Romantic City

The Rules

1. Playboy Aesthetic - this masculine aesthetic is based around the display of opulence and wealth, including but not limited to yachts, expensive cars, wristwatch collections, motorcycles, mansions, and firearms. Video games do not exist, televisions are noticeably absent, and there are no smartphones or cordless phones. Technology exists at a general 1970s level.

2. Cigarette Aesthetic - this consumer aesthetic embraces cigarettes, cigars, espresso, wine, and brown liquors. The common breakfast is an espresso and an unfiltered cigarette. There are no Starbucks, no coffee franchises, its every corner has its own coffee house, and hand-rolled smokes are doled out from silver cases, the lighter is a social accessory.

3. Military Romanticism - Romantic City is part of a fascist military regime, it is not a democracy, but the elite are able to collect firearms, military historians, and even maintain collections of antique and retired military hardware including jets, tanks, etc. Why send it to scrap, when the well-heeled collectors will bid to buy it, battle used for even more collector value.

4. The Arts - these are embraced because without authors and musicians, there are no plays, no radio dramas, no radio programs, no cinema (which consists of indie films, stag films, snuff films, and a milieu where the Western never dominated the big screen, but mob/mafia films did) Sci-fi and fantasy do not exist as serious genres, and are seen in pulp/serial form, comic books are ubiquitous for young boys, and pink shojo type comics are present for young girls. The traditional Western style of superhero comic never took root, but the manga tradition did, with most comics being adventure, slice of life, Mafiosi, militaria, and a variety of LGB comics that are half titillation and half guidelines on how a non-hetero person exists safely in Romantic City. The gay man has a wife, career, kids, and a membership at the local spa/gym with other similar men, and the lesbian woman has a husband, and a lady hobby (these being their side hustles that bring undocumented money into the home) children, and a membership at a spa, social club, or somewhere else where she can vanish to for hours at a time on a weekly basis.

5. Employment - no one has a manual labor job, everyone has an office job. The exceptions are doctors, lawyers, military officers, and benefactors of social stations and trusts, the wealthy who are free to explore the world, fund random bullshit, and get to be rich for the sake of being rich. The women in Romantic City also are variously employed, but none punch a clock or pay taxes on their hustles, they are secret authors, secret investors and fund managers, private investigators, courtesans, and so forth.

6. Income Inequality and Class - Romantic City is huge, and the average person is poor, lives in a rent-controlled unit, and has a clock-puncher job. Men and women both work in the factories and are conscripted into the military, with few women in frontline combat roles, most not in logistic units being put manning vehicles and artillery. Like Oceania, Romantic City is ever at war, and there is always work to be had in dangerous jobs like mining coal, working in a munitions factory, working in a foundry or forge, working the shipyards building warships and merchant ships, and building all the vehicles the city needs and uses.

7. Trysts - romantic and sexual encounters are common, and while the setting holds and honors marriage, it is relatively common for wealthy husbands to have mistresses picked out from the poor, often leaving them after they become pregnant, fostering generations of bastards in the slums. Likewise, the wealthy and aristocratic loving wives tend to have hairy virile handymen or other tradesmen to tend to their fantasies while their husbands are away, or suffering from alcohol-induced impotence. This being said, the men are always well groomed and socially polite, well dressed and well mannered. The women are always wearing borderline scandalous makeup, dresses, and lingerie under their regular outfits should the chance of initiating a tryst occur.

The City

Romantic City is a major coastal city with a significant waterfront. Like Venice, a good portion of the city is below sea level, and there are canals crisscrossing it. Many people own small boats rather than cars, and the water districts have massive levies that ward them off, with gates and locks that open and close with the tides and storms. There are still cars, bridges, and roads, and that is still the main mode of transport, but boats are probably about a third of the traffic in the city. Plus, it is much more chic to smoke and lounge on a boat than to sit in a car in traffic. Poor people ride the bus, or the canal ferry, and wealthy people have private launches and cars. Some of these canals are LARGE, large enough that on occasion large ships can enter the canal. Insert visual of a massive dreadnought pattern battleship belching clouds of black smoke as it lumbers through the Midtown Canal to the Great Shipworks for a refit, people on sidewalks being eye level with the deck of the ship, and people in offices waving at the bridge crew as they pass.

Most of the residential districts are block houses, but rather than brutalist (YAWN), they have Neoclassical tenements, pillars in the front and back, and small housing units by the hundred inside. Functionally, the residents of lower Romantic City live in Washington DC style mega-apartment buildings, scattered with parks, boulevards, and a surprising amount of statues and fountains. Even the poor parts of the city retain the aesthetic, they are poor, but this isn't some gritty grimdark corpses in the streets and boundless homeless problem. The statues are dirty, the buildings are patinaed with age, and everything has the weight of time to it. The poor of Romantic City aren't the poor of today, they're the poor of a century ago.

Commerce, Heavy Industry, and Logistics - these are the lifeblood of Romantic City. The Crescent District is the financial center of the entire country, deeply connected with the fascist government, the military industry, and the shipping companies, and many of the wealthy men of the city have their employment in the district. Money, money, money, greed is good, and the market is always bullish. The thing worth noting is that the largest sector of the market is Foreign Investment, which is a fancy way of mentioning that Romantic City is part of a literal empire, and the government controls large sections of other countries and continents and the stock market is investing in building these new markets, fleecing said countries of their luxury exports and natural resources, and continually funding the military containment and expansion of the empire. The Heavy Industry segment is resource extraction, building ships, war material, and the rest of what used to be done at home, before western countries decided free trade with China was a good idea. There are extensive distant mining operations, foundries, forges, and industrial factories building massive things. On the logistics side, Romantic City has a major hold on shipping, being a major deepwater port and shipbuilder. They also had a stranglehold of railroads, having controlling interests not just in rail companies, but in being in many cases the sole provider of rail equipment and engines.

