After seeing the in-game ad for edgerunners hamfistedly shoved in I finally just decided to watch it. Overall I was really disappointed come the end. I was hoping that there would be that Trigger magic that would take the mostly emaciated punk of Cyberpunk 2077 and make something more out of it, but while the first few episodes were fine, it ended up feeling like there was nothing there. Honestly it feels like Darling in the Franxx where Trigger was just there to animate someone’s story with close to no creative freedom over where the plot goes
The anti-capitalist, anti-establishment nature of the punk in Edgerunners doesn’t go any deeper than as set dressing that creates the motivations for the characters but is then left behind. David is deeply wronged by the system that exists in Night City, but nothing is really done with it other than setting him further down the plot.
The story feels like it’s just retreading what the game already did. It’s just a retelling of V’s story but without the Relic and instead an even less nuanced look at cyberpsychosis. David tries to better his lot, like V, after living in the absolutely bleak Night City and the city ruins everyone for even trying. Jackie dies in the heist, Evelyn’s fate is worse than death, Dex is unceremoniously executed in a dump, V is left with a Relic that’s killing her and rewriting her personality. David similarly tries and ends up watching his adoptive family shatter multiple times with sad pitiful ends.
I get that it’s just basically the personal story of David and the people he meets and David is one flawed motherfucker that only wants to see other’s dreams through because he’s left traumatized after his mother died, but there wasn’t even a sad washed up rocker even talking about how the system itself is what fucked David.
It felt no different than those anime movies made for Dead Space years ago. Just a tie-in product.
TL;DR I was hoping for a proper Trigger show and I just got more of what the game already did.
The best anti-capitalist messaging in the game was in the background anyway. The TV interview with the guy who had his arms repossessed does more in like 3 minutes to express the new dimensions of hell opened up by techno-neoliberalism than all of Johnny’s drivel put together.
Randomly walked past a couple of Trauma Team guys talking about how they needed to get new brain monitoring implants or lose their job with one guy being like “this is fucked” and the other going “well I have nothing to hide.” The setting being a dystopia is fine if you’re primed to look at it but otherwise it’s just sorta going to get missed.
A lot of the cyber-psychosis missions do that as well.
Some guy went nuts because a corp sold him a mech shop but nothing in it, so he had to sell the shop to the corp at a loss so they could ‘evaluate the tools in it’, then buy it back at like 3x the price
Some actress went insane because she was actually poisoned as part of a tv show then had a ton of implants stuck in her when she was unconscious
A man lost his mind because the hacks who sold him some implants didn’t give him medication to treat the early stages of psychosis but instead decided they were going to try and chop him up and sell his parts
They do a good job of coloring in what an ancap hellworld it is
I think that’s why I like CP2077 despite its many flaws: the flavor. It’s not the best or most original cyberpunk world out there, but it is definitely the most sharply tongue-in-cheek. I’ve talked about the bleakness before but I think the appeal lies in how it’s so absurdly bleak that it comes back around to being funny in a fucked up way. Of course the powers that be in America would rather make most Americans eat literal kibble like dogs, so that most remaining farming infrastructure can be devoted to the gene-engineered wheat they use to make the treated ethanol fuel for gas-guzzling cars. And of course its name, CHOOH2, is just a marketing gimmick and the actual chemical compound is both proprietary and far worse for the environment than standard ethanol is. It just piles on this absurdity and plays it completely deadpan, and it spits out broken people who are incapable of analyzing the hell that they’re in. All they can aspire to is being remembered after they die horribly. Most people don’t even get that.
It’s a shame they don’t even try to make hopeful stories out of it. The best anyone gets out of the entire IP is probably Lucy, who achieves her dream of going to the Moon thanks to David. Sure, David was definitely right about it being a bleak as fuck labor camp and she’s probably going to get vented into space in her sleep as collateral damage on a cyberattack, but she did the thing! Alternatively, if you go the Don’t Fear the Reaper route for the ending, where V solos his way into Arasaka HQ and fucks it up so badly he effectively acts as an accomplice to Yorinobu’s deliberate efforts to destroy the company. There’s a newscast in the ending that talks about how shitty Arasaka is doing and how the other corps are eating their lunch. Then V goes to space, achieving his goal of being a high-roller merc and completely failing to grow as a person throughout his entire story.
I’m just not a fan of stories that are so bleak and hopeless. I don’t want to see this guy
get crushed under the king’s boot for daring to speak out of turn, that isn’t an enjoyable story for me.I That’s why I didn’t watch it. I heard the ending was pretty bleak and was just like “nope, don’t need that”.
