But that story is never told, as explicitly, I think in fiction,” she says. “This is about a young woman who tries to build a political will in a community, which, interestingly enough, you see all the time in real life. Like Kan, Chloe is a queer Asian, which she says helps explore a side of cyberpunk that often goes unseen. On top of telling a cyberpunk story focusing on people’s different, yet nuanced, perspectives, Kan has made it even more personal by basing Chloe’s background on her own. Through Chloe’s hacking skills, you can learn more about his background, which reveals him to be a flawed person with his own financial and medical issues, which, in turn, gives you some options in how you approach him. For example, a previously released demo showed Chloe and her friends speaking with one of the militia members. This helped lay the groundwork for what would become Solace State, and it’s easy to see how it materializes in the actual game. Not just a few sentences, but to go quite in-depth with the world that they want to see, which I was really happy to hear about And these are not people who have studied political science or anything.” “Even if I had only Wikipedia-level readings of who’s who in East Asia, they’re very willing to expand and have that conversation with me. She says this openness extended to people from all walks of life, not just those with fellow political interests. “I was definitely very pleasantly surprised by how many people are willing to share their opinions on people who are in power, for example, or people who should be in power. It was during the Obama period, and I found that people were actually very willing to talk about their political experiences,” she says, noting that this helped make her feel welcome. around elections that were much more divisive. “ I was in East Asia, it was the precursor to a lot of movements in the U.S. In particular, she credits a 2016 internship at a VFX studio in Hong Kong for inspiring her to create Solace State. It’s a premise that draws heavily from Kan’s own experiences in both political science and cinema studies. To achieve that, she’s centred the story around Chloe, a young woman who forms relationships with a diverse assortment of characters as part of her activism. They have their own motivations and pains and fears and concerns and hopes.” They have their own lives, their own trajectory. So the main thing that we really want to pursue with Solace State is to show that these people come from all walks of life - their lives actually will go on. “The denizens who live in the cyberpunk world are often seen as manufactured they don’t have their own motivations and agenda. It doesn’t talk about the diversity of East Asia, but it’s always the foreigner who comes in and that’s the emblem of diversity, and then everyone else is kind of more cookie-cutter,” she says. “Early cyberpunk does have some really critical ideas, but at the same time, there’s sometimes this painting over of East Asia. With Solace State, Kan wants to avoid a common trope found in other cyberpunk media: techno-Orientalism, in which East Asian aesthetics are co-opted to prop up the story. Tanya Mstdn, Discord, Tiktok, Tumblr December 15, 2022
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