Proposed Punk-Punk subgenres

Thinking about past European civilisation most of us are familiar with, the Quattrocento and Renaissance had a serious case of “Columnpunk” (?), what with trying to recreate Classical Antiquity aesthetic ideals, which lasted till the American and French Revolutions’ love affair with Demopublicanism and Empire (for France).
Then they got all Romantic with, I dunno, “Castlepunk”? “Cathedralpunk”? This coinciding with the Industrial Age and the real Steam Era screwing it all up with their infernal machines of fire and metal.

One can imagine a future where technology would make it easy and thus economically viable to cater to all kinds of past “x-punks” with the same comfortable tech for all tastes, and costumers being able to mix and match a wide array of possibilities, with no clear dominance for one style and with the addition of many new designs (assuming innovative creativity doesn’t go away).
Or instead of the future it could right now, in an alternate timeline where culture threw all conformism with the arsenic water.

Just as my freedom ends where yours begins my tolerance of you ends where your intolerance toward me begins. As told by an old friend

Vaporpunk. Casette Futurism but more modern. Cyberpunk, except we never advanced beyond vacuum tubes, lots of cables, diodes, floppy disks and casettes, obviously. Likely to take place in a Crapsaccharine World. Bonus points for hoverboards and such.

Hi, name's Mike.

Bunpunk: The world revolves around bread-or rather, the act of baking in general. The overall aesthetic could be described as one giant kitchen, with tall towers that release steam-or smoke, if it's burned-into the air. Bread is the most basic thing, and the smell of cooked bread is probably the most common thing, but really anything that's baked in an oven fits the aesthetic-from cakes to pies to eclairs. Our typical protagonist is someone who is either a prodigy in the kitchen, perhaps an aspiring baker or chef, or perhaps a rebel/rebel group who's bread of choice is sourdough. Technology is usually more focused on cooking and culinary science, but there may be a sci-fi outlier who decides to turn an oven into a giant robot, or perhaps the other way around.

Works that fit into Bunpunk are incredibly rare, but Breadwinners probably fits the mold best. Fighting Foodons also fits when you stretch the idea of Bunpunk to cooking in general as the aesthetic. (My Little Pony and Hoodwinked movies also fit since those two have baking as a something that's super important, with the latter having the recipes of baked goods being integral to the plot. One Piece also has shades of this, especially with the latest 'Whole Cake Island' Arc.)

I've been working on a Sub Punk setting off and on. It's actually fairly plausible since a lot of the tech already exists. What do they eat? Seaweed, Algae, and Fish. What do they build with? Undersea mineral deposits and large seawater filters. Air and water? Oxygen generators, Algae air scrubbers, reverse osmosis, and distilling. Power? Solar, Biodiesel, Geothermal vents, and Nuclear.

My biggest problem is that I can't pick an aesthetic to flesh it out.

Technology designed to operate undersea is more rounded and smooth, both to make it hydrodynamic and because spheres and cylinders make good pressure hulls.

For civilian technology you could draw inspiration from undersea laboratories [1]◊ and various research vessels [2]◊ [3]◊ [4]◊ which typically have that rounded look but also have a lot of exposed hardware and cabin spaces. For military technology you could borrow from military subs [5] [6]◊ and divers [7]◊ which have a broadly similar aesthetic but aren’t made in eye-catching colors and don’t usually have exposed parts.

They should have sent a poet.

Toonpunk, set in a cartoony world similar to Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry or even Disney. Expect a lot of anthropomorphic animals and Cartoon Physics. May even have humans and toons living together like in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit".

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?

I've had another idea: something similar to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Secret of NIMH (both the original book and the movie) and Felidae (among others if I can think of any.)

It involves Uplifted Animals who have escaped from a lab/were mutated by some other method and are surviving in the city, hidden from humans.

That's all I got so far, I'm not even sure what to call it...

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?

Actually I did propose that idea about Anthromorphic Animals part as Anthropunk/Zoopunk while ago, As my view is that if there an Punk Punk page was created from my idea, Its description will say "It's beyond Anthropomorphic Animals seen appearing from Western Animation but rather appears in any medium and genre." And I may think it could be part of Science Fantasy and Biopunk genres if depends story has to reason them to exist.

Edited by Franco-America2018 on Oct 10th 2018 at 5:20:55 AM

Oh, okay then. I was thinking of calling it "Labpunk" if it involved uplifted animals from an experiment (ala The Secret of NIMH) or by accident (like with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). Though I guess the ideas could just be folded into each other.

EDIT: The more I think about it though, I'm not sure if I want to run into Unfortunate Implications involving the morality of animal testing, especially since my opinions on the matter are... complicated.

Edited by TheOtakuNinja on Oct 18th 2018 at 10:51:54 AM

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?

Found another one: The Journey Down has a Cyberpunk with a Chance of Rain setting combined thoroughly with Afro-Caribbean art and mythology in its architecture and culture. The people who live there, fittingly, also have heads that resemble African tribal masks.

Would this be simply cyberpunk (or Used Future), or would this be a new type of punk aesthetic? Voodoopunk, perhaps?

