Ride 763: The third year's start!!
Pag 2
1: Ten seconds until the start
Pag 3 /4
1: Let's run with everything we have!!
The last Inter High of the third year Sakamichi, start!!
Pag 5
1: Yeah!!
2: Let's go!!
3: Let's pour our whole guts into it!!
4: Yes!!
5: Let's go!!
6: Teh!!
Pag 6
1: The first day of the boy's Inter High competition in Fukuoka, starts now!!
It's here!!
Pag 7
1: All the cyclists are beginning to run, with the big bridge connecting Kyushu and Honshu through the Kanmon Straits in the back!!
Goo!
Waa, splendid!!
Do your best!!
Pag 8
1: The entrance of Kyushu, here from Moji city in Kitakyushu, going south, they'll fight for three days
Gooo
It's Sohoku!
Yeah!!
2: Waaaaa
The wind is so strong!
The cyclists are so close!
So fast!
Pag 9
1: Kumadai you can do it!
Fukuokaa!!
Their fight will unfold on the stage of Kyushu's nature!!
2: There are so many cyclists
Which team will win?
3: The one you need to pay attention to in the first place, is the one in the front with yellow jerseys
Pag 10
1: Chiba's representative, the two times in a row champion, Sohoku
The third year they call “Mountain King” took the top goal two years in a row!!
Huh... then it's decided already!!
2: Another one is the one with the blue jersey, Kanagawa's Hakone Academy
They were the team that kept winning before, and they're so strong they say that in that team “everyone is an ace”
Huuh... that's amazing too
Pag 11
1: Then there's Kyoto representative, with the purple jerseys, Kyoto Fushimi, who make the race unpredictable every time!!You can already feel their peculiar tenacity!!
They look scary
2: So those three!?
Well, yeah, but rumor has it that this year the mountain bike champion is participating, too
4: MTB!? The off-road one!?
That's right!!
5: And I guess the local Kyushu team won't keep quiet, and Hiroshima is strong too
There's a strong element of uncertainty in road racing
There are a lot of people, and the distance to cover and the time are long too
6: It's not the stronger one who always win
Huh
It's always been said that....
Pag 12
1: Until the finish line is crossed and the race is over, you never know what can happen during a road race!!
Pag 13
1: Hyoo... there's so many people, teh
2: They're all waving their hands, teh!!
Ahhh.... so many people, the scale is so different from the prefectural qualification, teh
3: What's wrong, newbie!! Hahaha
Ka-Kaburagi-san!!
4: It started
Huh!?
5: Finally, the Inter High!!
Pag 14
1: I'll show everyone here what I can do!! Take a look, newbie!!
2: This is the genius Kaburagi Issa's!! Super Special Strong-
3: Start Dash!!
Listen up, Rokudai
Yessir, teh
The red on the referee car means we can't surpass it
Pag 15
1: As long as that racket-like thing is red, this is a parade run
2: Until it gets turned round and becomes green, the race is in a neutral situation
Horuaaa
It means we have to run slowly and safely
3: There's no point in jumping ahead here
And if someone did that, he's just an idiot
Are you watching me, Aoyagi-san!! Haha
Teh... Aoyagi... san..
I'll surpass the care ahead of us!!
4: Once it becomes green, the speed will increase
Don't fall behind
5: Ye... yessir, teh!!
6: Hahaha I guess I left them behind of quite a lot
Waaa!? They're still right behind me!? Imaizumi-san, you're so fast!!
Choose a senpai to refer to
Ah.. huh... yessir, teh...
Pag 16
3: We've pretty much passed the residential area, teh
The parade will go on for a few more kilometers
4: Once we get on a wider road and can confirm it's safe, then there's the real start
Ohh
Pag 17
1: My first Inter High....
What on earth is it... the Inter High....
2: Ahh... my heart is pounding, teh...
Yeah, enjoy the scenery and the heart pounding while you still can
3: Teh!?
4: Once the race starts you won't have time to look at the scenery or take a breath
6: You- you have enough time to take a breath
Ro- Rokudai-kun
Don't bully the first year, Hotshot
7: Onoda-san!!
Pag 18
1: Only a little
3: Almost... none... the Inter High!!
I see... teh
Onoda-kun... you were even worst than Hotshot now..
Huh!?
The Inter H...igh sounds harsh
4: No, uhm
Uhm, it is
5: It's incredibly hard
It's so hard you could collapse
6: Your whole body falls apart and you can't even take a breath!!
Fall apart...!!
He's really putting the boot in...
Pag 19
1: But we run with all our strength
2: with everyone supporting each other
3: If we connect
Connect...
