This is exactly why I struggled with the show. Maybe it’s the Japanese way of storytelling or maybe it’s my own inability to follow the subtlety, but I didn’t like how the story was revealed to the viewer. In the very first episode they show the system is flawed (someone in shock or having a trauma response is ordered to be executed) but then the rest of the show just continues on anyway. So in the very first episode we’re shown that the crime coefficient can’t be trusted and yet we spend the rest of the show continuing to trust the crime coefficient.

I guess I didn’t get the sense that people were trying to fix a broken system; I got the sense that the main character had some initial doubts but didn’t do anything about them until the end of the season. In most episodes, the main cast are doing everything they can within that system and continuing to trust the system. It’s not like they were loose cannons solving crimes their own way, they were very much still following the system. Well, I guess the latent criminals were sometimes loose cannons but I though that was treated more as characterizations of them being “latent criminals” rather than a critique of the broken system.

Again, this might just be the Japanese way of going about it. If this were an American show, they’d probably start with a “true believer” who gradually learns to distrust more and more of the system as they get more of an inside view into how it works. Maybe the Japanese way is to immediately learn how things are broken but be forced to continue acting like nothing is wrong.

Anyway, I like your interpretation of the show and I agree it’s probably what the showrunners were going for. It’s just not what I got while watching the show. I felt like most episodes showed the system working as intended, not a broken system.

Now that you’ve got me thinking about it, I’d compare it to hard-boiled detective novels. In hard-boiled detective novels, the police force is also a broken system. They’re incompetent and can’t be trusted. As you said, the system is broke and will always be broke. So the hard-boiled detective works outside the bounds of the police force to get things done. I’d argue the hard-boiled detective isn’t trying to fix anything, but I wonder if that’s the difference between the American approach and the Japanese approach. One attempts to work within the system while the other will ignore the system to do it their own way.

Sorry for this long rambling comment but your comment got me thinking and I just kept running with it…

I’m the same way and that’s part of why I’m struggling with coming up with posts for this community. I’ve been trying to help kickstart things here but I assumed most steampunk fans were into the lighter and fantasy aesthetic of it, which I don’t personally care for. It’s fine for those who like it but I struggle to create posts for that audience because it feels inauthentic for me to do it.

Well now that’s interesting. I’m glad we’re finally moving past the -punk suffix essentially meaning “genre” at this point but I didn’t realize it was being replaced with -core as the new suffix. I’ve definitely seen some new -core genres spring up lately but I didn’t know we were getting some that were replacing existing -punk genres. Gotta love humanity’s desperate need to categorize everything…

Cross-posting from !CyberMoe@ani.social , just in case anyone wanted to subscribe to a Lemmy community full of cyber girl artwork. Usually the posts are more sexualized than this but it isn’t NSFW.

I dunno, at the end of GitS Motoko spent some time staring blankly from a child’s body. I think they’d have a lot in common. 🤪

I wouldn’t have called Contra or Bionic Commando cyberpunk (although they are kinda sci-fi) but I’ve never heard of those other games so I’ll definitely check them out, thanks!

And yeah, I’m setting a pretty low bar here. “Futuristic urban decay” is close enough to cyberpunk that I’d be at least interested in playing those games.

That’s right, Smash TV! Good call, I always think of it as a SNES game but it did start out in arcades first.

Sorry, I was referring more to coin-op stand-up arcade games, not arcade-inspired indie games. But yes, Huntdown is a fantastic game and I’m looking forward to the roguelike sequel Huntdown: Overtime!

I’m doing everything I can to keep !cyberpunk@lemmy.zip active. But I focus on cyberpunk as a genre of fiction and avoid news about our actual everyday dystopia, so that makes it hard to consistently post something.

Also, !steampunk@lemmy.zip and !vampires@lemmy.zip . Doing my part to fight against the flood of news posts on Lemmy with wacky genre stuff.

Sometimes there are snippets in dialogue I’m not even sure you are supposed to hear them but you can still read them in the subtitles.

This is the big one for me. If I hear a character mumbling but the subtitles say “[incoherent mumbling]” then I don’t worry about it. But if i hear a character mumbling and the subtitles actually show me what they’re saying, I know the audience was supposed to have understood it.