How come we don't see a lot of Weird West anymore?

How come we don't see a lot of Weird West anymore?

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Shares a lot of aesthetic space with steampunk, which degenerated into cogfoppery and then fell out of vogue. You make anything that looks steampunk and people into genre fiction will either just see dude gears lmao or hate it reflexively due to the first group

Because A: wild western stuff in general is seen as too /pol/ in this day & age, and B: everybody thinks of "Weird West" in terms of Cattlepunk (Wild West + Steampunk) and never actual Wild West + Fantasy.

Shame, too, because as Deadlands and Spellslinger proves, D&D + Wild West is actually a pretty fertile ground.

>wild western stuff in general is seen as too /pol/ in this day & age
Oh fuck off, no it isn't

It has always been a niche genre, at least ever since regular western went out of fashion

Not him, but I'd agree with it. Most new releases regarding that era have been about cowboys shooting eachother. Most of them shy away from having any conflict with the injuns because they're not seen as nazi-tier disposably baddies any more.

Because most modern audiences who think they like westerns dont actually like them, they just like the idea of it, the aesthetic, they dont understand the narrative style or the themes and thus its reduced to another expendable spice that doesnt attracts much attention instead of the whole genre it used to be, much like it happened to cyberpunk to some degree.

The average plebeian wont be able to recognize that "Rango" (a fucking kids movie) is a thousand times more of a western than "Wild Wild West" (actually a steampunk adventure set in the wild west) was or "Westworld" (actually just a sci-fi drama with cowboy aesthetic) will ever be.

I don't guess you'd be kind enough to do a breakdown, or point to an easily digestible rundown offsite? I've been trying to get into the Western mood but I don't really understand what makes the wheels turn in a western setting/story

Yeah, going to second

As a non-american I don't really have westerns as a cultural touchstone (Though our stories of Bushrangers are often said to be similar I can't confirm it) so while I'm curious about it I've not really got experience with it.

None of us can whistle, so we can't do wild west.
youtube.com/watch?v=h1PfrmCGFnk

Take cyberpunk for example, many people get fascinated with the "cyber" aspect of it but then end up taking the "punk" out of the equation, merely adding cybernetics into the setting doesnt makes a story cyberpunk.

Similarily the western genre had its own implied themes it was primarily about journeys, either literal or methaphorical but always with a sentimental importance, the setting of the old west was important not because of its geographical location but because of the situation of isolation and lawlessness it created which is the mood that westerns tried to capture, the heroes were not jolly adventurers and the villains were not evil masterminds with big plans, they were broken or vulnerable rangers and corrupt or amoral assholes.

When you think about it WWW is just a big sci-fi adventure, its just that the geographical location and dixie-southern aesthetic make you think its a western.

They were never nazi-tier disposable baddies in general, user. And a vast majority of famous westerns have been about cowboys shooting eachother rather than indians, because no one really thought those indian wars were cool on any level, and involvement is often used as a tragic or traumatic background for characters.

I think the post-apoc genre has very much inherited the niche that Westerns used to fill. Many of the archetypes are the same, as well as the feeling of lawless wilderness. The main difference being that post-apoc can generally pull off a higher adrenaline show that appeals better to today's mainstream audience.

Right, that's very interesting. Thanks a lot

I'll admit, I'm not sure if the game I'm in qualifies as 'Real' western (See my comment about not having it a cultural touchstone) but it's a lot of fun so far. In part because two of the PCs are Indian (Well, elven, same difference. It's got a fantasy edge to it).

A big theme of it is the vanishing culture of their people as they lose land to people, with the two heavily divided about how to handle it. One is very traditionalist, believing that their people should hold true to their culture, land and faith no matter what it costs as without that culture how can they really BE elven? The other one is much more integrated with the invaders, believing that the people and faith can endure the invaders and learn to live alongside them. She's currently pretending to be a travelling lawman (The badge she carried belongs to an old lawman she knew as a child who got himself killed trying to bring law to people raiding her tribe's land).

That conflict has been a lot of the plot (With one of our major situations being an attack on a railway line by an elven shaman who was the last survivor of his tribe and thus dedicated himself to dragging down as many invaders as he can before he dies, especially traitors like the second elf).

Weirdly enough, Star Trek is very much a Western show quite often (If not quite in the normal way). Kirk is out there, the only law on the wild frontier and exploring. Early DS9 was basically 'Frontier Town: In Space'.

Science Fiction can very much handle the western themes if people are concerned about the aesthetics turning people off.

The thing about post-apocalypse stories is that I feel they are too bleak, the bright aspects that westerns had that post-apoc stories usually lack is a strong sense of purpose and community that was probably inherited from samurai movies, they were generally more noble.

Basically, in westerns the foundations of a functional society were there and most good people were a majority, it was just the bad apples that spoiled it for the rest, in post-apocalyptic settings the foundations are destroyed, it just a few exceptional good people that try to rebuild civilization in a sea of shitty people.

