I want the Trigger ending to Cyperpunk Edgerunners where it’s revealed that cyberpsychosis is a corpo plot to keep the workers/humanity down and you can defeat it by going beyond the impossible and kicking reason to the curb.
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It is disappointing that they made cyberpsychosis an actual disorder caused by cyberware instead of just what happens when someone with an increased capacity for violence snaps and starts lashing out. Cyberpunk 2077 itself managed to have a better take on it than Pondsmith himself does, where every “cyberpsycho” you run into was someone suffering from chronic problems with their implants, often someone with an already violent background or who was literally being tortured, who had no way out of their situation, and who was existing in a society that revolved around violence and death. Like there’s a homeless veteran sniper with malfunctioning implants and no healthcare to deal with the constant, agonizing pain that causes who just starts shooting cops one day, there’s a construction worker who was coerced by his boss into receiving shitty strength-boosting implants that cause him constant pain and that make him into a debt slave for his boss, who kills his boss and starts wrecking the worksite, that sort of thing. Meanwhile in another plot a character with a near full body replacement kills someone in a fit of rage but doesn’t go on a rampage because she’s completely insulated from the consequences of her actions by her wealth and status and so can just have someone else (the player) deal with it while retreating into rationalizations.
It’s made abundantly clear that cyberpsychosis isn’t a real thing, it’s just a propaganda term for people who are suffering lashing out in the way that society expects and practically worships, and then doubling down on it because they’re afraid of the consequences and they’ve been propagandized into believing that they’re inevitably going to become a monster anyways.
It’s probably both. Brain damage from increased implants and just lashing out or both are considered Cyberpsychos if they kill enough NCPD. V is considered one if he kills enough cops and Maxtec arrives to stop him.
I’ve got a metal leg so my brain is going psychotic. What?!?
That’s on the level of “this Mexican smoked a single marijuana and went into a psychotic rage, killing and raping white women across the country”
Basic bionic replacements don’t really affect people much in the setting, it’s more the really invasive and extensive modifications that leave someone permanently dependent on a cocktail of medications and which require frequent invasive maintenance work that end up fucking people up when they can’t afford the meds or the maintenance work anymore. So instead of like a prosthetic leg think about something extremely invasive IRL, like having a bunch of pins put in everywhere to fix a ton of broken bones after a traumatic accident and how that can cause lifelong problems with chronic pain (my old neighbor had that after being hit by a car as a teen and some fifty years later he still has issues with them and has to have occasional checkups to make sure they’re not falling apart - at least from what I gathered talking to him), except instead of being a bunch of static parts that just hold someone together inside imagine a system of hydraulics, artificial muscles, reinforcing anchors, and nervous system taps running on electronics that heat up and wear out over time, that can glitch out and cause painful spasms as the artificial muscles fire at odds with one’s organic muscles, etc.
I don’t think that would be directly causing brain damage just by being hooked up, but when it starts to degrade and malfunction, when someone has to go off or ration the meds that stop their body from rejecting the implants, that’s probably going to cause some brain damage just from the constant stress and pain and sleep deprivation it would cause to say nothing of potential random electric shocks delivered directly into the nervous system from a malfunctioning CPU.
Also in Cyberpunk Edgerunners David’s implant is a fucking high-end sandevistan, a nervous system modification bolted directly into someone’s brain stem and spine that when active sends them into a hyper aware, hyper reactive state experienced as time slowing down. Out of everything that would probably fry someone’s brain pretty directly.
Ok that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the explanation.
Yeah, the sandy overloading the brain totally makes sense.
In Cyberpunk ,implants actively interact with the nervous system. Complicated implants are controlled by the brain and are more “straining” than traditional human limbs.
The more complex an implant is, the more it strains the brain. The whole “go easy on the chrome” thing meant that David/Maine were told to replace their complex implants with less complex ones which didn’t strain the brain.
David went cyberpsycho after he started using an experimental excessively complex exoskeleton which fried his brain.
Thanks for the explanation, but my headcannon is going to keep it as corpo propaganda.
If I remember correctly, he was going psycho long before that. Going for that exo was already a suicide run. But his original implant does make sense to fry the brain as it overclocks the brain.
It’s similiar to the Data Stream thing from Gundam where excessive strain to the nervous system by interacting with a Gundam on higher permet levels kills you.
This represents an ideological position on transhumanism which I find both unrealistic and reactionary.
