I had a very strange dream, and I'm not sure how much of the next is original.
I dreamt of a famed movie director making b&w film noir about gangland massacres, and having one actor struggling with remembering where he was supposed to lay as a 'dead body'. And then the director came by, a head in a circular band with mechanical spider legs. His kinky haired bleach blonde dwarf girlfriend got him a can of beer to fit into the slot next to the spinning black metal less than knee high 'cement mixer' of the small bot that held his nutritional supplement. At which time the head went flying and tumbled down hill to dissappear into a dirty snowbank. And then my dream suggests he got taken out by a sniper bullet.
Let me be clear. For me, this is seriously weird.
Now, that I've done the hideous thing of relating a dream (as in hideously boring), let's turn this into a world.
In the League of Tarkington, in their greatest city of Metria, is a district full of very strange people. All the weird, the deformed, and the messed up tend to migrate in this direction of the Humans of Tarkington, and even some from across the White and the Purple Oceans.
This district tends to produce much of the innovative art of the League.
It also produces widely acclaimed Dark Comedies which have the audiences gasping in laughter. A lot of this laughter is of the MSTK3 variety, as in 'I can't believe this is so horrible, I love it.' If MSTK3 made it to Tarkington, it would be a hit. So also 'America's Funniest Home Videos'.
But there is a hard bit of stone around which all of this weirdness formed.
The Inner Core of the Ville-Datrin District which has made the word 'datrin' synonomous with 'demented' is Not From Around Here.
There really is a famed director with mechanical spider legs and just a head. Just one. There are more dwarf girls.
You see, the world of rikTaK was created by an Anarch power. He made every variety of weird, and dysfunctional entity he could, and built this into the genetic code. Each generation is a 'hopeful monster' to use the Darwinian term. A 'head' and a 'squidgirl' might marry and produce a 'giant blob', 'four siamese conjoined twins', and a 'half-wolf'. The blob might marry a 'twisted face', and produce a 'man-bat' and a 'sleeper'.
The Power made it such that happiness and conscience were in inverse proportion to each other. The more one did awful deeds, the happier and jollier one was.
The Anarch power sought to spread his influence, and so his people learned to make steampunk dimensional transfer devices. The robbed other worlds of strange races. Here is where the dwarf girls come from. They breed by mitosis, and feed by pscyic vampirism.
Other races were picked up. Things continued.
Finally a small group got together that hated things, and wanted a better life, somehow. So they created a Steampunk Dimension Jump inside a giant film canister that was supposed to be an exhibit in a World Demo of Twisted Film. Instead, it was their escape from the servants of the Dark Power.
They landed in Tarkington, liked it, and set out to make the best, most cheerful films they could. Thus the first hit 'Gangland Massacre'. It was so bad, it was good. It was so depressing that the audience howled with laughter.
Tarkington has late 1960's tech. It has 15@10 biases, but very little usage of the possibilities. Its people are dry, down to earth, tolerant, and practical which is why they enjoy the demented oddity of the 'New Film Movement' so much.