495 Words About: A Roller Coaster Ride with Johnny Silverhand-Cyberpunk 2077
I was on my way to find yet another poor Cyberpsycho in Night City when I stumbled across some folks who’d set up a couch beside a busted roller coaster. My visual display didn’t register them as gang members so I approached without prepping my dildo-club and spoke to them. They were a group of friends, and they just wanted to fix the roller coaster so that they could ride it.
This was a lovely change of pace from the endless piles of trash, environmental oblivion, and dystopian capitalist wasteland that is Night City, so I set to work. Soon enough the ride was fixed, but who was going to ride it?
I turned V(the protagonist) back to the coaster and I audibly gasped as I saw Johnny Silverhand (played by Keanu Reeves) strapped in and ready to go.
I have never ridden a roller coaster in my life, but if Keanu Reeves asked me to join him on one I wouldn’t hesitate. If Keanu Reeves ever reads these words, you have great hair dude, seriously, and please nothing too high alright I’m a weenie.
Obviously, I didn’t hesitate.
V strapped in and the ride started.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a true cyberpunk narrative in the fact that V and the citizens of Night City are ever and always in the shadow of their own superficial prosperity. The game continually shows players how technological development driven and peddled by unfettered capitalism has created a disconnect and only driven massive gaps between human beings at the psychological level, interpersonal level, and the class structures of society. The endless sex in advertising that plasters every surface of Night City is as empty as the light that illuminates it. Cybernetic enhancement didn’t bring utopia, and passing drug addicts and cyber-psychotics twitching in piles of garbage only reinforced this.
V’s story is one of a woman constantly trying to catch up to a world that has already used her up and left her behind.
The side quest Love Rollercoaster (yes that is its name, I googled it) is a beautiful moment in all of this misery and existential despair because it’s one of the few moments when V is just alive. It doesn’t matter that Johnny’s soul is killing her body. For a moment she’s forgotten her best friend’s death and she’s just living and experiencing existence.
She’s having fun.
Cyberpunk 2077 manages in just about every detail of its narrative and gameplay to leave the player with a series of impressions of how fragile the humans of this world are. That’s why a moment like Love Rollercoaster is all the more beautiful. Johnny and V are fighting the world and each other just to survive, but none of that matters while they’re riding the roller coaster.
Some writer trying to be clever might say that their emotional roller coaster was put on pause to ride an actual roller coaster.
I would hate that writer, and agree with him.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
11.18.2024
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