Cyberpunk 2077 itself managed to have a better take on it than Pondsmith himself does
Cyberpunk Red more or less has the same take as 2077.
And obviously at the end of the day it was just a quickly slapped together excuse for there being a limit on what can be installed so that every PC doesn’t get six grenade launcher arms.
Also for what it’s worth imo David’s descent into “cyberpsychosis” is also parallel to a descent into regular psychosis due to having increasingly bad things happen to him (everyone he loves dies or gets kidnapped etc). In addition, the cyberskeleton seems to basically kill its user, which more or less matches up with the 2077 way of doing things. The characters in the show just don’t know it because they’re also subject to the propaganda and think “oh it’s cyberpsychosis”. Obviously this is all inferred and may be too generous to Trigger.
Preventing me from getting six grenade launcher arms is fascism
For every grenade launcher arm you install, I have to give the cops two more to maintain balance. Please reconsider
Curious how the cops don’t get this “cyberpsychosis” from too many grenade launcher arms but I do. Very convenient for the state monopoly on violence.
They can get actual therapy and days off while you’re stuck with mail-order SSRIs, the occasional skype call with an AI “doctor”, and the constant stress of living in utter precarity.
nope it’s because cyberpsychosis is TPM malware installed by the corpo elite
Cyberpunk Red more or less has the same take as 2077.
I probably should have elaborated a bit more: Pondsmith doesn’t have a terrible take, and his take now is better than the older cyberpunk themes of machinery and change literally being innately corrupting things, but I still think it centers the very presence of cyberware as something that’s dangerous in and of itself. He acknowledges the social issues, but still sort of frames it as more like having good personal circumstances protects someone from the consequences of having cyberware and having bad personal circumstances makes the risk of cyberware worse, when the cyberware should be tangential to the whole process: it is the horror of the setting and the trauma characters suffer that drives them to the edge, and the cyberware just goes along for the ride and makes them more dangerous if they start lashing out (or causes problems of its own that can be boiled down to the social issue of poor healthcare access).
Semi-off-topic, and this obviously isn’t Pondsmith’s intent, but this has me thinking of cyberware as a metaphor for capitalism. Capitalism has reshaped or destroyed many social bonds, breaking down communities to a series of untethered individuals, free from distractions and therefore able to be worked longer and harder. Cyberpunk takes this alienation to the next level: even breaking down to the individual is not enough, and they must be further divided down to their constituent parts, which will be replaced with more “useful” pieces.
I suppose this is all fairly fundamental to the genre but it’s telling that I’ve never thought of it on these terms until now.
It’s made abundantly clear that cyberpsychosis isn’t a real thing, it’s just a propaganda term for people who are suffering lashing out in the way that society expects and practically worships, and then doubling down on it because they’re afraid of the consequences and they’ve been propagandized into believing that they’re inevitably going to become a monster anyways.
It’s not so much that cyberpsychosis isn’t real, right? Because all the people who get it (in the show) also happen to be serial killers for hire. They shouldn’t be in the best of mental states period. But your instincts are right, only the angle isn’t made clear in the show itself. In short, cyberpsychosis is a real mental condition and dissociative disorder. It comes about due to how humans have to cope with their bodies being substituted for artificial hyper chemicals and metal circuits. This everyone knows. What is less well known is that what makes people more or less capable of taking on chrome is to what degree their social relations are genuine, human, and existing at all. The reason why David is ‘special’ is mostly due to his relationship with his mom, which is almost an aberration in this world. That bit of humanity he lived through made him rare in Night City, and gave him a buffer against cyberpsychosis. That buffer then changed to Lucy.
Cyberpsychosis is in some ways a story about how a society has become so hypercapitalized, so hypercommodified, that it is no longer fit for humans. Being a cyborg is baseline because robots are the ideal. It’s a story about alienation.
Nothing of humanity or human culture is left to be consumed by capitalism in a world where even your home appliances are a rentlord’s market. That makes people at large ill equipped to understand cyberpsychosis. Humanity, community and all only exist in the cracks of society, it is the exception not the norm. It takes massive effort to keep it alive, and it is easily extinguished. So why would alienation, something that people probably don’t even understand anymore, be the reason behind a well known mental condition? That is why the whole thing is coached in mysticism. ‘Some metal is not meant to mix with meat’, ‘Chromejocks always reach their end’, and so on. That’s why David snaps back and forth depending on his proximity to Lucy. It’s not fake. He really is delusional and in pain. That’s also why Dorio’s death hit Maine so hard, but he can still sorta keep it together when David shows up. What keeps people grounded are the genuine relations they’ve built around them. And those don’t last long in this world, less so amongst merc operatives.
