So it's been said Korea and India would be to our future what we thought Japan would be to our future back in the 80's...

So it's been said Korea and India would be to our future what we thought Japan would be to our future back in the 80's. Unfortunately, TRPGs are basically unknown in India and the Koreans have a mysterious aversion to science fiction as a genre, so we don't get anything from them.

With that in mind, what would you put in cyberpunk India and/or Korea?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtu.be/Xl0b2LGf9jM
youtube.com/watch?v=_peUxE_BKcU
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Who the fuck has said that. Korea is too small and India is too fractured and primitive. Whoever said that is a fucking idiot.

>what would you put in cyberpunk India
Chemical Streets to wash away the poo

Korea has an aversion to scifi? wouldn't Starcraft suggest otherwise? Or is it that all potential sci fi fans are busy playing Starcraft?

India was The Next Big Thing for at least 15 years. That shithole of a country is like Brazil: Could be great but will never amount to anything because of its people.

Researchers are divided on what exactly the reason for it is but the fact is that Koreans just don't likr science fiction. They're okay with the "aesthetic" of science fiction, so to speak, but they have no interest in film, literature or games which would be classified as science fiction anywhere else. They don't consume it, don't produce it, don't import it and in the extremely rare cases an individual Korean does they tend to define the science fiction text through its plot (e.g. "Drama", "romance") rather than anything else. StarCraft, for example, is seen as a strategy game, not a science fiction game. They don't mind that it has robots and aliens, it's completely meaningless to them. They don't give it a moment's thought. You could replace all the textures in the game with abstract colored polyhedrals and so long as the gameplay didn't change they wouldn't even notice.

>Korea and India are the future
>Not China
What the fuck, OP.

I read somewhere that it's because science fiction is inherently idealistic and Koreans as a culture are just absurdly cynical. Even what passes for science fiction in Korea is, 99.99% of cases, post-apocalyptic stories taking place "Next Sunday A.D.". And not even the imaginative kind of apocalypse. Stuff like "new strain of flu kills everyone" of "the economy collapses".

What's there TO be great about a nation other than the people? Does it have brilliant dirt?

Resources, positioning, weather...
Some countries are just shitholes and will never be good. Take some parts of Africa for example where nothing grows, no resources of note can be gathered and the position makes it irrelevant for trading or production.

India has all the downsides of China without the upsides. It has even worse pollution than China but not the industrial development. It has even worse gender imbalance but not the population control.

Westerners love it because it's supposed to democratic but the current ruling party are a bunch of Hindu fascists, the opposition are basically the Gandhi family aristocracy, and every government had been obscenely corrupt. It's supposed to have a rule of law, but the police can detain you for whatever reason and you can sit your ass in jail for years before you can even get to court.
It has multiple Communist, Islamic and separatist insurgencies raging across the country, some have been ongoing for half a century.

>Westerners love it because it's supposed to democratic
And in reality it's just anarchic and badly organised with a weak central government.

Not at all because of CIA constantly scheming to keep it down, no

The still did Natural City, a cyberpunk action/thriller/drama. 2009: Lost Memories, a sci-fi thriller/drama. 11 A.M., another sci-fi action/thriller/drama. Snow Piercer, a sci-fi/post-apocalyptic action/drama. But that would be about all real Korean sci-fi movies I know of.

I wonder if you could sell them on some of the darker Cyberpunk stuff (darker theme-wise, rather that the metal monster gore shit that Japanese cyberpunk went with), where it's a shitty world and even the "good guys" are just a slightly lighter shade of grey?

Anyway, cyberpunk India and Korea (ignoring for a moment , who has an excellent point, in the China is both the future, and cyberpunk as fuck), well I've seen India done before:

River of Gods is set in mostly peaceful, if balkanised, India (though the companion Cyberabad Days has some short story with a war, including a fun take on "cool teenagers piloting giant robots" anime thing), and Netrunner has the Mumbad cycle, set in an Indian megacity stretching from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, pic related.

