fetish.

Is my take on "modern fantasy" an underused one?

I run moé-fied, monstergirl/boy-ified Planescape campaigns (see image) wherein technology is effectively modern-day by way of enchanted items.

The Society of Sensation's recorder/sensory stones can record data, so they are used as the basis for computers, digital media, audio/video/smell captures, and the like.

The Harmonium desires to connect everyone together in harmony, so they have tapped into their musical affinity to transmit data via magical sound waves that pass through the Astral Plane. This is called the "Harmonet."

In the streets of Sigil and other planar cities, one can frequently see celestials, fiends, cordians, elementals, faeries, and mortals walking around with little crystals, bones, or shards of metal. These trinkets project "tactile illusion screens" that respond to touch and serve as the interface for what amounts to smartphones. Each of these phones has a helpful sapient A.I. within them called a "mimir," which is really just the awakened object-spirit of the phone itself.

Belief is power in the planes, and thus Harmonet memes are extremely serious business.

In the average planar creature's household, there might be a scry-levision that receives feeds from the Harmonet in the Astral Plane, a refrigerator and a cooling system powered by eternal ice from the Paraelemental Plane of Ice, and a computer with a quad-soul processor.

Businesses and buildings are likewise rather modern. There are department stores, beauty salons, nightclubs, and more. You might be attended to by a lesser guardinal store clerk (those compassionate Elysians simply love to help people!) as you go about shopping for a lightbulbs powered by Continual Flame spells.

There are no cars though. Intra-city and inter-city portals are a more convenient method of transportation, and for when people do need vehicles, they can always take spelljammers (which work more like 4e's spelljammers in that they can traverse the planes).

Literally stopped reading at "monstergirls". Why do people waste walls of texts on this sort of magical-realm garbage that never actually happened?

Good taste

so, pic related, stalker, an enormous chunk of russian fantasy art, and some video games nobody can care about, like Krater?


also, i played in exactly 2 space-western-themed games and both times the games felt unfulfilled in premise.

there's too many fucks out there who immediately point to Firefly when they hear "space western." i dig it, sure, it was alright, but hear me out: Jonah Hex in his time-travel episodes where he goes to wild-west equivalents in space. That's that good shit. lawless frontier themes are the biggest crossovers between space operas and old westerns and we never see decent mesh with them.

If you can deal with how awful firearms combat is in every system ever, setting like that are pretty fun in tabletop games.

Try running Shadowrun with such a setting sometime, it's a nice change-up from the typical corporate mega-cities and stuff, but still leaves room for tech-savvy characters to be assets to the story whenever pre-apocalypse tech comes up.

This. Just usual western, no weird stuff, no horror creatures, devils, robots, ghosts. Just piss poor, armed men.
You didn't stop at moé?
Krater has such a great setting and I often use the music for roleplay. Too bad the game itself lacks anything to hook me.
We played a space western campaign in star wars Edge of the Empire. If your GM knows what a Western is about (impact of a single man, frontier wars, revenge and poverty) it's really fun to do that on a mining planet and with lasers.

I like playing modern thieves and rogues, there's a lot of fiction about them (just watched art of steal yesterday, not bad movie) but there's an awful lack of rpgs about criminals, that aren't futuristic or have a fantasy influence. actually I don't care a lot, universal systems and such, but I think something else than One last job would be neat

>post-apocalyptic nature

Goddamn do I love a green wasteland. Also a big fan of abandoned cities 2-6 feet deep in water like a concrete bayou. Random, odd animals that escaped from zoos, the environment as a hazard.

I ran a short game about setting up a safe zone inside a rainforesty city, fighting overgrown killbots ranging from man-sized to Martian Tripod, and all ghillied up raider types who'd moved into the skyscrapers to stay out of the swampy ground level.

Japanese Wild North.
Angolan Civil War.
Street gangs.
Byzantium.
Mercury-period NASA.
Fantastic Voyage.
Really most of the underappreciated aesthetics are modern or early modern. I would love to see an airship drama except with early Cold War technology.

Certain degrees of moe are tolerable. I can't say it's my cup of tea, but I can see it holding the same kind of atmospheric appeal as pulpy comic-style fiction. If people are into that, fine.

