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The Arachne System (SPIDERLIV 3)

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Raiseth said:
Admittedly, I don't know much about American gun regulations, but it seems to me those perfectly nice people don't really deserve a big pile of illegal guns to get dropped on their collective laps.
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Gun regulation might have been removed or heavily curbed in the previous decade. Especially with the introduction of smart-guns and stuff like that, I can really see pro-2A organisations freaking out about the idea that every gun could become a listening device, or that the government could remotely brick guns.

open_sketch said:
You can propose write-ins
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Why is America so pointlessly big. Like, all the plausibly interesting stuff is way too far away.
 
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Baron Ouroboros said:
Speaking of the guns, we could melt them down and use their raw materials to help build new gadgets for ourselves.
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Sure, as soon as we find an empty warehouse with a conveniently displaced melting electrical furnace in it, along with something like three dozens to two hundred of highly specialized instruments to work on metal and plastics.

:thonk:

Mmm, we need a nuclear forge.
 
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That was a good update. I wonder if a bit of work on Eddie could have him become an ally, in both senses of the term. If he does get somewhere in journalism it would be very handy to have him, long run.

[X] It wasn't anything major. There was a flea market in Williamsburg that both of you were interested in poking around, then you figured you'd wander a bit. Degentrification has hit the area hard, but she was with you: you weren't worried.

I have a bad feeling about the con.

open_sketch said:
what even is the big anime of 2030?
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Honestly I think the fifth season of Eizouken was where it ran out of ideas, but it's still pretty good.

open_sketch said:
The Socialist Rifle Association. Founded as a joke, now a real thing, and in Liv's era its huge!
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Before we start giving the firearms out, please remember to check that it is legal to a) possess them and b) give them to other people for free with no paperwork because we stole them. We don't want to get anyone in trouble and we extremely don't want anyone to get in trouble and say Arachne is going around handing out firearms.
 
open_sketch said:
OBVIOUSLY

not sure who yet. what even is the big anime of 2030?

(other than One Piece)
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Lets see, the trend seems to be some runaway hit in a random genre every 5-6 years, then trash derivatives of the hit trying to capitalize on the market for a few years, then an actually good quality derivative(possibly subverted or played with) hits the scene, then a flood of trashier derivatives of derivatives, then something new steals the scene as the derivatives wear out their welcome, so applying a 10 year leap forward from the present day state...

...its probably not Isekai, LitRPG or Video Games. Magical Girls, Slice of Life, Harem and Sports stuff have become essentially background ecosystem, getting a runaway hit is hard.

Hmm, hadn't been a lot of memorable scifi, urban fantasy or pure fantasy lately, they're about due for a smash hit? Eliminating pure fantasy as the Isekai rehash #100031 has sucked all the life out of that one for a bit.

Wizards in SPESS!
 
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Baron Ouroboros said:
[X] Road trip! May's had her license, and there was an anime con in Baltimore she wanted to go. She didn't want to go alone, so she invited you along. You didn't particularly care for anime, but you were excited to be excited about her thing!

Speaking of, what does being a superhero mean to Liv & Athena? They probably consider the comics to be little more than libertarian myths, so they both might have their own ideas of what it means to be a "hero." Perhaps they don't see themselves as "superheroes," despite their appropriation of the aesthetic, but as rebels and revolutionaries who act to help build a better, more just world.
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Liv and Athena call Arachne a superhero and they are very consciously borrowing the language, but they are of mixed opinions. Liv thinks she's ironically subverting a genre with authoritarian roots by using its language and imagery, while Athena favours charitable readings of comics as examinations of the morality of power, not unlike Thought Slime's reading on Batman and Superman as reflecting what an ideal person ought to do with worldly and otherworldly power respectively.

Liv also identifies much more closely with supervillains than heroes. She sees superheroes as reactive, but she wants to be proactive. She's still trying to figure out how, though.

