So I'm working on a Bubblegum Crisis reboot screenplay...

[classicdrogn]

Yep, that's it. I always think, "No, Akuma to Tenshi no Kiss is a different one" when the title wanders across my mind looking for something to connect to.

[STMPD]

Wait, now I can't remember, was she a martial arts instructor in canon, or just aerobics and dance? My own story, long neglected as it's been, trips me up that way sometimes.

Just aerobics. I've sort of expanded her role as 'wellness consultant' in my reboot - she contracts with clients (very gig-y) to come to their place, do some personal fitness stuff - and act as dietician, sleep-cycle regulator, and occasional therapist to the rich and semi-famous. Doing martial arts (still not sure if I should have it be Panzer Kunst in a fit of references or just something more conventional) is more a thing she does for herself - I dunno, maybe she had a sensei take her under their wing in the years after the quake, or something? She keeps in practice. She's good at what she does.

Being offered a fat payday to sweeten the deal of putting her martial training to use in ways being a McDojo instructor never could and taking revenge for spilled blood and tears might get her to stop and think, but - even if not stated aloud, or not until later - making an effort at keeping anyone else from having their world shaken the way hers was could be the thing that makes her decide to agree.
I don't know, I just see her as a straightforward person, I guess - money is important because it buys security, and everyone wants that. If she can get paid for trying to make sure everyone has a little more of it against things that money can't fix or replace, even better, right? Not everything has to be complicated. It would also tie in to how she seems to have strong friendships but poor luck in love, if she's a little blunt about things and gets offended by the social lubricant sort of "white lies" in a closer relationship.

Yeah yeah yeah. I can work with that. Move the whole rant about childhood fantasies to someplace later in the script - just generally soften up Linna's tone. Not have her bare her whole dang soul, not yet, but admit that, yes, she wants financial security in her life. And then Celia brings up martial arts. Linna tries to pass that off as just a hobby, but Celia knows better - Linna still has a moral compass somewhere in there. And that's how she worms under Linna's armor and gets her on the team.

...Or am I making things too complicated again?

Yep, that's it. I always think, "No, Akuma to Tenshi no Kiss is a different one" when the title wanders across my mind looking for something to connect to.

Actually, Akuma might be a good song for that montage! It could be sung in a rock-y enough tone to feel like a Priss song, but still have that nice BGC pop.

[classicdrogn]

Sure, sounds good to me. Not everything has to be dribbled into the audience's ear with an eyedropper

[hazard]

The audience generally appreciates being treated as at least semi intelligent.

[Labster]

Been watching this thread, it seems promising.

Pretty sure her name should be Linna (or Rinna, I guess). Linna Yamazaki is supposed to be the "ordinary Japanese girl", Celia Stingray has two Western(-ish) names. The other leads have half-Japanese names -- I think there was supposed to be some symmetry here.

Go ahead and try it; if it works, great, if not maybe you can adapt it for a later part. The only thing I'd absolutely keep from BGC OVA1 is the Silky Van as a mobile transport/support unit to let the Sabers deploy without being seen hop-skipping halfway across the city (or launching a highly distinctive aircraft RIGHT OUT OF THE SUPPOSEDLY SECRET HQ like in Crash...)

I really do like how Bob handled it in DW2, where Quincy knew damn well who was in charge of the Knight Sabers, but never moved directly out of his own ineffable plan. In a modern surveillance state, how you manage to hide this kind of machinery and deployment on a regular basis? I mean, they're good at opsec but all it takes is one mistake across years of vigilante action. Another approach would be to handle it like in Black Lagoon -- any of the three criminal factions could easily crush the Lagoon Company, but they remain useful as a neutral party. The Sabers could be the same kind of "neutral vigilantes" who get used by the other powers, like GENOM (via subsidiaries), USSD, Gulf & Western as much as achieving their own goals.

[Bob Schroeck]

I really do like how Bob handled it in DW2, where Quincy knew damn well who was in charge of the Knight Sabers, but never moved directly out of his own ineffable plan.

