Discussion Main / PunkPunk

I'm not necessarily averse to a "craftwork setting" trope, but I am absolutely against diluting "punk" to mean "setting."

You can try going to the Trope Launch Pad to work it out, but please don't try to shoehorn it into a Punk Punk. It's already hopelessly abused.

wait.... if "punk" , in this instance, doesnt refer to a non specified setting that qualifies the culture around something having a "technological" aberration from the current accepted standerd of progress, with themes similar to detective noir, dystopian settings, post apocalyptic settings, or pulp settings , with an attitude to life and existence bordering between trans humanism, ennui , lovecraftian universe human minimalism , & "urban survivalist" style attitudes & qualifiers for accepted character motivations, further defined by its technological & , sometimes art value deviation from the known course of the world, then.... what does " punk " mean?

As far as I can tell, it means nothing.

Like many of the sub-punks, it's probably made by this site and then acted like it's a real thing.

Yes, this is one of my pet peeve tropes.

I disagree. There Is No Such Thing As Notability here, and while that's more strict for trope pages I don't see why it can't apply here as well.

Point A is valid as a fact, but there's plenty of other examples across TV Tropes where the work has no page. I understand that Solarpunk is a genre, not a work, but you can't discredit this one genre on such a narrow basis. I disagree with Point B, though. Solarpunk is defined just as well as countless other "genre" pages on TV Tropes. Take The Weird West, for example. Or even Dungeon Punk, which has as much consistency as Solarpunk. Heck, Bible Punk got a page and that's way sketchier than Solarpunk.

And as far as "how we define Punk Punk," Solarpunk acts as a Decon-Recon Switch to the whole idea. Rather than technology as a means to control the public, it's used as an enabler for communal cooperation. Solarpunk deliberately finds ways for technology to work in harmony with society and nature. And in relation to the very real "Punk" subculture, which ignores social norms in loud, proud ways like graffiti and hair dye, Solarpunk does the same thing through urban farming and solar roofs. Basically, Solarpunk is optimistic — even The Anti-Nihilist — to Cyberpunk and Steampunk's nihilism.

Solarpunk is a perfectly valid addition to the Punk Punk page. But if you insist, I'm already gathering titles that can go on the YKTTW.

Yep. Any that don't have a page yet actually belong here as Internal Subtropes. Like its sister genres Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction, Punk fiction is a very broad genre with many variants. There are many variants which are so niche as to not warrant a dedicated page- but still are sufficiently defined as a form of the genre that we can start to define them here.

In a general sense, its rather silly to say that things are or are not punk based on criteria like "nihilism". Post-cyberpunk, for instance, is the product of the creators of the original wave having grown up and matured. All the important parts are still there- the friction between the rights of the individual and the needs of society, the exploration of what defines "a person", the rejection of both romanticism and enlightenment, the use of technological "what-if"s uses as a springboard for social satire and deconstructions of philosphical concepts. Just minus the Wangst and fatalism.

First off, Internal Subtrope really doesn't seem to apply here. Either you have a genre or you don't.

Anyway, since the YKTTW has been started, I'll wait for it to resolve. If we don't have a trope, then I'll ask for it to be removed again.

The answer to the question lies in the roots of the Punk Punk meta-genre. The sf of the late 1980s, later termed cyberpunk, was seen as ultra-realistic in its predictions, e.g. space habitats and continued Cold War (both seemed likely in those days). Less than a decade later, cyberpunk was completely left behind sociologically and still unattained technologically. Unlike some other trends in sf however, it still resonated with speculative fiction fans and so didn't become entirely extinct. The natural continuation of cyberpunk is to keep writing successful tech + failing society fiction in the same vein, but instead of being wrong about the 1990s/2000s milieu only, it can be wrong about other eras and contexts. In contrast to cyberpunk, steampunk is a deliberately and explicitly anachronistic genre, but it is still true to the spirit of a meta-genre that is more or less defined by those two extremes. Some of the other *punk sub-genres bridge that gap (especially dieselpunk), and others extrapolate even further (like clockpunk and even more extreme, sandalpunk).

I don't see it as a major problem that there are only a few works in some of the sub-genres; Punk Punk is an unrestricted, inclusivistic, eclectic meta-genre that is quite willing to be speculative about speculativity. I feel it wouldn't be true to Punk Punk to winnow out sub-genres for being bizarre or unviable. As long as there is 1) a society with tendencies to alienation and authoritarianism and 2) pervasive, story-carrying technology that is rampant rather than advanced, I think it can be made into a Punk Punk sub-genre (I do believe this rules out Cottage Punk though, sorry).

That's reasonable enough. I'd contend that "punk punk" is more of an attitude than a function of technology versus society (how can one have rampant stone age or bronze age technology?). You could call Blade Of The Immortal "Samurai Punk" if you really wanted to. But that's neither here nor there.

My problem with it is still a matter of overdistinction. Sure, Eberron and Bioshock may not fit an overly narrow definition of steampunk as "Victoriana plus steam," but for all intents and purposes they're still steampunk, and they still feel like steampunk. Parsing it into fifteen subgenres just seems as if we're splitting hairs so we can put "punk" after a word. Like calling a particular sort of music "shoegaze" for the sake of having a new genre when it already fits into one that already exists.

I'd contend that "punk punk" is more of an attitude than a function of technology versus society

Maybe it came out as "tech vs society", but that's not what I meant. In Punk Punk, society and technology are almost completely fused together, in a (mostly) dystopian way.

how can one have rampant stone age or bronze age technology?

In approximately the same way that steampunk works: by introducing radical anachronisms.

My problem with it is still a matter of overdistinction.

Of the 14 sub-genres listed, 12 have articles of their own, so it seems strange not to mention them.

Maybe we could take out the stone / sandal punk examples, at least until there are articles for them.

And here I thought "steampunk" was a stupid term. You guys have really topped yourselves with this one. Congrats.

I don't know if you're referring to a specific sub-genre or to the Punk Punk cluster as a whole. In either case, yes, of course it is stupid. The term (Whatever)punk can be read as "we're serious about (whatever), but not too serious".

Sort of like how this very wiki has serious discussions about topics that usually get informal, punny, or just silly titles.