The Cyberpunk Anime Hurt Me.

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Never played the video game but ive been playing the ttrpg cyberpunk 2020 for a decade now and I gotta say I love how well the world of cyberpunk was shown and I love how the plot resembles almost every game I've every ran/played. The party getting swept into something far beyond their grasp and as things unfold the tension increases until everything catches up with them and it ends in an epic fight that let's everyone give their characters the flashy send off they deserve for surviving one of the deadliest ttrpg systems. I don't think I've ever played or read a cyberpunk story end with anything other than death or the loss of everything u hold dear

Patch 2.0 and holy shit Phantom Liberty my god

I may be interpreting this incorrectly, but the cyberpunk genre isnt for everyone. Hope and friendship is something for shounen anime lol Cyberpunk is a distinctly different type of story. It isnt meant to have that kinda messaging in my opinion. Its not really suppose to inspire you, if anything its cautionary. But mainly its just a different world and its meant to entertain. That being said I think it is okay if you dont like it, it makes you think about some heavy things and its understandable why it can cause bad feelings.

I am constantly having a dream that I'm in the night city, the side ruins and the neone lights, big buildings are the advancements, the technology everything, the poor deprived and the rich getting everything, i witness most of it. It's like I'm having this dream in a sequence for about almost a week and half by now. It's spooky

one thing rubbed me wrong, no one ever mentions how
Dex said "Die old and smelling like piss or going out with a blaze of glory?" that was a major part of living in night city

Then anime takes place before the game

This anime really has left a whole in my chest. I just don't know what it is. "That" song really makes my heart hurt.

Not having optimism is the core identity of dystopia done right. I personally loved the fact that the show was willing to let down the audience and hurt them a bit.

no happy ending. no optimism. no salvation for anyone. pretty much dark dystopian reality.

i loved every second and the show remains in my hurt because it really hit the feels for me. Probably because of the double connection the the world thanks to the game.
I wish more shows were willing to take that risk but in a good approach, i didnt like how akame ga kill killed of everyone for example. Here it felt meaningful or when it wasnt meaningful in the moment it had payoff later on big time.

I will probably rewatch it at some point but whenever i play and hear that song i just hurt actually thinking about it. From that perspective it has to be in my top 10 of shows all time because not many shows do that.

I'd like to Recommend REDLINE. You may be surprised by it

I just finished it today after putting it off for a year and I sat there at the end shellshocked and sobbing for a straight ten minutes

always happy to see House Hippo reference. Watching that as a kid it made me believe house hippos were actually real LOL

Felt the need to comment on the completely off base idea of violence in America. You've been fed a bucket of skewed data masqueraded as truth. America is one of the safest places on the planet, this is includes shootings. If you remove 5 cities... blue state run hell holes, we go from like 18th in gun crime, to nearly nearly dead nuts last out of every nation on the planet with only a handful having less gun violence. And if you take into account the few below us have a fraction of our population and a half a percent of the guns in circulation is actually pretty amazing.

People need to stop perpetuating this lie because this is how everyone is just convinced things are in a way that they are not. It is the same as racism and other doctrines that are continually spewed by media, social or otherwise. If they say the lie often and enough, people quite literally will just believe it eventually. There are tons of use cases of this kind of social manipulation. Heck many of which our government has employed on other nations. Like social media being used by state actors to drive the revolt in Egypt. The twitter files brought much of this to light but people prefer to be blind to it it would seem. It doesnt fit their world view or narrative, so it is too inconvenient of a truth.

I just moved from a town that hadnt had a single murder in over a hundred years. Just had its first one since the late 1800s, and it was a lovers quarrel. That is most of America.

Don't want violence... leave Shitcago, simple as that.

Much of what we have in the world in general, but here in the west specifically, is a cultural problem. Fix the cultural problem and much of the way of the thinking that promotes violence would go away.

The larger problem that isnt so easily fixed because this has been an issue in all civilizations is combatting the wealthy and powerful. Ruler and ruled, master and slave, these have been around for forever and those in power are not keen on letting it go. IT is what made America such an anomaly. A place where a middle class actually existed for a time. It is why they called it the great experiment. The experiment was seeing if we could do it different than it had always been done. Literally since the formation of this country though, there have been people at work trying to topple it all down and regain their seat of power. Those families and their influences have tried and often successfully altered the course of this country and further are trying to drive us into a real life dystopia.

Currently we are letting them do it too. We will all own nothing and be happy. But yeah believe the lies and tell everyone we need to be safe and secure and the ones who are lying to you will be happy to pass the right laws or remove the rights you have to make you nice and "secure".

Wait, so one of the reasons you're not particularly "impressed" by this anime is because it resembles the real world and its themes too much...? So.... what should've happened? David "wakes up" and goes on a redemption arc and gives everybody butterflies and flowers? Man, what a dumb take. You say you're punk (or used to be) - but I don't buy it. Someone probably skinned up in front of you once or dropped a tab and suddenly you thought you were "hardcore" and "living the life" lol.

