so you're calling your game "solarpunk"? how is it punk. show me how your solarpunk game is anti-authoritarian. Where in this pastoral suburban fantasy is the anti-colonialist thought. If your answer is "w-well post-apocalypse fantasy recycling has enabled us to live exactly as we do now but SOLAR PANELS" get out of here
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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:
shaking your hand. solarpunk bothers me on such a conceptual level
feeling this general vibe for a lot of american indie game settings tbh
punk is also a word for a bottom, sub. Who's down to solarsub? Living under the Sun. It's hardly different at all from the non-solarbottom!
genre -punk has never been that consistently anti-authoritarian tbh. I'm including cyberpunk here. The conscious realignment with punk ideals/practice is more recent.
Cyberpunk is mostly about corporation ruling over people as far as I can tell
I feel like this genre is more appropriately named "solarcore" or just "sustainable cottagecore". It's idyllic and completely divorced from reality just like regular cottagecore.
A lot of people want a sustainable future but no one wants to put in the work to get there, or fight the people and systems who are opposed to a future that doesn't suck. I would consider solarpunk a subset of cyberpunk, and all that entails...
...or at least authentic cyberpunk, which sounds super gatekeepy, but I think hbomberguy said it best in his Deus Ex vid, "what if...robot arms?" This is the same thing. What if...solar power and easy farming?
If you're not using that solar power to try to actively dismantle the police / government, I don't want to hear it! XD
I still haven't recovered from Bethesda trying to call their game "NASA-punk" with a straight face and now there's solarpunk
Is "solarpunk" actually about anti-authoritarian and anti-colonialist thought? Like, I think those are great things, but I thought solarpunk was kinda the opposite of that. Like believing in the current system, and believing that we can keep the earth alive by finding a solution within it.
I think it's bullshit, but if that aligns with what they're going for, my guess is that's probably how they're using the word?
Yeah that is how it's used, there's just nothing punk about that, is the point being made here
right, ok that makes sense. the post was about a specific game using the word, not just the word’s colloquial definition itself, so i was confused
it says something to subscribe to a definition, but honestly from their viewpoint “solar punk” might appear totally punk. the establishment is telling them green light bulbs wont make the difference, that coal is the only way, etc”. a weird class thing
i'd be interested to see how and why the etymology of the suffix got where it is, because i figure my understanding is pretty incomplete. like, to my knowledge the term cyberpunk just appeared? and it's hit-or-miss whether a story actually uses punk themes but they are present. and steampunk cribbed the terminology for some reason without any of the themes, just victorian alt-history aesthetics as an excuse to wear top hats and put greebles on every surface. since then people have just swapped out the power source (and choice of hat) which is how solarpunk formed.
but like i said that's just a game theory thanks for watching. i'd love to see some actual research into why cyberpunk got coopted by steampunk, like maybe the first time there was a good reason but it's just been buried since then in a pile of zeppelins and brass gears.