Monstergirls was where the whole thing became a stupid fetish-fueled magical realm sperg-fest. I mean, if people are into THAT, fine for them, but it's one of those things they should keep to themselves instead of obnoxiously shoving in everyone's face and parading around their complete lack of social awareness.

The classical world, settings with Greek, Egyptian, or Persian aesthetics are rare but have the potential to be really cool

>Golden Kamuy
Muh nigga

English Civil War - era shit.
You get renaissance-pseudo-era settings, you get Napoleonic-pseudo-era settings, but you don't really get anything in between.

>This. Just usual western, no weird stuff, no horror creatures, devils, robots, ghosts. Just piss poor, armed men.
eh while in theory that could be fun, in practice that will probably end up awful for most groups

>overarching quest for LEGENDARY AINU GOLD
>frequent meal breaks and fetch quests
>memorable side characters
>every time Hijikata's onscreen it's straight Hokkaido Western
>the most ridiculous random encounter table everywhere
I wish Noda were my DM. And that The Revenant were this good.

>Byzantium
My Negro

I've always been partial to "used future" aesthetics ala Alien movie franchise or the Millennium Falcon.

Tech, hardware, and attire that is 95% practical in design with minimal concern for aesthetic appeal. Often with a patch-job appearance from irregular upkeep outside a proper maintenance facilities.

Also that 80's/90's boxy computer feel with monochrome green screens.

Your theory against my anecdotal evidence

That tickles my dick too

>tfw Ender's Game movie would have been 100x better with a used future aesthetic even if they'd kept in the stupid warp drive

90s CGI demo reels.
youtube.com/watch?v=cbG34c1qorQ

Maybe enjoying the shit out of western is just something german. With the german 'dub' (better calling it version) of the bud spencer westerns and the winnetou books...

I feel like i'm watching PBS again

I run a post-post-apoc fantasy setting like this.

I love that Steven Spielberg sci-fi with comfy home life and weird robots

Pic related gets my dick rock hard

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Retro sci-fi gets no love.

Retro sci-fi is damn fine

I think we can all agree that there are a lot of changes that would have made that movie better.

Harrison Ford was a solid choice. I thought the movie was like a 5/10. Some bits were cool, some bits sucked, but it was a story I've read over a dozen times since I was 9 on the big screen.

Now is a pretty decent time to be a geek or nerd or whatever SciFi fans call themselves in this post-nerd era we live in.

Please... don't do that to Planescape. It's like purposefuly driving over a litter of puppies. I usually like modern fantasy, but no, please, don't do that. Rename it or something. It's not Planescape anymore if you anime it that much.

Future settings that are fucking beautiful. Like togas and crystal spires. And to flow into that, Where technology is filled with a sort of mysticism.

Throw in some mild feudal government structure, and some really spiffy philosophical religious bullcrap and you've got something i REALLY wanna play.

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I have a few.
First of all: whatever you want to call the Aesthetics of early Miyazaki works, like Shuna and Nausicaa. Central-Asia inspired post-eco-apocalypse?

>Goddamn do I love a green wasteland.

Fallout 3 and 4 really wasted an opportunity when they went with the same aesthetics as Fallout 1+2 that were explicitly set in a desert.

Another example. There is something quite fascinatingly exotic and nostalgic at the same time about this.

I don't think they really missed an opportunity there. Fallout settings are associated with deserts for a good reason. It was stupid of them to set the games in Washington and Boston, but I don't think trying to reinvent the aesthetics of the series the way say, Wasteland attempted, would be a good idea.

I've been trying to cobble together a setting which basically boils down to "warframe but not shit" for a while now mostly because of the reasons you outlined

>Central-Asia inspired
yes please

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The mongolian honour guard are pretty based in terms if uniforms. Wonder how someone could go about making an imperial guard regiment of them.

Fallout 4 really wasted an opportunity when they made the half the game a wild goose-chase for a bratty baby and the other half some retarded SJW-tier message about Synths.

But yeah, Point Lookout DLC in Fallout 3 is the closest we'll ever get to a "green wasteland" in a Fallout game.