>Basically, in westerns the foundations of a functional society were there and most good people were a majority, it was just the bad apples that spoiled it for the rest, in post-apocalyptic settings the foundations are destroyed, it just a few exceptional good people that try to rebuild civilization in a sea of shitty people.

So is the dollar trilogy not a western then? There are more assholes in that than good people.

Im trying to refer to a middle ground here, my point is that post-apocalyptic stories tend to be bleaker than westerns

Sure you have stuff like the dollar trilogy but the vast majority of westerns are still fairly upbeat

>it was primarily about journeys, either literal or methaphorical but always with a sentimental importance, the setting of the old west was important not because of its geographical location but because of the situation of isolation and lawlessness it created which is the mood that westerns tried to capture, the heroes were not jolly adventurers and the villains were not evil masterminds with big plans, they were broken or vulnerable rangers and corrupt or amoral assholes.
I guess it turns out I was way closer to the core of things than I thought, but having it all laid out like this is a massive help user. Thanks.

> anymore

Mate Weird West was always shit.

Man, no wonder I adored True Grit

Nice. That's really good info.

>They were never nazi-tier disposable baddies in general, user

Watch some really old westerns, like the ones from the thrities and forties. It’s not that there weren’t exceptions, but by and large protrayals of American indians only began getting more nuanced after world war 2.

The Disney John Carter movie had a pretty great western with fantasy elements start. Then it went all space fantasy before ending on a short victorian mystery.

This.

Wild West stuff produced in the US has never not been political.

spaghetti western best western

>Rango
Good lord, I think I still have that thing laying around somewhere. I haven't thought of it in ages.

This thread as made me want to watch a western. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? Or For A Fistful of Dollars? Or something else?

Same reason why there isn't much wuxia or kaiju outside of their countries of origin. It's not particularly interesting to non-Americans.

Watch the original True Grit or Cowboys, you communist.

You're ignoring the spaghetti western, which is a huge part of the western genre, being so thematically different as to be a completely different "genre" altogether. Like the difference between slow-burn horror and torture porn.

Traditional Western: About cultural division between north and south, often about conflict with Injuns or known incidents (Tombstone is a great example).

Spaghetti Western: Thinly veiled communist propaganda in many cases. Surprisingly strict formula: a hero who isn't so much a character as a force of nature (embodiment of justice or revenge or of The Revolution), often with a sidekick or kicker who represents the actual People. He's the only Good Guy. (think Cheyenne from Once Upon a Time in the West, or Tuco from Good, Bad, and Ugly)

It's quite a wide genre.

(And then you get into weird stuff like Northerns, and the occasional film made for Australian audiences, etc.)

You can also watch any movie by Kurosawa; his films are all westerns with swords.

Excuse me, The Cowboys, 1972.

Watch The Great Silence
and then kill yourself

Try "The Searchers" (if you can find it). It's an old John Wayne - John Ford movie. For something that's kind of obscure today, it's a startlingly influential movie.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Searchers

Westerns have been mostly tapped out in America save serious post-westerns like the 3:10 remake, Unforgiven, True Grit proper make, etc.

Steamfaggotry has never been popular in the US, and the wa wa wa movie in the 90s flopped.

I was in a Fantasy-Western not too long ago. The GM was having a lot of fun with it.

>Chinese Dwarves on the railroads
>Orc Banditos
>Wendigos, Bigfoots, etc.
>Dinosaur Valley in the Dakotas
>Magicians vs. Gunfighters
>Ancient Aztec curses
>Mormon Shenanigans
>Methodists

If you want to watch anime in the form of a live action western
Try the original Django

It's not possible to tell stories about your nation's past and not have them be political, especially when that past occurred recently and involves a lot of dead people, and especially not in a country that's tearing itself apart over unresolved fallout from that past.

Compare: would it be possible for an RPG about the Red October and its aftermath to avoid being considered political in Russia?

Bro, there's entire generations of Germans who obsess about this shit because of Karl May novels.

>You can also watch any movie by Kurosawa; his films are all westerns with swords.
You mean "Westerns" are just Kurosawa films with guns. The western film industry just ripped off Kurosawa for a few decades straight. They even ended up losing a lawsuit that was filed against them for making that movie that was a Yojimbo ripoff... Fistful of Dollars, iirc.

Shane, The Magnificent 7, Silverado, Trinity, High Plains Drifter, Going South, Paint Your Wagon.

Which is Best? You must decide.

Here is a list,
imdb.com/search/keyword?keywords=western-hero

>You can also watch any movie by Kurosawa; his films are all westerns with swords.
This has got to be bait.

I’d nominate “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” myself.

I think that’s mostly just “Veeky Forums really hates steampunk.”

