don’t touch cyberpunk if you don’t get it.
don’t act like you’re on some holy crusade when you make a video game with neon and rain and the look of cyberpunk but then throw in stuff like how women’s rights and basic income are the backbone of a dystopia
don’t make a movie with scarlett johansson playing a poor send-up to motoko kusanagi and then lack the spine to even mention the socio-political points of why the character prefers a caucasian chassis in the first place (spoiler alert: it makes incredibly unkind point about western women). especially don’t call it feminist when the themes and narrative are stripped away in favor of a generic revenge tale. don’t retell akira and put it within and about the culture that dropped those nukes in the first place. the teenage edgelord connoisseurs can just go watch these anime and film in the first place
don’t copyright the word ‘cyberpunk’ no matter how noble your intentions are. you have no real way of guaranteeing that your successors at your place of work will share your sentiments.
don’t tell another faux-deep story that cosplays badly as Blade Runner about a hacker or a detective or an android and his manpain
don’t give me more cool-looking stuff that either lacks the teeth to get political or has the fundamental politics of the genre contorted and perverted so that spoiled Gen X dudes never have to challenge themselves or their way of life.
just…don’t, okay?
Wait, did someone seriously try and copyright the word “Cyberpunk”?
Just
THE IRONY
Cyberpunk isn’t the playground of the fedora donned fuckboy. At least, it shouldn’t be.
Cyberpunk did something very fucking specific for genre. It took glossy science fiction and dropped it in the gutter. It’s Genesis was a specific Revolution unto itself.
Neuromancer came to exist as a push back against the military fetishism of sci Fi before that beautiful day in 1984. Neuromancer gave us the word cyberspace.
Cyberpunk isn’t just neon. Cyberpunk is cruel. Cyberpunk is the anti star trek. Cyberpunk is “we don’t get better as a culture, we just get more advanced.”
I’m not trying to hype it up. I write cyberpunk for a very specific fucking reason.
I’m saying; this is a complicated playground and there are rules, like OP said.Rules such as…?
Cyberpunk is subversive. Some genres don’t use the “punk” in their name very literally: cyberpunk does. Oh lord it does. at least, it’s intended to be that way.
When Neuromancer came out, Like i mentioned above, it was subversive of a couple of things. It went away from the techno-fetishist militaristic sci fi of the prevailing era (70s and 80s; imagine Tom Clancy in space and you get the picture) and it moved into a future where things didn’t get better. We don’t get a Star Trek nirvana; shit gets so, so much worse. Socio-economic stratification gets even more profound. megacorps run the world. And our future is an exploited one.
Cyberpunk is about reclaiming power. It’s incredibly political and the politics are so much closer to home. Like OP mentions with the Ghost in the Shell story; it’s not just about razor-girls looking sexy and cutting shit up. Cyberpunk has something to say about where we are as a society and it’s not fucking nice.
But! Here’s the but. Dude-bros just saw the grit and the neon and the sex and dropped themselves into it to play around because they don’t get why it exists as a genre to begin with.
I’m rambling. Rules, near as i can tell, as follows:
1. it’s about an exploited future. People as commodities and finding power under a system that treats people as things. If you need context, honest to fucking god look at the way Amazon treats its employees. People have literally worked to death in those warehouses.
2. it’s about reclaiming power. That’s a personal opinion. it’s about finding happiness in a world where oblivion is preferable to consciousness and drugs abound. Sound familiar? In such a story, a happy ending is the most Punk thing there is.
3. It’s about modern power dynamics that aren’t addressed elsewhere in sci-fi, at least not explicitly. Race, politics, exploitation, immigration, the entire world is minced up in cyberpunk and examined under an intense lens.
And for modern context, i mean, just look around. Rihanna used holograms to model her lingerie, Disney owns more than 50% of the media market (not even a joke) and one company controls 71% of local news.
Ours is a cyberpunk future.
But so many guys after William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson wrote it because of the razorgirls and the holograms and used it as wank fodder, it’s not a genre we take seriously, publicly.
Anyway. I don’t mean to @ you with any of this; i’m just trying to get a lot of thoughts down in a quasi-coherent fashion. No idea if i succeeded.