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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9095765" data-attributes="member: 18">To me it's more like being annoyed that someone is trying to convince people that cheeseburgers are totally cool and we should all want cheeseburgers and fetishize cheeseburgers without acknowledging either the horrific process that leads to their creation or the effects they have on your body.Let me be clear - I don't think LARP side of steampunk, which I imagine you're involved with, is really the problem at all. LARP is LARP, and it's not a major deal. People dress up as a lot worse than silly Victorians in LARP-type situations, as I'm sure you're abundantly aware!What I think is a problem is common-ness of steampunk imagery in our society, to the point where it's now the dominant imagery of the industrialized 1800s. It's far, far, far easier to find media representations of steampunk than it is of the industrial parts of the actual 1800s, at this point. People have been growing up for some time now never having seen or read really anything that accurately depicts the 1800s in cities and conurbations, but they pretty much seen or read a ton of steampunk aesthetic stuff, all of which will have been twee and mindlessly positive. It strikes a violent contrast with 1800s imagery - people will have seen and read brutal depictions of the slave-owning South, of the harsh life in the US West, but the cities? No. The utter horrors and exploitation of industrialization are basically kept under wraps. And it absolutely impacts their attitudes to the 1800s - a lot of younger people think living back then in a city wasn't that bad, maybe even kind of cool, when most of them would have been in the workhouse or dying in factory fire after having lived on near starvation wages.Maybe that's the real problem here - not that steampunk has become this debased aesthetic - though it has - but that it's become the dominant representation of the industrialized 1800s, because no-one is willing to represent that society even close to how it was.And I do think that if you make films or books or other works about a fictionalized 1800s, and they draw on real-world 1800s aesthetic yet are non-critical of the real 1800s, that's genuinely problematic and really disrespectful to million of people who suffered and died. But if it's just dress-up who cares.(Again, what strikes me is that the steampunk stuff which isn't set in the 1800s are the most fiercely critical of 1800s cultural ideals and most reflective of how tough the life was for most people - c.f. the recent Leech by Hiron Ennes.)</blockquote>

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