Well... they were proof that it was working, after all... He was just waiting for that alien baby to land in Kansas before he'd call it a done deal. <grin>

[STMPD]

Been watching this thread, it seems promising.

Pretty sure her name should be Linna (or Rinna, I guess).  Linna Yamazaki is supposed to be the "ordinary Japanese girl", Celia Stingray has two Western(-ish) names.  The other leads have half-Japanese names -- I think there was supposed to be some symmetry here.

Go ahead and try it; if it works, great, if not maybe you can adapt it for a later part. The only thing I'd absolutely keep from BGC OVA1 is the Silky Van as a mobile transport/support unit to let the Sabers deploy without being seen hop-skipping halfway across the city (or launching a highly distinctive aircraft RIGHT OUT OF THE SUPPOSEDLY SECRET HQ like in Crash...)

I really do like how Bob handled it in DW2, where Quincy knew damn well who was in charge of the Knight Sabers, but never moved directly out of his own ineffable plan.  In a modern surveillance state, how you manage to hide this kind of machinery and deployment on a regular basis?  I mean, they're good at opsec but all it takes is one mistake across years of vigilante action.  Another approach would be to handle it like in Black Lagoon -- any of the three criminal factions could easily crush the Lagoon Company, but they remain useful as a neutral party.  The Sabers could be the same kind of "neutral vigilantes" who get used by the other powers, like GENOM (via subsidiaries), USSD, Gulf & Western as much as achieving their own goals.

Yeah, I'm pretty certain Quincy knew from day one, or at least found out pretty easily. Perhaps he thinks they're useful to him in the long run - I keep bouncing around the idea that he wants Celia, the Only Sane Transhuman, to inherit his work - to be so ground down by the impossibility of her crusade against megacorporate excess that she'll start to see things his way. Or he sees her as a useful way to get rid of all the ambitious wackos who work for him but want his job - not just Mason, but even the more competent schemers like Mark Latus's Daniel Dumas.
(Who-ee remember that fic? I tried reading it but found Latus's love of his own Villain Sue so annoying I couldn't keep going. No Armor Against Fate had similar problems, but Hagen knew how to restrain himself. I've never really liked those fanfics that so eagerly proclaim that the Sabers Cannot Possibly Win, that the most they can do is hope for the megacorp to behave nicely. Yes, yes, I know 2032 Celia was aware of that inevitability, but I had a problem with that, too. Megacorps don't have limits; they destroy obstacles, even if those obstacles include the rest of the human race. See Exxon's gleeful climate denialism as case in point. But enough of my politics.)
Anyway, putting the Sabers up as a neutral vigilante group, basically Shadowrunners with power armor, is all well and good, it makes sense, but then it runs into two obstacles:
1. Color. I'm pretty explicit in the script so far about acknowledging that the Sabers are made to be seen. They are very literally superheroes, playing with media obsession with such things to shine a light on things they don't like, to weaken the megacorp's holds on public perception. That doesn't seem like something any megacorp would like, trying to leverage people power in such a way. Of course, they can deploy their own spin doctors, fund their private little Ben Shapiros and PragerU's and other Vichy types to disparage the Sabers as a bunch of 'hysterical edgelords' or something like that. Or they could just ignore the rising complaints of the little people - after all, this is a world where GENOM is continuously automating more and more of the global workforce. GENOM-allied megacorps may not need to respond to public outcry because they can just send in Riot Boomers to deal with the proles. Hell, they could even start their own public idoru-powersuit groups who fight for them in a similar manner... but it would be so much easier to just give the nod to the CIA or whoever to get rid of the Sabers if they knew their identity.
2. People. What, you think Priss is going to accept the fact that GENOM knows who she is and what she does and only tolerates her Sabering because she serves Quincy's ends? Likewise, what about the Yoshida Miriam's of the world, the guys who decide to make their fortune within their home megacorp by taking the initiative and taking down the Sabers when they threaten one of their little pet projects? Even if Quincy has the whole megacorp under the 'don't hurt the Sabers' order... surely some exec would lose patience and whip out the Battle Boomers. All it takes is one pre-emptive strike.

