Depressing commentary ahead (sorry):
Mike Pondsmith has said he is working on a history of Johnny Silverhand. It begins with him being sold by his dad for a pack of cigarettes at the age of 4.
Mike doesn’t say who bought him, which is scary to think about, but regardless… yikes. With a kind of dad like that, we can imagine his first 4 years on Earth were …not conducive to developing a secure attachment style. Later, he was taken in by a group of Nomads.
Interview with Pondsmith below. Note: I attached a time stamped link to start at the discussion, but I can’t get it to work on tumblr. It works everywhere else. 🤷🏼♀️
The discussion starts at 32:18.
So, what was he like as a kid/teen?
Opinion - besides being a little trouble magnet, his ACEs quiz score would be pretty abysmal, for one. Or as Johnny would say, he was “fucked in the head”. He would have been much less temperamental due to not having cyberpsychosis (yet), but he was still dealing with heavy childhood PTSD from the very beginning.
If the Nomads who took him in were at least somewhat good to him and grounding, having a positive experience in a family-like community would have likely kept him from going over the edge sooner in life. Perhaps they encouraged him to play guitar and write songs around the campfire, which was an outlet for his many developing issues that helped him cope, until he got older. Plus, his raw talent got him the attention from adults he missed early in life.
When V experiences his memories on stage, they say something along the lines of feeling full of hatred, no matter how much he screamed into the mic. So, Johnny was trying to get it out, but couldn’t. (The alcoholism, drugs and cyberpsychosis didn’t help, but I’d imagine music was some kind of outlet for him as a kid.)
Anger issues aside, being abandoned as a small child in such a profoundly brutal way would cause a person to develop DEEP feelings of absolutely zero fucking self worth. In his case, this lead to narcissism as a defense mechanism that probably started early on, but wasn’t nearly as bad as it became.
Johnny joining the military at age 15 to do the “right” thing was not only residual childlike enthusiasm/idealism/naivety that he held onto despite his rough childhood (he was stubborn as hell), but perhaps it was also him trying to escape his life and become someone “worth” more than a pack of smokes. From the age of 4, it was imprinted in his psyche that he was basically worthless. Shit like that in early childhood gets baked right into the limbic system. He spent most, if not all of his life, trying to prove otherwise (very loudly).
And yeah, the war, plus bonus cyberpsychosis from the arm was the final nail in the coffin for Robert John Linder…
tl;dr - he was fucked in the head
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