India has a long history of at least certain groups being very scholarly, and they have a China-like ability to rely on numbers for high end talent thanks to their enormous population.

Korea seems to be pretty ignored in general, especially after their bubble kinda burst, but they're still not small, and they're pretty cyberpunk - if anywhere fits the Gibson everyone-gets-surgery-for-fashion thing it'd be Korea, everyone knows how mad they are about e-sport, and at least one of their members of parliament is a Hyundai exec.
And speaking of Hyundai, it was a Chaebol (the Korean version of a Zaibatsu) and even after being split into mere allied companies on the death of its founder is still enormous. It is one of only 2 car companies (the other being Tata, which is Indian) to be vertically integrated - meaning it owns the whole process from making steel to selling to the man in the street. And they also sell mining equipment, even if they don't mine themselves.

While it's not especially cyberpunk, I feel it should be pointed out that in the 80s, the Indian Navy's Marine Commando Force were equipped with crossbows supplied with cyanide-tipped bolts. Because that's cool as fuck.

My understanding of SC was koreans always saw themselves as self insert protoss.
Every korean ive known of has been a chauvanist.

One reason why Korea gets often forgotten is because it's rather small. It has a population of 50 mio. inhabitants, which is like 15% less than France or the UK, 60% less than Germany, and none of those can be called a super power - at least not at US, Chinese or Russian super power level.

>Russia
>superpower
Its economy is smaller than Italy and its army shittier than the french. The only thing it has is a stockpile of nukes

Save the Green Planet
A damn great movie, too

River theory is based around this (it's basically the belief that most if not all great cities have grown alongside rivers due to the options for fishing and transport) and it's suspected to be the real reason why white people became the most populous race.

Cold, wet temperate oceanic is ideal for growing lots of crops. Flat lands, lots of space to travel, many rivers, a lot of game.

Also, despite you saying that, India is getting huge in biotech right now. Like the Lion tech Kings in Africa.

We also eat stray dogs and season them with sawdust, don't forget that

Stay safe and avoid the metro, дpyг.

Korea will always lead the US as long as they are the highest upstream internet culture. You could have predicted a Trump-like figure 5 years ago by watching Korean trends - and I guarantee you whatever happens from the impeachment crisis will happen here pretty freaking soon.

Don't forget the eventual reunification between south and north will most certainly cause the southern economy to go down the shitter even faster. Like what happened to Germany but many times worse.

Unless it is Best Korea that is doing the reunification, then its technically an 'improvement' instead.

>Christian regressionists and a country that won't stop shitting in the street
>future

You have no idea what actually happened in Germany, do you.

Why could South Korea go for the unification after seeing what happened to Germany?

>Buying into tumblr tier bullshit
>Poo in the loo and starcraft is our future

>(ignoring for a moment , who has an excellent point, in the China is both the future, and cyberpunk as fuck)

Actually, let's not ignore that. Consider for a moment that they are actually doing a "citizen points" system right now to electronically store how good of a citizen you are using all sorts of surveillance on your browsing/social media/internet footprint in general.

On one hand, this is terrifying. On the other hand, this is fucking perfect for cyberpunk dystopia. Manipulating that database can get you all sorts of benefits. Wanting to go off the grid, creating your own secluded and secure subcultures is more and more encouraged. All we need is for cyberlimbs to catch on and we are (the new black) golden.

China is teetering on social, political, and economic collapse, with about half the world eager to push them in at first opportunity to maintain the status quo.

Breeding like roaches and badly copying the ideas of superiors does not a future make.

Can you make me a tinfoil hat too? I think the lizard people are influencing my decisions.

That's just what we want you to think.

>Lion tech Kings
The what now?

Germany wasn't in anything like such a state as NoKo, but after their very costly reunification they went into boom and are the biggest economy in Europe even after that ended.
While a hypothetical United Korea can't really compete with China, at a good 75-80 million they could very easily become a power like one of the big 3-4 in Europe after the boom, assuming they survive it.

