Today on Cog Considers, let's talk about horrorpunk - as in a genre linked to steampunk or cyberpunk, not like in music. More specifically, let's talk about White Wolf’s Monde des Dénèbres Frame, because this verse has everything to please. Vampires, demons, werewolves, monsters, all these good things, plus a considerable help of the dark determination that works so well in cyberpunk and palpable fear of the cosmic horror of Lovecraft. Some time ago, I said that the cyberpunk was horror. In this article, I will go further and say that the horror is Cyberpunk - or at least it can be.
The most popular slice of monde des Dénèbres is vampire: the masquerade, but loup-garou: the apocalypse is also rising up there thanks to the new adaptations of video games. Both are as much punk as they are horror. Vampire obliges players to survive in a world they do not really belong to and in which they may no longer have the ability to operate, while the remains of their humanity and their empathy are evacuated regularly. Loup-Garou channels the helpless rage of those who lead a battle dedicated to failure while the holder wolves, guards of the planet, are fighting to save it from a malicious Eldritch entity known as Wyrm. In the TTRPG and their associated benefits, the emphasis is put on the imperfect characters who fight for desperate causes, that this cause saves the world or simply run away. The more a vampire is aging, the less he cares about others, a fact which is reflected even in the mechanics of the game. Meanwhile, werewolves cannot destroy the Wyrm more that we cannot destroy pollution or climate change - They can win battles, but the war takes place on a too large scale for the characters of the players to count. Or it seems...
Cyberpunk 2077 was inspired by the monde des Dénèbres, and I can see why. Cyberpunk as a genre has always been synonymous with inequalities, power struggles and hopeless fighting. It is perfectly logical that the game borrows from an existing property that exists to explore these subjects in the most creative way possible. Vampire gave us groups of immortal vampiric lords passing the lives of humans and their youngest parents in games against each other. Loup-Garou gave us desperate groups of Lycanthropist guerrillas who fight with beings of corruption and despair in the alleys. These two images are perfectly part of Cyberpunk philosophy, and the genus Cyberpunk becomes more and more relevant day by day.
So what is the attraction of horrorpunk? I would say it like this: this genre shows us a world as dark as ours, where the monsters of which we are afraid are literal rather than figurative, and always shows us characters who face this terror. Who wakes up every day knowing that it is probably too late to save anyone, but who tries anyway. It's pretty inspiring, isn't it?
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