What are the themes of Dieselpunk?
What are the themes of Dieselpunk?
Robert Brown
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Juan Sullivan
There are no themes because there's no significant body of work to draw from. It's just an art style.
However, since that art style is heavily influenced by the 1930s then any dieselpunk setting will probably have analogues to that decade's political scenes. So closest thing to a consistent "theme" you'll get is "Nazis are bad" which is not only obvious but pretty common in a lot of genres
Julian Flores
>So closest thing to a consistent "theme" you'll get is "Nazis are bad"
alternatively "nazis are good"
Christian Sanders
Diesel and Punk
Ethan Taylor
Generally the setting focuses on an ongoing WWI equivalent or an impending WWII equivalent.
Sebastian Diaz
It's got punk in the name,
So it's major themes will be anti-establishment in nature, along with a highlight of some form of social divide.
If you want the diesel half of it's name? That everything is shit and grimy because it's all based on a very dirty fuel that reflects the horror Europe faced after witnessing the First World War and it's industrialisation, so much like cyberpunk you've got some themes of being wary of what technology can bring and how it's utilised too.
Also that picture is the equivalent of cogfop for Steampunk, Christ. It's so... bright.
Hunter Foster
>alternatively "nazis are good"
Yeah but I generally don't play with people who try selling me on that
Ayden Brooks
>Diesel
>Punk
Anthony Watson
It's by and large more of an aesthetic than anything else, with no defining themes.
That said, you'll usually see some sort of focus on war, because of the WWI/WWII influence.
Hudson Anderson
Communism, Nazism, and Socialism in general being shit.
Kayden Lewis
Optimism for tomorrow and/or reeling from the shock of WW1/WW2. Powered flight is often prominent as a visual/structural element
Jace Rivera
Basically over the top WW1-interwar-WW2 thematics, both in artstyle and social/political issues and worries.
>Art deco architecture, except bigger and more brutal
>Heavy, strong shapes, few curves, generally a dirty look
>Lots of metal, dark colours
>Biomancing, transhumans look more like cyborgs, lots of experimentation
>Equipment generally looks blocky and clumsy, often has exposed worky gubbins, pipes, wires, cables...
>Somewhat grim in the face of the unprecedented powers of industry and war on a scale never seen before, globalism as a growing challenge to overcome, urbanisation, conurbation etc.
One of the most Dieselpunk-style things I know are Japanese WW2 battleships, take a look at them.
Juan Hill
The evils of militarized nationalism and industrialized warfare, imho
Julian Walker
You know how steampunk is about technology making the world a better place and fighting global ignorance and how companies use their assets to liberate people oppressed by monarchies and the old ways?
Dieselpunk is the realization that these same technologies or their more refined versions thereof can be used by said institutions to continue their regimes, or that less scrupulous individuals than the adventurer entrepreneur exist to use it and that the mad scientist might need to work with unethical groups in order to realize his dreams. It's World War I shattering the idea that technology could only lead to better heights in human progress, it's Stalin transitioning from a bright-eyed revolutionary to a heartbroken crook to a totalitarian villain, it's Ludwig II getting murdered by individuals who think his naturalist romanticism is insanity and has no place in the modern era, the dadaists revolting at the industrialists' increasing sidelining of nature and tradition in the name of progress, it's the protagonists of Steampunk growing older and having their morality tested; many becoming the very institutions they fought so hard to dismantle.
Technology has grown larger and stronger than the men who wield it, able to move a mountain, destroy a city, do the work of an entire community's week in a day. The same technology made to uplift man is beginning to be used to repress him, and unlike the monarch or the lord, you cannot reason with a machine, and the most deranged among those who wield them have taken on the mindset of machines; thinking along the lines of means, statistics, numbers. This is the beginning of the stripping away of humanity that will lead to the totalitarian police states of the Cyberpunk future.
Charles Bell
The last few vestiges of the romantic past might still exist: the cavalrymen descended from knights, the old samurai, the nobleman who still holds chivalry as an ideal to be upheld, fighting to defend the weak and the innocent, or to uphold their increasingly obsolete institutions, but it is clear that this is their last stand as technology has eclipsed man, and no degree of finesse and skill can overcome the tireless machines they face. Though some might see the writing on the wall and silently retire to fade away, others would rather die by their codes doing what they were trained to do their entire lives in a final defiant gesture, marking the decisive end of an era.
Connor Thompson
So would the new heroes of this era be the pulp heroes? People like the Shadow, the Phantom, Doc Savage, Blackstone and the like?