---

So... yeah. Thinking about power dynamics like this really took the wind out of my sails. Because, at least in my little fanfic series, I kinda want the Sabers to win? Watch the megacorps collapse into irrelevance with the rise of some sort of plot-bullshit Singularity or the liberation of the Boomer mind? But damn. Really gotta suspend one's disbelief to make this sort of superheroic thing work. Reminds me of some stuff Linna said in Night Life.
This was sort of why I wanted to work in a big phat financial crisis, or some similar bursting of the bubble, midway through the series. Yes, the '08 crisis and COVID have entrenched the power of the powerful - but did it always have to be thus? Isn't the whole point of a crisis to show how shabby and slipshod the seemingly unstoppable Old Order is? Doesn't it take crises of such magnitude to make people upend the systems of power that govern them? But that almost sounds too misty-eyed for a cyberpunk story.
Ugh. I just want some optimism in my hypercapitalist dystopian sci-fi. Is that too much to ask? What do you guys think?

[hazard]

It's even possible that Quincy wants to both grind down Celia's idealism so she'll be a useful heir and use her to dispose of no longer useful ambitious minions.

How do you convince someone that there's an endless supply excess? By making sure she has to constantly pick up the pieces. When she's ground down and no longer cares you make her your minion/right hand, possibly by murdering her friends to really drive the point home.


No, this is not necessarily a very smart plan.

[classicdrogn]

I'm all for keeping a hopeful tone in the story - the constant "you won but actually you lost" inherent to the premise was a key factor in why my momentum on B. Disaster got sapped.

[STMPD]

I'm all for keeping a hopeful tone in the story - the constant "you won but actually you lost" inherent to the premise was a key factor in why my momentum on B. Disaster got sapped.

I know, right? Within limits, of course. I don't want to end up writing Fred Herriot's Illusions.

But at the same time all this genre deconstruction stuff - considering the implications of the Sabers existing, having their enemies actually try to do something about them with all the power they have - is good to think about. Not as though realism is my goal here, otherwise I'd move the whole setting to Shanghai and severely reduce the cool factor of the Boomers. But plausibility, playing out the implications of new elements in the world - something that makes the audience think 'yeah, they would do that, wouldn't they' - is what I think makes good cyberpunk fiction. Like, so much weird shit has happened societally in our world with just the rise of the internet - I feel as though a strength of the BGC reboot could be considering, say, what happens when automation technology (Boomers) gets so good that we end up having a lot fewer human-necessary jobs than we do humans looking for said jobs. (Could argue we're there already...) So if you have something like superheroes in a cyberpunk world, the cyberpunk side of the story demands the author think about how people would react to their presence, even if the superheroic part wants one to just suspend disbelief and start writing up some supervillains to punch in the face. It's a careful balance.

It's even possible that Quincy wants to both grind down Celia's idealism so she'll be a useful heir and use her to dispose of no longer useful ambitious minions.

How do you convince someone that there's an endless supply excess? By making sure she has to constantly pick up the pieces. When she's ground down and no longer cares you make her your minion/right hand, possibly by murdering her friends to really drive the point home.


No, this is not necessarily a very smart plan.

I like this way too much. Like, at the end of the first 'season' of episodes, after they've blasted Largo Iteration No. 1 to bits on top of GENOM Tower, and the credits have rolled, she gets a call from someone who sounds like Quincy, but we're not really sure if it's him - he's thanking her for 'dealing with that impostor'.

And then he follows up with something like: "You see the dangers our future faces, now? The threats careless use of technology by small-minded men creates? What is necessary to stop such things?"
"Yes. I understand that humanity has great potential for evil-"
"You know. Abstractly. For all your father's gifts, you still do not understand. But you will. In time, with experience, you will see that I am right."
Celia doesn't respond. She's trying to think of a way to piss him off.
"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man-" She hangs up. Cut to black.
...Or something like that.