I don’t think that’s the story depicted in Edgerunners at all.
I think what’s depicted and what actually happens are very different things. Everyone THINKS that simply the act of changing your body brings on the psychosis, but that’s not what does it. What causes it is the slow deterioration of mental health due to all the horrible things that happen in these people’s lives. The reason they all believe it’s the changing your body that causes it comes down to the fact that the people who go so far with changing their bodies are also the people that see the most horrible things. On top of that they can not afford the basic drug upkeeps necessary for not having their bodies reject their various surgeries, they have to do increasingly more dangerous shit to pay for those drugs, and they have to see increasingly horrible things along with that. They get even more surgeries to do make more money by doing more dangerous stuff and pipeline themselves into the inevitable breakdown.
It’s not a simple “this makes you psycho”. It’s a combination of a variety of factors. This isn’t a magical “anti cyberpsychosis” drug they’re getting, it’s just straight up drugs to keep their bodies from rejecting all the implants, which would result in their body destroying itself anyway.
In short, really the implants are a catalyst rather than a cause. The cause is just the usual, a mental breakdown brought on by a person’s mental state being pushed over the edge. This is true in Edgerunners, the game, and the tabletop.
I think my issue with how Edgerunners did it was how it showed it both stylistically and in effect as like a separate, discrete thing taking over while the person inside got locked into a dream world. It’s not someone just reacting violently to a stressful situation and then spiraling from that into a standoff or rampage, it’s shown like something alien and mechanical is invading their minds/bodies. Like it literally gets portrayed as replacing their eyes in a way that’s stylish but at the same time othering in a way that’s a bit off. And yes, one could metaphorically describe a violent outburst like that as something inhuman taking control, but that’s obviously problematic for a number of reasons from obviating agency and responsibility to fundamentally othering anger and pain.
Like some guy who’s suffering constant, chronic pain because of his boss one day lashing out and killing his boss hasn’t been possessed by some sort of mechanical demon, even if he keeps fighting after that because his life is now over and he’s going to be killed or put in a cage forever over that outburst.
I guess my point is mainly that cyberpsychosis isn’t “real” because the cyberware is tangential to the actual pathology: problems with malfunctioning cyberware can be part of someone’s problems, but it’s more about the casual horror and hopelessness of the world where violence is everywhere and is just the “normal” way of solving problems intersecting with how cyberware makes individuals much more dangerous if they reach the point where they start lashing out in pain and desperation, believing themselves to have nothing left to lose.
I think my issue with how Edgerunners did it was how it showed it both stylistically and in effect as like a separate, discrete thing taking over while the person inside got locked into a dream world. It’s not someone just reacting violently to a stressful situation and then spiraling from that into a standoff or rampage, it’s shown like something alien and mechanical is invading their minds/bodies. Like it literally gets portrayed as replacing their eyes in a way that’s stylish but at the same time othering in a way that’s a bit off. And yes, one could metaphorically describe a violent outburst like that as something inhuman taking control, but that’s obviously problematic for a number of reasons from obviating agency and responsibility to fundamentally othering anger and pain.
I think this is culturally japanese clashing with culturally western. It’s extremely common in anime to use imagery to depict a mental state of being in a metaphorical way rather than a real way. For example a nuclear explosion happening when someone stubs their toe. I think you should chalk these up to artistry.
I think you’re right that they could spell it out clearer, but again this is something that the japanese just seem to regularly do. Like, not treating audiences like idiots that won’t get it. Or just accepting that some won’t get it and being ok with it. From our perspective wanting it to be more influential on people that’s annoying but from their artistic perspective I suspect they consider it a win to have all the layers that you could discuss and analyse about it, or debate, as we’re doing now.
Trigger gave me the expectation that all anime should finish in space otherwise it didn’t escalate appropriately.
Will there be revealing and/or skintight outfits?
I know the cyberpunk genre is about everything getting worse and everything, but I just don’t like sad ends anymore. I like drama, just not media where
spoiler
all these cool characters die, often suddenly and without warning.
Honestly why I don’t like Chainsaw Man.
