![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethAm reading a comment thread where someone said
There's a lot of denial of both context and consequence in the -punk genres.
The idea being that a Lone Hero Fights The System, and only the lone hero gets stomped for it, and then fights back real clever and wins. Lone Hero never has to worry about feeding relatives or getting them meds or whatever. Which isn't my experience of cyberpunk RPGs but that was pretty slim anyways.
I been thinking on my on space dystopia setup and how to fix context-and-consequence, because those are the most interesting parts.
My characters thus far should all have context that leads outside of the little band of rebels: One has a daughter she's desperate to get back to, she got in trouble for defending her in the first place. One has a father who worked his arse off to get her privileges he feels she threw away. One has adult descendents she's lost touch with, who may or may not be touched by her rebellion, and she needs to find out. And one is a deliberately designed geneset who could, if he proves too troublesome, get his whole kind stood down, when they're built so they want work more than they want to live.
They've got consequences and connections, people they care about who will be hurt by their actions. So why do they rebel?
Because they have to. If they don't all these people will be hurt by their inactions.
What one rebel is yelling at her father is it doesn't matter how hard he worked, how hard she does, because you cannot stay inside the lines when they keep moving. You have a good month? That's your new normal, you'll be measured against that thereafter. Your whole life before that was suddenly underperforming. Everyone in the same job has to meet your new standard. Everyone like you has to be just that good to measure up from then on. And you can't, humans don't work like that, everything goes down as well as up, and there's no room for that. So it's great that he worked and she didn't have to, but here she is, working, to change things so nobody has to.
If it were possible to survive inside the lines, given the cost of going outside them, nobody would rebel. So dystopia means a system nobody can live with but nobody has a choice about. At least until the ultratech spaceship shows up to give them a chance.
One taught her daughter all the rules, how to obey, how to keep your head down and stay squarely in the middle of the pack. It didn't help. What triggers suspicion and investigation and action is all subject to false positives, so you can be leading an exemplary life and still end up in rehab. And even after rehab, even after they've put things in your brain that don't allow you to disobey, being in the wrong place at the wrong time can ruin everything. A zero tolerance system doesn't leave room for error, and the error bars on really rare events like finding a rebel leave too many innocents involved. When the punishment is losing everything you hold dear *no matter what you do* then where's the incentive not to rebel?
Where can she raise her daughter now?
Well there's this handy dandy ultra tech spaceship with food stores and clothes and education machines.
Without that lever the system has been rolling along being awful to everyone. Introduce that and suddenly there's room to start a change. Makes a story.
But if you don't got the ship, then what?
My wall rat born-delta has been living that.
When nobody gives you anything you have to live on the leftovers. Recycling as a way of life, literal survival level. I've seen documentaries about slum dwellers on trash heaps who do this in various parts of the world now. It's like an ecological niche, just a really nasty one. Nobody would choose it, but when you're born with no choices you have to make them.
So he's the most steampunk, pulling tech together from whatever's available, like he's always had to. He got in trouble, repeatedly, from trying to redefine 'available' to include things people hadn't got around to throwing away yet.
His connections are at once the most tenuous - he doesn't like home, he thinks he's well off out of it, he wouldn't go back on purpose - and the most urgent, because if someone decides the deltas are getting too above themselves, a policy of extermination is entirely possible, and a policy of sterilisation is already law, ending them in a generation if they're caught. They're non-people anyway, they don't own any place or have any legal rights, they've got nowhere to go after curfew so they're technically rebels between lights out and daybreak, and since they're left out of all the official news most people don't believe they exist anyway. Sure, there's a few mentally ill people who camp out and act homeless, but all they've got to do is go for treatment and get jobs like everyone else. Rounding them up forcibly would be for their own good.
Deltas disagree. They like having kids, and culture, and if they need a little crime to get it done, well what choice have they?
So they're the ones that are born rebels, but never had the resources to do much about it.
Ship = Here's a big shiny lever.
The ones born to work themselves to death have an obvious reason to rebel but a genetically engineered lack of motive. Except the designers didn't take into account that making them want to work and making them want to do the specific work that others want from them is not quite the same thing. Doing work then becomes rebellion cause they're doing too much and/or it's not useful to others.
The category I'm least sure of is the Alphas who discover that their life work, the scientific research, is in fact recycled. Not all work is ever published, the work published kind of eats itself, and they've been kept in a sort of time loop for longer than anyone has records to detangle. I want to do that to play with definitions of human. That bit in the Matrix where the computer says that at any later date it stopped being their world and started being the world of the computer, how does the future avoid that? Does it? How about biotech and posthuman evolution? There's a society that clones all its members from file. Sure, it's efficient, but they've also got another reason - they don't want to go to what happens next. So I want to contrast this central dystopia with the surrounding civilisations, the ones so anathema to them they wipe them out of their records and pretend real hard they never did exist, the ones where whenever someone decides this place is really too terrible to bear someone quietly takes them aside and shows them exactly how it could be worse. Cybermen, cylons, terminators, Matrix planets, and a sort of genetic hyperdiversity as a consequence of biotech. As far as the Renpunk Cosmos is concerned they're the last bastion of humanity, and the only way they can stay human is never change.
It's as if they got back into the garden and decided to fort up and let no one pass the boundaries; like if they revived the golden age and decided that having achieved perfection they must never lose it.
But every bit of research, every new story, they all make change.
So Alphas, the big brains, the ones who want to Know, they spend their whole lives trying to change things... and would be really pissed to know they're not allowed.
And all these differents would have to contrast with an old old prison colony, which would be pretty much like Earth here and now. And then you ask, who's doing it right?
By this point in the story I'll have probably talked myself out of believing any of them are.
