18

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.

all 22 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] ProfessorAdonisCnut@hexbear.net 15 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] charly4994@hexbear.net 12 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] SacredExcrement@hexbear.net 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[-] FourteenEyes@hexbear.net 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] booty@hexbear.net 13 points 1 year ago

I'm just not a fan of stories that are so bleak and hopeless. I don't want to see this guy improve-society get crushed under the king's boot for daring to speak out of turn, that isn't an enjoyable story for me.

[-] Frank@hexbear.net 16 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] booty@hexbear.net 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] charly4994@hexbear.net 7 points 1 year ago

100-com

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.

[-] Frank@hexbear.net 7 points 1 year ago

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. : (

[-] Austinbro217@hexbear.net 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] SkeletorJesus@hexbear.net 8 points 1 year ago

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.

this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
18 points (100.0% liked)

Anime

11080 readers
136 users here now

Welcome to c/anime on Hexbear!

A leftist general anime community for discussion and memes.


Simple rules

High quality threads you should definitely visit

Gigathread: Good Anime Talks, Presentations, Conventions, Panels, etc


Piracy is good and you should do more of it. Use https://aniwave.to/ and https://4anime.gg/ for streaming, and https://nyaa.si/ for torrents. Piracy is the only means of digital protest that audiences have to fight poor worker treatment.

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS