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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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... because even "beloved classics" like Cyberpunk featured LGBT themes.

Okay, this is a nitpick.

There was the MtF bartender at the Afterlife with the street racing line of sidequests, and that did feel preachy. And there were the gay romance options. Did I miss anything else?

On the other hand, you have Fingers, the ripperdoc who has made himself androgynous and is unambiguously a villain, in a way clearly tied to his sexuality, in a major quest. I was pretty surprised they'd go there. I felt like they did a good job of preserving the setting's themes even when they were in tension with the mores of the current year.

Arguably the racial updates, making the setting less white, were more progressive. They were in line with the tech updates, though, splitting the difference between retro-future and future-future. So I have mixed feelings.

The way they handled religion was pretty bad in general, but I can only speculate as to motives there.

The LGBT stuff wasn't more than I would expect from a cyberpunk open world game. Probably a bit less than expected? In fact if you gave your male character no dick he could never have sex with any character, IIRC. Bold!

Also whenever you played as Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves) you were always doing straight sex/straight womanizing. I wonder if he specifically refused to do queer stuff or they just didn't want to go there since he's supposed to be a macho anarchist punk rocker.

OTOH the sheer volume of badass girlbosses and best hackers/netrunners being girls was quite overwrought.

Silverhand is canonically a practicing bisexual, but it only comes up if you go into a gay bar to start with. Reeves has worked that sorta blue more overtly in the past, with My Own Private Idaho, but he's also played a lot of bi-or-gay-in-other-media characters that dropped the theme in translation, most notoriously with the in-name-only Constantine film.