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prototypelq · 6 months

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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.

#thanks for reading #johnny totally deserves a second chance at life after this why cant he and johnny show alt the finger and delta out of there #so v could live out his days and then johnny would take over #on the other hand johnny is a great example that being an engram is not the end so maybe v could come back in some sort of form later #after giving alt the finger #btw thats not alt either that's probably just an ai that caught little wind of actual alt and just calls itself her #also alt herself might be alive but that story is WEIRD so no idea #cyberpunk lore is great i had an amazing time listening to it and discovering new things #mike pondsmith is also amazing heard a cyberpunk red campaign he mastered and listening to him has been a blast he is a true storyteller #cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk red #legends of night city #mike pondsmith #johnny silverhand #phantom liberty #this is the first and last time I praise cdpr after that back to hate for the ps4 version of the game i go #and for refusing to update the game for that platform and for not releasing the dlc for it and for upping the system reqs even higher #ill live to see actual 2077 before I get access to hardware that can run that shit #btw existential horror enjoyers I sure do hope you have heard of SOMA )))#oh i also dont think johnny was that bad in life either like he was bad but rogue and kerry are clearly happy to have him back so the game #must've shown just a very low time for him he had to be a good friend to earn that kind of loyalty still could behave like a bastard tho

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