I'm gonna try and make this brief as I'm goddamn exhausted, but I'm annoyed and want to rant a bit. So, speaking as someone who's heavily researching an urban fantasy novel set in London in the late Victorian era, I am getting well and truly sick of seeing the world Steampunk thrown around by people who seem to have absolutely no idea what the word implies save a) the Victorians and b) AIRSHIPS, OMG, and all too often they don't seem so sure on the first part, either.

It's getting to the point I don't want to even use the term Steampunk about what I'm hoping to produce, it's been misappropriated so often. Besides, anyone who goes into this expecting AIRSHIPS, OMG is gonna be disappointed.

Today's post, of course, has been brought to you by those geniuses over at Gaia Online and their noted tendency to be unable to brain because they have the dumb. No surprises, they're about as good at understanding a design aesthetic as they are at just about everything else they put their hands to, namely Not Very. Steampunk, to the average Gaia user, appears to consist of some combination of the following:

• Sky pirates
  
• Airships and airship battles
  
• Cogs on EVERYTHING, regardless of whether or not there's any bloody clockwork there
  
• People wearing goggles
  
• Displaced 21st-century girls whining about STUPID SEXIST MEN
  
• Solid Victorian names like Caprice Boselli, Asha Thorne, Emerald Underhallow, Alchera Sinclair and Billie Kol
  
• Ridiculously drab brown leather clothing
  
• Sky pirates
  
• The entire world being redecorated in shades of brown, gold, copper and black
  
• People with eyepatches and waistcoats
  
• Sky pirates

And I say, what a waste! Now, I don't claim to be an authority on all things alternahistorical, or indeed anything more than a wanky neophyte who thinks everyone else is Doing It Wrong. I just think that this is stupid.

Personally, I want to read books about people who are people, not people who are sky pirates first and foremost and actual human beings a very poor second and exist largely as an excuse to wank on about a flying boat. I want my flange-technology to be at least somewhat believably flangey and socially appropriate, thank you, even if the standard of believability is an H. G. Welles novel about the year 1980. Simply put, the tech is all very well but I have no desire for it to overwhelm everything else in the story. The clockwork flange-power shouldn't be the sole point of it. There needs to be an actual plot and characters with personalities who don't just serve as distracting set dressing before OMG AIRSHIP!

I do love clockwork flange-power - I wouldn't be trying to write these damn books if I didn't. I just like it best when it's used sparingly and well and the characters are no more prone to gushing over it than we are over AIRPLANES GO UP GUYS. They live in this world all the time, they should be used to this stuff. Unfortunately for my sanity, it very seldom is.

Worse, I'm just getting sick to the back bloody teeth of hearing idiots go on about how steampunk stuff is just because it involves brass, Victorian engineering, leather jerkins, goggles, or all four at once. I've seen Gaia users claim that an item that allows them to equip a welding set is steampunk seemingly just because it's a fucking welding set. Old-fashioned goggles are also steampunk just because they're old. Clockwork toys? They're like TOTALLY STEAMPUNK GAIZ because they have COGS DAMMIT. For fuck's sake. I know all the cool kids want to be one of them steampunks these days but seriously, the steampunk aesthetic is about more than wearing goggles, pointless cogs and the color brown!

Worse - and the thing that sent me ranting in the first place, because there's always a catalyst - I saw someone claim that an early automobile was 'very steampunk'. No, no it's not. I know it involves Victorian engineering, brass, goggles and leather jerkins but for God's sake so did constructing the RMS Teutonic and that was just an ocean liner. Cool though that car looks, it's not even remotely Steampunk. It's a fucking car.