Hey, it's ok to be sad from watching a cartoon. Just means you're human.
I'd say your take on the show and the ending is spot on.
So something interesting: The opening with Franz Ferdinand's "This fire" has the lyrics "I'm gonna burn this city, burn this city" changed to "I'm burning, I'm burning, I'm burning (it) down" instead.
So I think it's safe to say that what you're feeling is what the creators of the show intended, and maybe there's some small comfort in that? After all, the whole point of a dystopia is to show us a future that we don't want, and can take steps to avoid.
Nah I'm right there with you, I've gotten through 7 episodes and it's already heavy enough to make me hesitate to finish, both because I've seen the setup for the fall and know where these stories go as well as trying to sort of prolong the feeling of immersion, of the world of Cyberpunk which just tickles my escapism glands just so, the romance of David and Lucy, of the camaraderie of Maine and the crew is just so much kino entertainment what I've seen already weighs heavily in my mind.
I'll be occupied by this show for sometime, myself, I think. It pairs pretty well with having finally decided to read through Paper Girls a few days before starting, which has a similar amount of narrative gravitas and also has a kind of bummer ending.
I think that it is a perfect cyberpunk story. People will inevitably get crushed by the topdogs in capitalism and you can barely do anything against it.
I thought it was an incredibly sad show. The moment Adam Smasher crushes Rebecca, and you see her brains popping out on the floor, I knew there was no saving David. My wife and I cried, you're not alone.
People were angry about cyberpunk the game having a downer ending, but that's the deal with the genre. It's always been tragedy. It's fundamentally about what if we lose and fail to establish a revolutionary proletarian government, nothing good is coming for us if capitalism wins...
I guess people were hoping for cyberbright. But yeah it is a sad story, and there does seem to be an enforced fischer price esque only-happy-life-affirming endings allowed in the 2010s and 2020s.
I loved that the game had a downer ending.
I took what's probably considered the "easy" ending where
spoiler
V kills himself on a rooftop before he gets anyone else killed at his behest. It was exactly how I was feeling at that point in the game and it felt like this massive relief that the character had been pushed to his limit with the cruelty of that world in the same way I was.
It's not as concise as the anime in it's critique. Like the montage of bad shit they show during the world building in the anime? That's most of what the game accomplishes.
I wouldn't recommend going into the game hoping for more than what the show had, but I enjoyed my time. I'm desperate for any excuse to crouch walk around environments reading people's emails, so I was pretty easily amused by the game. I didn't play it until earlier this year when they did the big "next gen" (lol) patch.
I think by the point capital has established itself outside of humanity, no longer requiring flesh to think or act and perversely is able to alter humanity to its whim (by enforcing cybernetics on all strata of society), then we're at the closing of hope for a better world. Everything within the Blackwall is just a soap bubble, the actual march of history is what happens outside the corporate net because that's all that's left to make a change in the world. Capital's control is so complete that the working class has no hope to coordinate or make itself visible to itself, just a sea of lumpen. Marx said we either get socialism or the common ruin of the contending classes - cyberpunk is the latter.
In the setting, the world lost ecologically as well. It doesn't come up as much but the ecosphere has completely collapsed. It's very much a dead world that has just come shy of realizing it.
Embarassingly white reply incoming:
In the time of RED (named after the red dust produced by Johnny Silverhand detonating a Militech-provided suitcase nuke in downtown Night City in 2023)
there was a slave rebellion among the Highriders (the people who did the actual work in space) against the european space agency. In retaliation for the fourth corporate war going nuclear and damning crop yields, they dropped rocks from orbit on the headquarters of the corporations responsible.
The lore for what happens between 2023, and 2076 is a lot less bleak, for example there is a nuclear exchange and both Israel and Syria are still on the map.
Take a peek at the history section, CP:R is by far and away my favorite RPG system.
https://online.anyflip.com/rzjth/gdxe/mobile/index.html