It's okay dude, and I may think this idea could or already be part of the Biopunk genre anyway.

Edited by Franco-America2018 on Mar 10th 2019 at 9:29:45 AM

Subtrope/cousin-trope of Myth Punk, since Reality Ensues regarding the four or five hundred years when European powers were colonizing everywhere else: Decolonization-Punk, where formerly conquered peoples reconnect with their indigenous heritage and find out The Magic Comes Back. To avoid confusing it with the sci-fi "Colony-Punk" suggestion, maybe it can be Remythtification.

The Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty and idealism versus cynicism are heavily in play here, regarding whether Death of the Old Gods literally involves the gods DYING, is a figurative End of an Era, or maybe the literal deaths were just temporary.

Edited by Sharysa on Mar 14th 2019 at 11:45:02 AM

Not sure what kind of "punk" designation would fit - Yurtpunk? Punkistan? - but when I started working on Eight Year Harvest, I was kind of puzzled to find that Central Asian-inspired fantasy settings are basically non-existent. I mean... guys.

Boundless steppes.◊ Snowy peaks that touch the stars.◊ Windswept deserts◊ and cracks running deep into the bowels of the world.◊ Old gods◊ and new ones◊ in clash with those who turn away from them.◊ All races and their secret crafts◊ meeting on the crossroad-between-the worlds,◊ lined with cities of blue tiles and sandstone.◊ The nomads◊ living their lives in-between, riding out in winter◊ to hunt for the furs sought out by foreign kings.

The far reaches of this land hide the vast ruins◊ of a dead civilisation.◊ Their superweapons still leave their curses behind, placing a dark spell on the bloodline of anyone who ventures too near. Once they dreamed of walking among the stars.◊ Now their remnants wither away down on Earth.◊ Once they dug out a sea◊ to turn it into gardens. Now it lays barren, ground flat by storms of salt and poison.◊ And at its heart lies a lost city, where a dark secret awaits its unleashing upon this world.◊

It's a culture and place that I have a lot of personal attachment to, and I almost couldn't believe how little-known it is in pop culture. Fantasy takes you to places too heartbreakingly gorgeous to be real, and I'm hoping to do it justice in my story.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 18th 2019 at 7:11:33 AM

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

I actually love this concept. There’s a sci-fi novel I read years ago set in a retro-future Kabul that has a very similar tone, you might be interested in reading it. I’ll see if I can find the title.

They should have sent a poet.

That's actually an interesting point. When I started reading your post, I actually stopped to think of any Central Asia themed fantasy settings I know, and the only one I could remember was Tarkir from Magic: The Gathering. In most other cases, a given setting will have one Mongolian horde expy race/nation whose culture begins and ends with the stereotype of raiders on horseback.^note There's also a minor trend of making centaurs a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Temujin era Mongolia for similar reasons; a trend I have been guilty of as well, admittedly.

The steppe parts of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, parts of Russia) are indeed culturally similar to Mongolia. The Silk Road parts tend to be heavily influenced by Persian culture; before that, there's a lot of Hellenistic and Chinese (especially Tang-era) influences as well. If you look at the Arabian Nights, you'll see that a lot of the stories (including Aladdin, which is supposed to take place in 'China') are clearly supposed to be set in the Silk Road states, or at least their fairy-tale equivalents.

Bonus song.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 18th 2019 at 5:09:04 AM

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

@Sharysa that's a super interesting premise but don't some european countries have their own myths? but besides that point when you mean by decolonization is it also the rejection of things made by colonization? (i won't say tech as plenty of non-euro countries had their own innovations ala china and other asian regions)

correct me if i'm wrong on this since my history is fuzzy as heck.

MIA

Ewolf: Of course Europeans have their own myths, and that’s great—the point of Decolonization-Punk would be that the characters in question rediscover their OWN magical heritage and deities, which have either been hidden or (almost) exterminated by colonization.

I’ve been trying to post the decolonization-punk patterns about my own works for the past couple of days, but TV Tropes keeps eating my drafts, so I'll edit this post once I'm done frantically typing the stuff I remember into Microsoft Office.

EDIT: And here is my non-lost post!

—
So lately, all my works have been dealing with decolonization punk in VERY different ways.

-The Crocodile God. Filipino-American Mirasol finds a hot, dark-skinned Filipino-Australian with indigenous tattoos called Haik, shipwrecked on a California beach. He tells her lots of Tagalog myths and traditions from before Catholicism that fascinate her, and she finds out he’s actually the lost Tagalog sea-god Haik, while she is his constantly-reincarnating mortal wife—and unfortunately, The Only Believer he has left in 2017.

He is also the most literally undocumented immigrant ever, so the American government keeps deporting him back to the Philippines, which is not good for a dark-skinned tribal man with heavy indigenous tattoos.

I usually call this “my frantic Tolkien attempt to patch my heritage back together,” so while the main story is urban-fantasy, I also have a fusion of Filipino/Polynesian Mythopoeia stories. The magic is weird and symbolic; Haik has “taken off” a lot of his tattoos to avoid mistreatment by Catholicized Filipinos, but they’re coming back on with a vengeance; his magical paraw canoe can communicate and sail on her own; and Haik and Mirasol’s demigod children from their just-past-colonization life including their resurrected stillborn daughter have a shitton of powers.