The Nightlife is also staggeringly important in Romantic City, and the source of its cultural exports: music, fashion, and consumables.

Most restaurants are cabarets, with a music and dance show while the guests wine and dine.

Most bars are also burlesques, or cabarets, where the people drinking have something to look at, and someone to sell them cigarettes, matches, prophylactics, and private entertainment.

Night Clubs play a different type of music, live bands being the norm and only the divest of dives playing recorded music or radio. (the govt knows employed artists and musicians are going to be too busy making money and enjoying their professional perks and will be too busy and sated to engage in protests and antigovernment actions)

Fashion and cuisine are fad-based, with the food and dress of the most recent additions to the empire being elevated and assimilated into the culture of the country. Like England conquering most of the world and making Curry one of their top dishes, the empire does the same. These fads rotate, and for a few years it will be some version of kebabs and kofta, and then that will fade and the new cuisine de jour will be Mesoamerican polenta and seared meats, and the pattern continues. But, like most fads, this is just changing the paint on a building. Underneath the facade, Romantic City is fashion traditional with suits for men, dresses for women, and keeping a strong retro-vintage aesthetic in both. The traditional diet is heavy on protein, dairy, and seafood. Carbs are a low concern on the general menu, and dessert is more aesthetic, again, more than heaping piles of sugar on top of carbs. Macarons and petitfors, no tubs of pudding, no cartons of ice cream, and no individually wrapped sugar bomb snack cakes.

Notable Locations NOT in Romantic City

AKA locations for side-quests and mini-encounters

Upstate - the location of many family retreats, hunting and ski lodges, and other such primeval escapes from the hustle and bustle of the city. Goin upstate means large antique houses sprawling on the edge of great forests, usually near a lake. Escapes include horseback riding, hunting, and acting as safehouses for when things in the city get too hot for the elite, such as civil unrest, or in the rare instances when a foreign country manages to threaten the city, ships engaging in gun battles within hearing range.

To the Beach - what is an anime without a beach episode? Going to the beach means going to a nautical-themed house by the water for sport fishing, and boating, and a chance for everyone to put on bathing suits and lounge around large pools within walking distance from the actual ocean. Notable as Romantic City doesn't have beaches, it has industrial commercial space on its waterfront, not housing or recreational areas.

The Capital - the heart of the unnamed Empire, the capital is where the fascist government is centered, guarded by walls and military fortresses. The economic aspects of Romantic City had outposts and chapterhouses in the capital just to remain in contact with the government, with business leaders working from, or sending their kids to work from these offices, almost hostage ransom style.

Abroad - visiting a foreign city that has been part of the empire for decades and retains a good deal of its ethnic identity, but has been assimilated into the empire and its culture.

On Campaign/On a Trade Mission - traveling to a frontier country either on military venture (aka war of expansion or occupation) or merchant mission (economic expansion or exploitation)

To the Islands - ala Ibiza or Jamaica, this is an excuse to go to an island paradise explicitly for the purpose of parties, trysts, recreation drug use, and otherwise unhindered debauchery.

To the Back Country - this is social exile, away from the city to a small home in a small town far, far away. There are no trysts, no good things, only living near being poor. Some seek the spiritual purification of being away from the smoke, drama, and intrigue of the city, becoming hermit artists and writers, or turning to pastoral occupations.

Inspirations

1. Playboy was a total vibe decades ago, with baroque furniture and sets, the grotto, all that, and the work of Bunny Yeager showcasing feminine beauty. Culturally we've lost that aesthetic and vibe and swapped even mock sophistication for puerile and juvenile pornography.

2. What if the British Empire never collapsed, and there was no World War II? Jet engines, computers, atomics are not accelerated and those technologies take decades longer to come to fruition, and even then are not widely accepted. There are no integrated circuits, everything is on copper wire, vacuum tube, or chemically processed film. Romantic City would be a cornerstone of the Anglophone Empire.

3. Lacking those technologies, cinema is delivered on reels, radio is the main thing, there are no cellphones, no smart phones, and even landline phones are uncommon. The wealthy have them, sometimes several, while poor households do not and an apartment building might have a single phone. Most communication is by letter or postcard. Books, comics, and pamphlets are very common.

4. The erosion of culture by megacorporations has destroyed the once vibrant mom and pop small business model, replacing what would be local and ethnic offerings with mass produced, mass packaged, optimized goods. This erases local color. There are no Apple Stores, no franchise restaurants, no big box stores, no malls, and a department store is much smaller and the closest thing to modern would be something like the Sears-Roebuck catalog where people would see demonstration models and samples, and then order the things they wanted. Delayed gratification is more common.

5. A blend of health and vice, drinking and smoking are ubiquitous, but there are no massive national brands. Tobacco is sourced from nearby, same with booze, unless it is a prestige item. Beer is locally made, wine is imported, spirits are cheap local made or expensive imported. Added to this conspicuous consumption, there is no fast food and no franchise restaurants. It either local cuisine, or whatever the trending ethnic cuisine is. With a non-processed non-industrial diet, obesity is all but non-existent in Romantic City, unless fat is being used to show the wealth and disregard a certain character has for themselves.