>Because most modern audiences who think they like westerns dont actually like them, they just like the idea of it, the aesthetic, they dont understand the narrative style or the themes and thus its reduced to another expendable spice that doesnt attracts much attention instead of the whole genre it used to be, much like it happened to cyberpunk to some degree.
This doesn’t answer the question. Even if I bought the idea that a failure to embody the themes of classic westerns means that something isn’t a western— and I don’t— that wouldn’t explain an apparent decline in the incident of (false?) Weird West stuff. The actual answer is something more like .

This also wouldn’t explain an apparent decline in Weird West stuff, or westerns in general, given that Hollywood is still making movies. However, the increasing importance of foreign revenue might be a major factor, and the absence of an easily-recognizable franchise (aside from Zorro, which flopped) could also play a role.

its a shame penny dreadful didnt spend longer time in the US
the native american/cowboy werewolf thing was interesting
and that jonah hex movie had no damn chance at nott being shit
cant even get "almost" weird west style shit

Kurosawa was influenced by the early John Wayne films before Magnificent Seven and Sergio Leone built upon his work.
The big difference between Spaghetti Westerns and American Westerns is that the Italians acknowledge that Spanish settlements had been there for centuries, while American movies focus more on the pioneer milieu.
I'd say the place to start for Westerns is Shane (1953), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962).

Backing you up buddy; Kurosawa was hugely influence by the first wave of westerns to come out of the US, the second wave (Magnificent Seven, Fistful / For a Few Dollars, etc.) was in turn influenced by Kurosawas work. A nice tidy circle.

Bump for interest. I don't like deserts at all after being cooped up in one for the better part of a few years, but westerns always touched something special in me. One branch of my family were ranchers and my grandfather would tell me stories of those times told to him by his grandfather, as he grew up living on a farm. I mean, Westerns tend to be based off of the romanticised version of the events that transpired during that time and most of the things he talked about would be rather boring to your average listener, but I liked those stories, since they were stories about hard work and the satisfaction of managing to carve a better place for yourself from an unyielding wilderness.

Don't know what I'm saying, as it doesn't really pertain to the OP, but I guess part of it might be that, as fantasized as the west is, when you put it up against superheroes or spies or even the glamour of drug runners which seems to have become rather popular among the public lately, men fighting each other over the right to till lands, sell cattle, and extort townies seems too plain, even if you add technological anachronisms. And even then, I feel many would rather play a cowboy in a different setting then try to bring robots to the western.

It's like poetry.

I watched Red Sun not too long ago, the "Charles Bronson + the Samurai he was paired with finally get face to face with the man they are after when suddenly Indians attack.

They end up fighting alongside each other to stay alive.

Not evil, not good. Just a threat.

Pic related killed it.

I had an idea for a setting in which generic manipulation was invented around the same time as the push west, resulting in a biopunk wild west setting
suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/51980267/
I wish it was more popular, but shit happens I guess

It doesn't sell.

Does Fury Road count?

What about Hell on Wheels?

they rhyme

Is Into the Badlands a Western?

Huh. That's a good question. The biggest issue is defining "Western" since the genre has gone through so many transformations in its time.

Sanitized and morally clean in the forties and fifties, John Wayne in the sixties,and grimy antieroic with the spaghettis, dime-novel fiction in the eighties and then the genre really died out until a resurgence in the last ten years. In the end, I'd guess the setting and the ideal of an individual Maverick are the only real threads that tie those eight decades together. Fury Road nails the setting, to be sure. Individualism less so.

I just want Eastern Western. Like that obscure action game, Rising Zan the Samurai Gunman.
I want ninjas with revolvers and cowboys with katanas, I want massive railroads with five-story wagons designed after japanese architecture. I want injuns trading weapons with the chinese and mixing martial arts with firepower, resulting in Equilibrium-tier gunkata. I want gunchaku, gunswords, gun kusarigama and other retarded shit like that. I want silly names like Tatsumaru Eastwood, Hanzo Ramirez or James K. Kisaragi. I want old businessmen dressed in a mix of victorian and traditional japanese attires. I want it to be bonkers and fun.

Westerns from the thirties and forties don't count as Westerns as we know them.

If you like that, i would recommend Sukiyaki Western Django.

>until a resurgence in the last ten years

Can you really call modern movies set in the West "Westerns?" The Revenant is the only one I can think of that really captured the Western aesthetic, same with Rango.

The most recent incarnation of The Magnificent Seven removed the Mexican bandits (originally the leader was played by Eli Wallach, a Jew), and replaced them with a businessman meant to be an analogy for Trump. The Seven included an Asian, an Indian, and a handful of "whites" led by a black bounty hunter.

Who cares, the movie was a magnificent flop and hardly anyone even remembers it was released.

