I don't see how anyone could consider it not a parody. I mean the main character himself is named Hiro Protagonist (a pun on the literary term "Hero Protagonist") and Hong Kong exists as a chain franchise nation.

Lampshading something is different than parody it’s goal is to push suspension of disbelief just a little bit further, where parody doesn’t try to maintain it.

You can’t watch “Are We the Baddies?” as a war story. It introduced such elements simply to establish who’s getting made fun of. They remain in character but that’s it, the war story plot doesn’t progress the skit just keeps hammering the parody. Some parody has a more complete story but “Scary Movie” progresses the underlying plot to make fun of different elements of the movies it’s making fun of.

Harry Potter on the other hand calls out many of the tropes it’s using. House of the lions vs house of the snakes, guess who’s supposed to be the hero and who the villain. Except the characters once introduced are telling an actual story.

Snow Crash is between those extremes but focuses too much on the underlying story and its characters to be an actual parody. Over the top elements exist in the world, but they are played straight more Gulliver's Travels than Spaceballs.

Parody or not, I wish I could apply for citizenship at Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong

I forget the term for it but there is a thing in anime subgenres where something comes out that is a kid of rejection/critique of the previous genre and acts as a kind of pseudo parody that afterwards sets a new direction and redefines the genre. Often these are hard to understand unless one is already familiar with the trends and tropes that it is critiquing. A good example is neon genesis evangelion, it's a critism of the mecha subgenre that came before it, but changed the way the mecha subgenre was afterwards. I'm told hunter x hunter is the same kind of redefining pseudo parody with the battle shonen genre, but I'm less familiar with that.

I feel like snow crash it's kinda along those lines.

Are you thinking of "deconstruction"?

I think NGE as a critique or deconstruction of mecha anime is often overstated. For instance Shinji as a subversion of the typical macho teenage boy mecha protagonist... well there was already quite a lot of mecha anime with non-traditional protagonists, such as Patlabor's Noa Izumi who is neither a boy nor a teenager. Patlabor broke the mold in numerous other ways besides, more-so and better than NGE. Mecha (e.g. Labors) foremost as industrial tools instead of super-science weapons with mysterious powers. Pilots being professional young adults who mostly act like it. Most of life for the crew being mundane routine responding to DUIs instead of grand save-the-world plots (a few military coups notwithstanding.) I think in these regards, NGE stays closer to the traditional mecha formula that it ostensibly deconstructs.

I think where NGE really shines is the art, design, animation, which are all stunning. I have much respect for NGE, but specifically as a deconstruction of the mecha genre I've never been impressed.

And Martian Successor Nadesico is an excellent parody of the giant robot/mecha genre. If you liked Patlabor, you might enjoy that.

it's both a parody and one of the foundational works of the genre

Well said. The setup clearly was an (IMO schlocky) parody of the genre. The meat of it: neuro-linguistic hacking, the raft, the devastating gun called “reason” that was all superb and faithful to the genre.

I think it plays especially well because the parodic exagerations of one era are indistinguishable from the dystopian elements of the future...

> the devastating gun called “reason”

That punchline...

And in the real world there's the Earth model that heavily influenced Google Earth, and the librarian's "intelligence without consciousness" conversational style is lookig pretty damn prescient right now.

I found the main neuro-linguistic hacking plot to be incredibly campy; it certainly took some of the core concepts of the genre and dialed them up to the point where one could argue it was parody.

I found it deeper than most concepts in the genre, the core of that plot is one of the most impotant questions in contemporary philosophy - the realtionship between thought and language.

In this, it stands beside "Bela Legosi's Dead," which simultaneously invented goth and was the perfect parody of goth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKRJfIPiJGY

I think it was a little late in the game to be “foundational”

the bulk of tech foresight - Metaverse, Gargoyles, Earth (Google Earth)... of course it's foundational. the fact it lagged several years behind the sprawl trilogy, mirrorshades, or schismatrix, etc is irrelevant.

FWIW the metaverse goes back to True Names, with cyberdeck roots in Web of Angels…

and microtransactions in Ubik.... *shrug* I mentioned quintessential works rather than "origin stories" to avoid an inevitable "all work is derivative".

edit: True Names surely should have been added in my brief list.

I don’t think True Names is in any way cyberpunk. No mirrorshades vibe at all, which is part of its charm.

I want to assume you're joking, but I've encountered people who earnestly think the essence of cyberpunk is the retro-80s neon aesthetic, so your comment is in Poe's Law territory for me.

Then Sherlock Holmes is far too late to the game to be foundational in the detective story genre (first appearing in 1887, 46 years after The Murders in the Rue Morge).