As someone naïve to the Cyberpunk universe, I found the Edgerunners series to be a colourful and interesting pastiche of various anime influences, with some flaws [SPOILERS]...
David - the school age male central protagonist, generic fan demographic foil. Who finds that he's exceptionally gifted, through no effort of his own. Thus he's able to realise his daydream ambitions.
Lucy - Motoko Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell) hacker chick in an outfit mixing together that from Stand Alone Complex and 2045 series. Her distinctive hair design has a (Serial Experiments) Lain lopsided bang on her left and is coloured white like Benten (pretty boy) in Cyber City Oedo 808. She also has a built-in version of the nanowire weapon he uses, which I believe originates from Gibson's Neuromancer (sci-fi novel).
Maine - Duke Nukem meets Prototype JACK (Tekken) substitute father figure. He comes complete with paternal physical abuse and a hard nosed (but soft on the inside) butch lady-friend second in command - Dorio.
Pilar - actual transhuman-looking non-normative body plan cyber punk with super-hands. He fashion a visor and mohawk like Gogou (Cyber City). The abrasive clown, he's naturally the first to go.
Rebecca - the fiery Lolli archetype, literally obligatory in all anime, now (studio refused to make the show without her). Predictably she's romantically interested in our generic protagonist, though we thankfully fall short of a full hareem. She's not particularly problematic, compared to some, and makes sense in this context. Actually she's a fairly fun character, although her Scooby Doo impression gets tiring towards the end.
Kiwi - chain smoking albino cyber-goth second fiddle hacker chick, with a more extruded frame. Like Lucy, she inexplicably *has* do her virtual reality ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics - again Neuromancer) breaking shenanigans with full frontal nudity, in a bath of icy water. Big "Hey, I don't make the rules!" feel, male gaze fanservice.
- Blade runner - city design, flying cars/billboards, chain smoking, etc.
- Akira - motorbike gangs, neon style, ultra-violence, etc.
- District 9 - mech's weapon grabbing magnets hands.
- Blues Brothers - style car pile-up super-orgy.
- Various games - including Cyberpunk (duh), with nonsense red circle impact warnings inexplicable appearing on the ground, with one fight.
Part of the reason I've not been possessed to jump into the Cyberpunk PC game (besides the price and brutal hardware spec requirements) is the dystopian setting. Which is a failure as escapism, given how many aspects of this genre are becoming increasingly, depressingly, relevant here in the UK.
Our Tory governments seem determined to break the public provision of healthcare, by any means, whatever the death toll and permanent damage. They even seem to be trying to privatise democracy and governance, itself, via sneaky charter city legislation (massively expanding freeport areas and such).
Edgerunners starts out with viewer's blank slate character protagonist in a fancy private school, which his single milf (implausibly young looking) is working overly hard to afford for her golden boy. The circumstances make me wonder if her death turned out to be no coincidence...
But I think that it was, to (a) set protagonist in motion and (b) really rub our noses in how callous the provision of top-notch medical care is, allocated only to premium customers. Then how precarious every aspect of their lives are, without money - apartment immediately locked out. Decent bit of world building.
Protagonist getting bullied by top-flight exec's son, discretely packing the latest upgrade toys, again, rubs in the hopeless inequality. This is one of 4 implausibly rough beatings our protagonist's body takes within our first day or so of following him. I was expecting bully to perhaps return, after the revenge beating, powered up. But he became a nobody.
The series starts to hit its stride around episode 3, with the crew pulled together. But it immediately losses that strut, as we get caught up in the protracted arcs of the main cast self-destructing. Then the plot casting around a bit, not quite able to do everything it might have liked to.
I'm not sure it was ever made fully clear what "edge running" is supposed to be about? Is it surfing the cutting edge of bodily cybernetic enhancements? Specifically in the context of mercenary gang-warfare? David starts out as a voyeurist-junkie, watching murder-orgy VR recordings for fun. But then we return to those as a torture and that's the worst case scenario for all the heavily enhanced. Namely...
