The Edge

Back with some insights, my retarded potatoes. Today I would like to talk about why the entirety of the cyberpunk world attracts me to such an inhuman degree.

Like the show Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. I have seen it 24 times so far. Twenty-four times. Yes. WHY? That is what I have been asking myself these past few days. I looked up a bunch of Reddit threads, watched a couple billion video essays on YouTube, and discussed it a lot with GPT. I feel like I finally have some idea about it.

Let’s start by pointing out the things that I specifically like about the setting. The neon lights. The tall buildings. The ability to swap out any part of your body with enhanced metal. The late-stage capitalist society gone to shit. Mega-corporations with private armies. The normalization of crime as a way to earn a living. The extreme income inequality. And, above all, the constant push to find human connection and meaning in a world that is actively against you.

The main character is David Martinez, a street kid whose mother dies in a fatal car accident in the first episode as collateral damage during a high-speed chase in Night City, which is a common occurrence there. He gets his hands on a military-grade Sandevistan, a cybernetic implant that lets the user move and react at inhuman speeds. It takes a toll on the body, obviously. He becomes a cyberpunk, joining a squad of mercenaries who do random gigs for eddies, trying to make a stand in an everlasting technological dystopia.

The plot follows David’s life as a cyberpunk. I won’t spoil more. Go watch it already. But I would definitely like to share why I like the characters so much.

David, for example, is relatable in the sense that he does not necessarily have a grand dream of his own. He finds purpose by borrowing and fulfilling the dreams of the people around him. Becoming the best in Night City was Maine’s dream. Sending Lucy to the moon. Climbing to the top of Arasaka Tower, which was his mother’s dream. David values his people and cares about them deeply. He is fair and protective toward his team members. He looks out for Lucy and the trauma that keeps seeping back into her present life. He lives for the sake of making the people around him lead better and happier lives in a world where that is not common.

I feel like I share more or less the exact scenario.

Another thing that I admire is the connections he makes in Night City. Whenever he hangs out at a bar with his crew after a high-risk gig where he almost dies, it just gives me peace. That one beer they all love to drink. The way they care about each other and help maintain each other’s spark. The empathy they show in their own rough ways.

Maine acts like a father figure to David. He shows him the roots of the cyberpunk life. He teaches him how to drive, how to handle the body’s response to replacing flesh with chrome, how to survive. Rebecca acts like a good friend, a sister, sometimes even with a stepmom-like instinct toward him. She sees him at his lowest and is there for him, especially when he starts hallucinating due to cyberpsychosis. Lucy acts as an anchor for him. She is the one person who loves him for who he is. A healthy relationship in Night City is practically a utopia that most people never get to experience.

At the end of the day, after he is done challenging Night City to a fight, he has a home to go back to. A person to sleep next to. Someone to share his most intimate emotions with. She acts as a safety net in a world that discards and forgets your existence the second you stop moving forward.

All of these are things that I also desire in my life. Not the cyberpsychosis, not the existential dread, not the dystopia. But those elements raise the stakes so high that even the tiniest bridges between people feel more meaningful and significant.

The reason why, in my eyes, this show feels like perfection is because it introduces the city and the characters so well that you get hooked on them. You empathize with them. And in the short span of ten episodes, the ending hits you as hard as a multivariable calculus lecture on a Monday morning.

So I guess my obsession with this genre comes from my relatability to certain characteristics, good or bad, I don’t know, and from the genuine connections people find in such a technological hellhole.