I'm seeing some Korean megacorps buying up what little can be salvaged of newly privatised Nork industries and exploiting that pretty much anything is a step up in standard of living even if it's shit to get a very loyal indentured workforce that'll make make current Korean company towns look like a totally free market.

Germany was the biggest and most dynamic economy in Europe, before the reunification. A united Korea could become the same in Asia, but for now I don't see Korea getting united anytime soon. The North hates the South and vice versa, whereas Germans always thought of each other as separated brothers - a war between the two would have been a Bruderkrieg (war between brothers).

>Brazil getting super friendly with China
>suddenly, out of nowhere, a coup lead by the most pro-American politicians in the country
Gee, I wonder!

Tens of millions of half-starved homeless ex-commies flooding their country looking for a handout would wreck Korea's economy. SoKo isn't hurting for unskilled labor, which is all NoKo offers.

>All we need is for cyberlimbs to catch on
Pretty sure this is china, anyway.

Yeah, sesame credit is definitely like something out of a dystopia novel, but definitely fits some cool themes.

I thought they considered themselves to be the ONLY Korea. Certainly would be a lot harder to reunify. I presume it'd happen when China stopped propping up Pyongyang, but you'd need a reason for them to want a huge mess on their doorstep. Maybe a backroom deal for a few Chinacorps to exploit the newly "liberated" north koreans?

But yeah, I've checked the GPD for '90, hadn't realised that West Germany dominated in Europe all through that time and before

India's supposed biotech is entirely based on copying western pharma research and producing biosimilars. India does virtually no innovative medical research, unless you count finding new applications for cow shit as research.

Technically, companies like Hyundai, Kia, Lotte, Samsung and LG could outsource work to NK instead of Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand. This would cut shipping cost and time, but it would require to improve NK's infrastructure. Then, land in North Korea could be used for more intensive farming, which could lower Korea's dependency on imports. But I guess that it still wouldn't be enough to provide work for 25 millions unemployed Best Koreans.

>coup

African multi-millionaires investing in IT and tech. They have been called the Lion Kings.

>but it would require to improve NK's infrastructure.
There's probably contracts there - it'd be a huge outlay, but you could bill for the returns for decades, and there'd be plenty of very cheap labour to spare

Cool, though all my searches for the term directly get eaten by the stage show dominating the google

Sure. Poo... mountains of poo everywhere. The poo-runners illegaly try to keep the streets clean, evading the watchful eyes of the poolice.

Coup.

The runner evaded the police by gliding over the poo-filled streets like mercury in a teflon-coated frying pan, thanks to his interfaced Salomon-Völkl cyberskis. His diarrhea dispenser was working on overdrive covering the street with liquid shit.

>all these retards thinking they know anything about economics, politics, or history to be able to make any sort of prediction as to what countries will prosper and which will collapse in the future

you guys should just stick to what you do best: fiction

as for OP, india already has the caste system so I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to fit that into a cyberpunk setting (augment caste?)

Sanjit the runner was evading the police by gliding elegantly over the poo-filled streets, like a drop of mercury in a teflon-coated frying pan - mainly thanks to his interfaced Salomon-Völkl cyberskis and the turbine mounted implanted in his lower back. His automated diarrhea dispenser was working on overdrive, covering the street with warm and liquid shit that had the consistency of millet porridge. As he reached terminal velocity like a runnaway train on amphetamines, his biomonitor signaled him that his vector-oriented anus was close to rupture under the heavy load.

>dude people have been saying India and China are going to boom but lmao they're not
I sincerely hope people here are not this retarded. The average household income has increased for both countries (when compared to the dollar), national GDP has increased for both countries, and the economies have been doing quite well.

I know a ton of people in my field who are looking to finance Indian start-ups. People are consistently saying they are going to be the next big thing because they already are. They have huge successful corporations in India like Tata Group.

Korea has already hit its "big deal" moment with a ton of people around the world driving Hyundais, using Samsung phones, and using LG screens.

