THE END OF THE BEGINNING

Welcome to Manorpunk 2069, a speculative fiction series set in America several decades after the Polycrisis, a near-apocalyptic breakdown of the central government. Equal parts neo-feudal corporate barons, Attention Economy stock markets, and The Almighty Algorithm. Asks are always open to Sunny Roosevelt’s loyal voter-subscribers. Icon by @Edelblau. Main blog: tumblr.com/apricops

[manorpunk]

The soul still burns, folks!

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

friends don't let friends use swords with rat-tail tangs

[manorpunk]

In response to growing pressure from the Appalachian Khans, vtuber-president Sunny Roosevelt stated that she was developing a bold new strategy for pushing back the holler horse-lords. “While I can’t give out any specifics for security reasons,” she stated, “I can tell you this much: I have white woman normals now.” She then proceeded to demonstrate for the crowd, performing a sweep with a ten-frame startup, good range, and a low-profile hurtbox. While it was -8 on block, Sunny assured the audience that the pushback made it difficult to punish if properly spaced.

[robot-roadtrip-rants]

Appalachian Mongols? Nawww, you’re looking at, hmm, I’m gonna say the American equivalent of Afghan mountain tribes. Fiercely independent, WILL raid your trade lines, supply lines, and any other kind of -lines you might use to transport valuable shit, unless you pay them off and/or raid them first. Tell me that ain’t Appalachia post Omnicrisis. Horse lords would naturally gather on the American steppes, AKA the Great Plains. I think they kinda did in real life after horses were introduced to the Americas, many of the Great Plains peoples were known for the love of horses. Am I locking on to a minor detail to the exclusion of the actual focus of this post? Yes. Sorry President Sunny, your white woman normals are amazing.

[manorpunk]

Heh... you fool... you just walked right into my trap...

So, a rule of thumb for mountains is that the older they are, the shorter they get through the slow and steady process of erosion. The Hindu Kush mountains are 40 to 50 million years old, while the Appalachian mountains are about 480 million years old. They are, geographically speaking, old as balls.

This means that Appalachia is not big pointy rocky mountains. Appalachia is rolling hills, grass-covered plateaus, and long ridges, the sort of terrain that is difficult even for all terrain vehicles but can still be traversed on horseback. Heck, mule packs are used for disaster relief in Appalachia to this day because they can quickly get to places that vehicles can't.

Appalachia is also wide valleys and lowlands - in other words, choke-points, the sort of terrain that can become a tribute-printing machine faster than you can say "sedentary bandit theory."

And what's on the other side of those valleys and ridges? Kentucky! The epicenter of the old empire's horse culture! The flat and fertile grasslands of the Ohio valley, enough grass to graze the Khan's horses with hay left over for the winter!

Pay this townie no mind, his soft brain cannot understand the ways of transhumance. Today we shall begin the circuit, collecting tribute along the sacred trails of the 64 and the 81. Follow me, men! For the Khan!

*my retainer unfurls a massive war banner of Gold Ship (Red Strife), the official emblem of the Khan, as I pick up a traffic sign sharpened into a makeshift lance.*

*we have guns and stuff but I carry the traffic sign lance because it looks cool*

thank you for the Swordmaster Girlfailure read-along btw I had a lot of fun reading it

[manorpunk]

and regarding the powers of the Great Plains, there is an uneasy balance between:

the ‘sovereign ranchers,’ a delirious patchwork of libertarians where every ranch is its own microstate and the typical way to spend an evening is getting into a shootout with your neighbors.

the Front Range confederation, formerly the Denver-to-Albuquerque urban corridor. It has a distinctly ‘marcher-lord’ flavor to it - a steady rhythm of military outposts, heavy industry, and college towns (in other words, nothing has changed).

the goddamn MORMONS

various indigenous nations which have an unofficial “I’ll ignore you if you ignore me” agreement with the Front Range confederation based on the mutual understanding that nobody on either side wants to be the idiot who says “the federal government will definitely keep their end of the bargain this time!”

and whatever weird X-Files shit that just spilled out of the Rockies this week

[manorpunk]

In response to growing pressure from the Appalachian Khans, vtuber-president Sunny Roosevelt stated that she was developing a bold new strategy for pushing back the holler horse-lords. “While I can’t give out any specifics for security reasons,” she stated, “I can tell you this much: I have white woman normals now.” She then proceeded to demonstrate for the crowd, performing a sweep with a ten-frame startup, good range, and a low-profile hurtbox. While it was -8 on block, Sunny assured the audience that the pushback made it difficult to punish if properly spaced.