Well, first Miyazaki's big manga project was actually set directly in Mongolia, and revolved around local Mongolian clan wars and disputes. Rather... interesting choice for a kids comics.
Later on, Shuna is based on old Tibetian myth and a lot of the settings were inspired by high altitude plateaus, steppes and that kind of shit. I think Miyazaki was rather fascinated by the subject and it bled through all the way into Naushicaa.

Personally, I found the whole setting so fascinating that I based my own world-building exercise on it.

Another type of aesthetics I have a huge boner for though: "Scandinavian/Slavic Fairytale", Bauer and Biblin style. Should include works of Trnka and the recent movies by Tomm Moore.

Another example. Honestly, this "scandinavian/slavic fairytale" is mostly just specific form of art-nouveau applied on fairytale topics. But it's absolutely beautiful.

Now you are just being a mad angry /pol/ sissy faggot.

Go swallow a bucket of smegma and then carve out your whiney faggot guts with a butcher knive. Go fucking kill yourself.

Warframe's setting is pretty flawless.

The setting is just too good for an F2P micro-transaction multiplayer game.

>He actually liked playing through a story that the player character had zero reason to actually care about.

Lets be real here, when it comes to setting, the best Fallout game was New Vegas, the one that was deliberately set in a desolate desert. Funny how that works, huh?

Yes, it is. Good tastes.

>implying i played fo4

Won't buy it until TC mods hit the Nexus.

Calling the syth part "SJW-tier" might have been a little extreme, but gotta agree when the guy says it made for a pretty shit story.I wasn't against Syths being a thing, but I didn't fucking CARE enough to be invested in that part of the story either... and when that part of the story was literally like 70% of the game... yeah, bad choice there.

Pic unrelated, just trying to stay slightly on topic with setting stuff.

Thanks. And speaking of art nouveau: I like virtually all iterations. One of my favorite ones, and little known, is the setting of the movie Revolutionary Girl Utena.
I mean the movie is pretty fucking shit, but MY GOD the environments.

youtube.com/watch?v=EHwMrOkqldY
Fun little fact: the second biggest artistic influence (right after Disney) that west had on anime and manga was actually the work of Alfonz Mucha, who is largely to blame for the anime hair and female character proportions.

You can't salvage that game, it's core systems are all trash except for gunplay.

Warframe scratches sooo many itches, and the new stuff has been very A plus lore wise.

Next on: East-European Melancholy.

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>I don't think they really missed an opportunity there. Fallout settings are associated with deserts for a good reason. It was stupid of them to set the games in Washington and Boston, but I don't think trying to reinvent the aesthetics of the series the way say, Wasteland attempted, would be a good idea.

/disagree

The aesthetic of the first and second games already differs to show the growth after people stop doing Mad Max and start in on the serious work of rebuilding civilization. Not by a lot, but I'd argue that this is more of an engine constraint (and the fact that we're still in the same geographic area) than because the art direction wanted to stay the same.

I especially feel like Fallout: New Vegas shows that you can stay true to the general Fallout Aesthetic (50's weird sci fi post-apoc) while innovating in the details to show changes in time and location (sarsaparilla, cesars legion, New California Republic military developments etc.)

>Fallout 4 really wasted an opportunity when they made the half the game a wild goose-chase for a bratty baby and the other half some retarded SJW-tier message about Synths.

It was especially infuriating to have to blow up the institute if you didn't side with them.

>But it's the only way to kill them!

Listen fucker I am whirling death incarnate, I've killed more people than you've ever known. If you task me to kill the institute, I'll kill them the best way I know, with fire and steel, not your fucking stupid "let's nuke the only useful powerplant" strategy.

>Now you are just being a mad angry /pol/ sissy faggot.

get fucked yourself faggot, this was a nice discussion before you showed up.

Magical realism is the best genre.

>I am aware "asthetic" is a meme term
>aesthetic is another word sacrificed on the altar of idiocy
Please be lying, or something to ruse me. Please.

>I can't use a word if people I don't like also use that word, but wrong
Grow up.

>Another example. Honestly, this "scandinavian/slavic fairytale" is mostly just specific form of art-nouveau applied on fairytale topics. But it's absolutely beautiful.

