(03-21-2021, 11:01 PM)Valles Wrote: <stuph>Wow, here I thought this thread would go dormant without my constant promotion of content within it. Cool to see it can sustain itself. Well, I'm back from another quarter of college, I've got a week of break, so hopefully I can move on this whole abstract notion of a thing for a bit. Get a few scenes in.
1. Yeah, I've got a bunch of in-my-head backstory for how GENOM rose to power, and yeah I saw them as a startup of sorts. And it does make sense that Celia would have shares in GENOM. And certainly using the Sabers as a distraction while she takes out other shareholders makes sense. I think I even remember a fanfic where she actually manages to take over the company that way.
Aesthetically, though, in terms of what I want to get out of the cyberpunk genre, it's not really my cup of tea, for a few reasons:
- How the hell is she supposed to sell this terrible truth to the Sabers, especially Priss? With the promise that she'll be a more responsible Chairwoman once she's in charge, won't send berserk Boomers out for innocent children and all that? With promises of becoming hilariously rich on their own shares, even if they can never publicly use their power there because then Celia would be admitting she ran the Sabers in the first place? Either she tells them at the beginning, when Priss is in it solely for revenge, and loses a team member - or she reveals the whole thing was a scam later in the overarching series, and loses all of them.
- Even if we assume Celia is a little less monomanaical than Quincy, what makes you think her taking over GENOM would overall be a Good Thing? Absolute power corrupting absolutely, and all that. Would even she be willing to dismantle the megacorporation? Perhaps make its patents public? Would that even be enough to atone for all the shitty things cyberpunk (and contemporary) megacorporations do as a part of their business model?
- In regards to breaching of contracts, even if she brought that to court, I don't think anyone would care. I don't think the Japanese government is virtuous enough to have said breaches result in anything more than a settlement for some hefty-ish sum legally. Hell, if she takes legal action against GENOM, Quincy can a) pin her father's death on Mason as a 'rogue agent' and then very publicly reveal that she ran the Sabers as an 'armed terrorist group' for her 'revenge'. It's not too hard to imagine the media spin on something like this - Celia as an annoying trust-fund baby who wants her 'share' of a Real Value Creator's Hard Work revitalizing the Great Nation of Nippon, a parasite exploiting a few minor breaches of ethics for money and for a father who didn't really understand the Real Value of his own work and so deserved to be shut out of the company.
- But, again, aesthetically, the whole thing smacks of a certain willingness to give up in the face of megacorporate evil. In this reboot, GENOM is going to fall, and perhaps bring much of capitalism with it, none of this 'keeping certain corporate excesses in check' bullshit from Scoop Chase. Like, having Celia try to undermine GENOM through its own systems, working within the system to 'change' it - in no cyberpunk media should that sort of thing ever work, otherwise said work is lying about the nature of power.
2. Yeah. Leon is cool-ish. Less cool than he thinks he is but that's sort of what makes him charming - he knows when to stop being Grizzled 80s Action Hero and be a pal to someone like Nene, who desperately needs pals. (He's better than the growly yelly mess of a dimwit in 2040, that's for sure. I could write a whole essay about why 2040 is bad.)
Here's the thing, though. I'm not so sure I think the ADP, at least in this reboot continuity, are underarmed. I think the notion of the cops as the underfunded, unloved defenders of the law against a hostile crime-ridden city, epitomized in American crime drama of the time, and carried over to 2032 (I swear to god Chief Todo should be called Chief Two Days From Retirement) is a little - obsolete. It reflected Reaganite paranoia about drugs and 'inner cities' and Shady Ethnic Gangs more than anything else, but now we live in an era where cops actually have gear as heavy as the 2032 ADP in America and they, uh, haven't exactly been models of community protection and high virtue. I don't know enough about Japanese cops beyond the more restrained sense I got from Patlabor, where the cop who wants to be a Dirty Harry type is more of a gag character than anything else.
I mean, I still want to bring Leon and Daley into the picture, still want them to be generally likeable, but they're bright spots in an organization originally designed to deal with rampaging Boomers that, in practice, sees most of its heavy weaponry brought to bear on the margnialized post-employment precariat GENOM and the right-wing government want to get rid of anyway. They're riot cops with anti-armor guns, unable or unwilling to take on the holders of power - that somehow feels more grounded than the sort of batman-ish state of the ADP with Commissioner Gordon and whatnot.
Also I never thought of the cybernetics angle as a thing. I had a separate idea for what Priss's gang was doing that pissed Mason off, tied to the whole not-Soulkiller thread that drives the plot forward by virtue of being Mason's Sinister Conspiracy - killing randos to harvest their uploads for continuous tweaking of the project after Nene and the original dev team got fired. I say had because I had a conversation last night which kinda threw me back to square one on this project.
It went like this: I was talking to a guy I knew who I had gotten to watch the OG OVA's, Crash included, but he'd never read extensive amounts of fanfic and whatnot, about some writer's block I was having regarding this screenplay. I know it's fundamentally an 'exercise' in working on my greatest writing weakness, ie coherent plot, but still. I've only got so many days before I'm back on the treadmill and I want to make the most out of them.