There's a lot of denial of both context and consequence in the -punk genres.
The idea being that a Lone Hero Fights The System, and only the lone hero gets stomped for it, and then fights back real clever and wins. Lone Hero never has to worry about feeding relatives or getting them meds or whatever. Which isn't my experience of cyberpunk RPGs but that was pretty slim anyways.
I been thinking on my on space dystopia setup and how to fix context-and-consequence, because those are the most interesting parts.
My characters thus far should all have context that leads outside of the little band of rebels: One has a daughter she's desperate to get back to, she got in trouble for defending her in the first place. One has a father who worked his arse off to get her privileges he feels she threw away. One has adult descendents she's lost touch with, who may or may not be touched by her rebellion, and she needs to find out. And one is a deliberately designed geneset who could, if he proves too troublesome, get his whole kind stood down, when they're built so they want work more than they want to live.
They've got consequences and connections, people they care about who will be hurt by their actions. So why do they rebel?
Because they have to. If they don't all these people will be hurt by their inactions.
What one rebel is yelling at her father is it doesn't matter how hard he worked, how hard she does, because you cannot stay inside the lines when they keep moving. You have a good month? That's your new normal, you'll be measured against that thereafter. Your whole life before that was suddenly underperforming. Everyone in the same job has to meet your new standard. Everyone like you has to be just that good to measure up from then on. And you can't, humans don't work like that, everything goes down as well as up, and there's no room for that. So it's great that he worked and she didn't have to, but here she is, working, to change things so nobody has to.
If it were possible to survive inside the lines, given the cost of going outside them, nobody would rebel. So dystopia means a system nobody can live with but nobody has a choice about. At least until the ultratech spaceship shows up to give them a chance.
One taught her daughter all the rules, how to obey, how to keep your head down and stay squarely in the middle of the pack. It didn't help. What triggers suspicion and investigation and action is all subject to false positives, so you can be leading an exemplary life and still end up in rehab. And even after rehab, even after they've put things in your brain that don't allow you to disobey, being in the wrong place at the wrong time can ruin everything. A zero tolerance system doesn't leave room for error, and the error bars on really rare events like finding a rebel leave too many innocents involved. When the punishment is losing everything you hold dear *no matter what you do* then where's the incentive not to rebel?
Where can she raise her daughter now?
Well there's this handy dandy ultra tech spaceship with food stores and clothes and education machines.
Without that lever the system has been rolling along being awful to everyone. Introduce that and suddenly there's room to start a change. Makes a story.
But if you don't got the ship, then what?
My wall rat born-delta has been living that.
When nobody gives you anything you have to live on the leftovers. Recycling as a way of life, literal survival level. I've seen documentaries about slum dwellers on trash heaps who do this in various parts of the world now. It's like an ecological niche, just a really nasty one. Nobody would choose it, but when you're born with no choices you have to make them.
So he's the most steampunk, pulling tech together from whatever's available, like he's always had to. He got in trouble, repeatedly, from trying to redefine 'available' to include things people hadn't got around to throwing away yet.
His connections are at once the most tenuous - he doesn't like home, he thinks he's well off out of it, he wouldn't go back on purpose - and the most urgent, because if someone decides the deltas are getting too above themselves, a policy of extermination is entirely possible, and a policy of sterilisation is already law, ending them in a generation if they're caught. They're non-people anyway, they don't own any place or have any legal rights, they've got nowhere to go after curfew so they're technically rebels between lights out and daybreak, and since they're left out of all the official news most people don't believe they exist anyway. Sure, there's a few mentally ill people who camp out and act homeless, but all they've got to do is go for treatment and get jobs like everyone else. Rounding them up forcibly would be for their own good.
Deltas disagree. They like having kids, and culture, and if they need a little crime to get it done, well what choice have they?
So they're the ones that are born rebels, but never had the resources to do much about it.
Ship = Here's a big shiny lever.
The ones born to work themselves to death have an obvious reason to rebel but a genetically engineered lack of motive. Except the designers didn't take into account that making them want to work and making them want to do the specific work that others want from them is not quite the same thing. Doing work then becomes rebellion cause they're doing too much and/or it's not useful to others.
The category I'm least sure of is the Alphas who discover that their life work, the scientific research, is in fact recycled. Not all work is ever published, the work published kind of eats itself, and they've been kept in a sort of time loop for longer than anyone has records to detangle. I want to do that to play with definitions of human. That bit in the Matrix where the computer says that at any later date it stopped being their world and started being the world of the computer, how does the future avoid that? Does it? How about biotech and posthuman evolution? There's a society that clones all its members from file. Sure, it's efficient, but they've also got another reason - they don't want to go to what happens next. So I want to contrast this central dystopia with the surrounding civilisations, the ones so anathema to them they wipe them out of their records and pretend real hard they never did exist, the ones where whenever someone decides this place is really too terrible to bear someone quietly takes them aside and shows them exactly how it could be worse. Cybermen, cylons, terminators, Matrix planets, and a sort of genetic hyperdiversity as a consequence of biotech. As far as the Renpunk Cosmos is concerned they're the last bastion of humanity, and the only way they can stay human is never change.
It's as if they got back into the garden and decided to fort up and let no one pass the boundaries; like if they revived the golden age and decided that having achieved perfection they must never lose it.
But every bit of research, every new story, they all make change.
So Alphas, the big brains, the ones who want to Know, they spend their whole lives trying to change things... and would be really pissed to know they're not allowed.
And all these differents would have to contrast with an old old prison colony, which would be pretty much like Earth here and now. And then you ask, who's doing it right?
By this point in the story I'll have probably talked myself out of believing any of them are.