The World Building of Dimension 20’s Cloudward, Ho!
World Building Wednesdays #15: We explore the politics of steampunk and how it relates to what we've seen so far in Cloudward, Ho!
Part 1: The Politics of Steampunk
I would not consider myself a member of the Steampunk community by any means, but my interest peaked when Dimension 20 (D20) announced their new show, Cloudward, Ho! (because I am a member of the D20 fandom).
I’m familiar with the Steampunk aesthetic – it’s hard not to be when you frequent comic conventions – but the announcement of Cloudward, Ho! made me wonder: What are the deeper ethics and politics of Steampunk? What is beyond the outward aesthetic?
This is the World Builders Club, and this is what we’re interested in: how world-building informs and molds the politics of a particular piece of media, and how we can find inspiration from those politics.
So, I looked more into Steampunk.
Immediately, I was face-palming when I realized that the politics is right there in the name: punk. As a counter-cultural movement, punk communities are interested in non-conformity in lots of different forms. As Margaret Killjoy puts it,
“It shouldn’t be a surprise that the first consciously steampunk works were radical as well, since steampunk as a genre is born of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was a reaction against the arguably imperialist and often problematic science fiction of its time. Cyberpunk was the punking of science fiction, introducing as it did the corporate dystopia and a strong sense of class struggle, taking the stories away from interspace travel and back towards the problems here on earth.
…
Colonialism is a process that seeks to force homogeneity upon the world (to speak nothing of its racist assumptions). Steampunk is one of many, many movements and cultures that seeks to break that homogeneity.”
There’s a joke within the D20 fandom that capitalism is always the bad guy. So, it seemed like Steampunk was the perfect genre for the next D20 show, with both the genre and the creators of the show being interested in anti-capitalist narratives.
My curiosity now was, how exactly would the steampunk ethics manifest in Cloudward, Ho!?
Part 2: Gath & Zood
We’re talking about world-building here, so I think it’s important to look at how the GM, Brennan Lee Mulligan, introduces us to the world of Gath (where Cloudward, Ho! takes place).
“I bring you now to the world of Gath, a world of machine wonder and machine peril, a world of innovation, technology and progress."
If there’s a phrase that can describe our relationship with technology since the Industrial Revolution better than “machine wonder and machine peril”, I’d love to see it. Cloudward, Ho! is still running, and will be for a while, so there’s a lot more information we’ll get in the coming weeks, but we’ve already been introduced to many aspects of Gath that have political relevance, both within this fictional narrative and in our real world.
But overall, we see a lot of dualities throughout the world we’ve been introduced to, and particularly, between Gath (where the main characters live) and Zood (a planet that is believed to be fictional by most, but – spoiler alert – is not).
Here is a non-comprehensive list of the dualities and interesting aspects of the show I’ve jotted down so far:
Immediately after hearing “machine wonder and machine peril, the cogs in my brain were turning and I started thinking about how technological advancement, and both the positives and negatives around that advancement, are going to be central to the story.
In terms of character design, there seems to be a duality around age and world-weariness. Two of the characters, Maxwell and Olethra, are young: they are bright-eyed and adventurous, at least one of them is rowdy, and they have a yearning for adventure. The other four characters, Van, Monty, Daisuke, and Mayra, are older: they have already traveled the world and it has not been kind to them. They’ve lost limbs, one is an outlaw, and one describes herself as suffering from starvation, “not of the body but of the soul.” And so, we see a society that produces folks who are tired, who once yearned for adventure and are now weary of it.
As the plot kicks off, our characters decide to try to make it to Zood, a planet that is believed to be fictional by most, but also where they believe Comfrey (Olethra’s grandmother) has become lost. At one point, Mayra is looking at old notes of hers and explaining that Zood was the concept of a place where everything that gets thrown away goes to find use again. And on their way to Zood, we see another duality appear, between the air quality on Gath vs. Zood:
Our characters encounter antagonists who are reliant on, “The Queen's Smog… a side-affect of the "Widow's Breath", a chemical which makes flight much easier and more financially viable but has toxic side-affects.” This sounds so familiar that I’m sure we all immediately see the connections between chemicals that make transportation more viable (fossil fuels) at the expense of our air quality and a thriving climate (rising temperatures). By contrast, Zood is described as, “...the air here is clean and bright, the trees vibrant and alive.”
So, what does all this mean?
I don’t know yet! But, given the “capitalism is the bad guy” and punk, anti-conformity of it all, I expect that we will be delving into themes of over-consumption, over-industrialization, corruption, and much more! I do hope (and expect) that we will continue to explore these interesting dualities, these themes around machine wonder vs. machine peril, world-weariness vs. adventure-seeking, and the literal air we breathe.
Some questions that I personally have about where the story is going:
What are the specific and far-reaching impacts of Widow’s Breath?
What is the impact of things going to Zood to impact?
Why are things from Zood now bleeding over into Gath?
Is there a controlling force behind the Biangle?
What happened in the past to break up the crew of The Zephyr?
And, where is Comfrey MacLeod?
But that’s just my guess. What’s yours? If you’re watching along, where do you think this story is going?