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Notes -
I have a deep, abiding love for the cyberpunk aesthetic. I've worshipped at the altar of Sterling, Gibson and Stephenson. And unfortunately I'm going to have to hard disagree and express puzzlement with:
As a disclaimer, I haven't played Cyberpunk:2077 so I likely missed some minor tie-ins. But Edgerunners was a good series with an amazing aesthetic that profoundly failed to live up to it's promise. Here are the problems:
**** MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW *****
Gratuitous character deaths. Pilar dying in episode 4 was shocking, and let you know we're playing for keeps. By the time Rebecca and David explode into puddles of gore, it's impossible to give a fuck anymore because the entire team died in stupid ways that don't further the plot. Just watching violence for the sake of violence isn't particularly attractive.
Utterly pointless climax. The culmination of the series is just a reheated 'Do it for her' meme. Love interest is abducted. Main character acquires
macguffin(okay, giant mecha suit) to rescue love interest, dying in the process. All other main characters die pointlessly, with one possible exception (Maine dying of cyberpsychosis. But also...what's Maine's backstory? Why is he randomly running in the desert? Why should I care that he's dying?).Complete lack of meaningful character progression. Nobody has a relevant backstory. The closest thing we get is David's mom dying early in the series, which changes virtually nothing because David already had a pile of reasons to hate the corpos. Now he hates them more. Profound. Meanwhile, what do we know about Pilar? Maine? Dorio? Kiwi? Rebecca? All these characters die and it's just impossible to care because they're sad cardboard cutouts without motivations or actual stories.
**** Spoilers done ****
And because I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the good:
Incredible worldbuilding and aesthetics. The combat sequences with the Sandevistan and cybernetics more generally are fun as hell. David and Lucy's song is a major earworm.
Color me deeply skeptical. Cyberpunk and fantasy are fairly played out and at this point there isn't a whole lot of new ground to tread, just the occasional talented author who can write an excellent interpretation of the old formula. We'll keep seeing the occasional hit or new franchise, but there's not going to be a renaissance of talented authors bravely taking cyberpunk to new places.
By the way, does this site support spoiler text? The old >! !< doesn't seem to work.
All three of your points seem to miss a key aspect of the show: it's a tragedy. The characters don't 'level up' in a tragedy, they write their endings. Do people complain that Macbeth lacks 'character progression' or that Reservoir Dogs has 'meaningless deaths?' Each character earns their brutal ending by the way they conduct themselves.
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