[robot-roadtrip-rants]

Appalachian Mongols? Nawww, you’re looking at, hmm, I’m gonna say the American equivalent of Afghan mountain tribes. Fiercely independent, WILL raid your trade lines, supply lines, and any other kind of -lines you might use to transport valuable shit, unless you pay them off and/or raid them first. Tell me that ain’t Appalachia post Omnicrisis. Horse lords would naturally gather on the American steppes, AKA the Great Plains. I think they kinda did in real life after horses were introduced to the Americas, many of the Great Plains peoples were known for the love of horses. Am I locking on to a minor detail to the exclusion of the actual focus of this post? Yes. Sorry President Sunny, your white woman normals are amazing.

[manorpunk]

Heh... you fool... you just walked right into my trap...

So, a rule of thumb for mountains is that the older they are, the shorter they get through the slow and steady process of erosion. The Hindu Kush mountains are 40 to 50 million years old, while the Appalachian mountains are about 480 million years old. They are, geographically speaking, old as balls.

This means that Appalachia is not big pointy rocky mountains. Appalachia is rolling hills, grass-covered plateaus, and long ridges, the sort of terrain that is difficult even for all terrain vehicles but can still be traversed on horseback. Heck, mule packs are used for disaster relief in Appalachia to this day because they can quickly get to places that vehicles can't.

Appalachia is also wide valleys and lowlands - in other words, choke-points, the sort of terrain that can become a tribute-printing machine faster than you can say "sedentary bandit theory."

And what's on the other side of those valleys and ridges? Kentucky! The epicenter of the old empire's horse culture! The flat and fertile grasslands of the Ohio valley, enough grass to graze the Khan's horses with hay left over for the winter!

Pay this townie no mind, his soft brain cannot understand the ways of transhumance. Today we shall begin the circuit, collecting tribute along the sacred trails of the 64 and the 81. Follow me, men! For the Khan!

*my retainer unfurls a massive war banner of Gold Ship (Red Strife), the official emblem of the Khan, as I pick up a traffic sign sharpened into a makeshift lance.*

*we have guns and stuff but I carry the traffic sign lance because it looks cool*

thank you for the Swordmaster Girlfailure read-along btw I had a lot of fun reading it

[manorpunk]

In response to growing pressure from the Appalachian Khans, vtuber-president Sunny Roosevelt stated that she was developing a bold new strategy for pushing back the holler horse-lords. “While I can’t give out any specifics for security reasons,” she stated, “I can tell you this much: I have white woman normals now.” She then proceeded to demonstrate for the crowd, performing a sweep with a ten-frame startup, good range, and a low-profile hurtbox. While it was -8 on block, Sunny assured the audience that the pushback made it difficult to punish if properly spaced.

[ashenmind]

“Living weapon” covers a lot and all of it is hot

[ashenmind]

[dying-crying-pining]

“stabbing crying killing hot” has a fantastic ring to it

[just-a-little-unionida]

turned it into a bingo for blorbo (Anon from Swordmaster Girlfailure)

[manorpunk]

the thing about Sunny Roosevelt is that she’s the Funny Vtuber Gremlin President but she’s also an industrial-strength Unmarried Young Men diffuser. She’s parasocial-goonbait-as-state-technology. She’s a load-bearing waifu. I meant ‘load-bearing’ in the architectural sense but you can finish the joke however you’d prefer.

[theehorsepusssy]

[manorpunk]

louisianisation en cours

[elancholia]

Gavin this, AOC that. I think what people are forgetting is that Biden is totally eligible to run for a second term in 2028.

Imagine the second Biden admin.

Imagine the air so thick with wokeness you can mold it in your hands like clay. It smells of ozone, ozone and oud and a bit of wild sage. It sticks to your hair a little. The sun is too bright. Jeff Davis has been dug up and hanged from a pawpaw tree in Kentucky. On Wall Street, a leading firm tries to juice its diversity quotas by manipulating a female Arab exec into developing dissociative identity disorder. The malarkey is discovered and the firm liquidated by the Secretary of Labor, a small Indian man with shining eyes and a beautiful smile. All is well. The exec is made Undersecretaries of Neurodivergence. Neurospicy. Listen, Jack. They told me I was mad. Some of you guys are alright. Don't watch the State of the Union. (The Zohrandate of Heaven settles uneasily across the Hudson River like the woke fog of morning, like a python about to consume its aging keeper.) All is well. Don't try to understand the press releases. Mandela is here. Somewhere in Indiana, small Black children watched over by serenely poststructuralist schoolpeople throw a brick through the window of a police station. The sound tinkles across the country like laughter, like song. All is well, and all manner of thing shall be well. God is in their heaven, and everything is vaxxed on Earth.