In Johnny Mnemonic has an austere but ultimately happyish ending. Same deal with Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Neuromancer. A lot of the classics of the canon end with a lot of people dead, but the heroes are better off in so far as they can be. The Matrix? Happy ending, mostly. GiTS? Section 9 usually sorta wins. A lot of PKD stories are pretty grim but not all of them. Deus Ex ends with hope for a better world. Mirror’s Edge. EYE’s ending is very complicated but not entirely hopeless.
Cyberpunk is often misunderstood as pessimistic or negative, but what it really was, mostly, was a warning about capitalism, technology, futureshock, and the alienation of contemporary and rapidly emerging life in the 80s and 90s.
Yes, exactly! A lot of people think that complete hopelessness is an integral part of the cyberpunk genre, and I don’t think that could be further from the truth. Cyberpunk is, as you say, ultimately about life under capitalism. To write a cyberpunk story in which the capitalist dystopia is nigh-omnipotent and to fight it is to commit a very roundabout suicide is to suggest that there is no point fighting capitalism at all. Which sucks. That message sucks and I reject it completely.
Shadowrun is loaded with hope and small victories as a recurring theme, and it has magic and fantastical creatures and a big part of the US got forcibly returned back to the First Nations.
In my experience, people that hate Shadowrun and call it silly or “for babies” or otherwise shit on it for having magic and the like while also being Cyberpunkerino fans tend to be abrasive assholes that I don’t want to play tabletop games with anyway.
people that hate Shadowrun and call it silly or “for babies” or otherwise shit on it for having magic and the like
This is really funny to me because cyberpunk “tech” is all very unrealistic and basically scifi magic, but it has a veneer of technology so of course people think it’s better than fantasy magic. 🙄
This is really funny to me because cyberpunk “tech” is all very unrealistic and basically scifi magic, but it has a veneer of technology so of course people think it’s better than fantasy magic.
That’s exactly how I feel about it. It’s about “sciencey” vibes, not scientific plausibility.
And the magic is cyberpunk af! Making pacts and alliances with spirits to fight back against corporate greed! There are spirits of manifest pollution and corruption! There’s sufficiently analyzed magic and magitek, it’s all integrated in to the cyberpunk world. It’s not what people usually think of as cyberpunk, it takes that basis and expands it in new and interesting ways that open up new avenues to explore cyberpunk questions.
The spirit of punk is in the spirits themselves.
Arguably, what’s missing from the Cyberpunkerinos setting by contrast (especially the CDPR version) is that spirit. It’s absent, both as a literal spirit and as a metaphorical spirit. The corporation is invincible, things suck, nothing really gets better, time to be a Legend of Night City™ by beating up people for the police, protecting the president, and serving the alphabet agencies!
God, it’s so gross. Several times I forgot about the cops thing and my friends mentioned they were doing some cop related thing and i was like “Oh how hard are the cops to kill?” and they were like “I’m working for the cops” and that pretty much sums up why I’m not interested in the game.
“Presenting something doesn’t condone that thing, though you’re expected to present yourself as condoning that thing.”
I can appreciate a tragedy, where our hero and their company commits themselves to an ideal and gets burned for it but in the process makes a significant mark that leaves hope for the future, but no matter what anybody does in this city, Arasaka is immune to actual consequence and the only things that shake up the company are when the corpo royalty make power plays against their parents. Which in the end further solidifies that there is no hope under the current system and the only people that can do things are the wealthy.
There are a bunch of cyberpunk stories that are like “I’ve done bad things I regret my whole life, but here’s a chance to sacrifice my life so this one person can have a chance at a better life, and I’m going to take this shot at redemption”. Like that can be enough. “I can save this one”, “Cast a torch in to the future”, “Live to fight another day”. They don’t have to tear down the whole system, but I hate the bleak “Lol you thought their was hope? Fuck you” stuff.
Like I am honestly somewhat disgusted at how popular squid game was. I don’t know why anyone would want to watch something that unremittingly horrible. Especially who watched it. A lot of people gushing about it have enthusiastically voted for politicians who created the dire circumstances the show is inspired by. : (
Which in the end further solidifies that there is no hope under the current system and the only people that can do things are the wealthy.
