Me: Now that I think about it, Star Trek is a 60s retro future, Star Wars is a 70s retro future, and Cyberpunk is an 80s retro future. What's the 90s retro future?
@urusan The 90s were a time when the future still seemed bright, so I'd say TNG would be the best representative.
That said, everyday I'm more and more convinced that _Soylent Green_ will be the _actual_ future.
TNG is such an outlier.
Yes, as a franchise it dominated the 90s, but imo its an 80s show in the core of its DNA. All bright and colourful and with trustworthy authorities. It's like 21 Jump Street in Space.
DS9 and Voyager are 90s shows. They both have the grim, gritty 90s aesthetic, broke the moral compass, and tossed out their storytelling core for cheap action.
@natecull Most people associate the 90s with “grim, gritty” aesthetic, but they weren't like that at all. To me, the 80s aesthetic is much uglier, what with all that sweaty makeup and shit. The 90s were a reaction against all that. To me, what you call ‘grim’ and ‘gritty’ was simply ‘honest’ and ‘true’. The 80s had a phony and artificial quality in my opinion. And I lived through both decades.
Think of LPs like _Nevermind_, David Bowie's _Outside_, or Marilyn Manson's _Antichrist Superstar_. Their sound could be considered dirty and noisy by some, but in reality it was a very controlled noise, designed to sound good. That sums up the 90s aesthetic quite well, I think.
At our hearts, we wanted to create a beautiful future out of a grim and gritty present. The Cyberpunk idea from the 80s, while cool in theory, was not what we wanted in practice.
That's why I consider TNG a legimate product of the 90s, much more than DS9 or Voyager, which were the equivalent of Nu Metal, a bad imitation of the 90s real _ethos_.