Cyber-psychosis - is *the* all-encompassing technological hazard, in this world. Ridiculously one-size fits all puerile nonsense, in its portrayal. Its psychological break is pre-shadowed heavily by ticks and depicted, when it hits, by crazy-eye animations. It is supposedly mediated through the immune system, which rings faintly of how real world conceptions of the genesis of various 'mental' illnesses.
However, the immediacy of onset, and the use of industrial cleaning product sized quantities of what are supposed to be immune suppressants, is comically silly. Drugs that thoroughly wipe out (various arms of) the immune system already exist. And taking more in a tug of war with the provocation is dumb. But the huge quantities of deadly violence not enough; our main male characters need a way to spiral into oblivion. Drawn down a rabbit-hole of excessive modifications like moths to an inevitable fiery death.
I guess over-simplifying makes sense for TV. But it's a shame we don't get to explore any sociological or moral hazards, beyond the axioms of the setting. It ends up as mostly a romp with tragedy dialled in from the start.
Impossible physics - the "san devestan", as a spinal implant, somehow coaxes the baseline human body it's installed in, to move as fast as The Flash (DC comics) or Quicksilver (X-Men). Something that might kinda make sense in a game, where the rest of the world is slowed. But is clearly impossible as shown, massively exceeding the strength and structural integrity of organic matter. Also falling faster than gravity. And taken to greater anime extremes as things progress.
Lucy - should probably have been the central character. She does seem to become so, for a short while: her sub-plot develops some world history about how their internet was split apart by a cataclysmic hack. But then she spends the later half of the show mostly moping about in the background.
She has a briefly promising stint taking out some corporate related hacker, or other, like a badass. I'm not sure it was properly explained. But then she gets suckered like a fool, and (literally) dangled as a helpless wench, to be saved by our powered-up protagonist. Who wins the game of who gets to self-sacrifice in saving whom.
Her characterisation is somewhat all over the place, in general: initially cautious, she has a manic pixie maniac-girl moment, steering a gurney-strapped David down a busy highway using only her ass in the air. Also takes on various rando gang members with just her garrotte. But later becomes a cowering wee girly to be saved when bullets start flying. Maybe she has some PTSD kicking in selectively...
For a while, I flirted with the idea that they might do something bold, like reveal that she was transgender (and have him still love her). You know, actually take this self-modification thing to a logical conclusion. But alas. All characters appear to be cis and hetro-normative. A little dull, these days; even 1990s Cyber City Oedo had a lady-boy!
For all the sexualisation, of the female form (far less the males), and men with public masturbation attachments, there's no romantic sex. Well, it's implied to have occurred. The VR date scene (on the Moon) does ring true, romantic in Zoomer kinda of way, that's cute. The couple laid fully clothed on the bed next to each other, without physical contact. Kind of poignant.
Of course this restraint is contrasted with the ubiquitous joyous explosions of blood, gore, general violence and inexplicably unmedicated and implausible surgical procedures. Pretty standard. The more subtle, psychological incidences of violence get a little troubling, in the margins, as cyber-psychosis takes Maine, in particular. Like a metaphor for alcoholism/drug abuse causing men to hurt those close to them..?
It involves a dementia-like forgetting of the present, transporting their conscious attention elsewhere, while their over-powered bodies become *psychopathic* killing machines. "Psycho" conflating that with psychosis. Which is quite different. But neither condition necessarily homicidal, in real life. Psychopaths commonly day-dream detailed acts of violence that some plan and execute.
There's off-world travel via city launched rockets, much like Space-X promotional material, always in the background. But there's no world building of life off-Earth, beyond Moon tourism. Or of anything outside of the one sprawling city, beyond the rusting forests of wind turbines infesting the desert surrounding it.
► Verdict:
Edgerunners certainly works as a stand alone series. It's colourful and unique enough to be worth a viewing. Its retro-futurist influences make it appear to be targeted at fans of 90s anime in this Cyberpunk genre. Those 30-40 year old males, like me. With obvious appeal to younger viewers not put-off by mediocre level (relatively sanitised) 'gritty' cartoon violence with a splash of soft-porn and gaming tropes.
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