Streets of Hope

I'm curious as to what consumerism feels like, in a world where so many people have eclectic needs. Any weird standoffs in terms of advertisements?

"Think of the Hopeverse as your own world, but with an extra dose of everyday weirdness thrown in - which in turn means it stops being weird.

I've grown up seeing ads for armatures and augmentations, shuttle rides across the planet, lanolin oil creams for ungulates needing to take care of their horns or tusks, specific conditioners and shampoos for anthro canines or felines... There's mortgage and partial retirement packages for immortals, blood-based pseudo-meat products for vampires wanting to put their useless kitchen to good use in recipes, the occasional gadget getting advertised for arcane geeks...

Still, seeing robotic body parts treated with the same attention to flair or luxury as with top-tier cars is kind of odd. Duesenberg Armatures. Style. Flair. Horsepower. Make a statement. Be all you can be - Be a Duesenberg.

I see that and I kind of end up thinking 'Yeah, cool - but I'm not a soul stuck in a phylactery, and I'm not willing to shell out hundreds of thousands for a body'. There's ads for blood donor services for vampires, too, and general PSAs regularly reminding us that anthros, undead, liches or whatever else are people, too, or others reminding us to lend a hand to recently-manifested superhumans, especially kids that end up being scared of what they can do. You don't see them much in the more tolerant parts of America, but chunks of the Midwest are blanketed in that. There's a whole branch of retrograde pseudo-Christian bullshit festering around that allows some idiots to think that if you're not strictly human, White and mundane, you aren't worth shit. The meek shall inherit the Earth being twisted out of shape to satisfy someone's wounded ego....

Going by Vienna's intel, though, the irony of it all is the counter-claims made by the assholes out there are usually funded by scheming immortals looking to exploit the masses' fears for their own ends."