Have you seen Pic Related before? It sometimes travels with the words Art Deco/Art Noeavu replaced with Art Dwarf/Art Elf.

Fucking forgot to attach the pic like the faggot I am

The first time I did a Brotherhood of Steel run, I was legitimately surprised (in a bad way) that they were honest about wanting to nuke the Institute, since in their every other appearance in the lore ever, they've always had an uber-boner for technology. I literally went through the whole game thinking Maxson was just lying to your face and his true motives were to take the Institute for the BOS.

And then he didn't...

What the hell Bethesda!?

Also needs more pic-related, Scifi stuff that actually has to do with exploring/surviving on hostile alien planets instead of this whole "intergalatic community of hyper advanced races" every scifi tabletop does nowadays.

That'd be unfortunate... I guess I should have expected it.

Tell that to the angry /pol/ reddit tumblr virgin autist who immediately started schreeching about mystical magical goblin gremlin boogeyman sjws.

The rest of you post is on point though. Why the BoS would blow up the powerplant, after they fought soooo hard for a simple solar collector in NV...

>/disagree
I think we have misunderstood ourselves. I'm not against the human civilization growing and evolving between the games, and I'm not against introducing smaller new elements. What I do find pretty bad idea is changing the entire core aesthetic premise: that is going through the dry, desert settings to say, "green apocalypse", to nature reclaiming the land, that kind of shit. Just as it would be completely stupid to move the series outside of America.

I think New Vegas pretty much handled it perfectly, but Fo3 and Fo4 completely blew it. They did not waste the opportunity to re-invent the settings, they just did not understand what made the original settings appealing in the first place. Those are two pretty different things.

I haven't seen that pic. It's pretty amusing.

>Getting this triggered over what was obvious sarcasm/exaggeration that literally everyone else in the thread figured out.

Do they use an actual nuke?

Because even in NV, the BoS are really really really against nukes.

If you dismantle the nukes in LR, the BoS becomes really happy with you.

I really, really like symbolism. And Fin-de-siècle stuff in general.

>universe full of dead worlds to explore
I never knew I wanted this.

Though I did design a setting once where ancient aliens had hollowed out a brown dwarf for catacombs and installed ecosystems to watch the honored dead, at appropriate depth for gravity.

No, same as every other faction they destabilize the Institute's reactor which causes it to go critical and blow up the Institute.

It's pretty much the same as using a nuke, aside from the fact that they're using one that's already there rather than launching one.

I legitimately thought you were referring to the user who called for gruesome suicide until I untangled your sentence.

maaaaan, that was a good game

At least 3 (haven't played 4 so can't comment on it) felt like a theme park version of Fallout that someone with no real understanding of what made the setting to work put together in one afternoon.

You seem like the only angry person here, you triggered autist.

>Bethesda

I actually think the problem with FO3+4 was Bethesda. If Obsidian had been in charge, DC and Boston would have been fine environments.

Have you played Pathologic? And the new prototype, Marble Nest?

That is very much precisely what it was. Actually Fallout 4 shows a little more understanding for the settings, but the fucking storyline is about god-damn replicants, so yeah. They officially run out of an ideas where to take the bloody series.

I don't think Obsidian would ever place their games in Washington or Boston in the first place. Those are actually pretty poor choices for Fallout settings. I mean if forced, Obsidian would probably make it work SOMEHOW, since they are (were, not sure about the direction the company is taking now) pretty good at making fun classic RPG systems and writing. But I think the very decision to set the game in those cities alone shows utter lack of understanding of the actual tone that made Fallout 1/2 so damn good.

To be completely frank, Fallout should have died after New Vegas. There is basically nowhere to take the series without destroying what it was about.
They should have developed new IP: that would relieve the creative constraints and allow new space and new tone to be explored without being dishonest to the originals.

I think that if we got a better class of dev than Besthesda Game Studios, FO3+4 could have been better games. Yeah, NV was better than both, but I'm not convinced it's because they moved back into the desert, I'm pretty sure it's just because Obsidian is a better dev.