Also, keep in mind they live in a universe where only DC comics exist, and Spider Man was never written. Superheroes are generally less relatable and more archetypical figures even as the writing grew more complex. I like to imagine their universes batman, superman etc lean very hard into mythological/religious construction rather than trying to have them be extraordinary people with normal people problems.
 
open_sketch said:
Road trip! May's had her license, and there was an anime con in Baltimore she wanted to go.
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How many 1940's animes where there anyway? :V
open_sketch said:
You didn't particularly care for anime
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Athene: Lies.
E:
open_sketch said:
not sure who yet. what even is the big anime of 2030?
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After much consideration, the only thing sufficiently distopian for your setting is that hollywood remake syndrome hit anime and half of all shows each season are remakes of various seasons of SAO
open_sketch said:
Liv also identifies much more closely with supervillains than heroes. She sees superheroes as reactive, but she wants to be proactive. She's still trying to figure out how, though.
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Also she builds doomsday weapons.
 
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A scandalously accurate retelling about a peasant uprising sometime during Sengoku Jidai. Anime tropes are brutally subverted, the good guys are sometimes as awful as the bad guys, the samurai daimiyo, and in the end every member of the main cast gets brutally killed off.

You know, Evangelion in Feudal Japan.
 
[x] This weekend, you and her were jumping on your bikes and going up the North County Trailway. A lovely and very long ride as far out as you could go, just the two of you, out of the city and into some trees. You're looking forward to it!

Let us see if Liv can withstand the no-internet challenge!
 
[X] Road trip! May's had her license, and there was an anime con in Baltimore she wanted to go. She didn't want to go alone, so she invited you along. You didn't particularly care for anime, but you were excited to be excited about her thing!

Throwing out some some possible anime and anime-adjacent ideas
  • JoJolion anime probably just finished a couple of years ago
  • It's the latest Final Fantasy <Current Year>
  • Tsukihime remake exists in fanfiction land
  • 90's anime remakes: it's free real estate
  • Slice of life Anime about vTubers and their IRL selves (depression optional)
 
Come to think of it, 2030 must be the year to unseat 2020 as the most bewildering year of all time (from many of our mind's eyes here in 2020, anyway). Inb4 Earth becomes a battleground between the Skrull and Kree empires, Asgard, and gods forbid Thanos. In the midst of this, Doom might also make their move.

So yeah, this might change into a sci-fi space opera in but a blink of an eye, given Loki's warning.

edit: ngl, much of this speculation is based upon my love for space ships with lasers and magical sorceries. I'm biased.
 
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open_sketch said:
He walked off, and you were struck with a sort odd feeling. You and Eddie used to be close friends, before everything got weird. It was remarkably easy to slip back a moment into Dude Talk and connect again, but... wow, it left you feeling kinda gross. That hot girls comment was uh... it wasn't great. It felt like regressing to an earlier mindset, one that didn't reflect who you were now, and it sent a little shiver through you. A cruel voice in your head, the one that couldn't help but read the comments, whispered something about male socialization. Urgh.
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Eh. Upon rereading this, in my completely unasked for heathen opinion, Olivia is being too hard on herself for seemingly no reason at all.

Putting aside labels and stereotyping on what is considered "masculine" and "feminine", finding fit gals do sports hot or acknowledging the fact doesn't mean Olivia is "backsliding back into habitual male mentality" or some shit, it means she's gay.

I mean, I thought we've established that already. :p

Like, there's obviously nuance I'm missing because I don't have a relatable experience, but I had female friends who were much less restrained when talking about hot guys, and we weren't even sixteen.

Honestly, this was tame.
 
Adaptations of best-selling SF/Fantasy novels as of ~five years before the anime. Which means we then need to figure out what the best-selling SF/Fantasy novels will be in 2025.

Disclaimer: My credentials re: the history of science fiction are that I took a course in college (first half syllabus, second half syllabus, professor). That was like a decade ago and it was during the single worst semester I had in my entire undergraduate degree. I am not an authority.