One of the reasons people go down that route is precisely because they realize we ALREADY live in a cyberpunk dystopia. A small handful of corporations already run the world, and in your own words - we're all either haves or have nots. That isn't going to change anytime soon. The discrepancy is only going to grow larger. Especially when people are spending €14 on stupid shit like a coffee mug with the logo of some online personality. IRL, there is no super-hero in tight underpants and flowing cape to come rescue the world. In this world you either become a cog and fit into the machine or you take what's yours. Being hopeful and having "positive vibes" is not going to suddenly change the minds and aspirations of the ultra-wealthy and the consumerist populace that feeds them.

all I can say that you need to rewatch it

i love it because no matter what you do in night city, no matter who you are, there is never a good guy, at the end of the day everyone has done evil things and that's a nice change because even as good as we think david is, he killed innocent people, im not sure about lucy but maybe she has done things she regrets, maybe we will get something in the future that looks into her life going forward.

I'm saying this as a response to an amazing interpretation of cyberpunk and detailed opinion:
I will reply to this video as a psychologist and build upon your main points. You nailed major points of the series but there are so many psychological reasons why what you said is true and thought provoking.

Wow man, just 5 minutes in and you've spewed a bunch of shitty opinions that REALLY don't do either the game or anime justice. And your taste in other anime is lacking at best. For having such a badass PFP and channel art, your video quality sure doesn't reflect that.

The Hotline Miami music you have in the background tho 👌

Yoy hit on the head tho night city is alot like america if you didnt come from a family that already had money youe making mence meat to survive and like you said corporate just like in nightcity run the world we making them richer mean while we struggling over here it sad that i have to to work overtime to see a decent check and csnt be with my family in right about another thing shooting in america has gotten out of hand we should have to look over our shoulder afriad some one go pull a gun put on us wr aint safe bo where hell when i went to south Korea they got a zero gun policy almost no one have gun its crazy the world we live in same thing with insurance in america you have to have job to get insurance where as i here in other countries you automatically have them

I’d say the best part of this videos topic is your main dislike is the whole point of the show and the games. See the book and tabletop game the real main character is the city not us or the players No one can and no one will win. In the end all you do is disappear into night city. It’s a game designed to show that hope is the only thing left once everything is striped away. That it’s not about who you are, if your special or what you own. But it’s about what you do, what your remembered for and how you live your life. That’s the symbolism of it all. And if the hero wins in every story what is the point of it all? He or she no longer needs to try or better them selfs. But in cyberpunk there is no escape just hopes and dreams of escaping that influence your choices and what you get remembered for. summery it’s a game about living your life knowing it will end but your breathing now so go do something to be remembered for. Its depressing because hope is only available in the worst situations thus the hero must always die but they must die in away that’s meaningful to them.

I think you kind of missed the point of the scene where Lucy kissed David for the first time at the end of episode 4, at least in the way you dubbed the "promise me you'll never die" meme into it - Lucy doesn't want David to promise he'll never die. She already knows then that he's getting in too deep to not go out with a bang.
This quote from her earlier in the scene sums it up perfectly: "You don't make a name for yourself as a cyberpunk by the way you live. You make a name by how you die."
Also, when she says "I don't want you to die on me", my interpretation of that line was that she knows it's hopeless to expect him to live. She wants to be with him, and she doesn't want him to die, but her voice is not hopeful, but sad. Her face after she says it is not the face of someone expecting a happily ever after.
Anyway, you are of course entitled to your own interpretation. It just hit me in the feels when you said you laughed at that scene, as I found it quite tragic. My opinion about the scene could be changed by the fact that I know how their story ends, and it could be that it didn't hit so hard the first time round.

Keep up the anime content 👍

It's been confirmed that Cyberpsychosis does NOT exist and was actually fabricated by the Corpos to get people addicted to drugs to "help" combat the illness, but it actually CAUSES it as a side-effect of not using the drug for too long

Punk originated in the 60s bro.

I think if you really want to get a good sense of the whole Cyberpunk universe. You should get your hands on the original material put out by Mile Pondsmith. That would be the original Cyberpunk table-top pen and paper RPG. It lays out the timeline, the players, places and the gear and all of the player classes you can play in a campaign.

The optimism point is the exact reason why I liked CP. The game and show presents us with how easily society can slip into an absolute shit show where things will be nearly hopeless. Yet the beauty of it is the sacrifices David made, V made have the potential to become the spark that causes change and inspires hope. Cyberpunk just paints it bleakly because in order to even give people hope, you have to sacrifice something it's almost like a law of equivalent exchange, but in the CP world it isn't really equal the little guy has to sacrifice more to etch even a bread crumb more of freedom. I find it wonderful, appreciate what you have and don't let people tread on it. Defend it with everything you have because if you don't do it now, someone else might take it away in the future.

What I learned from playing Cyberpunk 2077 and watching Edgerunners: Silverhand was right. There are no happy endings in a hyper-capitalist cyberpunk dystopia.

