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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Once I head someone say Sarah is the only really necessary or meaningful female character, and that Nazz and the Kankers are pretty much disposable; ''Nazz has no personality, and the Kankers are absent from 50% of episodes and are just a Diabolous ex-machina ending when they appear. The could work very well without any of them.''
What do you think of this?
are they implying that she's only "meaningful" because she's related to ed? because...yikes dog. sarah serves a pretty similar role to the kankers in that she foils the scams and pranks and acts as an obstacle and/or deterrent. an antagonist. but the way they fulfill the role and the reaction they get from the eds are different in ways that i'm too lazy to get into at the moment.
now i could genuinely be missing something because i've never taken a class on media analysis or whatever the fuck, but i truly don't get what people mean when they say nazz is uniquely lacking in personality. i'm not saying eene has excellent, fleshed out female characters, but some people act as if 1) any of the non-eds have highly complex personalities that are explored canonically 2) being kind, outgoing, flirtatious, sporty, etc. aren't personality traits. just because someone doesn't like her personality doesn't mean it doesn't exist. and we know just as much, if not more about nazz's interests than we do the kankers. or jonny: he likes wood, is laid back and seems to enjoy superheroes. or kevin: he likes bmx. he's a bully. he has a crush on nazz. he's buds with rolf, whose backstory we probably know the most about after the eds (maybe even more?). then there's jimmy who lowkey has a great, complex personality.
seems like since nazz is pretty, is into stereotypically "girly" things and is nice, people consider her a "bad" (female) character. which to me is hilarious and ironic. these are the same people who call the kankers "evil". like okay... 😂
this idea that all female characters are supposed to be virtuous geniuses... it's a show about 3 dumbass preteen boys. there are tons of female-led shows available out there, and female main characters galore. these people should go watch em. seriously. im tired of hearing about it frankly.
oh and if edd was canonically a girl, people would hate her and call her a mary sue 👍
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My thoughts as of rn on foolish's betrayal
The “arc” did just start, so things are subject to change. But this is my opinion/take on what happened yesterday and the things that stood out to me.
Long read ahead and this is the short version OTL
To me, even entertaining and trying to do an “well actually…” in this case is so unserious and disingenuous. Q!Foolish betrayed his friends. As of right now, he’s a traitor. I don’t know how you could watch q!Foolish arrest q!Pac and q!Mike, and not think that in itself wasn’t a major betrayal? He literally led them to the place of arrest without giving them any sort of indication that they were in potential danger. He arrested them for crimes they seemingly didn’t commit and gave them up to the federation. Just like that. This was at the very least betrayal of q!Tazercraft, but in my opinion, also a betrayal of all his friends. Especially the Brazilians and Richarlyson.
Part of the betrayal is also the fact that q!Foolish really doesn’t think he did anything wrong, he feels no remorse. Leading up to the arrest, he keeps saying stuff like “they’ll understand, they won’t get mad”, as if he’s not fully grasping the severity of his actions.
He really sat there in the federation office and just went along with Cucurucho’s plan with a lot of enthusiasm and excitement. And that just continues, he gets a bit nervous too, but mainly he’s super excited and happy.
Another thing I noted was the “I trust your strong sense of justice” book Cucurucho gave him. It doesn’t align with his person at all. Q!Foolish hasn’t ever been about justice, he’s been much more of a let live kinda guy. Even his answer to Cucurucho about what he thinks about Order, is a clear indication that he’s not really occupied by these themes, to him order is fine, if it doesn’t get restraining. That’s really all the thought he has about it. Q!Foolish is not someone with a strong sense of justice. He’s actively hiding an illegal item as we speak.
It felt as though Q!Foolish intuitively knew something was off, but he actively chooses to not think about it. He clearly doesn’t see himself as someone with a strong sense of justice, he does find it a bit weird Cucurucho asks him to do the arrests, when the federation usually does it fine themselves. But in his excitement, he ignores all the red flags.
Q!Foolish also seem to be under the belief that he’ll be easily forgiven and that no one will be mad at him, which shocks me, because by now, he should know that working with the federation and not sharing information is social suicide on the island. Especially when he really isn’t being threatened nor blackmailed. For all intents and purposes, he could’ve refused, but he didn’t even entertain the idea of not helping the federation.
Even when q!Cellbit makes it clear, that if q!Foolish is in any way omitting truth and not sharing information, he would no longer consider him a friend, q!Foolish still just talks in circles and refuses to elaborate and explain. Q!Foolish seems to think he can get away with his empty words and generally likeableness. The final nail in the coffin is his lie to q!Jaiden. Painting his actions as a last resort to protect Richarlyson is clever but also so underhanded. But if it ever comes out or people start to question it, it will also be his downfall.
He thinks he knows what he’s doing and that he’s in control, but in reality, I think Cucurucho/the federation are using him and he’s in way over his head.
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