Aaron Wilson
The fact that the old still exists but is fading out provides an convenient explanation for pulp heroes to run into samurai or ancient orders of monks and similar, as well as the examples trained by such as an echo of their legacy, some of them tempered by it but not so inflexible as to be unable to adapt to the new reality, while others choosing a different path altogether for the sake of adventure while there is still parts of the world to explore.
Parker Gutierrez
A lot of good ideas here.
Dieselpunk often has a theme of individual heroism and skill giving way to ruthless pragmatism. You'll often see old-style WW1-and-earlier armies being ground under the treads of new-style tanks and early mechanized warfare.
I don't like mechs in dieselpunk, but they are pretty common. If you don't have mechs, you almost certainly have zeppelins. Unlike steampunk airships, zeppelins are usually industrious, efficient, and heavily armed and armored, more akin to dreadnaught-style warships than adventuring vessels. Mechs I think are just a symptom of the writer lacking imagination on the use of tanks.due to the latter's modern familiarity. Zeppelins are just plain cool, though.
In general, expect a lot of "end of an era" and "changing of the guard" style themes. Oh, and dieselpunk doesn't have to be WW2 - in fact I think it fits WW1 better due to more accurately portraying this eclipse of the old ways. But usually it's vaguely 1920s-1930s. All good aesthetics need contrasting elements, and shifting it to pre-WW2 allows you to bring in the sleek lines and retro-futurism of art deco, which historically was in the process of being replaced by modernism and so contrasts nicely as a civilian aesthetic with the militant, industrious look of sharp lines, cold metal, exposed rivets, and so on of dieselpunk. This dual aesthetic again plays into the idea of an era coming to an end, where fanciful and artistic aesthetic gives way to cold and practical reality much like fanciful and heroic warfare gives way to brutal pragmatism.
Austin Wood
Have a tonk, OP.
Jonathan Fisher
>I dislike steampunk
seems to be the main one in practice.
Kayden King
Here's what you do.
You don't set it in NotEurope, but NotPacific with tons of pulp and appropriate levels of proxy interest of larger nations
Angel Rogers
Fine, peaceful, spot.
DESTROY IT!
Logan Foster
>''From my point of view the gasoline combustion engines are evil!''
>''Then you are truely lost!''
Jaxon Long
I wonder how a not-so-super hero thing would work inspired by the Minutemen from Watchmen
Andrew Morris
Alternatively alternate "commies are bad"
Lucas Mitchell
Red Panda Adventurers is a pretty good take on this sort of thing. Masked men in smart suits punching evil.
Joseph Perez
Dieselpunk is all the themes of the actual post-Victorian to ww2 era but turned up to a heightened degree and usually with the addition of some fantastical elements.
Crack open a history book about the era and have a good look. A social history will serve better than a political one.
Ian Collins
Neato!
Got any sci-fi dieselpunk?
Bentley Powell
That's pretty broad. Anything in particular you had in mind? Space ships? Airships? Mechs? Robots? Something else?
Joshua Jones
fuck, ya know what? i actually meant fantasy dieselpunk, but sci-fi is good too!
Jace Parker
Usually "muh world war", sometimes "muh fifties sexism and McCarthy".
Wrong, although I don't blame you.
Brody Martin
have a few fantasy dieselpunk pics
Josiah Scott
Adam Miller
William Green
Alternatively "Nazis never came around and Germany/Austria-Hungary still has an aristocracy."
Camden Jenkins
>tfw you setting has all of the above
should I feel bad?
James Stewart
Alternatively
>"Nazis are good, but their Commonwealth allies are gooder, good-cop bad-cop space empire"
Aliens are bad, commies and star spangloids are a footnote on history.
Jaxon Williams
Are the Nazis and royalty at odds with each other in your setting?
Jeremiah Perry
>You know how steampunk is about technology making the world a better place and fighting global ignorance and how companies use their assets to liberate people oppressed by monarchies and the old ways?
No? What the fuck are you smoking?
Jace Scott
Yes and no. The !Nazi's blame the fall of their empire on the royals and have taken over a small portion of the territory. Most aren't aware, but they're being funded and influenced by some of the emperors cousins.
Wyatt Bennett
This
Alexander Edwards
>Jack motherfucking Churchill fighting magical/spooky tech Nazis
Why in the hell did I never think of this before.
Lucas Gray
Not him, but tell me of a seminal work in the deiselpunk genre, a la Neuromancer for others.
Anthony Taylor
>deiselpunk
When the fuck are you people going to check if TVTropes has a page before constantly reinventing every wheel.
Kevin Rivera
This drew some heat in the last thread but the BioShock games set in Rapture have a dieselpunk vibe. I got dragged into an argument with someone trying to say that the literally only thing that makes a dieselpunk setting is diesel fuel, and that aesthetic was irrelevant.
