Zeerust
"Zeerust: the particular kind of datedness which afflicts things that were originally designed to look futuristic."
— The Meaning of Liff
Basic Information
This trope describes how something — a character design, a building, whatever — used to be someone's idea of futuristic. Nowadays, though, it ironically has a strange sort of datedness to it. Also sometimes called "Retro-Futuristic".
Examples of Zeerust
- News: What May Happen In The Next Hundred Years - technological predictions from the year 1900
Sources
Game and Story Use
- This cheesy aesthetic can be used to great effect to establish setting and tone in a pulp or alternate history game.
- For example, picture a future that fits the old Flash Gordon serials and Amazing Stories-style magazines. Oversized red rocket ships and flying saucers, Brass Bra Babes, boxy robots, and silly silver helmets sporting big antenna: Raygun gothic/Rocketpunk is a well defined theme … although modern users will probably associated it with the Fallout universe.
- The PCs are kidnapped by aliens, who take them away to be the new homo sapiens exhibit in an alien zoo. Their new pen is adorned with an blend of Zeerust and iconic items anachronistically separated from their original context, because the aliens based the exhibit on old TV and radio waves and the resulting Popfinitions.
page revision: 7, last edited: 21 May 2020 12:22