I have a few:
- Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It’s eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how “most people are just NPCs” (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
- Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
- All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
- Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.
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cybernetics makes you evil. No, fuck you Pondsmith, there is no way to make cybernetics mechanically reduce your humanity that is not inexcusable ableist bs. Let it die.
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any kind of bioconservative/biotrad reactionary anti-transhumanism. Radical bodily autonomy is based and cool and that holds whether you want to be a fish, grow boobs, live forever, or encode your conscious mind in to the magnetic flux of Jupiter’s orbital system. I don’t care that you lack the imagination and joy for life to live forever. I don’t care that you think inhabiting a giant metal deathrobot would be self-alienating. I don’t care that you think merging your flesh with six billion other people to form a new gestalt god mind is icky. Work out your own issues, we’re going to be over here disfugirng The face of man and woman and having a great time
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basically all military sci fi. If i never read another book that is just some fascist freak masturbating about murdering immigrants or being the victim of the imperialism they gleefully inflict on others it will be too soon.
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also if you try to give me a book/show/game where the ai’s are evil and want to destroy and enslave all humans but they’re only like that because that’s literally the only relationship you can imagine between people with any kind of power disparity i will scream until i pass out. A single, high pitched wail. Dogs will bark and a wine glass will shatter in close up to emphasize how loud it is. I will literally turn purple and fall over.
I think in the OG version of the game, cyberpsychosis was canonically all the fucking ads loaded into your cyberware morphing into malware that drives you insane the more stuff you install
sneaking through a corporation’s 100 story maximum story business tower/fortress using every augment and skillsoft to get through multiple levels of security
“Anderson Windows. Would you like to spruce up your home? Would you like to reduce your heating and cooling costs? Anderson Windows, call to make an appointment for a free estimate, TODAY!”
That is all just space liberalism. Transhumanism is rad. Liberals can’t accept it because it would mean they aren’t the best they could be. Same for the other stuff. Admitting AI would make better decisions would be admitting the current ruling class isn’t the best.
Counterpoint though. Capitalism is effectively and AI and it is wildly hostile.
Socialism is also effectively an ai and is not wildly hostile. Beep boop! Checkmate meatsack! Boop beep!
At best that has us at 50-50. We could push the odds this way or that way but the risk case will always be high enough that we can’t specify rule out hostile ai. True any sufficiently advanced AI would figure our co-operation real quick. It is just that there is no way to know for sure you get it right out the gate
cybernetics makes you evil. No, fuck you Pondsmith, there is no way to make cybernetics mechanically reduce your humanity that is not inexcusable ableist bs. Let it die.
now my guy is a flaming but he does seem to give that choice to the dm. Within universe there’s at least three explanations for cyberpsychosis;
AI takeover (there’s also the idea that the AIs beyond the Blackwall are actually demons and that a secret cabal has been upholding the wall since Babylonian times), planned obsolescence by the companies(checks out tbh), and then the one that you referenced, which is loss of humanity and not seeing other people as humans anymore.
overall it’s just a balancing mechanic, Shadowrun does it better though
At the end of the day you have a stat called humanity and you lose it when you get cyberware. He could have dropped it entirely. He could have come up with a different balance point - you’ve got limited neural thruoughput and too much ware can cause an overload resulting in seizures, or you run an escalating risk of software incompatibility, or just create a totally arbitrary cyberware capacity stat. But he’s kept humanity, he’s kept cyberware mechanically reducing your empathy, and he’s kept cyberpsychosis as something represented in core game mechanics. He’s had every chance to stop over many decades and many editions. I’ve heard his attempts to exuse this, and attempts made on his behalf, and i reject them all. He could have removed humanity. He could have removed cyperpsychosis as a game mechanic. He could have found a different way to balance the mechanical benefits of cyberware. He could, but he has not. “Wheelchairs make you evil” remains one of the most fundamental and recognizable features of the setting.