So AIs today, right?

i grew up "punky" aswell... but how can u make this video and not crying on the last episode? i like your analogies with corporate and so on... but man.... i really wanna stay at your house.... this ... this makes men cry..

fun fact cyber psychosis isn't biological witch is stated in the game and TTRPG source material, its actually caused by the different OS systems of your cyber wearer rejecting each other and trying to force each other out that's why you can get full borgs like smasher because all his chrome is designed to play nice with each other.
It's effectively the side effect of anti competitive DRM built in to you body... not such a fun fact come to think about it

Maybe this will help you understand why the game and the series are so insanely dark and "hopeless". CDPR is a Polish studio with a shtton of Polish people working there. And if you know something about Poland and its people then its that it has a really dark miserable and hopeless history, a history that even know is damaging current generations. There is saying "Poland will have its borders even if they're on the last map humanity ever draws" which to the perfection describes the Polish people. We (Im Polish) understand that the world is fcked and it will get only worse and that there is very little we can do, but that doesnt mean we will stop fighting the endless fight for a better future even tho its a hopeless fight thru misery and pain. Sooner or later a deranged mf will hit the red button and everything will go to sht. This is also why we Polish people are not really scared of Russia threatening us constantly with nuking our country. We sort of accepted that this is a possibility. Its not the first time we faced doom head-on. After all we are the doomsdsay nation and if doom is on "todays" menu, so be it.

So much of what you said in the first minute is flat out wrong or misleading. Stick to anime because you clearly know nothing about the game.

The point of the anime is that night city always wins.

I think the music in cyberpunk is on par with GTA.

I know it's an "unpopular " opinion but I can't help it..

Even original music is bad ass

What is especially galling about how depressingly real the cyberpunk setting is is that the setting was first released in the late 80's. Pondsmith saw reaganomics in action and knew whereabouts it was going if there were no brakes, and there were no brakes

My mate told me about this anime a couple weeks after it came out and I ended up binging it in a single day. Gave me the same emptiness that I felt after watching Devil Man Crybaby.

The only way i was able to come with turms wit the ending is that i avenged him and blew adam smashers head off so ...

for me the hopelessness and the general feel of the world is a breath of fresh air. I'm a little tired of the good guy always finds out a way to win or there is always hope. Its in almost every form of consumable media and its not a bad way to tell a story it just got a little repeteive for me. So, when I watched cyberpunk the feeling of constant doom and watching almsot all of the main characters die and watching lucy on the moon by herself made me feel terrible but in a way no other show has made me feel.

yknow, in a way i cant stop thinking of 40k and hotline miami when i see the cyberpunk anime, the darkness makes something in my brain light up. also cause all three of the franchises have themes of mortality and going insane, also i wanna see a full cyberphycho david and adam smasher fight a blood angle space marine undergoing the full effects of "the flaw"

chooma is short for choombatta,

"music from the radio in game that of course pales in comparison to Fallout and GTA" is the weirdest, most random, poorly written and confusing dig at... an in-game radio I've ever heard in my life. How did you write that, speak it into a mic, listen back to it and edit the video without ever thinking "hm... that's a very odd thing to say totally at random and doesn't add anything"? What a weird way to try sneak in an extra dig at the game for no reason

They should've made 6 seasons and a movie. I was all in. New main characters or whatever, I'll get over it. I just wanted more. So fukn good.

It still breaks me...

Corny

But the "bad guys" have indeed already won and there is in fact nothing we can do! We only think we are still figthing cause they let us and need us to think that way, optimism and hope are poison!

Majority of animes that are released are garbage very few anime are actually good and i believe cyberpunk was a really great anime

Likewise I hated the message that the show gave. If someone is feeling down in life I do not recommended watching this show at all, it's just going to kick you while you're down. Your final thought on this was spot on, if this show brings anything to learn or follow is that we must at all cost avoid this future.

In my opinion, the saddest thing about the ending (sadder than all the deaths) is the fact that Lucy is alone and probably feels guilty as hell. She was trying so hard to save David that she ironically ended up being the the biggest factor in arasaka being able to lure him out. She distanced herself, got captured, got David wrapped up in a whole mess without ever being able to talk to him and clear her name. Imagine having to live with that guilt. I really felt for her in that ending scene on the moon, where she realizes that David is no longer there. You can tell she blames herself for everything. In the end, David failed to realize that her dream wasn't the moon anymore, it was a life of peace with him. Be it on the moon, or wherever. She just wanted him to be there. Imagine how she felt when falco said "if I turn around now David will have died for nothing" and when falco told her David apologized for not being able to go to the moon with her. Her entire being probably broke in that moment and the guilt probably started to kick in as she was fully taking in what was being said to her. I feel like if she communicated with David, and talked to him sooner, she could've gotten him off the cyberware that ultimately ended up giving him cyberpsychosis and they could've laid low, got enough money and potentially left. Truly one of the most tragic stories.

Pretty much the only things i said through out the whole show is " OHH SHITTT, dayuuummmm, NOOO WAYYY, "