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dcc3f3.jpg
Tropical Cream
dcc3f3
The city in question is not really cyberpunk, so much as dystopic. People are not all "LOL WE SO CRAZY, DIFFERENT IS BETTER" all the time. See the demonstrations for particularly stark example of this - people were mostly just worried about their kids. Thus we see that human nature is not, as you suggest, fundamentally different in Vresch's domain. People still form groups. The factions which we have been visiting are, in fact, such groups. Therefore, the differences between their members and the members of different factions do not cause the members of a given group to feel poorly about their compatriots, because within their affiliation they share many characteristics. What that difference does do is contribute to an us-and-them mindset. We've seen evidence of this pretty much every time someone other than Vresch talks about groups of which they are not members. ("You can't trust them Transcendentalists!" "Those sorcerors are gonna get us all blowed up!" etc.) People focus on problems they perceive among other groups, and have strong loyalties to their own factions.
Whether this attitude applies to the general population is not something we really know yet. Since this is a literary thingamajiggy, however, we can assume that most of what we're shown has relevance. In character, we can assume that because it's what Vresch recommend we scope out. Thus it's fairly safe to assume that the types of attitudes we've been seeing are not, as you would have us believe, drastically atypical. It is likely that the common folk band together by family, or by the physical types that they were magically formed into when shit first got hairy.
Now this brings us back to the original point: that people are most willing to support those who are like themselves. If you recall, the magical change is fairly recent. Everyone was human a mere handful of years ago. Thus, human is a sort of "neutral" state with which everyone can empathize. It is true that modifications would endear us somewhat to those who choose modifications themselves, to some extent. However, it would alienate us to every other group. Hell, it might even alienate us from folks who modify their own bodies, if a tail of this nature is generally held by them to be a poor choice. For all you know, getting a tail could be the local equivalent of showing up at the game table wanting to play FATAL. And even if modders think tails are bitchin' rad extremities, that does nothing for the general population.
tl;dr: I am a dystopian pollster.
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