Fix your shit Mike!
i guess theres an argument that the corporation provided tech doesnt actually want you to maintain your identity and would prefer to make you a complacent and productive little piggy, so lowering empathy would be good. though that should really only be for central nervous system tech, not any tech
regardless, yeah, the people i know with missing parts and surgical implants are some of the nicest people youll ever meet
I think the problem is that Pondsmith and others inspired by him still use the word “humanity” for it
In Cyberpunk RED, only implants that take you above and beyond what a human can do begin to affect your “humanity” score. Replacing a limb or getting cybereyes to allow someone blind to see doesn’t make anyone less human anymore in terms of game mechanics - you don’t get hit with a “humanity” penalty for it. If you start loading up on cyberware that begin to push you into the realm of (often violent) superhuman - implanted weapons, a reflex booster that basically makes everyone move in slow motion - that’s when the stat begins to be affected, and even then it’s meant to represent an alienation from others rather than becoming ontologically less human
It’s a sight better than Shadowrun where even an implant that lets you taste food better will materially make you impure and less able to tap into the purity of magic, but it is still problematic. I think there’s definitely a story that can be told in cyberpunk about being able to pay to become literally superhuman, and how that would inevitably cause class divide to be a literal physiological divide - imagine a world where every rich kid is literally smarter and faster and stronger than anyone else can ever hope to be unless they also paid up. The problem is most cyberpunk writers are lib as fuck and can’t even begin to think about class properly, so instead of a discussion about alienation and paying to become superhuman, we get this garbage about becoming subhuman for modifying The Divine Form
A reddit comment from the man himself goes into the finer details of his thinking with cyberpsychosis and it really isn’t as simple as “get chromed, go crazy” and he delves into the socio-psycho reasonings behind the phenomenon: he presents a more nuanced ideal than most people engaging with the concept will allow either because it’s a game with rules, or an anime with plot contrivance (cyberpsycho serum meds)
Oh and he says it isn’t AI net demons lol
I think I am kinda into the humanity thing. We can observe in real life growing in power making you less empathetic. Put me in a dystopia and give me a skull gun and I can’t promise I would be able to find empathy. Give me a robot fist and put some corporate bullshit in front of me and there is only so long before I’d spiral out of control and have to gun fight the cops after punching an ATM that ate my card. I don’t know if that is how he ment it. I think it works as a way to examine alientation from humanity compounding with alienation from the human condition.
cybernetics makes you evil
I love Star Wars but this is so core to it and I hate it. “He’s more machine now than man; twisted and evil.”
Yeah I really don’t like that. I do appreciate that in the end part of why Luke and Anakin are able to overcome their hatred and fear is seeing that they share the same disability from the same origin of violent conflict. You could explain that in a positive light, with Luke realizing that Vader is just a man. An old man with disabilities that mirror his own. And Vader in turn realizing that he maimed his son the same way he was maimed long ago, and relfecting on the futility and misery that came from pursuing vengeance.
My least favorite trope is more of a universal one
It’s the “If we beat the bad guys using their own tactics, we’re no better than them” trope and it’s been pissing me off since I was five years old
Like, it’s one thing to have a character who is extremely optimistic about rehabilitation and redemption, it’s another one entirely to just pull the old “We’ll figure out a better way” and the better way is an absolute pulled-it-out-of-my-ass thing that only happened because otherwise the hero is fucked
To piggyback on your first point: when the hero witnesses the evil bad guy do something personal to them and they still refuse to kill them and then the bad guy tries to stab them in the back and dies by mishap.
Example: bad guy just triggered the Innocence Bomb and blew up seventy orphanages of kids with cockney accents. He then stabs the loveable side kick/mentor. Hero screams in slow motion. Cradles their dying friend. Swears vengeance. Hero fights the bad guy. Epic swords and guns. Gains the upper hand. Has a knife to the throat, a gun to the head, and is standing on both of the bad guy’s balls. Hero says “this isn’t what Comedic Uncle Mentor would have wanted me to do.” Hero lets the bad guy live. Hero turns around. Bad guy leaps up with a poisoned Doom Blade of Death, the same one he used to kill the hero’s godparents in the flashback or intro! Bad guy slips on a skateboard and falls backwards over a rail into the giant magma-acid pit-reactor.
I hate that shit.
I honestly think that is part of a general psy op to discourage the poors from getting revenge on thr people that have wronged them as capitalism is based on wronging the poors. Pretty much every society had Norms around not harming your social superiors. We just try to hide it so it feels weird.
That can be expanded to any “the hero nobly denies doing something ‘unethical’ to get what they want/decides to sacrifice their own desires for the sake of someone else, only for reality itself to turn around and reward them with exactly what they wanted/were going to sacrifice as a special good boy treat for doing the right thing” situation, I think.