[manorpunk]

Electronics in the Post-Post-Apocalyptic USA

Global Logistics Network: “Thanks to our successful development of nanoimprint lithography molds, we are now mass-producing 28nm semiconductors capable of capturing 4K video and 55 megapixel images.”

Sunny Roosevelt: “The GLN are a bunch of meanies who won’t let me use their nanoimprint molds, so our tech isn’t as fancy as theirs. But! When you charge the battery on our newest phone model, it lets out a little moan. 😊”

Some guy in the midwest autonomous region: “I duct-taped a cathode ray tube to a game boy to make an EMP bomb.”

[manorpunk]

Are Piccolo and Vegeta Saul-like figures in Goku Catholicism?

absolutely

[manorpunk]

me: what if post-apocalyptic folk religion that’s a syncretic fusion of Latin American Catholicism and the entire Dragon Ball canon because Goku is at least as popular as Jesus.

me: I mean, the overlap is so obvious that people already make jokes about it - the narrative of redemption and transformation through suffering, constant divine tests of moral worthiness… giving Goku your energy for a spirit bomb is genuinely just the power of prayer.

me: wait hang on this actually ticks all the anthropological boxes of ‘what needs are an organized faith supposed to fulfill’ - the emphasis on protection and brotherhood becomes a hospitality network with ingroup signals, mutual obligation, and a ritual template of feasting and training. The stories themselves have culture-heroes and villains who provide a moral framework for communities. The running theme of “people who announce that they are the strongest and put on airs are Bad Guys” acts as a check against petty tyrants trying to establish a hierarchy: you do not get to decide your reputation, you must let your deeds speak for you.

me: there would be regular debates and arguments between ‘originalists’ (ki is an innate but dormant power that must be unlocked through effort and discipline) and ‘Ultra Instinctivists’ (ki is a zen-like state, it’s what remains when all distractions have been removed)

me: I am genuinely kinda sad that these people aren’t real because I would give anything to chill with them at their Sunday asado.

[parkchanwoohoo]

The facial expressions of everyone trying not to lose it are killing me

[gunsandfireandshit]

This is painfully American

[dirtbaby2016]

Americans be like it is totally normal for an entire stadium (including military members) to stand at attention while a fast food clown mascot sings the national anthem

[irl-loading-screens]

[manorpunk]

hello! actual California-based baby trans Filipina with sword autism here! the idea of animating Anon’s 「Heavenly Ougi: Sundering Wheel of Fate」 has been tormenting me for the good part of 3 months. So! I would like to ask what exactly the ougi looks like? An overhead twirling/spinning slash like how European two-handed swords fight off multiple enemies? Does Anon just spin on an ankle and stab whoever happens to be in range? or maybe she taps into secret Filipino ninja techniques? im sorry for the word dump this has been on my mind a lot lol

omg that's so cool! :o I'll be honest, I didn't actually have a specific image or sequence in mind with anon's super moves, but I really love the spritework in SNK's weapon fighting games so I was imagining something along those lines:

[manorpunk]

oh thank god you're here. Okay. So. We've got a bit of an ongoing situation. It all started when some treasure-hunters poked around in the ruins and found a bunch of server racks and hard drives, y'know, computer stuff. Anyway, they started looking inside the computer stuff and found this thing called "World of Warcraft" on 'em. They showed it to some of the young folks in town and they picked up on it real quick. And I mean they really picked up on it. Obsessed, one might say. And then-

Okay. Right. The point is, there's about two hundred teenagers running around terrorizing the town 'cause they're convinced that they're Illidan Stormrage. Yeah, all of them are individually convinced that they, personally, are Illidan Stormrage.

What's that? How do we know who Illidan Stormrage is if we didn't know about World of Warcraft? It's simple actually, we just - shit, get down!

"YOU ARE NOT-" "-ARE NOT-" "-NOT PREPARED!" "YOU ARE-" "-ARE NOT-" "-PREPARED!" "-NOT PREPARED!"

[manorpunk]

I need to get back to writing regularly because I really can’t wait to add The GLN Guy to the cast, both because I’ve put a lot of thought into the GLN as an ideological group with a kernel of compelling truth that has been warped beyond belief thanks to ingroup reinforcement and one-upsmanship, but also so he can say some shit like “anyone who wants a lawn should airdropped into an active volcano” and everyone else is shocked and horrified but anon’s like