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Saints of the Streets

This is a recent concept for me, though it comes on the tail of me re-writing one of my first and earliest stories that I thought might have some potential. So, obviously the world setting is Earth many years in the future and heavy on cybertech and biotech and all sorts of other things (clones are common as droids) but it is also a world of massive megacorps and other standard cyberpunk and sci-fi drippings like independent Lunar and Martian colonies. And then enter the gangs and their religious outlooks, along with anyone who's daily life is on the street. And enter the Saints of the Streets.

Which are canonized in different ways and usually don't have so long of wait. These Saints often live short, brutal lives and often are popular not just within their general area but all around their cities. Some are more then just gang lords and the like, charismatics and revolutionaries are among them. Several become more and end up their own religions and cults of personality.

But, at the end of the day, especially depending on how they died, they end up a patron of the streets. Currently I've only managed two, Sorrow and Hell Kat Maggie. Sorrow being a heavy empath that cried blood and tried to help out on the streets, which when died turned the followers into a highly religious gang attempting to follow their tenants and keeping the skull that still cries blood as a miracle.

Whereas Hell Kat Maggie led a gang known as the Misfits and almost took over the entire mega city of Blues Bay (the settings primary set piece) more then thirty five years ago. She was inspirational person, big on revolutionary ideas, heavy against the corpo's and a hugely popular populist sort who's calling card was Haven Is Real, being a basis of her entire railing against the world. Haven was what she would rename Blues Bay once it was hers and had burned out the worst of it. But she got killed trying to take one of the city's highway bloodlines known as the 18th Street Corridor. Pummeled into the tar by a jet trooper cop named Nyvaz and her signature mechanical claws ripped from her. And within a year she was sainted and has became a patron saint of sorts for the current day revolutionaries and her old gang tags and the Haven graffiti has come back around.

This has became more of one of my rambles on it going no specific direction I guess. Thoughts? Idea's for other Saints? More look into the building gang culture and the religious stuff within them? Roll with them.
 

Queshire

Auror
Hmmm... The patron saint of nomads that travel from mega city to mega city, a hacker saint who is said to live on in digital state down in the depths of the web, the patron saint of freed clones whose symbol shows up after clones are stolen or cloning facilities are attacked (replace with the same only for androids if necessary.) An astronaut saint whose last moments were heard by millions over the radio as they manually steered a hacked space ship away from being used in a kamikaze attack against a megacity.
 

Eduardo Ficaria

Troubadour
From the descriptions you gave, Orc Knight , you made me think more about martyrs rather than saints. I mean, one becomes a true official Saint (with the capital S as you wrote it) when the Vatican decides to canonize you, so its a very political matter in the end. Of course, this is the way in the catholic church, I don't know in the other christianity variants. In this sense, what I'm trying to convey here is, since you're essentially making up new religious groups, you could make them use terms taken from their own cultural background. In other words, you have a good oportunity there to go beyond the christian standard, so to speak.

On the other hand, I cannot think of examples of cyberpunk "Saints" right off the bat right now, but I must point out that not all saints died martyrs. Some (or many, I don't know) where canonized due to have lived really pious lives, and died naturally. Again, here you can tell that being canonized is a political thing more than anything, and an element that you might like to use for dramatic purposes when working with the internal balance of power such groups will have. For instance, you could have a group that could have internal conflicts due to have two or more heroes to worship/follow, or having strong arguments about certain traits of their worshipped figures (like the virginity of Mary, which was something decided in a council).
 
Fair enough. But there's not really a Vatican or the like to say other wise when it comes to sainting. A lot of the life in the current era of the setting has little to no clue of the past and a lot of it comes from surviving pop culture and being pieced together and rebuilt almost from the ground up, which has resulted in something along the lines of the voudon and sort of pidgin religion from surviving texts and the like that weren't lost or destroyed out right. And sainting is as divisive as anything else in the world. Maggie is out right hated and only a Saint to a few of the gangs, powerful ones though they are. She made enemies of the Yakuza and the Mob, or what was left of them after she hit them and left them with a shadow of their power in a short gang war with them and after the loss on the 18th Street, most lost faith.

And Sorrow would have been the sort sainted for their work on the street, trying to make things better even had they not been run down in the street. But that it is one one of the primary things about the street saints, they may not be martyrs in general but it is far more the usual way to go. This the streets of a cyberpunk city, so with the broad definition of sainting, most would be more martyrs in general. The two may be a bit conflated, but given how the world is, that's not much of a surprise.
 
Are you modeling all your street saints on actual gangsters? When I saw the name Hell Kat Maggie, my mind immediately went to the nineteenth century New York gangster by that name. Use the name of an actual historical figure, and you will have readers looking for the similarities.
 
Kind of, two of my big influences for this setting came from The Warriors and Gangs of New York, with the historical Maggie being a slight influence on the new Hell Kat Maggie. And then other things like Death Race and that sort of stuff, well before I really understood cyberpunk and dystopia stuff in general. My cops take cues from the clone troopers of Star Wars (some being literal clones) and the like. And some early anime influences like Akira and Ghost in the Shell.
 
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