True. The groundwork for it is set in era2. But there is some steampunk-esq leanings in that direction at the end of Era2.
But serious to anybody reading this… mistborn is fantastic and the change to a new era is also fantastic.
Mistborn era 1: Epic Fantasy with metals based magic system.
One of the examples is people with certain abilities can “push” or “pull” on metallic objects like coins and leap, fly or fight with it.
Mistborn era 2: Epic fantasy magic in the age of firearms and steam engines with metals based magic system.
Same as above… but now somebody can fire a bullet into the ground of a small gulch and use the metal of the bullet to push off of allowing them to “leap” that gulch. Or another person can deflect bullets fired at them, etc etc.
Not to regular people, but I bet it gave Silicon Valley and lots of other people with more money and power than sense ALL kinds of bad ideas. Dystopian fiction often does 🙁
are you kidding? westworld ABSOLUTELY fits! did you not watch the first two seasons? or even just the finale of season 1? the old engineer and his redemption arc, the robot girl and her apotheosis? the jaded nihilistic madame and breaking her programming, proving she's her own person, by breaking her code, possibly in a way that was planned by a manipulative bastard who played everyone around him for decades, blurring if not effectively erasing the line between humanity and our creations, emphasized by the man in black's whole arc, in kind of a more drawn out version of the cinematic cut of blade runner you can't even find anymore?
I was inspired by cowboy bebop and dune! not to, you know, become the chosen one or a space bounty hunter, but, like, you know, in other ways. they were beautiful. they said stuff about life. they touched my heart. they taught me about myself. cowboy bebop in particular really drove home the beauty of the temporary, of relationships even if they weren't forever, the beauty that can come from facing your trauma, your past, and potentially even your death, and also inspired me to be a deeply annoying weeb for a couple years, among other philosophical shit.
Its probably been 15 years since I've consumed any of the Trigun story, but from what I remember it was a story set in a dystopian future where local strongmen and warlords battled for control over a desert wastelands while the most altruistic person was targeted by society with the largest bounty on his head in history. Meanwhile the local populace is barely scraping by as they are set upon by both man and nature just trying to survive. So, Western, yes. Sci-fi, (careful of spoilers) yes. Inspirational?
One could argue that Vash the Stampede perseveres despite all the hardships he's had to endure and kept a cheerful demeanor through it all. He acknowledged the harm he's done but is also willing to atone for it as much as he can. For readers who've done bad things in life but want to make up for it, that seems inspirational.
I've been running a tabletop campaign for Scum & Villainy which is very much in the Space Opera/Western category. It's been a really fun and evocative setting to game in.
Galaxy Rangers or Saber Rider come to mind, when I think about a setting like this. But both are nearly 40 years old now and were a bit obscure even back then.
A futuristic self-aware city which stores data in its very structure is attacked by terrorists. In an act of self preservation, after a section is cut off with no redundant backup, the city downloads a couple library categories into the brain of an unwitting resident. His whole identity is replaced by the entire human category of Wild West movies, comics and books, along with some scientific data on radio communications. His memory erased, his entire personality is now Radio Cowboy.
Most scifi westerns are also neo-noir(since many of the good western revivals they were cribbing off were noir-westerns in the first place) and being inspirational is the opposite of noir.