When I say I want a green apocalypse/nature reclaiming, I am definitely not talking about the south-west deserts - those should stay barren because that's the terrain. I just want FO5 to be set somewhere green.

/agree on America though. It could be fun to have a spin-off DLC in Europe or China, but the main game should stay American.

>Fin-de-siècle

my boner is ready

I think Bethesda just shot itself in the foot popularity wise.

They are a nerd company, their entire upper command is made up out of Morrowind veterans.

But they are popular with the Coowadoody crowd. They have to create simple dumb narratives that dig deeper when you hit sidequests and shit -because if they make games like Morrowind, 99% of players will be "wut?"

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From world building&story viewpoint Bethesda's big mistake probably was to start releasing their RPGs on consoles.

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I hope they bring aboard some writers skilled at layering lore.

I know it is a meme by now, DAWRKU SOAULZ, but if Bethesda learns to layer lore like how From Software does, we hypernerds will have lots of BESThesda to look forward to.

>Yeah, NV was better than both, but I'm not convinced it's because they moved back into the desert, I'm pretty sure it's just because Obsidian is a better dev.
Actually, the two are inseparable. Obsidian is a better dev, which is why they understood what made Fallout special, which is why they moved it back to the desert. Again, if you want dramatically different type of settings, then why the hell do you insist on it being Fallout? That would be FAR better solved by just creating a new post-apo IP.
The fallout games are set in a desert because it's a series about how humans FUCKED THE WORLD. Remove that and you are literally removing one of the narrative and aesthetic cornerstones of the IP. It's like setting the next Mad Max in a lush forest, or setting Blade Runner in a green fucking countryside. If you want to explore how cyberpunk countryside might look, you might not do it in a series whose aesthetic cornerstone is perpetual fucking night.

>They are a nerd company, their entire upper command is made up out of Morrowind veterans.
I don't think that is true anymore. I think anyone who actually cared about good world-building, the people who made Morrowind, are long gone. Nowdays, Beth is one of the most souless, cynical and uninspired developers out there. They have absolutely zero creative ambitions: their games are basically purely market-research driven.

The real mistake was to stop viewing game production as an actual valid artistic persuit, and start viewing it as pure business proposition. I think the fact that this shift in design philosophy aligned with their decision to persue the console crowd was actually coincidental, not causal process.

Fantastic shit. The swan-song of modern western art, really. Also, you can see where Moebius got his ideas.

Arts and crafts movement stuff is excellent too.

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Firearm combat is pretty spiffy in Traveller.

However it does suffer from being Rocket Tag, though that's fairly accurate to shooting IRL.

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I'm pretty sure that was drawn as an illustration to one of Poe's short stories...

As far as I know the only notable Morrowind veteran that left is Kirkebride.

Truth is made by majority rule. The more you let the words slip and twist away eventually it will be you who is wrong. Moobs and yolo are in the oxford dictionary now. This is the future you're choosing. Still happy with your choices?

Yes, maybe not this one but the previous one, definitely. They both are Harry Clarke engravings. All of his work is stunning.

Dude, are you familiar with the works of Tomm Moore, contemporary Irish animater, the guy who made Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea?
Because if you aren't, I REALLY recommend you getting those two movies and watching them.

Also, slightly unrelated, but still something I always think off when I see this kind of stuff:
Martin De Thurah, Danish (I think) music video and short movie director with some amazingly atmospheric and magical works.
Examples:
youtube.com/watch?v=h4rZE_J1beA
youtube.com/watch?v=X7Kw6s8CTrk
youtube.com/watch?v=Jr2JQNBGxC8
youtube.com/watch?v=4F-CpE73o2M
He inspired an entire wave of aesthetics in mostly Scandinavian and English music videos.
Symbolism and Fin-de-siècle stuff may not have much of a continuation in classic visual arts (outside of few rare exceptions, like the aformentined Moebius), but in cinematography, it still has quite a legacy.

Semper, ego non felix.

>Truth is made by majority rule.
Not really, no. There is always a balance between public consensus, and authority consensus. Language has a pragmatic, functional dimension. If the public let's certain valuable and useful concepts slip into meaninglesness, it's necessary that an authority body steps in and gets them back on the right track.