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.
@beardalaxy @Iffine @Minty Actually, adding to this.. I think a cyberpunk genre story could include an element of "old world dying, new world struggling to be born", but the new world would only be hinted it in story and occur proper only after the story's end.
@japananon @Iffine @Minty that's basically ghostrunner's story.
@beardalaxy @Iffine @Minty That was a game, right? Was it any good?
@japananon @Iffine @Minty 2 games! the first one is the better of the two but the second one is pretty damn good too, i had a great time playing both of them. if you've played hotline miami, it's got that kind of difficulty to it while also having like, a doom 2016 mission structure. the encounters are really hard and you die in one hit but you just get spawned back at the beginning of the encounter so it doesn't feel too punishing. i'd recommend them heavily, really fun games that are kind of overlooked.