John Turner
Steampunk in the truest sense is about the hardscrabble poor being exploited by the forces of industrial change and classism, though.
Asher Lewis
Dieselpunk is more so an aesthetic for cool art than a broader genre. By and large, any "dieselpunk" story will likely be just Weird War I or Weird War II, as the aesthetic is defined by the military hardware of those eras.
Jaxson Gray
>Dieselpunk does not require diesel
I mean yeah, I'd complain too.
But then, the term "punk" doesn't carry any bloody meaning to any of the 3 major Xpunk genres anymore either so what the fuck does it matter?
Aiden Ross
> steampunk is about technology making the world a better place and fighting global ignorance and how companies use their assets to liberate people oppressed by monarchies and the old ways
What the fuck? No, no that's not what it's about at all, why the fuck would Steampunk, birthed from Cyberpunk, take the total opposite view on corporations?
Read The Difference Engine as the cornerstone of Steampunk, by the same guy who wrote Neuromancer (the cornerstone of cyberpunk), jesus fucking christ.
Joshua James
>Neuromancer (the cornerstone of cyberpunk)
Yeah. Neuromancer. Not True Names, Snow Crash, the original Akira manga, Eclipse, or the fucking book called Cyberpunk that coined the fucking term Cyberpunk.
Yeah, neuromancer is THE cornerstone of Cyberpunk.
Joseph Fisher
>Mechs I think are just a symptom of the writer lacking imagination on the use of tanks.
You have my attention and I wish to know more. This thread needs more tanks
Hudson Edwards
The nature of Nationalism and the nature of Empire.
Oliver James
Well it is. It's not the first, it didn't coin the term, but that doesn't mean it isn't a really fucking important work to defining the genre.
Tolkein didn't invent fantasy, but to claim he's not had a massive fucking influence on fantasy is disingenuous, same with Gibson.
Ryan Stewart
Man is dwarfed by his creations and subsumed into abstraction.
Wars are pure numbers games with the husk of romance and heroism reserved for delusional, heartless commanders sending legions of men to their doom.
Political upheaval as people live in fear as fascism and imperialism clash with democracy and anarchism.
Evan Wood
Neuromancer is far more representative of classical cyberpunk than Snow Crash, tbqh.
Josiah Adams
Is Snow Crash even cyberpunk? I remember it being a real good post-apocalypse time but hardly cyberpunky as one thinks of the genre today.
Anthony Evans
Snow Crash was a love letter to cyberpunk.
Michael Ramirez
>Realises I'm thinking of Snow Piercer
Ignore me, I'm retarded, I'll go seppuku myself in a bit.
John Jenkins
Adrian Ward
My main gripe with the critique was that it was the promotion of diesel as the only qualifying factor for dieselpunk, which seemed a bit reductive.
Evan Williams
Also the rudeness, but that is neither here nor there
Charles Jones
Theres a lot of misconceptions here about the the things ASSOCIATED with dieselpunk (mostly actually art-deco) and the actual motif of dieselpunk.
This user has it right. Though dieselpunk is a reductive term for the genre, its really more of a motif. Iron and rivets, smoke and gatling guns. Coveralls and grease stained men with hats and linen shirts.
Studio Ghibli unironically has some of the best dieselpunk in "castle in the sky" and "Nausicaa", though they also blend other motifs into the movies.
Here have some airships.
Julian Morris
Aaron Ward
NAZBOL
Jaxson Diaz
Oh and to be clear, a lot of this artists work also has ancient tech and is decidedly not completely dieselpunk, i just like his paintings of ship hulls and shapes. The glowy bits are something else altogether.
Hunter Rodriguez
Dylan Lopez
>tvtropes.org
you think people actually learn from their mistakes 90% of the time?
Leo Peterson
Adam Kelly
Ethan Reed
This is one of my favourite tropes DESU.
I love the idea of 1940's europe where the great powers are still monarchies and there's political intrigue and upper class women who really know how to dress.
It also avoids the problem that all real-world settings around that time are stale. How many times can you read/watch nazis getting kicked around? Apparently too many.
Landon Bailey
Nicholas Hall
I need this to be a thing.
Wyatt Gonzalez
Akira is not even close to a cornerstone of cyberpunk.
Christian Lee
Oh hey look the thread is turning into a "lets discuss the 'punk' portion of any -punk genre" thread.
Zachary Sanders
Lord of the Rings with airships and machine guns.
Ian Hughes
Neuromancer is to cyberpunk what LoTR is to fantasy and Jules verne is to hard(er)-scifi.
Connor Foster
That's literally the thread, user. "Major themes" would include the punk part of the -punk genre.
It's not turning into that, it's always been that, by design in fact.
