Why are good steampunk settings so rare in anime?

Why are good steampunk settings so rare in anime?

It requires thought.

You could just say that good settings are rare in anime, or even that good anime itself is rare, and you'd be right.

It really doesn't.
It's just a sci-fi with a shit-looks-old-and-mechanical-instead-of-nanomachines-everywhere look.

Steampunk is a recent normative genre, conceptually its precepts are not well established.

why are there no good steampunk settings to start with?

Because steampunk is basically just an aesthetic rather than a genre. And even then it's basically just fantasy Victorians with lots of pointless brass cogs and valves.

>steampunk
>good

pick one

Pointless but still looks pretty damn cool.

Because when you take out the worker viewpoint, class conflict and environmental crises, all you're left with are cogwheels and tophats.

because it is a boring piece of shit artstyle nobody cares about

Not selling.

Because the aesthetic of steampunk is rooted deeply in a european cultural and historical context.
Japanese media often approaches the same themes and subjects central to steampunk, but with a different aesthetic more directly related to their own cultural and historical context.

In europe, modernization was tied directly to the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle class. Capitalism was, in large part, a social movement that fundamentally changed the power structure of the affected countries. In Japan, it was motivated externally, by contact and competition in the west and a sense of manifest destiny. State authority was reinforced rather than subverted, and the interplay of nationalism and industrialization were linked far more intrinsically.

>lots of pointless brass cogs and valves.
That's what people think steampunk is, and thus it slips into media and popular perception. And it's wrong. I fucking hate it.
There's nothing wrong with steam-derived technology and shit, Verne style sci-fi can be hella fun, but usually when steampunk gets tossed as a label we get shit like pic related

Princess Principal isn't steampunk.
It's Victorian fantasy. Things clearly run on other power sources, such as gasoline, or cavorite. It also doesn't really follow many themes commonly found in "punk" media.

Because people tend to overdo it. Studios think steampunk means everything has to have a cog attached to it and everyone lives inside a giant clock and eats coal and has a steam powered pet cat who wears goggles. Stuff like Princess Principal has a more subtle touch and it works.

Steampunk is gay WW1 for retards.

It requires money too. Don't overestimate the japanese. They are surprisingly incapable most of the time.

Come on, guys.

Colonypunk WHEN
>All powerful megacorporations that routinely borrow the navies of nations to enforce monopolies
>Subjugation or eradication of native peoples
>The entirety of the Congo is the private property of some fuck in Belgium
>Strip mining any resource they can find for sweet euro dosh
>Getting Britain to invade china to force them to buy drugs
>Villages wiped out if they don't meet rubber and ivory quotas in africa

I don't think you really need name colonypunk for that, sounds just like an historical theme wit exaggerated details.

Very little there is actually exaggerated though.

True, even less of a reason to name it colonypunk and not just historical.

"historical" isn't a genre, unless you mean in the form of documentaries. You can tell a "punk" story so long as the setting allows for punk themes of individual subjugation, ruthless pursuit of profit, people as capital, etc. The cyber/steam/colony are a lot less important than the rebellion against the system, is mostly used to denote how the people up top keep the people on the bottom down.

Maybe it's not technically correct, but historical fiction is a commonly used term for stuff set in the past with no other particular genre.

I had no idea about the punk stuff though.

PP is not steampunk tho

When have those things ever been present in steampunk?

It's not wrong though. Jules Verne was never steampunk, he was cutting-edge science fiction.
It doesn't have to be overdone dogshit though. It just usually is.

Damn, I loved this movie.

>Jules Verne was never steampunk, he was cutting-edge science fiction.
Correct, but given the age when he wrote, his works are based in the late 19th century technology, as steampunk is. Verne is a direct link of inspiration, and the biggest one arguably, on latter steampunk works, just not because he made the aesthetic and style, but because he happened to live in the era that steampunk depicts and "invented" sci-fi.

...

The same reason good cyberpunk settings are rare in anime.

That doesn't make his work steampunk, any more than the animated version of Around the World in Eighty Days makes him a cartoonist or a furry.
Besides, how much of that style actually comes from Verne as opposed o people adapting his work?
Still, the fact that Verne is the best anyone can point to despite his writing not resembling any steampunk just confirms that it isn't a coherent genre at all, just an aesthetic. Which is usually executed very poorly.

Will Violet Evergarden be the best steampunk anime?

Ha. If you think that you have it hard, try to put yourself in my shoes.
There are next to none positive representations on transhumanism.
Hi-tech future just has to be a dystopian shithole with mega-corporations controlling everything.
Sometimes I wonder if it's a one big setting with different districts.

there was no plot

good stuff airs every season

>transhumanism
You mean like animal people or people who transform?
>Hi-tech future just has to be a dystopian shithole with mega-corporations controlling everything.
I don't see this a lot in anime, it's mostly just mechs and space.

I think "corporations bad" is one of the biggest cliches in science fiction right now that's probably why I flipped my shit when Sarif Industries in Deus Ex Human Revolution were NOT portrayed as cartoonishly evil psychopaths. Not anime I know but its so rare that Its the only thing I can think of.

It looks great but that was it for me.
After the usual McGuffin hunt in the beginning i thought it was going to have a message about war and the morals of having to stay on one side.
Instead every adult is evil and lies to MC boy to get the McGuffin, only the insane old guy that builds a ferris wheel on top of a giant war machine is a good person because he doesn't like war.
MC boy was ok, but i don't think anyone could really like the girl, since her introduction was her hitting a dog and she didn't do anything really to make up for that.
The whole thing just seemed a but confused about what it wanted to say, just like the characters that acted pretty weird.
The steampunk part worked i guess

Evil megacorporations is one of the principal staples of cyberpunk.

>steampunk/neo-industrial
>cyberpunk/transhumanism
Literally plebeian.
We need more biopunk anime/manga like Alien 9.

>yet another anime with children as protagonists
Oh come on already

It was a nice show though. Shame it wasn't more episodes.

Well, it because transhumanism even further increases inequality between rich and poor and empowers those who can afford them, allowing them to seize power.

You say that when the AOTS is exactly that.

It's worth watching for the horror.

steampunk doesn't lend itself to good settings

Tech design and backgrounds are pain in the ass.