So I started talking to him about the whole idea of the Sabers opposing Mason on the grounds of uncovering his not-Soulkiller-adjacent conspiracy - maybe, I said, it wouldn't be building up to a specific climax where he harvests a whole bunch of people at once, but just dealing with an ongoing process. Not as Marvel-ish. But he fixated on something entirely different that I wasn't going to play up - namely the Sabers being, as Celia put it, mediagenic. Both out of necessity - the Sabers could never be a truly covert group in an age where everyone has smartphones and cybereye cameras - and out of thematic necessity because this is still at its heart some sort of superhero movie.
If the Sabers need the 'respect of the streets', he said, then this first movie has to establish that relationship to the civilian masses and how the Sabers acts rely on small-scale media and preexisting tropes about superheroes to hijack public opinion - and how more establishmentarian sources could be a counter to that. So fighting Mason for something relatively unknown like that whole soul-harvesting operation is almost too disconnected from that bigger theme.
He proposed that the Sabers a) not be so mediagenic in the beginning - I had the idea that Celia is a closet tokusatsu fan (a la Shadowjack) and he thought it would be more interesting if Priss or Linna would propose the multi-colored thing in the first place, basically having the full concept of the Sabers as an explicitly superheroic team not being entirely Celia's idea but a team effort - and b) have them start just by dealing with rampaging Boomers doing the usual rampaging Boomer thing, and slowly work their way up the chain of command to eventually whack Mason, with the media angle constantly being played with all the while.
So I'm at this point where I half-agree with my pal, about the necessity of media, about the need for the conflict with Mason to be made public, to make that theme more present. Only I'm not sure how I would build on that idea in later installments, because if you bring up media perception of superheroes once then it kind of needs to become a core theme otherwise it looks like you're intentionally neglecting the thought you originally put into the setting. (And, again, I can't shake the feeling that going into this whole media thing undermines the necessary suspension of disbelief needed for 'well why doesn't GENOM just hire the CIA or whoever to smoke the Sabers out?' issue that I still haven't internally resolved.)
But here's the thing, I've always found the trope in BGC fanfiction of 'another day, another Boomer rampage' kind of suspect for a few reasons:
1. No Boomer ever goes legit crazytown in the original OVAs without some underlying control thing going on. The 55C in episode 1? Controlled by Mason as a distraction while his other team nabbed Cynthia. The 12B's in episode 3? Mason suspects Celia is his foe and is trying to provoke her. Pretty much the only 'Mad Machine' that isn't doing what it's supposed to do for GENOM or whoever is the Griffon in ep 4. The randos in ep 8? Miriam's scanners to weigh the Sabers power level and to surpass it. Even Bob himself had all those rampages be directed by Quincy towards greater goals.
2. Well, my pal said in response to the above, then say that the public unofficially knows regular Boomer rampages go towards a larger purpose but they can't do anything about it. All those rampages are to destroy bits of old Megatokyo, rendering land unfit for habitation by noodle stands and whatnot so GENOM can build another luxury highrise. I responded that GENOM wouldn't need to be so brutal, because they probably have the infamously conservative and corrupt Japanese government on their side, their partner in rebuilding Megatokyo as the City of Tomorrow. A quick word to some bureaucratic office, the government whips out Eminent Domain or some failed safety inspection, GENOM gets the land.
3. More importantly, don't regular Boomer rampages in an ostensibly futuristic corporate showcase city look bad for business? Because that's what I think Megatokyo is: a showcase to the rest of the world, with GENOM's business model relying on contracting megacity governments worldwide to level their cities and build them back up as 'innovation hubs' and 'special economic zones' and 'trade network hubs' in exchange for near-total control over urban infrastructure and whatnot. So if GENOM's other big product, infantry-replacement Boomers, are suddenly running amok and depressing property values in the city on the regular, that might cause city governments hesitate, yes? Maybe contract out with some Chinese Belt-n-Road-sponsored competitor for their big urban overhaul. So the Sinister Plots GENOM and other Sinister Organizations would perpetuate on the unsuspecting people of Megatokyo wouldn't involve as much random violence unless they could justify it in advance, I think. Not because they care about the public, but they care about potential clients.
But then my buddy said that there needs to be that public, direct action, things exploding and being shot, Sabers battling Boomers on the streets, for any good BGC fiction to sustain itself. And he's not wrong. Like I said, if the Sabers dressed in camo and fought a shadow war against GENOM they'd lose quickly and in any case they'd just be plain terrorists, which isn't half as novel for a cyberpunk setting.
So... yeah. I'm definitely overthinking this, way more than the original creators of BGC ever did. But I think that trying to consider the implications of things that other superhero fiction lets slide is part of what would make BGC a true cross-genre work. Cerebral like what a lot of cyberpunk wants to be, but also unafraid of being good clean fun. Able to think deeper to provide new plot threads for the series to work with, but not getting so bogged down in those semantics that the Sabers can't fight GENOM and win.
Argh. There's a way to balance all these things, I know it's not impossible, I just don't know how to do it!