Update: Okay, political madness aside, things are okay. Really. I just wrote like five good pages of close-quarters gunfight - the Sabers rescuing Nene from GENOM 'Repossession' Boomers. Lotsa shooty, lotsa Boomer gore, even a mouth laser involved. Read it!

[Labster]

I support hazard's ineffable plan. Or is the grand plan?

Well, the fact that they can't really win against GENOM is fairly genre, the punk part of cyberpunk. But you can always amend that to "can't win completely". Just because they're being used occasionally doesn't mean they don't do good things! It just means the good things are harder, happen less often, and are more meaningful when they do them.

I mean, maybe I'm the wrong person to talk to about this, being almost averse to the superhero genre. I just never saw the Sabers as supers. They're just folks with a budget and a grudge(t) who got tired of living in a world that treats them as disposable, and decided to fight back. Once they leave that suit behind, all that power they have is gone, and can be stopped with a bullet or a knife just like the rest of us. Which makes them more amazing.

That doesn't seem like something any megacorp would like, trying to leverage people power in such a way.

But if they just happen to find the Chang Group's (/me steals example from latest Doctor Who) new security bot is actually Dalek technology, then it's to GENOM's benefit to hire them to expose it. As Nep would say, "Do it for the shares!" Attacking another corp directly would be illegal, but those Sabres did it, not us, and they have great publicity.

[Valles]

A couple thoughts from various fanfics and my own aborted BGC Reboot musings...

1. Sylia's father invented the basic technology behind the boomers, correct? While an employee of GENOM, hence why they control the patents now, rather than Sylia. But it can't be that simple, or there'd never have been any need to kill him; they'd've just frozen him out and laughed when he tried to go to court. So Dr. Stingray did have at least coequal rights to the technology. How large was GENOM at that point?

Presumably, Sylia inherited those rights... but as a minor child, could not exercise anything resembling control. What happened to them after she came to adulthood? What other rights did Dr. Stingray have?

Theorizing: GENOM, in those days, was a startup. Amazon, Facebook - or Boston Dynamics. Most of those types of companies, to my knowledge, give out a lot of stock options to their early employees, as incentives. Especially valuable, keystone ones, like Dr. Stingray.

Quincy knows damn well what Sylia is doing - because as CEO, keeping track of one of his company's largest shareholders is basic survival. He sees her diving off on a childish and quixotic quest, rather than reaching for the levers that he knows could actually threaten him, and he smiles.

The Knight Sabers cannot succeed in bringing down GENOM by force or propaganda, but as long as Sylia is trying to do so, she's neutralized in the great internal game of politics between GENOM's major shareholders.

And Sylia, not a damn fool, knows that. She's counting on it. Because while Quincy's patting himself on the back and covering for her 'sloppiness' and smirking at the entertainment value of her naivete, he's not tracking down the proxies she has buying public stocks, or the legal teams meticulously documenting proof of breaches of the contract GENOM had with her father for the boomer rights.

It's a long, slow process. It'll be years before it's done. She's hoping Quincy lives that long. Long enough to see the rug pulled straight out from under him.

2. Leon. Leon, Leon, Leon. You're a cool guy, but lord does your whole Flirty Dude schtick age badly. But you're a good window into the ADP or whatever acronym replaces them, and their role in illustrating the state of the world is valuable. "Tell me again how overarmed we are!"

So, my thought for my own rewrite, slightly adapted... Priss's motorcycle gang was into cybernetics, not just bikes. When Priss's lover went down, it was Mason's will and arrangement, and she knew it. But they were a cyborg - a 'cyberpsychotic', a 'rogue boomeroid', or whatever you want to call it. Augmented enough to cause a big mess if they'd gone crazy rather than being focused on something Inconvenient...

