Listen just because my underconfident and socially awkward bug lady protagonist joins a ragtag multiracial fantasy airship crew and finds a human bf among them who uses their tramp freighter gray market status to undercut East India Company type resource gathering firms and deliver anti-ship weapons to tribal lizard folk and the world is kinda shitty because they're discovering capitalism and discovering how if you just pass laws against racism it doesn't magically stop racism and also there are factory worker rebellions happening back home in the West doesn't mean I have some sort of agenda
Vaguely pseudo-victorian whateverpunk usually has themes of social change at their center given that the 19th century was full of revolutions and new political ideas and science and people finally figuring out that making sick people bleed on purpose is a bad idea
I'm sure anyone could look at either one of our stories and go "whoa just like Treasure Planet/Perdido Street Station/other vaguely similar thing"
People keep telling me this but my brain is like "you're a horrible writer and you suck and you're unoriginal and nobody will ever love you and your death would release others from the burden of your existence" and tbh I'm sick of its bullshit
It's perfectly normal to write a story where a guy who is totally not you has a harem of secretaries/submissives who serve his every need and listen obediently to his political opinions
and mine where all sorts of animal like people fight capitalism (and the occasional other thing) (i have 2.2m buff dragon people with several meter long tails, they are way more cool then your hunky vampires) (i love my worldbuilding thing)
I like how the Disco Elysium writers did historical materialism in the world building. There's the central conflict over the strike that sets the stage for the murder and Harry's story, then you have the revolution/civil war and the coalition airships hovering in the background enforcing the counter-revolutionary order. So class struggle is at the root of everything else in that world. It's like you can decide you want to tell a story rooted in a particular class conflict, then the dialectics of the class conflict help you elaborate the rest of the world, it's an interesting approach.
just embrace it and make it not cringe. all three will come through anyways. it’s the writing equivalent of a foot fetishist trying to draw sfw art but everyone knowing immediately
I honestly don't know what kink I was venting when I came up with the idea of vending machines selling disposable fleshlights disguised as knock-off soda cans, complete with public health messages in place of the list of ingredients; where the idea is that after you nut in the can you can close it back up and then put it in a reverse vending machine to get sorted and sent to some sperm bank for use in IVF, epidemiology, medical research, demographics, and forensics
Like, that definitely feels like the sort of thing that would come from a kink, yet at the same time I do not think there is a single soul on Earth who finds the idea of nutting in a Mr. Peter and putting it in a TOMRA machine to be at all arousing
I mean, I could start with the bit over ten thousand years ago where some lakeside village by chance discovered that they could use the shit of the larvae of a moth fed on a certain type of normally poisonous weed to induce abortions and suppress their menstrual cycles, but long story short: I needed to figure out how to get a large quantity of cum to the sperm banks, without the sperm banks knowing whose cum it is, with the added restriction that people would not under normal circumstances simply give away their own cum for free.
A sci-fi setting where a comparatively minor planet overthrows its monarchy and becomes a nascent socialist project. It is immediately beset by other major powers in the solar system and wrestles with building socialism and also the military. Eventually, it is overwhelmed by reactionary forces and the revolution is overthrown.
I like exploring how shared trauma affects people differently so it's a more character-focused story. The main characters are former socialist military who struggle to adapt to the political reality post-reaction. Some try to fade into society, some still believe in the cause, others join the reactionary forces. Former friends set against one another.
Oh and the characters are anthropomorphic fly-boy pilots with sexy well-designed flight suits. There's also some weird consciousness enmeshing technology that I'm still fleshing out.