@ug It's inherently post apocalyptic

@ug Huh I had the sense that most solarpunk stuff was set a few hundred years post climate apocalypse

@ug @letsbeworms I remember when Chobani made a solarpunk yogurt commercial. solarpunk is toothless and easy to co-opt because it's based on utopian aesthetics from tumblr and a refusal to address the realities of collapse

@ug @scathach Star Trek was sort of "proto-solarpunk" and if you start digging into the stuff Gene Roddenberry said about the 21st century in the timeline he created, shit was fucked. There was the Eugenics War of the 1990s which ended in a nuclear holocaust and then the survivors sort of rebuilt by the mid 2000s and then there was massive civil unrest in the 2010s resulting in many smaller civil wars around the world and this trend continued into the 22nd century when the first space travelers started venturing out and then iirc got into a conflict with the Romulans and managed to beat them with vastly inferior tech which caught the attention of the Vulcans and Star Fleet was founded and only then did humanity get to have nice things again.

@ug @nautilus @letsbeworms I do think science fiction in general has this problem of the setting being Chekhov's gun. You can't build this futuristic society without it having direct impact on the story so you can't just have some normal love story set in a futuristic utopia because why would you build the futuristic utopia if it does nothing to advance the plot? It has to be relevant to the story in order to exist in the novel and the only way for it to be relevant to the story the stakes have to be higher than some highschool love triangle or what have you which usually means that either all of humanity is at stake, or people wind up finding your story boring.

@letsbeworms @nautilus @ug https://youtu.be/emhfPd4L6ag