It was Mason's plan... And Leon's finger on the trigger. Ex-military, in the ADP to try and do something good with his power-armor training. And instead he's executing stupid kids in over their heads because some corporate scumbag bought himself a judge or three, and getting in trouble for not gunning down the friend right next to them who had a few less pounds of metal to be right under the arbitrary line.

And he knows it. It cost Priss... a lot. And he knows that, too.

He figures that means he owes her. She's practical enough to use that.

She knows he avoided killing her, after all.

[STMPD]

<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!

[Bob Schroeck]

A couple thoughts, although I probably won't address everything above right now.

Firstly, Sylia doesn't have anything to admit other than she was fighting the war on more than just one front. The Sabers were one prong of a multipronged attack on GENOM, and just because they weren't the only means she was using doesn't mean they weren't doing good and didn't have a part in the success. If Priss really won't settle for anything but the complete destruction of GENOM, Sylia could always become a corporate raider, dismantling GENOM and selling off its individual parts to any of a hundred other corps out there. Otherwise renaming, rebranding and restructuring could turn GENOM into a completely different company with a new and better corporate ethic.

Regarding the ADP and being underarmed, might I direct you toward Dead Bang, a sequel to DW2 that I host here on my site even though I'm not the author. It has some really interesting ideas about how the ADP could get around whatever formal restrictions there are on its budget and firearms policies.

[hazard]

Regarding GENOM and Syllia: It's entirely possible for Syllia to end up on top of GENOM as a key or even the shareholder and yet be unable to effectively deal with what GENOM is doing. Organizations that large have a life and will all their own, and their nominal head may not be able to control it.

It's quite possible Syllia ends up in charge, or at least in charge of appointing the board of directors, and her reforms just don't work. Not because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but because Quincy has been cultivating a mindset in GENOM's upper ranks that works around or flat out nulls every attempt to reform it. At that point Syllia might well pull the plug, go for the assassins to make her point, carve up GENOM with the higher ups mysteriously not getting jobs in the much smaller new companies, or otherwise deals with the mess.

That'd admittedly be a whole other movie mind you.


As for Boomers; it's a known risk that Boomers go violently crazy, it's as simple as that, and whoever makes the decisions does not care. I mean, the USA doesn't care about the fact that cars go through front windows in cities all the damn time, to the point the news doesn't even note such events except on slow news days.

[Labster]

Wow, here I thought this thread would go dormant without my constant promotion of content within it. Cool to see it can sustain itself.

BGC is like catnip for fanfic writers. Strong characters, a decent setting, and a plot that just ends in the middle. Sequels that really only considered quasi-canon.

I honestly don't see a problem from Priss about Sylia being a shareholder in GENOM. There's poetic justice in using the company's profits against itself. And power does not corrupt absolutely, no matter what the genre says -- there are lots of examples in history of responsible use of power and things get better. No, my main problem with it is that the higher a chance of Sylia being able to stage a coup, the bigger threat she poses to Quincy. And the more likely that just one day he'd decide to go all-in against her.

Megatokyo itself makes more sense in the context of the bubble economy. It just kept getting bigger, and things got worse along the way. GENOM swoops in to rebuild after the earthquake, and suddenly they're your biggest taxpayer. It's not supposed to be a showpiece, it's just what happened as Japan continued its mass migration to the cities and declining birth rate. They need that extra labor from bumas. I mean, if they didn't have that, the economy would be in shambles.

Not to go all *punk on you but public policy is always a game where someone's life is at risk. Not just war, but health care, education, social welfare, policing. It's entirely possible -- entirely probable -- that people decide that the cost of losing a few hundred people a year to boomer rampage is worth the benefit to the economy. People in the U.S. think that freedom to own weapons is worth the thousands that die every year, so why not there too?

I'd put public knowledge of this like US politics. Some people know that rampages tend to benefit GENOM and thus they are behind it. Other people know that boomers just go crazy once in a while, and we need a strong AD Police to take out rogue boomers and other subversive elements. Make social commentary on how corporations take advantage when we can't even agree on facts.