4: and we run until the end with all our might
7: When everything is over and we look back at it
Pag 20
1: We'll feel like it a really irreplaceable time
2: That difficult moment
Pag 21
1: When we were angry, frustrated, or when we smiled
We'll remember everything
2: Then, we'll think that we're happy we didn't give up
3: “Think”....
“Wish”....
4: That's....
Pag 22
1: That's the Inter High!!
3: If there are people who have “power” in their words
4: For me, it's this person
I've been thinking it since I've met him
5: Are you... in trouble?
Follow me
6: He usually seems unreliable when he talks, and there are times when he's awkward, but
… yes
Pag 23
1: His words always strike my core!!
Yessir!! Teh!!
That's right, Onoda-kun
You're right, Onoda
You can bet on it..!!
Yes!!
Pag 24
1: Thank you so much, teh
For bringing me, who didn't know anything, in such a brilliant and heart shaking world!!
Pag 25
1: Huh!? Everyone else too!! You were listening!?
Ah... uhm.. I was talking to Rokudai-kun...
2: Hahaha, we heard
3: And thanks to it, I'm all fired up!!
Don't get fired up more than this or you'll turn into ashes quickly
4: I-I'll run with everything I have, teh!!
5: So that you can fulfill
6: your dearest wish you told us about when we were coming here on the ship!!
Pag 26
1: “Dearest wish”
5: Yokosuka-Kokura ferry, off the coast of Kochi Prefecture
7: Well, the schedule after we arrive is roughly like this
Remember it yourself
Yes
Yes
Pag 27
1: Now if you get too excited you'll only get tired, and now it's okay to relax
Get a good night's sleep today, when you wake up tomorrow we'll go ashore
Yes!
2: Onoda, you want to say anything?
Huh!?
5: Let's... let's do our best
6: Yessir!!
Yes!!
On!!
7: Good night
Good night!!
8: Can I ask one last thing?
Pag 28
1: Earlier, Naruko-san said that our objective for this Inter High is to get our “third consecutive victory”
To be on par with Hakogaku, who is the only team to ever win three times in a row in the history of the Inter High
4: I agree, I also think we have to do it
But I there's one thing I'm curious about, and I don't think it's been asked yet
5: Onoda-san, what's your objective this year?
What are you running in the Inter High for?
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The Most Unreliable Narrator I Have Ever Seen
soooooo I had a Cyberpunk-obsessed phase pass recently, and this time Johhny Silverhand's character caught my eye. His story, more specifically, and how... inconsistent he seems, depending on each source.
In the game, Johhny acts like a bastard for most of the game. He panic-rages on his first meeting with V, throws many threats around, but is later beaten into the background with the blocker pills Misty gave to V. Even Johnny's friends' are well, they react Loudly to his return. Y'know, make it known his presence alone provokes a lot of anger from them.
Even during his first appearance, when V gets thrown into Silverhand's memories of his SAMURAI concert, the only real thing V recalls is the all-consuming rage that he felt, which he tried to shout out through the microphone, but it never felt like enough.
And doesn't this sound weird then, that the only thing Johnny does throughout the game after that first meeting is help V out? He learns about the Smasher guy hideout at the docks (he does that through dubious means but that's Johnny for you), he helps V out when the seizures become worse, he calmly agrees to Any decision V makes, despite V clearly Not being in any real state to oppose him in the finale of the game, he plans the whole thing with "Alt" so V can get his body back at Johnny's own expense, from the beginning, and he doubles down on that claim at the end of the game.
Do you see the dissonance? The egoist rockerboy that admitted to using his friends to getting what he wants, and the downright self-sacrificing hero and a friend that is Johnny at the end of the game? People change, sure, but this divide is very massive and too sudden, so I wanted to dig into that. And what I've stumbled upon, with the help of canon Cyberpunk materials like the Red sourcebook (or, more specifically, LayedBackGamers' reading of the canon books and his lore videos on different topics), is that
Johhny Silverhand from Cyberpunk 2077 is the Most Unreliable Narrator I've Ever Seen.
Count with me here:
Johhny's personality in general. No matter what your interpretation of him his, it's impossible to ignore that Johhny is very much a people person and he exploits that knowledge and charisma to suit his own goals. If you choose to trust him, then you might have already been played.
2) Johhny has been alone, only his lovely self for 50+ years inside the Arasaka chip. Don't ask me how he is still even remotely sane, I haven't got a clue (hopefully the time as a construct without outside stimulation flies differently and he hasn't felt those 50 years in real time). The thing to mention here, however, is that, being alone with your thoughts and emotions for a long time, having nothing else for entertainment, is a great opportunity to rewrite your own memory of events or emotions you've felt.