Historically, there have been a few general trends that influence SF/Fantasy:
  • In response to the world's cool new problems. For example, you got a ton of apocalyptic fiction during the Cold War, because nuclear war was the threat du jour. It went away with the fall of the Soviet Union, then made a brief resurgence when the public started realizing that climate change was happening, then went away again as the PR engines got underway and climate change got boring. As another example, for a couple decades following WWII you got a lot of fiction asking "what happens if our tech gets too good".
  • Preceding and leading ongoing social movements. For example, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress happened right at the beginning of the sexual revolution in the US. In the last few decades we've started seeing a ton of SF addressing international issues (c.f. The Three Body Problem being translated and published. also afrofuturism - did anyone here read The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm in elementary school?) and identity and civil rights stuff (The Shape of Water, anyone? Rule 34 by Charles Stross also sprinkles this stuff around liberally).
  • In response to SF's previous Big Thing. For example, immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a huge burst of cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic fiction because, by then, people had just gotten bored of it and started asking "Okay, but what if people survive WWIII?" or "Okay, but what if it just keeps getting worse and worse but the nukes never actually fly?".
  • In response to people seeking something different from what they're seeing in everyday life. Idealist, escapist stuff gets written when IRL media looks bad; look at the Golden Age of Science Fiction spanning roughly 1930 to 1950.
So, applying these to THE FUTURE, what do we expect?
  • People are seeing, in everyday life, a lot of Really Bad Shit around the police, the economy, and the climate. Illustrating the Doom and Gloom that will result from those would be the domain of science and news media, not speculative fiction. Expect things to be generally escapist, either by ignoring current issues entirely in favor of cooler problems or by presenting solutions to those problems.
  • Ongoing social movements include "fuck the police", basic civil rights, and increasing economic unrest.
  • Speculative (and therefore cool) upcoming problems will probably involve technology, superheroes, and cold wars.
  • A response to a response to IRL today's big thing. I'm... honestly not sure what IRL today's big thing is, since I've been mostly reading quests and playing video games instead of reading books or watching movies or TV. Superheroes were the big thing from roughly 2008 (Iron Man) to a few years ago, and we're midway through a pendulum-swing back to antiheroes (Deadpool) and super-gritty subversions (The Boys). I'd expect this to roughly continue paralleling the historical trajectory of comic books, so finish the swing to cynical and swing back to idealistic in about ten years.
In summary, I'd expect a substantial portion of the SF/Fantasy industry that May is working off of to be:
  • Blatantly escapist superhero fiction that involves fixing the economy
  • Singularitarian fiction with special attention paid to solving justice, law enforcement, and economics
  • Speculative warnings about particularly weird and interesting failure modes of governments
  • Civil rights metaphors, some thinly veiled, some less so
  • Edit, forgot a category: Cute people doing cute things, for people who are just tired of all the excitement and want to relax. Probably engages with current events in kind of a low-key therapy type way - "Other people are going through this too and here's how they (and you) can deal with it."
TL;DR May could probably justify dressing up as fanfiction Arachne.
 
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[x] This weekend, you and her were jumping on your bikes and going up the North County Trailway. A lovely and very long ride as far out as you could go, just the two of you, out of the city and into some trees. You're looking forward to it!
 
Vebyast said:
  • A response to a response to IRL today's big thing. I'm... honestly not sure what IRL today's big thing is, since I've been mostly reading quests and playing video games instead of reading books or watching movies or TV. Superheroes were the big thing from roughly 2008 (Iron Man) to a few years ago, and we're midway through a pendulum-swing back to antiheroes (Deadpool) and super-gritty subversions (The Boys). I'd expect this to roughly continue paralleling the historical trajectory of comic books, so finish the swing to cynical and swing back to idealistic in about ten years.
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The big thing is platformization, interconnectedness, As a Service, and so on.

The goal of every corporation, from media to agriculture, is to create an ecosystem that they manage and which the customer never leaves. In media, it manifests as giant interconnected franchises, like the Marvel universe. Online, it manifests as the giant social media empires, with facebook, google and others combining dozens of seemingly unrelated services in one platform (I mean seriously, I can now watch football in a banking app, why?). Videogames and television both have the big platforms going on, and a move from ownership towards a subscription based model with a big catalogue.
 
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Raiseth said:
Eh. Upon rereading this, in my completely unasked for heathen opinion, Olivia is being too hard on herself for seemingly no reason at all.
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The reason is that she's more sensitive to what behaviors qualify as masculine or feminine than most people, especially since the conversation was about how someone had accused her of not being a real girl.
 
[X] Road trip! May's had her license, and there was an anime con in Baltimore she wanted to go. She didn't want to go alone, so she invited you along. You didn't particularly care for anime, but you were excited to be excited about her thing!
 
open_sketch said:
not sure who yet.
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[X] Road trip! May's had her license, and there was an anime con in Baltimore she wanted to go. She didn't want to go alone, so she invited you along. You didn't particularly care for anime, but you were excited to be excited about her thing!
- [X] Cosplay as Arachne

You thought beating high school girls in track was a power rush? Try dominating the fuck out of the con's cosplay contest.
 
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