South Korea is basically a real life cyberpunk "dystopia"

The population is wealthy, educated, swamped in technology and has decent social services (comparatively at least). However it has high suicide rates, high burn out rates, gigantic family corporations that controls a good chunck of the country with an obscene amount of influence on politics.

Their just outsted leader was also effectively... a cultist being manipulated by the daughter of a well known (In korea) cult leader.

It probably explains why sci fi and cyberpunk isnt so interesting for South Koreans. Its basically everyday life.

>China is teetering on social, political, and economic collapse
t.jealous American that works at McDonalds and has a clown for a President.

People drive Hyundai, Kia and Ssang Yong because they are decent cars. Tata on the other hand is shit. Sure, they bought Jaguar Land Rover, which are great, but Tata brand vehicles are either shitty cars built for the indigenous market and cheap trucks and busses built for poor countries (even emerging countries don't want them). Their main competition are Chinese vehicles, which are about equally crappy.

>social, political, and economic collapse
China has been through political collapse before, that doesn't obliterate a country; especially not nowadays

Tata is shit because its cheap. Tata obviously needs to market their products to the only people who matter to them. That doesn't mean that entities in India don't exist that have a large amount of capital that they could invest in technology, manufacturing, and infrastructure. Only an absolute idiot would ignore India in terms of their economic potential and clearly no one is ignoring them in the finance world.

B-but poo in loo! The memes, Jack! The memes!

I distinctly remember when they were all considered automotive jokes, but they stepped up their game. They're unlikely to be high-end, but they're solid and decent when in the early 'thousands (do we have a decent name for that decade yet?) they were noticeably both poor cars and low-quality.

They've just got a big head start on Tata, and didn't have an enormous but very poor market they wanted to focus on - Tata wanted primarily to sell cars to people riding bikes in India, and there's still a lot of people they want to convert. Hence cheap and shitty cars

Tata is shit because it doesn't have the knowhow US and European car makers have. VW, PSA, GM or Fiat could also make dirt cheap cars, that still would be much better than anything Tata has ever produced. Heck, Dacia, that belongs to Renault, is making almost decent cars that cost the price of crappy Indian and Chinese cars and still pass Euro crash and pollution test. You can have all the money you want, if you don't have knowhow and skilled workers who care about their job and are somewhat competent, your high-tech assembly lines will only produce crap.

I can give you tons of examples. The HAL Tejas, India's first indigenous 4.5th gen fighter. This flying piece of junk didn't even make it into production and it's already hopelessly outdated. In the same time China produced its first 4.5th gen fighter, the J-10. Then it made another one for export, the JF-17. And now they're making two 5th gen fighters. Or another great example: Small arms. India is still building WWII crap for its civilian market (Webley revolver clones and stuff like that). The Indian assault rifle, the INSAS, is a total failure. India is probably the only country in the world that could fuck up an AK-clone. Even Iraq and Egypt make better small arms (and I guess that Flip gunsmith make better firearms in jungle workshops than Ordnance Factories Board and ARDE).

china definitely has major problems

Pollution, demographics, ethnic tensions, public debt in "private" companies... but its problems are not more perilous as those in western developed countries. And unlike the West, the Chinese still has a generation of people that remembers what its like to not eat a meal.

The Western World lives in a nice house slowly falling apart and with house mates that have wildly different ideas on how to fix it. Some of them involve burning down part of the house.

China is in a house that was really shitty but with some nice improvements added on top of it and a poor paint job to hide cracks. However it can dedicate itself to one idea... but their only effective tools are hammers of varying sizes.

>Indian arms procurement

lol

The Indian military is a great case study on why taking great ideas and pieces from almost every military in the world will be complicated as fuck and ultimately a detriment.

China has huge problems. India has even more problems. The EU turned into a bureaucratic nightmare straight out of a Kafka novel and is plagued by low fertility rate that can only be covered by immigration. I really see no one that could compete with the US in the next decades (big inner market, strong economy, natural resources, most advanced military, very innovative, stable population...).

