What made steampunk mainstream? Obviously it all started in the year 1990 with The Difference Engine, but the book evidently failed to make a big splash at the time and I don't recall any deliberate examples of steampunk until the tail end of the decade. Then, in quick succession, we had Wild Wild West and Steamboy, which exposed the mainstream audiences to the genre, but neither movie was very successful. In my observations, it wasn't until the 2010's that steampunk truly exploded and began seeping into every adjacent genre. So what happened?
stale 10 year old bait, don't engage with OP.
Tell me about your steampunk settings anons, what distinguishes them from the norm?
Go hijack a different thread, sperg.
every steampunk setting NEEDS atleast 1 rape factory. it can't be a steampunk setting without one
Self propogating aerosolized chlorinated hydrocarbons produced by bacteria which feed on oil and oil byproducts.
It's created a world somewhere between Nausicaa and 9 where everything is covered in the black smoke except the low pressure high altitude areas. Most of humanity lives in a maginot line equivalent in the mountains, going out to scavenge airships and LAND IRONCLADS and such.
Internal combustion engines exist and are understood but since oil is both naturally rarer and actively consumed by the black smoke of death it's mainly steam engines that get used.
Ok that's actually super cool, I love steampunk that gets inventive with the steam part. I have something kinda similar where coal-powered steam engines are currently being replaced with more efficient ones powered by an exotic redox reaction that unleashes vast amounts of energy. It's more portable and compact, but the end result of the reaction is a caustic toxic sludge most industries just dump directly into the environment, creating entire regions where flora and fauna are completely destroyed.
The goth kids discovered the color brown
This is a little too accurate. I like steampunk in limited quantities, it just more often than not tends to be all of the things I don't like about modern fantasy piled together in a nonsensical world.
Steampunk almost doesn't even exist as a genre. It's an artstation tag with two movies and a book. Its aesthetics are surface level, and it has no philosophy or purpose. Despite being completely shallow and having very little actual works in the genre, it is already completely self-referential and disconnected from the earnest speculative fiction of Verne, Welles, and even Gibson who would be bored and confused with the genre that supposedly was inspired by them. What happened? People realized the fad was stupid and ugly.
I think the problem was the idea that it was ever a genre to begin with; it was always just an aesthetic, but pretending it was more than that ended up giving it a worse reputation in the long run.
You're not necessarily wrong, but technically Neil Gaiman's Stardust, that shitty Three Musketeer's movie, The Golden Compass, and the Shadow and Bone series constitute as it. There's other examples, but all of the examples listed aren't so intensely steampunk as the thing that games get.
That counts for pretty much every [insert X]punk genre. Only Cyberpunk has any real weight to it.
It was easy and fun to cosplay and make props around the theme; that's really all there is to it.
It got too popular and some people got really lazy with it which is what made it eternally cringe for the kind of people who post here.
Social media. It was basically just a cosplay/art fad that got legs because any idiot could buy some shitty Victorian style get up, slap some cogs and goggles on it, and post it on facebook or whatever. Or they'd draw some steam engine/clockwork monstrosity. And then other idiots would see it and do the same thing and so on.
Nothing happened. It's just a very obvious aesthetic that doesn't have the volume of material to have to actually engage with so kids can just glue some gears and tat on stuff and call it steam punk.
Do you have even a single proof to the bullshit you are trying to sell?
You can make decent victorian scifi, but you need to take every notion of steampunk and all knowledge you gained from tvtropes out behind the shed and put it out of its misery. Steamboy and The Difference Engine are fine I suppose, then read some Welles and Verne, touch grass while you're at it, and make something based on that instead of what you saw at an anime convention. And the speculative fiction of the 1800s-very early 1900s had the kernel of steampunk, but it was earnest sci-fi written by educated men. And it was harder scifi too, Verne gave Wells shit over writing a story with antigravity.
Reginald Pikedevant helped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA
Is steampunk essentially done right when it is just "there" in the background as something extra to take note of while the fluff is already able to stand on it's own legs?
who the frick is the artist of this image
I know it's from around 2012 or 2013 and a few sites say choi keun hoon but I cannot find an actual source