They even had to twist the knife with rebbecca. Jesus Christ. Night city has aoe damage, that shit was tagging them in an entirely new universe.
That's Cyberpunk baby. The whole genre is this. Either you go out in a blaze of glory or you stick around and get worn down by the world. Couldn't have ended any other way.
Though the genre is intentionally designed to be like this also. If you strip cyberpunk of the misery, you just have scifi. It's no longer cyberpunk. What makes cyberpunk what it is are all the megacorps and treating everyone and everything like it's a commodity. Does that make it better? Not really. The best ending you can hope for in cyberpunk is pretty much getting a job for someone who will cause others misery instead.
Only happy endings I've ever seen come with an asterisk, since getting a proper full happy ending would downplay the dystopia. There's also cyberpunk as a style which is its own thing, and it doesn't really apply to cyberpunk as a genre since you can make cool cyberpunk-looking things show up just about anywhere.
Again, it's not like I'm much of a fan of these ideas but they're the foundation of the vast majority of cyberpunk works.
@Iffine @Minty the bleak nihilism is very specific to Cyberpunk(tm) not the cyberpunk genre as a whole. pretty much every other cyberpunk story is not focused so much on the style or cool factor, they're kind of just cool by their very nature. they usually carry more substance than style, with a lot of exploration of inorganic vs organic things and what makes them different or alike. Cyberpunk(tm) doesn't really do any of that kind of philosophical stuff and it feels kind of surface-level for me as a result. it's still cool as fuck, don't get me wrong, but that's about all i can say.
cyberpunk usually takes place in a dystopia, of varying degrees. but nothing comes to my mind as being quite as fucked as Cyberpunk is, and the way it is fucked and the stories that are told just feel needlessly over the top for my tastes. i love the aesthetics and the worldbuilding and lore and everything but the actual stories being told and the way a lot of characters are written don't have enough substance to capture me which makes all the death and destruction feel annoying rather than saddening.
the granddaddy of cyberpunk, "do androids dream of electric sheep," ends with the main character basically finding peace and going to bed while his wife makes coffee and orders some food for his pet synthetic frog. now that i think of it, Cyberpunk is pretty much the only cyberpunk setting that is so fucked up which i guess carves its own section of the genre out, but it's a little unfortunate that it carries the same name because in actuality it is quite different from everything else. it's just extremely, borderline comedically, tragic by design and i'm not a fan of that.
@beardalaxy @Iffine @Minty idk man, fairly or unfairly, Neuromancer is cited as the seminal cyberpunk story, and the ending there is more downer than upper. Not exactly misery porn, but it's definitely about broken people who stay broken.
@japananon @Iffine @Minty haven't read it so i can't really confidently give an opinion on it.
@beardalaxy @Iffine @Minty Well, at any rate, I think I agree that there's a dystopian/utopian slider with sci-fi, and if it moves too far away from dystopia it stops being cyberpunk. The catchphrase I was always familiar with being associated with it was "high tech, low life". If things get too happy and optimistic is slides more into solarpunk, for me at least.
@japananon @Iffine @Minty the point i'm trying to get across isn't that cyberpunk can't be a dystopia, it's that Cyberpunk(tm) is forcibly bleak and i can feel that so it turns me off. idk maybe i'm just not expressing it properly. it's the difference between the actual setting and the story being told within it as well as the characters in said story.
you think tron would fit as the neutral on that sliding scale? its real world depiction is pretty much just ours but with higher technology than we currently have going on behind the scenes. it has factions tugging in both ways to make things either a utopia or a dystopia which i think is pretty interesting.
@beardalaxy @Iffine @Minty Cyberpunk (tm) is definitely more miserable than a lot of other works in the genre, so that's understandable. There are games/stories where the character survives, or accomplishes some personal goal while the world around them remains fucked up. The writing for the main story in Cyberpunk (tm) was honestly pretty weak, imo. I found a lot of the characters just plain unlikable.
I'm honestly not sure where Tron fits, genre-wise. It has some visual aesthetic that bleeds into/shares blood with cyberpunk, but idk. A lot of the genre boundaries are really hazy anyway.
@japananon @Iffine @Minty i was so upset with the ending i got man. did so much stuff with and for judy and talked about moving away and everything but because i didn't like panam, V decides to be all emo and not leave night city with judy after all. i'm still mad about that.
