Anyone still love steampunk? I do so this came home with me; never mind that I haven’t listened to this band. In my defense, the disc was signed by… someone
"the illegitimate daughter of art and science. A modern marvel of engineering, clockworks elevated to the very natural process which even now sets your blood racing and your eyes flashing at such irreproachable beauty."
Since apparently there are a fair few people whose introduction to Steampunk was Cloudward, Ho!
Let's start with the basics: Cloho is technically not steampunk. It's Gaslamp Fantasy (the non-scifi twin to Steampunk). The line between the two is very blurry.
With the understanding that these are very basic, beginner-friendly definitions:
Steampunk imagines an alternate history in which the second industrial revolution (yes, there were two: the first industrial revolution was in the 18th century/1700s, the second - the one most people think of when they say industrial revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries. Again, there is some line blurring) advanced technology significantly farther than in reality, with a focus on retrofuturism (which is "a movement in the creative arts emphasizing and harking back to depictions of the future as produced in earlier eras" - i.e. Steampunk is the time between the Second Industrial Revolution and now as the people living through the Second Industrial Revolution might have imagined it).
But the setting is, of course, only half of it. While Steampunk's surge in popularity about ten years ago (urgh) made it very popular to just use the asthetic, the Punk in Steampunk is just as important as the Steam. Punk is an ideological movement, not just a suffix or fashion trend. Generally speaking, punks are politically on the left, being against all forms of bigotry, against animal cruelty, and against the hyper-corporate mainstream culture, while being heavily inclined to mutual aid.(Although, of course, it has been co-opted numerous times by groups that are the opposite of everything it stands for.)
So. Cloho gets this more right than many other Steampunk works, because it is explicitely anti-capitalism, anti-classism, and anti-consumerism.
As for the Steam. I can't believe I need to say this but apparently I do. Steam-powered technology is powered by Coal. Steampunk is always a balance between the Steam "What if the coal based industrial revolution advanced technology further" and the Punk "fucking up the environment with coal is bad, actually". But if you have a Steampunk setting, there will be coal in use to power your cool machines or you have a lot of explaining to do in universe.
Cloho ...has problems with this. We do get mentions of lots of inventions steaming and the Zephyr being coal-powered. But most thinigs seem to just steam randomly with no coal input. Now, this bit is significantly more flexible, so it's not an issue - especially since the biggest offender is Van's prothesis which is actively holding back something magic and putting water under a lot of pressure (thus could make steam without coal). But it is noteable.
...That said. Dear fanfic authors of AO3, for the love of whatever deity you believe in: CLOCKWORK IS A DIFFERENT AND OLDER TECHNOLOGY THAN STEAM POWER. WIND-UP BEINGS LIKE TORSE SHOULD NOT BE VENTING STEAM, BECAUSE THEY ARE CLOCKWORK, NOT STEAM-POWERED. (To be fair, the D20 crew also don't seem to understand that clockwork is powered by kinetic energy manually inserted by winding up when they talk about clockwork automatons, but still.)
Ahem. Pardon. Moving swiftly on.
But I started this with "Cloho is not technically Steampunk" so you're probably wondering: What the Fuck is Gaslamp Fantasy?
Great question!
Gaslamp Fantasy is a term coined by the creators of the webcomic Girl Genius to describe their too-fantasy-to-be-sci-fi work (Kaja Foglio has also said "we have no punk, just the steam"). Girl Genius won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story three times in a row before the Foglios (the creators) refused to be up for nomination again to prove the category was viably winnable. Yes, it's that good. You can start reading it here if the tagline "Adventure, Romance, Mad Science!" and the premise of "a world where Mad Scientists rule the world ...badly" sound fun to you.
Now, Steampunk and Gaslamp tend to lean towards Victorian England (with the Wild West - which existed at the same time - as a close second) for setting, because Victoria's Britain was where the Second Industrial Revolution kicked off, but that is by no means a requirement (the protagonist of Girl Genius - Agatha - for instance, is from alternate history Eastern Europe).
But as a result British and especially English stuff gets mixed in very easily. BTW. "Wet" as British slang means inept or ineffectual or - to use other slang - a bit of a pussy. It also has some political connotations as Thatcher's supporters called their opposition "wets" to the point that the opposition started calling them "dries". It does not mean that someone is actually wet as in covered in water. Yes, I get how Van having the Vanticle could make that confusing.
Naming in Cloho clearly follows - at least in the Confederated Imperial Republic - a very English style. How can I tell? Because the official spelling of one of the main villain's names is Mordecestershire. Not Murdershire. Mordecestershire. A name which makes USAers weep in confusion and every British person on the planet go "yeah that makes sense, that's not unusual, obviously it would be spelled that way". Why is it spelled that way? For the same reason "Wustersure sauce" is actually Worcestershire Sauce. A shire - usually ending up pronounced sure or sheer - is a a traditional term for an administrative division of land in Great Britain. Basically the same as a county. So a Worcestershire is the shire (county) of the City of Worcester. "Cester", meanwhile, means a place was built on the ruins of a Roman (or, in Cloho, Tressian) military settlement or town. This has the same etymological root as the word Castle. The Wor- and Mor- are thus the remnants of the Old English town names. Wor-cester-shire: the county of the original place name built on a Roman ruin.
If you want more advice on British (English!) name spellings vs pronunciations I cannot recommend enough this Steampunk song: Shibboleth. Because, oh yeah, Steampunk is also a musical genre.
Reginald Pikedevant also has a great song about why just putting gears on something does not make it steampunk, and a festive one for those still in the holiday mood.
Other musicians I would recommend include Professor Elemental/Rapscallion and Chums (very silly, very hopeful, and very British - he has a song about tea. just tea), Abney Park (may I recommend Airship Pirates?), The Cog Is Dead (here's a song about factory labour conditions, although the messaging is somewhat ...mixed).
Now. This has gotten a bit long. So I'm going to leave it open to other steampunk fans to leave their own recs in the reblogs.
After complaining about there not being very many new, personally curated aesthetic playlists, I decided to go ahead and make my very own Steampunk playlist. These are songs that personally make me envision a steampunk world, and I'd love to hear some suggestions on tunes I can add for a more robust playlist!! So, if anyone wants to pregame for the inevitable resurgence of the Steampunk aesthetic; here you go.
