Help us decide the future of our canon lore!
To ease things up for localization, the characters will be officially renamed into Shift, the boy and Shift, the girl respectively.
Lore development is important in storytelling. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), for example, would not feel very integrated without movie directors and script writers mapping out what's next as the story progresses to one movie to another. A great lore can even be a strong foundation of the creative industry, merchandises, ARGs, and more, like spinning off Harry Potter or Genshin Impact collabs with cafes, department stores, mobile apps, shopping malls, and more.
And that's exactly why countless fantasy novel writers, artists, game developers, VTubers, really want to present their own lore as satisfying and entertaining as possible. As they spend the more time spent to convince audiences that the lore is the "fact", they will obtain the same levels of influence as those movie and video game storywriters do. Like, how people finally believe that a "vampire VTuber" is truly a vampire in real-life?
There is a never-ending discourse of drawing the lines between fantasy and real-life. People are still convinced that if you commit a great heist in a fantasy role-playing game (RPG), that does not make you legally guilty in real life. In particular, politicians who are supporting censorship of certain fantasy acts in games, media, and the Internet, posit that things you do in fantasy is indifferent from reality. Jesus Christ actually supports that statement (see Matthew 5:21-30), hence it's our proposition of the problem.
Because the problem is not about the acts. It's about heart and mind.
Matthew 5:27-28 NIV: [27] “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ [28] But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
But in Christianity, we do have a greater lore that has been written in the books of the Bible, such as the Gospel and eschatology (the knowledge and understanding of the end times). And when you really want to start a Christian missionary, clearly, you have to follow the Lord over the Lore. It became a great ethical, doctrinal, and holiness challenge for us who wants to write a Shift lore that transitions from fictional to reality, and especially, from transhumanism to Christ.
Our plot choice is nothing fictional. It was Reinhart's personal desire to love cyberpunk-induced transhumanism (in 2013-2021) before recommitting back to Christ (2022-present), except for one thing that makes Candidate A different: Shift is at the brink of losing humanity when he finally accepts Christ.
Since Candidate A is quite controversial to justify, I also made Candidate B that puts more focus on our (Christian) future instead of our (transhumanist) past.
That said, we strongly believe God has put us greater weights of wisdom in these (cyberpunk, transhumanist, and real-world Information Technology) areas that we love to share as someone who used to believed in the machines.
How would churches act in the age of cyberpunk?
Why are cyberpunk and transhumanism concepts important to our stories?
As we have written a few years ago, just look at the Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus video game trailer (YouTube) that became a copypasta meme (Know Your Meme), but exactly described his faith concerns:
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me.
I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you.
One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you.
Refer to 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 (NIV): [19] Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; [20] you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal…
Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
Who is the Omnissiah? Clearly not the true Messiah, just another mechanical cult leader (Lexicanum Wiki, Warhammer 40k Wiki (Fandom)).
The cyberpunk and transhumanist movements are not as new as the Nephilim, but we know the beliefs are still spreading into more people to this day. There are corners on digital streets of the Internet that depict synthetic-looking female angels (Pinterest example), "spiritually-healing" real-life setups straight from those aesthetics (YouTube video by the same artist, use Closed Captions (CC) for context), dedicated accounts over Archive of Our Own (AO3), DeviantArt, and Tumblr that implies holiness came from replacing your blood with cables and your flesh with metal and plastic.
Charlie Kirk's last visit to Japan pinned a problem for us to consider, and I found it as true to these cyber-transhumanist movements as well: Nihilism, that influence people to feel having no purpose. And because of that, "duty" became meaningless because we eventually serve nothing for no purpose. In contrast with Christianity, we have our job, and we have our current and even greater purposes.
In many cyberpunk stories, people are either forced to either fight or lose their hope to (corrupt) governments or corporations. The "losing" part here is the most saddening for our souls so far, like cyberpsychosis (Cyberpunk Wiki (Fandom)).
But if the story is all about resistance, then, what happens after the corrupt ones became punished? Ready Player One (based on movie adaptation)