[classicdrogn]

Without getting into the political furball, I'll say that I think Priss would care much more that Sylia was right beside them risking her life in a hardsuit than that there's a win condition other than roasting marshmallows over the flames as GENOM Tower burns. After seeing the results of Largo blasting the rest of the towers worldwide (because holy civilian casualties, Batman!) she might even welcome it. Her grudge is personal with Mason and the decision decision makers, not with the thousands of schmoes just trying to survive to the end of their sixty-hour week to pick up another salary check.

[Valles]

And, if we steal some details from Crash - no, hear me out - the corporate side doesn't need to be just Sylia's project.

Linna's Entry Level Stocks-worker bit there could easily suggest some kind of business or economics degree, making her an ideal co-conspirator for the economic attack angle...

Hm.

And if we assume that Priss's musical talents are enough of a standout to be folded into the long-term planning, she'd be a great way of signal boosting.

As for the aesthetics, I think that it ultimately comes down to the reform-vs-revolution question. Which is appropriate enough, given cyberpunk's role as a social mirror. And I think that which of the two is intended, from a narrative perspective, to be Correct, is actually immaterial. Because I think that Sylia is ultimately something of a chess player, personality-wise, and that she'd favor the more theoretically elegant, less visceral approach.

And if that turned out to be completely unworkable, she'd adapt and come up with something different at that point.

As for the ADP, the line I was quoting was from the Adam Warren comic - a news interview with an ADP trooper standing in front of a memorial wall covered in dozens of photographs and names of dead troopers, gesturing behind him as he spoke. So I think it's appropriate to separate the entirely legitimate Issues present with police use of force IRL from the in-setting reality of regular killdozer events. Using the Police to address the 'rogue boomer' problem at all might well be the wrong answer - I'm inclined to think so - but that decision having been made, and the ADP having been given that role, the casualty rates we see them take indicate that they lack the tools, training, or both to actually do the job.

Whatever ends up happening with the ADP as a whole, though, I think that the most important thing to keep in mind is to not let - as 2040 did - changes in updating contexts change what kind of people given characters are. 'ACAB, Leon is a cop, therefore, Leon is a bastard' might be realistic, but it wouldn't be satisfying.

[Bob Schroeck]

It's entirely possible -- entirely probable -- that people decide that the cost of losing a few hundred people a year to boomer rampage is worth the benefit to the economy. 

You see that all the time in the business world, although they don't like it when it goes public. For instance, car companies routinely weigh the cost of recalls against the likelihood of wrongful death suits, and far more often than people like they decide that paying out on X-many deaths is better for the balance sheet than the recall.

[Rajvik]

i'm going to throw my two nuyen in on this i guess. One thing to also remember is that the reason that we keep getting "Rogue" boomers is that the AI's that drive the cyberoid frames is becoming sentient/sapient. The Boomers are arguably victims here as well

[STMPD]

Okay, I'm back in another quarter, but I've found some time to get further in the script, I'll update it when (if) I feel like I get to a good stopping point on this one scene I'm working on.

I just wanted to poke my head out to reply to the feedback I've gotten, and to start by saying that I'm gonna split the difference between the 'rampaging Boomer' plot and the 'soul harvesting' plot. 

Basically, the Saber's first few nights out are fighting rampaging non-Combat Boomers - who have gone all maniac-on-the-floor because they're being covertly 'updated' with Mason's attempts at human-emulating 'engrams' as a sort of in-field beta testing. Of course the engrams haven't been sufficiently 'neutered' and the vague memories they have of being something else, plus the shock of being dumped into an alien body, one whose subconscious and autonomic systems are hella different than human ones, causes them to go berserk - and to, via the loose hiveminds between various Boomers on a similar job, drag non 'updated' Boomers with them. Cue rampages, the ADP, Knight-Sabers-Sanjo, etc. I think this gives me excuses for necessary fight scenes, showing off the hardsuits before the Sabers have to go up against harder targets like Combat or Battle Boomers, deployed as part of GENOM's security to suppress any no-good-sneakin'-around the Sabers might do. Something like that.