3) Lack of a body. The aforementioned constant rage, that was the dominant emotion is Johnny's life (before Alt, at least, if Never Fade Away is anything to go by, and I mean, that's literally a love ballad), is a symptom of his PTSD from his too-young years serving in the corpo war, same as his signature silver hand. I'm not a specialist here, but I do know PTSD, especially for war veterans, is a physiological illness just as much as it is a mental one. Johnny's body literally had trouble living normally after that experience, and knowing this bastard - he never managed to treat that. Existing as a personality construct frees him from the many bonuses of being corporeal, but it also free him from the physiological side of PTSD. His day-to-day existence is fundamentally different from that of the Johnny Silverhand that the world knew 50 years ago, so yes, as a 'time traveler' or a source of information and comparison about the 70's and 20's of cyberpunk world Johhny is not a good source.
4) The chip with Johnny is literary inside the head of another person. The characters in game question, multiple times, just which decisions is V making on his own, and which of them might be Johnny's doing. Not consciously, no, but V and Johnny are clearly not your simple neighbours. They are not your 'close friends that start subconsciously copying each other' too. It is quite possible that the chip with Johhny is adapting to the 'hardware' it is running on, so it is specifically implementing parts of V's personality into Johnny, to minimize the 'friction' between the personality and the body it is supposed to inhabit. Everyone say hi to existential horror)
5) How does Soulkiller ever work? Is there data on how much the resulting engram actually resembles the person it tried to copy? How did the process of copying Johnny go? I can answer the last one - very badly.
Death of Johnny is told in excruciating detail in the Cyberpunk sourcebooks. Johnny died on the floor of Arasaka tower, torn in two by a shotgun blast from Smasher. There is no information on how much time it takes Soulkiller to create the engram from the brain, but it better have finished doing that before Johnny's brain started dying from a lack of blood and oxygen, and he clearly didn't have much time either, considering bisection is not the best for bodily fluid preservation, so it's a wonder the engram even works properly. Plus, during the initial heist to steal the chip with Johnny, the chip was damaged further before the idiots decided to stick an unknown harddrive into their heads to preserve it. Basically, it's nothing short of a miracle, that engram-Johnny is actually a whole damn person, that he can function, think and feel properly (well, as much as Johnny can do those things)
It is very sad that V can't talk to Johnny about this, as the man does blame himself over things he hasn't even done, and he had done enough emotional damage to himself and people around him without that kind of burden on top of it.
6) Johnny's memories are literally false. The attentive reader had to pick this up in my previous point - didn't Johnny die in the hands of Arasaka after they interrogated him? Nope. Nope, and I can say that confidently because,
(drumroll please)
Cyberpunk tabletop sourcebooks! Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the Cyberpunk universe and the TTRP series of games, has worked closely with CDPR writers during the production of the 2077. He oversaw everything, and he says that 2077 is in the same cyberpunk universe too, it's not an 'alternate reality' or anything.
Johnny Silverhand died while trying to buy time for his friends to escape, from a shotgun shot from Adam Smasher. That's it, he died on that floor, there was noone to interrogate, no rooftop helicopter he ran for.
The sequence of 'memories' we see from Johnny's POV in the game is a mishmash of two different assaults on the Arasaka towers, yes towers there were two of them. There is a great video explaining all the small and Major details Johnny's version of events got wrong, because we have the sourcebooks and the text inside. You may accuse me of holding a 'holy canon' argument ... and well, yeah, this is kind of holy knowledge, as it was written for gamemasters.
Still, some of the things in Johnny's version are Major, and while the media certainly covered the whole story extensively with corpo propaganda (oh, btw, Johnny didn't bomb anything, he probably didn't even know there was a nuke involved, he is literally just a scapegoat), there are some holes that a citizen of this world might know and wish to poke. The aforementioned Two Arasaka towers, or the absence of the legendary solo Morgan Blackhand from Johnny's story. Interestingly enough, there is a radiostation of Maximum Mike in-game, who is actually just pretty much Mike Pondsmith, and he does propose a couple of questions the 'official' version of the attack doesn't cover (like, where would a rockerboy even get a nuke, he might have been popular, but that's not just something you find without military contracts, and that means corporations). Another thing is that since Arasaka owns Soulkiller and has had the engram for a couple of decades, it is quite possible they are the ones responsible for messing with Johnny's memories.
So uh, yeah, Johnny is the Most Unrealible Narrator I have ever seen. Johnny of 2077 is most certainly not the Johnny of 2020's, but this might be a good thing. Maybe the 'real' 2020's Silverhand could never have made the progress the engram did, or become such a good friend and companion for V, or maybe he could have done those things too. We'll never know. I really love this story anyway.
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