| |
It's interesting, and not always in a good way, just how caught up some people can get in a fictional concept. Sometimes, what should be a simple matter of, "You have your ideas, and I have mine, but I don't have to do things your way, and you don't have to do things mine for either of us to have fun," turns into heated arguments with a lot of anger and hurt feelings.
Most recently, I've been on the fringes of this happening within the Steampunk genre of costuming and fiction. If you're not familiar with Steampunk, it's an alternative history genre that imagines a Victorian era wherein Mad Science is a dominant force. Think taking Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and imagining an entire world filled with the kinds of inventors and creators they wrote about, and you're on the right track.
This leaves a heck of a lot of leeway for the imagination. Some Steampunk fiction writers stick towards plausible science as we know it today, while others throw in a bit of the supernatural such as vampires and zombies to the mix. What tends to be constant through Steampunk are the steam-powered and clockwork gadgets, gizmos, weapons, and such, and dirigible style airships.
It's a big playground, and it would seem there is lots of room for all kinds of scenarios to be enjoyed. Alas, all too often, someone decides to try and narrow the definition of Steampunk for everyone, and if your interpretation doesn't line up with theirs, then you're not doing it right. You're "not really Steampunk."
Random aside - does that make it Steambunk?
Anyway, in my not so humble opinion, this kind of thing falls under the same response that I've heard model railroaders give when criticized about some detail on their layout - "I don't care if it's not 'prototype.' It's MY railroad."
You see, at the core, whether we're discussing written fiction, or costuming, it all comes back to the same reply. "I don't care if it doesn't fit YOUR story. It's MY story." Costuming is, really, just a detail from a story imagined in our own minds. Perhaps it was derived from a story we've read, or something we came up with all on our own, but a costume is essentially a fictional character that we choose to dress up as, for either cons, or gatherings, or whatever.
Let me give a personal example. A few months ago, we attended a Steampunk convention here in Tucson, called Wild Wild West Con, or WWWC for short. I attended a couple of panels run by Thomas Willeford, author of Steampunk Gear, Gadgets, and Gizmos: A Maker's Guide to Creating Modern Artifacts. If you watch the TV show Castle, you've likely seen some of Thomas' work in one episode centered around a Steampunk event.
Mr. Willeford makes some pretty awesome looking stuff, and he has his own set of criteria that he follows when he's designing a piece. One of these criteria is that a Steampunk gizmo should appear to be almost as dangerous to its user, as it is to any enemies that it might be used against. I can definitely see his point. After all, this is MAD science, and what screams "MAD" more than an invention or creation that is on the ragged edge of backfiring?
While I saw Mr. Willeford's point in that criteria, though, it wasn't one I wanted to follow in building my own Steampunk prop. I decided my costume / character would not be a Mad Scientist or a minion thereof, but rather that I would work from the basic concept for the Steampunk novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2011. This story was set in the Victorian Era, but in the Arizona Territory, far from the Industrial Centers where the greatest influence of the Mad Science would be manifest. My story introduced a Clockwork Automaton into a small, rural town in Southern Arizona, among people who had little to no use for such things, and went from there.
My Steampunk character / costume does not yet appear in the story (though I plan to add a new chapter introducing him into the tale), but I went with the idea of an Arizona Ranger, equipped and dispatched to deal with renegade automatons being used by criminals. Historically, the Arizona Rangers were a select band of law enforcement officers, tasked with dealing with the most troublesome outlaws in the Arizona Territory at that time. They were well-equipped, very skilled, and extremely effective at their tasks. From a costuming standpoint, they provide a wide-open selection, as the Rangers had no official uniform. The idea was that they were to work covertly, or undercover. Period Western wear, therefore, is perfect.
For my weapon, however, I went a bit different than the typical Steampunk weapon prop. For one, many Steampunk props go for the "bigger is better" effect, to the extent that some people are carrying props that, if real, would be so heavy and unwieldy that they would be nearly useless. For the other, and here's where I diverge from Mr. Willeford, I imagined that someone like a territorial lawman would not want something that could not be trusted. Whether in the real world, up against mundane human criminals, or in a fictional world, facing rogue automatons, an Arizona Ranger would need a weapon that would work when it mattered. He wouldn't care if it was big and impressive looking - he would only care that it did what it needed to do.
I made my prop to be about the same size as a standard rifle (in fact, I used an actual rifle stock as the starting point). I reasoned that it should be no more difficult to carry and to use than a conventional firearm, and it should be rugged enough to withstand the harsh environment of the Arizona deserts and mountains. Finally, I established the criteria that the user had to be able to trust that it wasn't going to be as dangerous to him, as it would be to the automaton he was targeting. Regardless of the era, law enforcement personnel go for weapons that are not likely to fail them at a crucial moment. A mishap that might mean nothing more than a few powder burns on the practice range, could mean serious injury or death if it happened when confronting an armed assailant.
Does this mean I think Mr. Willeford is wrong in his criteria? Heavens no! After all, his creations are designed to fit HIS stories, and who knows his stories better than he does? His ideas are different, and while I may not adopt his ideas into my stories, what I can do is learn from them, and see how they fit into the grand scheme of the genre. Above all, I'm certainly not going to contact him and try to tell him he's wrong (even if I thought he was), as all that would likely accomplish is to make us both very angry, very angry, indeed, at each other.
Of course, in that regard, the argument itself certainly fits his criteria. It's anyone's bet whether it's going to hurt the one it's aimed at, or the one launching it more. Perhaps the arguments should come equipped with a certain feature he says he likes to include on his props - the pressure gauge flickering close to the redline. Maybe if we had a visual cue that we were on the ragged edge of an explosion, we might think twice about pursuing the line of argument.
Or maybe we'd just let it blow up in our face anyway.
Myself, I just want to have fun with it.
|