Feedback, then:

Regarding the ADP: For the time being I’m going to punt the question of their virtue till later. I said elsewhere that I’d like to play around with establishing a series of sorts, and so episode 1 would be 50-ish minutes immediately after Mason’s death, introducing Leon and Daley as they’re assigned to track down the Sabers - with the episode involving the Sabers helping them uncover corruption within their own ranks and establishing a truce between the cops and these otherwise-sketchy vigilantes. I think that’s reasonable enough.

Regarding Boomer rampages: Again, punting that down the road. They have a definite cause in this movie, but I still don’t feel comfortable using rampages as a shorthand plot-igniter. It feels like in most BGC fanfiction the rampage-of-the-day is how the author’s super-cool new OC gets introduced to the Sabers, so just having them do it on the regular might make sense with the lore and all if you twist things just right. I mean, car crashes aside I couldn’t help but think of how the NRA uses the fear caused by mass shootings in the Glorious People’s Republic of Amerikastan to make people buy more guns to make themselves safe from paranoid whackos who also have lots of guns - fear is good for business on a consumer level. (No word on whether or not Japan has legalized civilian guns in this cyberpunk future, because I honestly don’t know enough about their politics to predict such a thing.) So it’s not inconceivable that it’s a regular event. I’ll draw the line at Combat Boomers being the ones who go crazy most of the time, though. Give excuses to have other types go nuts, do some worldbuilding on the side. And in any case, like I said, I see rampages as a crutch one has to be careful not to lean on too much.

i'm going to throw my two nuyen in on this i guess. One thing to also remember is that the reason that we keep getting "Rogue" boomers is that the AI's that drive the cyberoid frames is becoming sentient/sapient. The Boomers are arguably victims here as well

I’m getting a little sick of the ‘the robots are WAKING UP!’ / ‘Robots are so human they’re like slaves’ shtick. It was done well in Blade Runner, but there they were pretty much explicitly clones.

I mean, I think that having Boomer brains (ie neuromorphic computers) be explicitly human-imitating-but-not-quite-there-yet, or perhaps not even human at all to fit a non-humanoid body, a) makes more sense in the context of manufacture (the last thing you want is for that brain to ‘wake up’ and demand shorter hours and wages, and it’s not like human brains are universally the best for every situation anyway) even IF we assume (as many scientists now do) that any brain-like thing with enough neurocomplexity will eventually become conscious (at least one theory links electromagnetic activity in some neurons cascading over to trigger action potentials in neurons that aren’t directly connected - literally brain-waves stimulating independent activity - is what causes all that meat to ‘wake up’). Also, b) there’s a more interesting situation going on in the case of Boomers being still unable to cross the uncanny valley, where humanity has to stretch those mirror neurons to understand what’s going on inside their cybertronic pals who literally don’t think the way we do.

But also, c) even if the Boomers aren’t ‘waking up’, they still are a symbol of a particular kind of societal failure. I mean, Keynes figured we’d all be working fifteen-hour weeks by now, and uh, we really aren’t. Automation as a process doesn’t have to be about ‘the robots took our jobs’, it could even be a good thing because it frees most of us from doing drudgery and produces things of material value with minimal labor cost, we could all be living in a leisure utopia with Boomers hanging around to maintain our society - but that’s not what happens in BGC because we still hold onto the idea that our work, no matter how insignificant it is in the bigger picture, is what defines us relative to others. (Okay, maybe that thesis is undermined by the fact that so many humans would have to be robot-fixers, watching the machines for mistakes and correcting them, but still.) So one idea I’d like to play with is the perversity of a system where Work is Life but no one can actually FIND meaningful work in mainstream society - what happens then? The pre-eminence of organized crime in a sort of parallel economy? What kind of jobs would people invent just for busywork’s sake? What would it be like knowing that a Boomer could do your office-slave job better and cheaper than you and that you’re only around for PR’s sake? What happens when the vast majority of the human race is no longer needed by the people who rule them? You can ask these questions, but then you can’t say that the Boomers are human too, but are just slaves or whatever. I think that kind of undermines the point.
(Then again, that assumes that Boomers are always cheaper than humans barring outright slavery. Which, yeah, maybe. Electricity to recharge a battery is probably cheaper than food, and if Quincy is explicitly running GENOM to Take Over The World he might have to be a loss-leader of sorts and sell Boomers cheap just to undercut the Puny Humans.)

