Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9646993" data-attributes="member: 18">I mean, that's a cheap and rather bitter characterization that I'd think was beneath you. God forbid someone seek to be able to identify a genre, eh?But it doesn't change the fact that I'm right, and I think you know it doesn't. Steampunk was not an equivalent of -gate at the time in the 1980s and early 1990s. It became that later.These were different groups of people, at different times. Steampunk was a literary genre. Then the term started being used for just any kind of Victoriana that wasn't striving for historical authenticity, or any HG Wells-esque retrofuture. I personally think it was kind of gross because there was so much worship of elites, so much lionization of creeps, so much deletion/elision of the horrors of the Victorian era in a lot of the Victoriana (and some of the retrofuture stuff). I see far less of an issue with proper fantasy that is steam age/gaslamp vibes, note, it's when it's using real-world stuff (places, people, etc.) and whitewashing the hell out of that it grosses me out, especially because that kind of stuff is directly adjacent to Nazi-style "things were better in our imagined, whitewashed (in all senses of the word) past!"."He's the oneWho likes all our pretty songsAnd he likes to sing alongAnd he likes to shoot his gunBut he knows not what it means"</blockquote>