hi i miss seeing you on my dash hope all is well 🫶
Hey, thank you so much for checking in, that’s really sweet 🫶🏻✨
I’m doing well! I’ve been working a lot on other projects the past weeks and didn’t have much time to engage in fandom stuff, but I’m already working on a new SilverV artwork to post, so it won’t be much longer!
I’m really happy to hear that you enjoy my content, that means a lot 🩷✨
Random thought because I come across those posts more and more often:
CW NSFW mention
Heavily sexually fetishized photomode screenshots or realistic 3D renders of Johnny Silverhand feel kinda weird to me.
Like, he’s a fictional character, sure, but it’s still very obviously Keanu Reeves’ face. It just sits in a bit of a grey zone to me. If the character was purely fictional and not based on a real person, it wouldn’t be an issue at all. But when it’s clearly someone’s real face, it just hits different.
Stylized artwork is one thing, but realistic photomode shots or 3D renders start feeling less like “a character” and more like someone sexualizing a real person’s likeness.
However, some people mod Johnny so he looks slightly different from Keanu, which creates more distance from the real person, and that’s a good thing. But there are also a number of posts where they don’t.
At that point I sometimes wonder where the line even is between that and doing the same thing to a real person with AI when it comes to sexualizing a person without consent.
I’m aware that Keanu has said in an interview that he’s fine with people wanting to fuck Johnny Silverhand. Things like ingame animations, model swaps, or casual NSFW content are one thing.
What I was mainly referring to are the heavily fetishized, modded pornographic images that go far beyond what exists in the game and still use a very realistic version of his face. That’s where it starts feeling like a different situation to me.
I don’t think it’s talked about enough that Johnny is a high-functioning Cyberpsycho (as stated by Mike Pondsmith) in Cyberpunk lore. Johnny believes his cybernetic arm is alive and talks to it, calling it “The Hand.” He blames it for almost every terrible thing he does, like firing a gun into a concert crowd, saying “The Hand took over” instead of taking responsibility for his actions. It’s really disappointing that this aspect of his character wasn’t included in the game.
Sometimes I wonder whether the rogue AI that tries to kill us in the Chimera or the Cerberus bot is the same rogue AI that later claims to be Alt.
Why?
(Spoilers ahead!)
Originally, Spider Murphy was the one who tried to rescue Alt during the assault on Arasaka Tower, where Johnny died. But when Adam Smasher appeared and she ran out of time, she split Alt’s engram into hundreds of pieces. Those fragments scattered beyond the Blackwall, and some were probably absorbed by rogue AIs. However, Alt's fragments never merged back into one coherent AI.
So when we meet Alt behind the Blackwall, “she” even says that she isn’t really Alt, she’s just using Alt’s engram data. Which technically doesn’t even guarantee that she was ever one of Alt’s original fragments at all.
Shortly after the real Alt died, she contacted Johnny and told him to let things go, saying she didn’t want more innocent people to die. That sounded like Alt. Yet later, when V storms Arasaka Tower, "Alt" kills hundreds of innocent people without hesitation. She killed even fleeing Arasaka employees who were trying to escape, despite the fact that they posed no threat and would never have stood between her and Mikoshi. That behavior feels out of character for the real Alt, who explicitly didn’t want innocent people to die and originally created Soulkiller to help others.
This raises the question: maybe Alt doesn’t exist anymore at all. The AI we encounter outright says that the Alt Cunningham Johnny tried to save no longer exists. What remains could just be fragments and the entity we meet is actually a rogue AI that picked up some of her engram data: her appearance and bits of her memories. This would also explain Why “Alt” has some of her memories but not her ethics. And why “Alt” wants to absorb all the engrams in Mikoshi, to become an even more powerful AI. Her response to Johnny’s engram was likely driven not by emotion or longing, but by curiosity about the data it contained.
We’ve already seen something similar with Songbird. A rogue AI managed to take control of her, even though by 2077’s standards she’s an extremely talented netrunner, probably the best. Since the real Alt died around 60 years ago, Songbird would have been significantly more advanced by comparison. It wouldn’t be hard for a rogue AI to absorb simple fragments of Alt’s scattered self behind the Blackwall.
But then why would a rogue AI try to kill us and later help us as Alt?
Well, Alt doesn’t really help V and states that she "forgot" V’s brain was no longer repairable. And while the rogue AI initially tries to kill V, it later allies with us through the Erebus weapon, abandoning its attempts to kill us in favor of collecting data through the weapon itself. So why wouldn’t it help us, if in return it gains access to Mikoshi and becomes an even more powerful AI?
I was watching my friend play Cyberpunk with a male V and noticed that some dialogues with Johnny were different from those with a female V. Now I want to play a male V too, because I want to hear aaaall of Johnny’s lineeeesss
I’ve been away for a couple of days helping out at a cyberpunk fan booth, and I’m back now and just realized that the Tumblr UI looks completely different. Ugh, I preferred the old UI.