But this might all be really stupid and insufficiently cyberpunk. It would take awhile for these sorts of themes to be explored in the hypothetical series, anyway. Moving on...

[classicdrogn]

Being in customer service positions is all the justification you need for civilian boomers to go nuts when updated with a near-human mentality, I'd say. Especially when niggling things like moral scruples or compassion are apt to be part of what's edited out on the basis that centuries of business practises say that they're considered bad for the bottom line in any form more concrete than PR messaging.

[hazard]

Also, most customers are dicks. Customers are tremendous dicks when they know (or at least think) that no matter what horrors they inflict upon the staff there will be consequences for them.

Not every customer, mind you. But plenty enough.

[STMPD]

Oh look I'm back. With remarkably little to show for it in terms of concrete material, but it's been awhile. Please forgive me.

Anyway. Divine Patronage is still a thing, I'm about 5K words deep into the next chapter (and I think close to the end of it by extension?), but that's not important for this thread. What is important is that I Am Still Working On This.

Two big focuses for the foreseeable future:

1. Regarding the proposal for the Priss intro where she and Celia meet when Priss tries to go after Mason - I changed my mind. I'm gonna do that instead of the bar-fight scene I've got going on now.

I still want to make it look more intentional on Celia's part - she doesn't just choose Priss after seeing her try a hit-and-run, but rather was waiting for the girl to try something stupid, knew something was going on. But the more important thing is that we get across that violent desperation Priss is all about a little simpler than the fight she tries to pick in the bar, and more importantly we get a look at Mason, maybe a few villainous schmoozy scum he likes to hang out with, learn to remember Mason and despise him so I can get more mileage out of him as a villain later on. So that means rewriting a pretty good chunk of the first 'act', and probably making it much longer. Ugh, fine, it's for the best. I don't think this means tweaking the scene where we meet Linna - or the scene where we meet Nene - but I'm pretty bad at judging these sorts of things. If the whole thing gets too long... what could I actually cut or rewrite? It's worth working on if only to soothe my anxiety.

2. The big block I have in terms of scene organization for the next chunk (mini-act?) is getting to the Sabers' first big night job, one involving some rampant construction Boomers and not much more. So we go something like:
- Interrogate Nene on Koschei
- Get Nene on board
- Display the hardsuit (Celia only has hers built)
- Cut to Mason in his element, checking up on his project and generally being a tool? (Is this needed)
- Montage of hardsuits, Priss starting to play around with singing and getting money back (or is that a full, proper scene?), Linna cancelling a few wellness consultant contracts, Nene joining ADP, Celia & Mackie building hardsuits, maybe some preliminary testing, etc. (This is going to be hard to write so it isn't too long)
- And then, then it's showtime, a chain of action scenes with a bit of downtime between them before they finally go off to fight Mason. Details a little more sketchy there, I feel like 2-3 big slugouts are good before final battle with Mason, wherever he decides to 'stage' it. (He very much is spoiling for a fight with Celia by that point.)
(I want to introduce the ADP in all this, but not Leon. Not yet, anyway. I think.)
- Epilogue: Priss gets ready for her first show, it's not much but it's something, Konya Wa Hurricane over ending credits.

Thoughts?