-Takotsubo: The story of a superhero. Nominally follows Cord Cai, a Chinese-American who moonlights as a gangster called the Tin Man, the superhero of the title; he struggles with being “yet another Asian gangster,” since the death of his old fiancé and the non-response from the cops drove him to shoot the murderer in revenge. He deeply misses his family’s culture, but is terrified of falling into MORE stereotypes.

It’s also becoming an ensemble show: Generational stories, playing with stereotypes, a racist Double Standard regarding who gets to be a superhero and who’s just a vigilante/gangster, and long-forgotten Filipino magic propped up with a nice helping of You Are Better Than You Think You Are.

I call this “Moana mixed with Mad Max: Fury Road;” the Moana half is because of the subplot that Cord and the Filipino characters have about rediscovering your culture, while the Mad Max half is for the junkyard Diesel Punk aesthetic. The magic here is falling apart and rusty as shit because most street-gangs have limited resources, while the Filipino gods are stuck Walking the Earth, trying to rekindle worship in their followers while avoiding the Feds for being undocumented immigrants.

-Moonflowers. You know how the first two stories were HEAVY on decolonization as an active force in the story? This one is more focused on the racist tendencies in mainstream Western fantasy, because I have The Wild Hunt attempting to murder an American family for kicks… but their leader flat-out ignores that they’re ASIAN-American, and they have their own gods. And they’re not happy about him.

The series focuses on Alima Song as she inherits a severely neglected fairy-kingdom, connects with the Filipino gods, and has Conan the Barbarian-esque adventures, and the sequel(s) are gonna have a lot of Reality Ensues regarding an Asian woman in the standard Medieval European Fantasy setting.

Several Irish mortals think that a foreigner (both non-Irish AND non-white) doesn’t “deserve” an Irish fairy-kingdom, so she has to keep shutting them up by explaining 1) it’s COMPENSATION for almost getting murdered by the previous king, and 2) her dad earned it through right of conquest and passed the title to her since he didn’t want it, which is why Hades offered it in the first place. Then Alima’s constantly Mistaken for Servant because 1) she’s tiny, and 2) she's got a pretty Multi Ethnic Name, so folks tend to expect a pale Middle-Eastern/Chinese-looking woman instead of a tan, wavy-haired Filipino-looking one.

At heart, I describe it as a Fairy Tale (and it’s gonna have at least a few Conan the Barbarian-type companion stories), so it’s gonna be heavy on the wish-fulfillment, but there’s a strong helping of social-justice—part of the reason she becomes a good queen is BECAUSE she used to be a commoner and she has a completely different perspective on society than a lot of born aristocrats.

Edited by Sharysa on Mar 22nd 2019 at 11:45:28 AM

Not sure whether this is a good thread for this idea, but i've been kicking around the idea of a dystopian society that is similar to the modern day, but the society is in a fantasy setting where other nations and peoples are at an Iron Age/Medieval level of technology. I think at its foundation I want to imagine what cyberpunk would look like if it was in a pre-modern fantasy setting.The dystopia has mass media, an Internet analogue that permeates a vast part of society, and advanced cities and infrastructure, but I'm having trouble deciding whether they owe this advancement to technological or magical processes.

If the latter, I think the likely form that it would take is like the Rings of Power from LOTR. People in the society wear and use items that allow instant communication, telekinesis, and a deep level of interaction with the surrounding urban environment.

If I try to just make it technological, my concern is the fact that this is a powerful nation with a wide influence that has existed for at least a whole century. Is it still realistic that other nations won't have adopted the advanced technology? If they use advanced IT and have a complex urban infrastructure, what level of military technology would they have developed as a consequence of the presence of electricity, film and TV, radio waves, transistors, the Internet, etc. (I don't want them wiping the floor with every other nation they encounter)?

You better write a book or imma steal your idea cause damn this is fucking brilliant; I wish I had thought of this

Edited by A_Really_Big_Cat on Apr 15th 2019 at 10:05:00 AM

It might overlap with other Punk Punk genres, but I propose Radiopunk, which takes place at the time radio were invented, and things like T.V. have not been invented or possibly never invented, so it is a future or modern era where everyone depends one radios all the time.

Oddly, there still is a degree of Radiopunk IRL in the Amateur radio crowd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio

What about Hope Punk?

Edited by mariic on Nov 15th 2019 at 12:59:01 PM

Not sure if this works too well but how about Tundrapunk? Depending on if we're talking Arctic or Antarctic the technology could be wind powered or powered by hydro-electricity. A major emphasis would be made on ice structures for buildings, the lack of vegetation being a theme, lots of ice age foreshadowing.

Hopepunk sounds GREAT! I knew there were more people sick of all the grimdark hopelessness and pessimism out there.

Maybe downplay the lack of vegetation so that humans have a shot at physical survival? Even polar areas have extremely short summers where vegetation can grow, and there would definitely be folks making greenhouses to mitigate the cold in the fall/winter.