(09-22-2025, 09:16 PM)classicdrogn Wrote: They all sound interesting in their own ways, though I have to admit I prefer the now-retro futurism of the original 80s media - modern real life tends to make it look bright by comparison, while newer takes tend to up the grit and grime proportionately. There's enough big business proudly announcing "At last, we've invented the Torment Nexus from the famous science fiction story, Don't Invent the Torment Nexus!" without giving them new depths to challenge.
I think you're half right, there. I don't think updating takes on where society under the thrall of megacorporate power is going necessarily means giving the Paypal mafia or whoever new ideas, especially in a cyberpunk adventure as non-objectively-realistic as a superhero story like BGC. It's giving sci-fi authors too much credit to say that Stephenson proposing a perpetual VR otherworld gave Zuck the same idea.
It also helps that I'm 25, born in 2000, so any updating of that world that I would create can't rely on, say, Pondsmith's world where there was an economic crash in 1994, where Arasaka keeps chugging along without a post-Showa real estate bubble in sight - I can't anchor myself in it. To be more specific, I enjoy 2077's story but not its world. It tries to split the difference between eras by making the player Cyberpunk 2020's version of being a badass Edgerunner, a rock n roll mercenary that's a soldier of fortune by some other name. But then it mocks that way of living in how Silverhand, for example, changed nothing 50 years down the line. In that split, and still using the Evil Japanese Turbo Zaibatsu as the main villain and image of the megacorp - insidious, faceless, stable - it paints a picture of a world both stagnant (not cyberpunk at all!) and beyond saving (could be cyberpunk! I still hate it!)
With BGC 206X, especially, for all that the past few decades of its world are extremely horrible for various reasons, the Knight Sabers can change that world, not just because they're cool protagonists, but because the megacorps aren't exactly eternal guardians of stability. To hell with 2077's 'you can't save the city but you can save yourself', which was never how Cyberpunk 2020 started out but drifted towards; I'd rather say 'okay, we all know this isn't working, these megacorps are gonna blow themselves up in a quest for transcendence through AI or whatever and take humanity with it, how do we get out?' in my fic.
Perhaps that is, itself, a fantasy, that there is a way out, but I want to write that in contrast to 'ha ha GENOM cannot be destroyed or even kept in check' the way even pre-now fanfics used to. Like, seriously. Neo No Armor Against Fate? Shawn Hagen's self-congratulatory Villain Sue wankfest? That's an All Hail The Torment Nexus fic if there ever was one! I totally understand what you're saying, but I hope I can reassure you that despite not being super invested in retrofuturism I'm still coming from a cautiously hopeful place.
In other news, a smaller project I forgot to mention is a UC Gundam kinda thing involving Lalah Sune framed as a cosmic horror of sorts. I think I've got something here, and it does kind of bleed into how I think of UC's world. (I've had a bunch of ideas for a Unicorn rewrite for months but I know better than to crack that project.)