For very similar reasons, even if I could surgically remove all the sexual violence and gory torture spectacles, ASOFAI (especially the shows but not exclusive to them) was, to me, a smugly hopeless stagnant setting that wallowed in self-congratulatory inertia and narratively punished people for even trying to improve society somewhat. The extra-sexual-violency show building up the ice zombies for so long just to cheaply kill them off was a “gotcha” of the highest smuglord order, too, that also reinforced that the status quo was effectively maintained and all the “winter is coming” false buildup was just a middle finger to the reader/viewer. The “hehehe you thought this guy was important but now he’s DEAD hehehehe” novelty should have worn off years ago, but maybe the hog feeding gimmicks kept people around.
Hard agree. it’s such a deliberately and relentlessly mean story. Martin claims realism and then uses it to create a thoroughly unrealistic world.
I’m still peeved that there’s never been any explanation or resolution to the winter storyline. I’ve wanted to know what the hell is up with the cycle of winter and summer on that world for over a decade and all the official products have just shrugged and said who cares nerd? Is it some weird planetary mechanics thing? is it magic supernatural stuff? Who knows, Martin doesn’t seem to give a shit about telling us.
I’m still peeved that there’s never been any explanation or resolution to the winter storyline. I’ve wanted to know what the hell is up with the cycle of winter and summer on that world for over a decade and all the official products have just shrugged and said who cares nerd? Is it some weird planetary mechanics thing? is it magic supernatural stuff? Who knows, Martin doesn’t seem to give a shit about telling us.
There’s always feasts in the murder house.
Oh that’s an interesting point on hopelessness. I’ve been thinking about this, and specifically in the context of the new cyberpunk expansion.
The thing i’m realizing is, cyberpunk 2077 is much more a noir story than anything else. The way they put so much narrative and emotional effort into night city itself as a living thing, the “try to do good but something always gets fucked”, every powerful group is untrustworthy and working with them risks losing who you are, the consistent attempt to find glimmers of joy and genuine humanity in a fundamentally hopeless place. All of these ideas are very core elements of noir fiction and cyberpunk as a genre pulls from it quite often. Hell the most common mainstream “cyberpunk” thing, bladerunner, is a noir film and has a very nihilistic ending when it comes to fighting the capitalist structures at the core of it’s world.
Basically, hopelessness isn’t an integral part of cyberpunk, but noir definitely is a very common part of the genre which is why we get lots of stories where the goodest ending we can hope for is maybe protecting those you care about and getting out of the situation, not solving it.
In cyberpunk 2077 at the very least it’s anti capitalist message is consistently shown. But like a lot of artistic works anti-capitalist doesn’t mean shit about pro-communist and i would say it’s definitely not pro-communist. Maybe pro anarchist with the nomads but even that’s stretching quite a bit. I don’t hate it for sure i think it does some very very interesting stuff artistically, specifically the work they put into making Night City feel like a place in it’s design and writing really works, architecturally it has sprawl and density represented in such a way you feel like you’re in an actual city not just a big carboard box like with most open world shit.
I’m just not a fan of stories that are so bleak and hopeless.
I can handle a grim story if there’s something to cling to and something at least cathartic if not triumphant at the end. Self-described “mature” consumers may smugpost against that, but considering that it’s entertainment, and it’s fiction, there is no real reason to binge-consume “everything is shit in shit world and the people are made of walking shit and shit on each other” fiction for me unless I wanted to performatively please “mature” consumers, and I don’t.
I watched it when it was first getting big, so my memory might be kind of fuzzy, but my copium thought-deeper-than-thought reading of it was:
This story is David’s happy ending under capitalism. It sucks a fuckton, but that’s because every other ending sucks a fuckton. One guy on his own was not going to start the revolution. But you know what he got? He didn’t have to bow his head as deeply to the shitty and abusive system as everybody else. He got to hit it back, even. He got to keep his humanity right up until the end. He got to live as part of a (small) community in a real and meaningful way. He got friends who put their lives on the line for him and who he put his life on the line for. The dream he wanted to grant to Lucy was essentially what she convinced herself she wanted rather than what she actually wanted, marketing having told her it would fill the hole in her self. That doesn’t matter to David, though. He got to give the 10/10 knockout girl he was crazy over her dream. Compare his life to most anybody else around him. You think the guy hooked up to the vacuum blowjob fleshlight drooling out of his slacked jaw next to the train station has a better life? The rich corpo kids who will live without ever feeling a genuine connection to something greater than themselves in their whole lives, driven insane by the unjustified violence their class position demands that they inflict? David died a painful, awful death. So did most of his friends. But it’s the only real end that could come from a life lived to the fullest under his circumstances.