Justin Collins
Snow Crash is sort of the final bookend to classic cyberpunk. It's equal parts parody and homage. It takes a lot of the typical cyberpunk ideas like corporations eclipsing the government, cyberspace, etc., and then imagines a new kind of setting where all of that is super lame and annoying instead of sleek and sexy.
Sebastian Taylor
I believe then the thread OP would have been "What are the themes of -punk genres".
Similarly to how if I made a thread in /mu/ about themes of classical piano, it would not be a thread about classical music. See how that works?
In addition to the fact that of all the -punk genres Dieselpunk usually has the LEAST to do with the associations of -punk which originally came from cyberpunk, which I'm sure I don't need to inform you is derived from the clash of low class vs high tech.
Now please call me faggot or make some other personal attack instead of responding to my actual rhetoric and we can move on.
Mason Peterson
faggot
Charles Miller
>cyberpunk
The average man surviving a working class only apocalypse by exploiting the poorly regulated tech that set up the utopia/slum divide.
Technology is driven by corporate needs, and they hold ultimate power.
>steampunk
A wave of scientific discoveries done outside the public eye has created a divide between those in power seeking to exploit or ban new technology and the roguish inventors and the inventors seeking to better the world.
Technology is in the hands of the individual, power is in the hands of the nobility/church.
>dieselpunk
Industry is devoted to imperial states locked in aristocratic pissing contests, the grunts are a cog in the war machine seeking to make things better for their small town and keep it from the mess.
Tech is in the hands of the state, power is in the hand of the military.
Ryan Allen
dieslepunk and cyberpunk can exist in the same setting
Adam Brooks
Would you consider Princess and the Pilot and Skycrawlers to be Dieselpunk?
Kayden Gonzalez
Both of these series are a bit more advanced technology-wise than traditional diesel punk usually is. Like 20 years after diesel-punk. Plus other than Last-Exile which is also kinda borderline for the genre, usually the emphasis lies in much larger scale conflicts.
Landon Stewart
Shit, that sounds amazing.
Possibly take out the great depression as well, or at least delay it some
Ian Powell
No, I'm equal parts bored and stubborn.
I see where you're coming from but I think discussion of the other, more popular, genres of -punk, insofar as comparison at least, are more or less inevitable; then from there you discuss what the punk suffix means in general and thus how it applies to dieselpunk.
To draw an analogy as you did, it's like discussing the fantasy part of urban fantasy; discussion of fantasy in general is inevitable because of how it relates to urban fantasy.
I'd also say that cyberpunk contains a multitude of themes but that it's focus on technology is in it's use, not of high vs low, and to highlight social/power/wealth divide in society; hence why Steampunk uses this as Victorian times suffer from a very apparent divide in society at the time highlighted by growing industrialisation. It still has those punk themes. From there, you get to dieselpunk; to qualify as being a part of that genre it's focus would be on some form of social divide and using technology to highlight this; in this case, that of technology's ability to create a complete disregard for human life of all but the powers that be, with the time period it's pulling from (The First World War) being a demonstration of both those themes - use of technology highlighting a theme of people's inherent worthlessness to a system, similar to the corporations of cyberpunk or steampunk.
See? Discussion of what -punk constitutes as it pertains to dieselpunk.
Adrian Martin
I have to say you've explained yourself fantastically, and we basically agree, I was mostly referencing these posts which aren't even discussing the distillation of the -punk but are rather just off topic:
Etc.
They really have no bearing on the conversation and cyberbois have multiple hangout threads already.
Dylan Sanchez
That guys designs are pretty good
Robert Ramirez
What would you say about Disney's Atlantis? not enough -punk elements?
Camden Wright
I would say the overworlder's portion of Disney's Atlantis is VERY dieselpunk. And while the Atlantean technology and culture doesn't jive with the main motifs of Dieselpunk, almost every good Dieselpunk media has these semi magical elements hidden away in them.
Jose Jackson
Not to mention the central theme of ethnic underdogs defending themselves (with the aid of rebels) against the threat of an imperial military power.
Jack Bell
I always thought TaleSpin had a weird setting for a Disney series aimed at kids.
Why even Baloo? It has NOTHING to do with the Jungle Book!
Eli Wilson
Why not Porco Roso?
Jaxson Garcia
too cheery and bright?
Leo Cooper
What would you like to know?
Wyatt Martinez
Eli Fisher
Can we start with how smaller tanks like in your picture were used in actual combat?
John Hill
Pretty much explained how to do good punk.Its about the social clash of new tech and status quos being challenged whether it be by aristocracy, Ideology or corrupted captialism
Parker Collins
casuals.
Benjamin Davis
Technically speaking, that is not a tank, but a Panhard armoured car.