That's the thing about these remakes, user. They might diversify the fuck out of the movie, but if it sucks than it's nothing more than a paper tiger to the source material's legacy. Do you think The Dark Tower with Idris Elba has irreversibly changed the way people see the Dark Tower series?

It's kind of a shame, because I liked the gunfights in the new one (though people falling over dead after getting an arrow in the shoulder was a bit silly).

Chris Pratt had a really poor go at being a cowboy, though. And his sudoku at the end didn't make sense.

Wait, I thought The Dark Tower was a reference to Elba's... *ahem* main asset.

>though people falling over dead after getting an arrow in the shoulder was a bit silly

Shoulders are full of arteries, user, and arrows are vicious when they enter the human body.

His last act was meant to be symbolic.

Even the "good" whites are meant to give their lives to stop the "bad whites."

I know that. An arrow in the shoulder could very well kill the fuck out of you, but the guys in the movie just keeled over like they'd been domed by a rifle shot.

They kinda had the same issue with the hatchet dude, with guys getting hit and just flopping over like a sack of flour.

It's a shitty message, and the shitty reception the movie got seems to show the rest of America agrees.

Yes, there is a concerted effort by Hollywood to shove the liberal agenda into whatever aspects of American life remain that aren't already stained with their touch. No, it's not working. Fuck, NuWars has been Hollywood's greatest success at doing this and it's surviving purely by the cash of a bonafide Megacorporation, who aren't even able to plug the leaks caused by The Last Jedi.

Good, respectable people know quality when they see it, user. All the remakes or rehashes won't change that.

>implying America wasn't founded on liberal principles

The idea of "real America" being conservative is hogwash.

>They might diversify the fuck out of the movie
>how can I miss the point
You do know the highlight of Seven Samurai was that each was some manner of failure or reject redeemed by being heroic at death, right?

The common man is conservative while the actual cogs of the political apparatus are liberal. That's how successful societies have been since forever.

"Conservative" principles as you know them didn't exist until recently.

Real America was founded on the principle that state governments are inherently corrupt and you need a federal government to slap them around a bit. But do little else aside from slapping those state governments around for being dicks. Also that there is a reason the common man should only have a say in a relatively small part of government because if the common man is allowed to vote for every part of the government the government becomes mob rule and demagoguery. But for some reason we vote for senators anyway.

Because I'd rather have a weird Napoleonic setting.

We dident liked being ruled by britfags so we shot them. We did not protest and demand safe spaces.

Sorry, when I said conservative I meant "traditional," as in, "people generally take after their father, and their father before them, and their father before them, etc."

An example of this is Childlore, aka the lore children pass onto other children. Did you know some games played by kids are virtually unchanged since Roman times?

>Also that there is a reason the common man should only have a say in a relatively small part of government because if the common man is allowed to vote for every part of the government the government becomes mob rule and demagoguery.

But Switzerland has a robust tradition of direct democracy that works just fine.

America was founded because they didn't want to pay higher taxes after the Brits saved them during the French and Indian War.

>Weirdly enough, Star Trek is very much a Western show quite often (If not quite in the normal way). Kirk is out there, the only law on the wild frontier and exploring.

It was pitched as Wagon Train to the stars.

Switzerland also has a robust tradition of keeping things neutral.

See, I almost fell for the common Yankee mistake of saying they also had cultural and ethnic homogeneity, which isn't true at all.

Because whites.

America doesn't have whites.

And America's success as a nation is dependent on the Enlightenment idea that a man need not be limited by "social caste" or what society expects him to do.
One of the better conversations I ever had was with a European immigrant who waxed fondly of how his children would not be expected to be like him, but could be as successful as they wanted based on their efforts and respected for it, while the same would be virtually impossible in Europe based on the traditions you are holding up.

>And America's success as a nation is dependent on the Enlightenment idea that a man need not be limited by "social caste" or what society expects him to do.

That ideal has been dead for years and is probably one of the reasons America has become a bloated corpse.

But didn't, because "white people" are clearly all the same, everywhere.
>goddammit Americans

Whites are anyone of Swiss, Danish, German, Gaulish, Swedish, Norwegian, etc. heritage. Of course, obesity, autism, mental illness and/or idiocy negates whiteness.

You shitting on Rango? That was an amazing movie.

Never seen it. Somehow never even heard it existed.

Try The Good, the Bad, the Weird for a Korean take on that sort of thing.

He said with a confused look on his face as he posted a picture of the bad guy from Wild Wild West.

>6’3”
Well he is quite tall

That's not true at all. Westerns are huge among, in particular, older generations of Europeans. Younger people, I'd say about 30 and down, probably a little lower even, have much less of an interest in it though.

That was an amazing film

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWestern

user meant his BBC

And is the size of my left nut-at the scale the current USA operates at, representative democracy is barely viable, let alone direct
I don't think it would even work in some of the larger states...

>american education

I posted in your thread user

Don't explain the joke; it makes you look retarded.