A lot of YA fiction seems to take that route. Then the kids who read it grow up and turn into adults who cry about the unfairness of Marie Antoinette getting owned.
“If we beat the bad guys using their own tactics, we’re no better than them”
The related trope of the hero not killing the villain after the villain has spent a whole story possibly killing, and the hero themselves just probably killed a ton of nameless goons to get to the villain, drives me up a wall
Tying onto that, having to do the “honorable thing” and fight battles symmetrically. Indy shooting the swordsman is peak cinema.
Legend of Korra. Killmonger. Idk, doz2ns of others.
Sleeping Beauty is the only good Disney Movie because Maleficent’s entire motivation is that she has the power to hurt people and she has fun doing it. There’s no tragic history or grievance or any shit like that,s he’s n
I take it you didn’t see the Maleficent origin story movie that does in fact give her a tragic history and grievance
The tacit acceptance of monarchism and aristocracy as normal and legitimate things. Even when there’s intrigue like “oh no, the bad scheming sneaky nobles are doing a heckin scheme against the good and pure and charitable main character friendly nobles, we must make sure the good landed gentry come out on top!” it’s just treated as drama within an inherently legitimate system.
Childish ontologies of good and evil where the good guys are rightful property owners who are nice and good and the villains are disruptive cartoon villains who squabble and betray and do silly cartoon villain things. Further, in that framework the villains are always either barbarous underdogs scheming to take power from the legitimate powerful land owners, or are some sort of fever dream expy of aUtHoRitArIaNiSm that’s either styled as Napoleonic liberal meritocracy as seen by British monarchists or some absurd caricature of the Soviets/China.
The tacit acceptance of monarchism and aristocracy as normal and legitimate things
Something that I thought dealt with this well was The Magicians.
spoiler
After becoming kings and queens of legally-distinct Narnia the protagonists decide “Hey this is real fucking weird” and decide to hold elections, at which point the high king is booted back to Earth because the creature that created legally-distinct Narnia is insane and made it a fundamental law of the universe that the rulers must be from Earth.
Any representation of feudal ruling classes. Maybe I’m overdoing it with the class hatred a bit, but I can’t watch nobles cavorting around and not feel an instinctive revulsion. It’s even worse when, in fantasy, we’re required to care about the machinations of court intrigues as if that’s a real form of politics. One thing I do like about many standard fantasy settings, like that of Pathfinder, therefore is that they usually have a modern conception of class and an abundance of republics; especially the whole idea of adventurers as individuals outside of society but still integral to it has a lot of potential I feel. Basically, I just don’t want any more fantasy stories about good kings and evil kings.
They can’t even have gentry-on-aristocracy violence. We have to care about some shitty inbred royal family.
Exactly! I think part of it is a, in my view, mistaken historical realism where authors think fantasy should be based on the middle ages when, in reality, the better part of our modern fantasy genre derives from post-1600 literature. Like, the rise of the bourgeoisie and decline of feudalism is the primary social context for all of this, I think.
One of the things l like about wuxia is that the good guys are mostly doctors, monks, cops, and random dorks and if there are any nobles they’re usually bad guys. And the good guy cop is often an anti-corruption cop going after corrupt government officials or corrupt cops or corrupt nobles.
I have derailed a few DnD sessions by refusing to save nobility. Like nah, fuckem. I’ll trade a prince to an evil god for spider powers too. Where do I sign?
One of the reasons I left my old DND group. Everyone else was happy to play out a “put the baby boy on the throne currently occupied by the adult woman” plot without batting an eye. I’m like, first off monarchy is awful and second off why are you trying to make us support literal patriarchy?
I don’t think anyone literally said “why are you making this political?” but that was the energy I was reading.
My gf loves Bridgerton and so I pretend to like but I would install a guillotine and bring terror to the ton
Court intrigue is a real form of politics though. We can still see it today. Staff members selectively leaking material to the media, parties “strategically” donating to their enemies, Watergate, COINTELPRO, lobbying, sex clubs, Biden not trusting his own security, intelligence agencies, oppo research and cyber warfare, and so on
They’re small parts of politics, but legitimate nonetheless. It usually only happens within the realm of power and not normal people. But even office gossip with the hopes of someone getting fired is intrigue for the civilian.
