One very queer post to remind my fellow buddie truthers that patience is virtue...
Never forget that the show clearly called us clowns and crows...
And neither of those is an insult.
If you haven't, I recommend you read up on the history of clowns. Do you know where they evolved from?
Fools... What are fools, in story-telling?
They have always been the breakers of taboos, the ones who dare speak up and illuminate the truth.
That's repeatedly been the role of the "fool" in literature and theatre.
And remember the scene with these modern versions of fools, clowns, in 4x06? Bobby tells Eddie and Buck to be professionals!
...Much like when he has to cut off Buck from flirting with the tapework guy... In season one. The tapeworm guy? It's basically a scene of Buck being blatantly bisexual, totally flirting with a man... And Bobby going: Be a professional Buck, finish this conversation later!
And then that clown scene later on... There's a clown trapped under some (obviously quite phallic) helium tanks, and Bobby yelling about needing to "release the pressure"?
It's a parallel. Go rewatch Eddie's and Buck's first emergency together. They need to release the pressure to save that patient.
And the name of that first episode Eddie appears in? Under pressure. That's also in the season 2 promo, the first season with Eddie. And the songs in those promos... Under pressure by the Queen and David Bowie. And a version of Nowhere to run by Martha Reeves and The Vandellas. It's a love song, about a persistent, devastating love. Fitting for a slow-burn.
Also...
Eddie: "You're a badass under pressure, brother.
Buck: Me?
Eddie: Hell yeah. You can have my back any day.
Buck: "Yeah. Or you know... You could... You could have mine.
....
Then that emergency with the grenade when they first meet...
Everyone originally assumes it's not live. Oh but turns out, it very much is a live grenade, isn't it? We see it exploding. What's a grenade, going off?
Well, it's basically deathly amounts of pressure. Grenades injure and kill from a distance, the blast, the pressure is so powerful.
So the clowns watch that scene, watch Bobby urging Buck and Eddie to release the pressure... They look at Buck and Eddie working together...
And the clowns make their opinion known.
A clown starts choking, and coughs up rainbow colored string. That's the unsaid truth which this fool says out loud to the audience.
"This story is queer. I'm telling you, there are rainbows. I'm choking on them here!"
The combination of clowns, pressure, grenades... Again... Makes me think of the Batman movie Dark Knight, especially the clever bank robbery heist which
Joker - A famous fool type character, also related to fools and clowns... plans.
Btw, some of you may have noticed that I keep rambling about the Joker, and Dark Knight. Why? Because THAT MOVIE IS A CAPRICORN OF QUEERNESS!!!
And there's that clown theme which obviously comes up in 9-1-1, too. The clowns are the queer audience, it's quite clear. That clown scene was written as commentary, to us, freaking out about the queerness of buddie.
In The Dark Knight... Remember that whole conflict of the two freaks, a Batman and a Joker?
It's a battle against conformity. Diverting from the norm. Joker spends the entire movie trying to make Batman see and own his freakiness.
Honestly I think that we queers should worship that movie, it's a tale of us, the outcasts, the freaks, us against the world.
Because we are the clowns, the fools, the freaks that people fear. Who are always told to shut up, and hide. The ones who have always been the outlaws running from the police, still are. Who nobody believes, when we see our kind.
That bank heist in that movie, which the ultimate clown, fool, Joker, organizes?
They enter the bank dressed up as clowns. The Joker is among them, a twofold fool, a jester wearing a clown mask, his true identity unknown to the other clowns.
The bank robbery heist btw includes lots of stuff which make me go "is this intertextuality?, was 9-1-1 inspired by this?", because they remind me of memorable buddie scenes. A failed phone-call ("I couldn't even call you to bail me out of jail!"),
the bank vault with electricity ("What more proof do you need, Eddie! We are trapped in a death box, thousands of volts of electricity...")
the clowns, the queers, hiding from detection, from the gunfire,
then clowns, destroying each other, one by one.
A clown getting hurt because he's an idiot who cannot really count (Buck, Eddie, the embarrassing struggle to get to "bi"?),
This one clown who thinks it's his time to spring out of the box and stop waiting. This shotgun has no ammo...
and the Joker nods, which convinces the dumb math challenged clown that the bank manager's shotgun has no more bullets...
Here's another deathly nod from our favorite fool...
This backfires quickly, the math challenged clown who thinks the gun wasn't "live"... Dies.
A fool just fooled a fool. A third fool cries out in dismay.
In the end... it's the patient fool here who ends up outsmarting the manager, and winning the battle.
Clowns are clever. We see under the surface, we voice the truth, but also, sometimes we lie to save ourself. That's what being an outlaw, an outcast is.
The Joker bides his time, is smart about it, and when the right moment arrives... he does not hesitate. He robs that bank, proves himself to be the smart one. The ultimate fool. The cleverest clown.
So remember the history of us clowns. We are silly, scary, strange, queer, the annoying ones who won't shut up.
And we are the fools. And fools are the truth seers. Tellers. We aren't dumb, we are clever.
That's how the story goes. Ultimately the fools always realise and tell the truth. We clowns, like the Joker... We saw the potential for "aggressive expansion" in buddie. We were there from the start, we looked at that lurking grenade, and thought... I'm seeing something here. And they will keep laughing at us clowns... But they'll learn when it goes off. I do think it's a live one, darlings.
So, how does the heist and the movie end?
Joker survives the danger, ducks the gunfire... And leaves the manager alive.
He also leaves an impression that will forever change that survivor. The Joker sticks a grenade in his mouth. It doesn't kill him, but that grenade is live, it releases a strange, queer gas.
The Joker gently tells the manager that whatever doesn't kill you... Makes you stranger.
Then... The way the Joker spends the entire movie urging Batman to hit him, to kill him... He challenges Batman to make him realise that they are really the same. That they are both freaks, outsiders... Birds of a feather. Batman needs to stop pretending that he isn't a freak.
It's like Buck and Eddie. Take a swing at me.
Wanna go for the title?
And in the end, they both survive this (really quite queer-coded) stand-off. They prove each other wrong.
Joker finds that he's wrong, that Batman cannot bear to kill him. And Batman admits defeat.
He becomes an outlaw, too. He takes the blame for the chaos, falls out of favor. The bat signal is smashed. Batman knows he'll be hunted... but he can take it.
"...Because sometimes... the truth isn't good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded..."
And that's why Buck and Eddie, "Buddie" has really never been a tale of two buddies.
The "truth" is a lie. The fools have always seen it.
And so the Joker, the fool, the clown, actually... wins this battle. He is captured but creates another freak by turning Harvey Dent into the Two-Face.
He makes Batman realise who he really is, an outcast. Batman goes into hiding. But Batman creates another freak, Robin.
It's a lesson. Some of us freaks argue for chaos, some will argue for order. But to others we are still the strange ones. Outsiders, outlaws. Queers. Listen to the fool and realize it, own it. See that we are the same.
And they will hunt us, but the circus grows stronger. Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stranger.
Oh, and the crows I mentioned in the beginning? Well, they called the crows buddies, and told the audience that the crows always remember their tormentors, didn't they.
Do you think they're waiting for these boys to come out, the show asks?
Of course we were, are. And we've got one now. Waiting for another.
After all, sometimes the fool needs to wait and have patience to see the vision materialize. Doesn't mean the fool was wrong. In the end, the crows will feast.
Crows are smart. And the clowns see the hidden truth.
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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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