live fast, die young | Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

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I appreciate that they respected the world of Cyberpunk. No happy endings here.

David was the epitome of the pharse " the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long"

This is one of the few anime that feels like the world while still live on even if the main character is dead

Probably the best most tragic thing about the writing is something you touched on briefly, aside from David and Rebecca, most of the main cast are killed by nobodies. Because in night city it doesn't matter who you are, after enough fights, after enough close calls your luck will run out, your death probably won't be some beautiful last stand, but simply a matter of bad luck

The setting of Night City is just so full of theme. The bright neon lights everywhere, and yet it’s so dark. The clean, sterile streets and grimey, filthy alleyways. So much atmosphere

"Cyberpunk isn't about saving humanity, it's about saving yourself." Is how Mike Pondsmith described Cyberpunk once. No matter how high you climb or how far you go, you'll never break the corporate machine that governs this worlds settings and everything in it. The best you can do is climb the corporate ladder or live and die in a spectacular enough fashion to be remembered. The show embodies these themes so well.

One exceptionally tragic thing about the whole scenario that we learn from the game (and Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the original Cyberpunk board game) is that Cyberpsychosis isn't even a real thing. The term is a scapegoat from the corps to distract from the fact that these people who go on violent and insane outbursts really just snapped from the strain of this Hellish life and loss of humanity. Iirc, the original owner of the Sandevistan was a traumatized war vet, Maine had just lost a friend and was feeling the pressure from the increasingly dangerous heists, David had just lost Maine, was feeling the same pressure and was facing the potential loss of the person he loves most. The chrome isn't the cause, but quite literally losing pieces of your humanity contributes.

My favorite scene was when David is telling the Doc to give him stronger suppressants and the Doc was like "do you really think there's something out there that could save you?" It was horrifying and great.

The biggest tragedy like greek lvl in this story was that D and Lucy did not communicate if she would just tell him what she was doing and what she learned about him also maybe convinced him to get some personal cloned meat and scaled down the implants they might be happy but they both were too broken by the world and the upbringing they had for healthy communication like that

The sheer amount of blood David kept vomiting and gushing out of his nose was truly worrisome considering how like 90% of his body was mostly chrome at that point

The two lessons I learned from edge runners is chasing your dreams are worth it even if they ain’t your own and there’s only so much one man can do against an evil so large and a world so uncaring.

Despite it's flaws, the game touches on this as well, with an in game quest added to tie into the anime, it's message being "don't end up like David". The game itself tells you from the get-go there will be no happy ending, not with the decision to come to Night City, the city that embodies all these themes, but the endings, the happier ones in my opinion, all have a similar message. Leave the city, it's culture, it's empty promises of fortune and success, leave it all behind. In the Nomad ending, you leave the city behind with your new found family. Yes you will die, yes you will struggle, but you will do so with friends and family, your last moments spent happy and fulfilled, free from the corporate overlords and even the government. The nomads live on the fringe of society, criminals by the very nature of refusing to take part in the game the very top have trapped everyone else in. They'll never be rich, they'll never be truly famous, but they can be happy. Their hard work will provide for them and their family. With Night City itself a metaphor of this cycle, Judy's advice and drive to "leave the city behind" because "if you play by it's rules, you'll always lose" ring true. I have no real ending to this essay I've ended up typing, but this video has captured the feeling have everyday I wake up and go to work.

I’d argue in a matter of perspective David did get his good ending. He fulfilled the one goal that he fought for, he fought to realize the dreams of those he care for the most. He got to the top of Arasaka, he became more Chromed than Maine, and he got his girl to the moon. It’s sad to see him go, but he died with a smile, and a conscious mind.

13:16 the cursor on the screen really served as a good visual as to how the upper class of Night City controls your life the same way you control a computer program. The only way to break the cycle is to never join it. That's what Lucy was trying to do for David from the start and sadly he never saw it.

In Cyberpunk, Night City is the protagonist. Everyone else loses.

Corporate schools in the world of Cyberpunk are just as much about feeding the students corporate propaganda to instill loyalty towards the corporation as they are about educating them. It's focused on turning them into employees.

A lot of people fail to realize David was only 18 when he died. They sent the NC boogeyman after a kid because he became too OP. People give David cramp for loosing to Smasher when he was never trying to fight him just save Lucy. David’s attitude throughout the show was that he never had goals or seemed to care. Once he saved Lucy he accepted his fate. I kind of wonder if he was 28 like V with more battle experience under his belt and couldn’t become a cyber psycho. He definitely became a legend

Cyberpunk is our world not even a distorted mirror it literally is like that

I think the one silver lining in David's story and perhaps the hint of a "solution" to the state of it's world the show (and the game as well) provide is in David's one final success, to get Lucy to the moon. Despite her begging him to prioritize his own self-preservation over her dream, he made the decision, by his own, to sacrifice himself for another, to be truly selfless in the end, and to value those personal connections over everything else, over "becoming a legend", over "making it big", over the false hope of survival; All that mattered to him in the end was his EMPATHY. And with it, he achieves his one and only victory over the system, not for himself, but for Lucy. That message of empathy being the only thing that can truly hope to provide an escape from the system (unlike the deluded faux-rebellious carnage of edgerunners or the likes of Jonny Silverhand, which seek to violently escape/topple but ultimately achieve nothing) sits at the heart of at least CDPR's Cyberpunk stories.