Is This Steampunk?
The questions the genre argues about most, answered plainly. For each one: why people say yes, why purists say no, and the label we would actually use.
How we judge
We treat “steampunk” as a spectrum, not a passport. A work can be core, proto, adjacent or borderland without anyone needing to lose their temper. The verdict matters less than understanding why.
Piltover’s brass-and-glass invention district, the chem-smog underbelly of Zaun and the whole hextech industrial revolution read as steampunk at a glance.
Hextech is magic-tech rather than steam, and the world is a video-game fantasy setting rather than an alternate nineteenth century.
Best label: Steampunk-adjacent hextech fantasy
Dunwall runs on whale oil, brass and rivets, with a plague-ridden industrial city and a retro-futurist technology base. It is one of gaming’s richest steampunk worlds.
There is an overlay of the occult and the Outsider’s magic, which nudges it toward the fantastical end of the spectrum.
Best label: Whale-oil steampunk
Automail prosthetics, an industrial military state and alchemy treated as engineering give it a strong steampunk grammar of brass, machinery and consequence.
Alchemy is its central magic system, so it sits as much in industrial fantasy as in pure steampunk.
Best label: Core manga steampunk
Lyra’s Oxford runs on anbaric lights, zeppelins and a brass-and-amber alternate technology, with a strongly Victorian-Edwardian texture.
The heart of the story is metaphysics, daemons and theology, not machinery. The tech is atmosphere rather than subject.
Best label: Steampunk-adjacent alt-history fantasy
The Nautilus, the great flying machines and the journeys to the centre of the earth gave steampunk almost its entire vocabulary of wondrous Victorian machines.
Verne was writing contemporary scientific romance, not looking back at the steam age. Steampunk is retro-futurist by definition; Verne was simply futurist.
Best label: Proto-steampunk / scientific romance
Want the full reasoning on any of these? Each verdict links through to the complete field-guide entry, where the “Is it really steampunk?” section makes the longer case.