That's an unfair thing to say about... Chinese cars. They are way ahead of Indian cars in terms of safety features. Indian consumers are more than a decade behind China in car safety awareness. Indians will buy any death trap as long as it's cheap.

> potential

Unfortunately that's all it is, unrealized wasted potential. Just like Africa and south America

Toilets for India

India with toilets? Sorry this is breaking my suspension of disbelief.

>>Poo in the loo and starcraft is our future
Won't lie, I wouldn't mind a pneumatic-suspension athletic cup. The automatic gausse rifles would be fun also.

And Antarctica. India's population doesn't mean shit beside most of them besides the upper castes are literally IQ89. They have more poverty than Africa.

>The EU turned into a bureaucratic nightmare straight out of a Kafka novel and is plagued by low fertility rate that can only be covered by immigration.

The latter is a meme created by Merkel to further destroy wages in Germany and the former isn't half as bad as you are making it, but certainly needs a massive cleanup and restructuring.
Still, we'll never be truly relevant again until we start dealing properly with Russia and pull each other up.

India in 2030
youtu.be/Xl0b2LGf9jM

As a Korean, I can confirm.

We're pretty damn ultranationalist (and racist) as a culture. Our usual propaganda is that Korea is a nation of impeccable moral virtue and achievement that invented everything worthwhile in human civilization.
Also Japan is satan.

Both North and South Korea are varying shades of Nazi, with the Japanese as the Jewish-Bolsheviks.

There's also the fact that any futuristic scenario taking place in Korea MUST by nature talk about North Korea somehow, and what you can say about North Korea is tightly regulated.
They don't censor info about it, but their media does their level best to avoid any ideas or anything that would antagonize their neighbor because a full-scale war that now would likely involve nuclear exchange is a very real and very scary possibility for them.

So they have to make sci-fi where NK is still around, or just not talk about it all.

Pfffft, got evidence to back that up friendo?

NK achieves final stage of communism and becomes a true worker's paradise, dissident South Koreans flee across the DMZ to true freedom under the guidance of Kim whatever.

Instead of Cyberpunk, this feels like it would make a great science fantasy setting. You and another species land on a planet you can both use, but the other one is a race of giant insect people you try to work around.

Do you know there's a 300 pages long directive on the curvature of cucumbers? Do you know there's a directive about how much salt should be in bread? Did you follow the EU gun ban? Obviously not.

The EU is a bureaucratic monster created to employ ten-thousand of otherwise useless academicians. If you check how most successful unions were formed (Swiss Confederation, USA...), you'll always see the same pattern: practical men forged a military alliance to defend a common interest. There's a common constitution and all the rest is more or less left for the different states to decide.

The EU is the opposite. It's not a military alliance, it's a centralist trade alliance that imposes rules from top to bottom - it's pretty much like the USSR. But how could a trade alliance work when you have countries with a medium salary of 3000 bucks per month and others with 400 bucks?

>But how could a trade alliance work when you have countries with a medium salary of 3000 bucks per month and others with 400 bucks?
Everyone is afraid of the big, bad Russian bear

Worked for quite awhile actually, come to think of it.

>But how could a trade alliance work when you have countries with a medium salary of 3000 bucks per month and others with 400 bucks?

Simple; everyone was afraid of Russia.
Then they weren't.
Except now they are again.

>nation of impeccable moral virtue and achievement
dunno about the rest but this is true of most countries

The cucumber thing wasn't 300 pages long, it was part of a set of regulations to ensure comparable standards for vendors across the EU, so you don't have to check if every fucking cucumber conforms to the regulations of your country if you import them. Because, believe it or not, the EU didn't invent regulations, the member countries themselves wanted them standardized. Which is also one of the biggest challenges for the UK right now: Figuring out and putting their own regulations into place.

The Union has degenerated into a pile of shit regardless and needs some serious reformation and re-invention regardless. But if you actually think most successful long term alliances aren't heavily economically motivated, you should do some more research. Not to mention that the EU was doing fine until certain german cunts started pushing for the retarded east expansion.

