A year ago, Netflix earned its place in the Cyberpunk canon

26.09.2023 - 14:01 / polygon.com

On Sept. 13, 2022, CD Projekt Red, Studio Trigger, and Netflix released Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, an anime series based in the same world as CDPR’s 2020 video game Cyberpunk 2077. The rough initial state of 2077 left potential Edgerunners viewers cautious, and the trailers seemed to promise an edgy, ultraviolent action anime with more in common with Ninja Scroll than Perfect Blue.

A year out, it’s almost silly to think about anyone having been cautious about the show. It’s 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, was an Annie Award nominee (a relative rarity for anime), and outright won Anime of the Year in Crunchyroll’s Anime Awards. It is, by all accounts, a masterpiece. Not only that, but it ended up being a pitch-black, razor-sharp satire of the dark future we’re hurtling toward, and an especially important one to revisit with the release of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty.

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One could be forgiven for thinking the show’s satire would be shallow, given how heavy-handed the show’s parallels of current issues are early on. We first meet David Martinez, the protagonist, when he’s informed by his washing machine that he can’t wash his school uniform unless he pays a fee. His mother, Gloria, is exhausted by a night-shift job that leaves her and David with barely enough to survive, in a dirty, cramped apartment. David’s school is a privatized, megacorp-run charter school that gives him seemingly AI-generated lessons. And, near the end of the first episode, David finds himself trapped in an overturned car, watching his mother bleed out on the asphalt as paramedics walk right past her; she’s uninsured, so the “medical care” she does receive kills her.

[Ed. note: The rest of this post contains spoilers for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.]

When David bursts into the local ripperdoc’s office holding a stolen piece of blood-drenched cyberware from a crime scene, shouting “high time I chrome the fuck up,” viewers might be primed to expect a series about him rising up and fighting the system. The Hunger Games (soon to receive a new film installment itself) isn’t a story of Katniss Everdeen getting crunched into dust. Same with Divergent or The Maze Runner, or the original Star Wars trilogy and nearly everything that copies its template.

The typical format for these stories is a Campbellian hero’s journey against a corrupt power structure, and Edgerunners doesn’t do much to disrupt that in its first third. The characters in Maine’s gang fit into the usual archetypes: Maine and Dorio settle into the roles of David’s mentors; Lucy becomes his love interest; Rebecca, Pilar, and Kiwi are the “cool ones.” There’s an initial job with them to get David acquainted, and then a montage of David getting stronger and more familiar and