India is a third world shithole everywhere outside of the most touristy parts of it's largest cities. It has zero chance of ever achieving anything even remotely close to being the kind of cyberpunk powerhouses that Japan was depicted as in the 80s.

How about stuff like space opera, which doesn't really have to involve anything from Earth directly? The only one I can think of is that VN which technically takes place on a spaceship but in every other regard it's just a historical drama so I don't think it counts. I mean, is it that hard to set your story in some galaxy far, far away and have some robots blow each other up or something?

Excepted the EU isn't a military union - there's no EU army. The defense treaty of Western Europe is NATO, and NATO is to 50% the USA. Oh, and almost no European country fulfills its NATO-obligations apart of Greece and one other country I don't remember.

>But how could a trade alliance work when you have countries with a medium salary of 3000 bucks per month and others with 400 bucks?

The idea is to help out poorer nations and uplift them to better wages, which should pay off because richer economies are better trade partners. And that worked really well in some parts, until it was abandoned. The Union got too big too quickly to pull this off.

EU is run by bureaucrats, the US by /pol/. One of these can keep the cogs turning, the other won't even try because it's easier to claim they are and it's all Hillary's fault anyway.

US is finished as a superpower and likely as a country as well. It comes down to whether EU can overcome its separatists and China it's authoritarianism. The worst case scenario, "no" to both, would leave Russia free to spread whatever the Hell is wrong with it to the rest of the world, likely simply stopping progress in its tracks until it (once again) rotted from within and collapsed.

Poland, Greece, UK and motherfucking Estonia.

And iirc, France and Turkey like the tread the line a lot.

>and one other country I don't remember.
In 2016 only five met the 2% target -- the U.S., Greece, Poland, Estonia and the U.K

Yeah, they were like 1.8, 1.9% of GDP, it's countries like Germany skirting along with like 1.1%

Excepted companies have no interest in paying higher wages. They are absolutely happy to have low-cost countries next door. And then comes the fact that some of the poor countries cheated their way in the EU.

>US is finished as a super power and as a country
This is so stupid, it's incredible. Are you French by any chance?

Estonia strong.

If I was, would that refute my argument? If I was the most cheese-obsessed french mime imaginable, would that make the current US government any less moronically malevolent? Would it make "alternative facts" any more true?

And let's not forget _why_ Tweeter-in-Chief was elected: half of America doesn't _want_ a future, but a return to some (imagined) golden age in the past with plentiful industrial and coal-mining - in other words, low-tech - jobs. Well, all yours, but don't expect to "lead" anything if you insist on staying behind.

The US is lagging behind the EU in term of tech by the way

>India

S U P E R P O W E R B Y 2 0 2 0

youtube.com/watch?v=_peUxE_BKcU

>the impeachment crisis

>he thinks Trump has done anything worth being impeached for

lol

Hence why I said "It worked for a while and then they fucked it up"
The income, living standards and infrastructure of my ass-backwards neck of my country vastly improved thanks to the EU. Our federal government literally did not give a shit about us for fourty years and even though the fucks in your regional government mostly kept the cash to the region around the regional capital, the situation vastly improved for everyone thanks to the EU fundings. It's something I'd wish for everyone living in poorer regions.
But they shot the entire system to shit by loading up way too many poor fucks precisely because Germany wanted cheap labor.

Why would Koreans be averse to science fiction? They love Starcraft

What surprises me is that there's no Korean mecha (meka?) culture. They stole everything from the Japanese except that.

We're heading into the era of specialized micronations like Slovakia, Monaco, Malta, etc.

Shithole, tax shelter, tax shelter?

By what metric?
The US produces far more published scientific material than the entire european continent.

As nations get more and more invasive in terms of taxes, privacy and morality, these countries will start becoming more appealing to people that don't belong to just the rich. Hell, almost everyone emigrates out of my country as soon as they get a college degree because no one worth something wants to pay half their salary in taxes.

They had some standards when they were doing their stealing.