So I recently watched Cyberpunk: Edge Runners. Great show, very enjoyable almost made me cry, yadda-yadda. Big spoilers under the cut-
David Hernandez hurts my soul on a deep level, not just because he’s ultimately a tragic character. I don’t think I’m going to be the only one who relates to him in this crowd especially, but it’s all but outright stated that David is a gifted kid. He’s good at school, he gets great grades at one set up for much higher income families than his.
He’s a gifted kid, and he’s experiencing that oh-so familiar burnout at the beginning of the show. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t have the money to get the equipment he needs, he’s only doing it because his mother wants him to.
The kid’s got all A’s in spite of this, so he handled it better than I did by a wide margin before he ultimately drops out due to inciting incident reasons.
I feel this fucking kid so hard. Being in the single-mother household, forcing yourself to make it through school because she wants what’s best for you in spite of how every day feels like getting your soul crushed again and again.
I was never particularly bullied, nor failed to fit in quite as bad as him, so the parallel certainly isn’t 1-to-1.
But, and I think many of us gifted burnouts will get this-
We don’t see David do a lot of particularly ‘smart’ things. Sure, his quick thinking in episode 9 was impressive, but aside from that his only advantages through the series are the speed his Sandevistan gives him and the fact that the people he meets like his drive.
There are some moments where he performs some notable feats of quickhacking, most notably when he releases Lucy’s paralysis near the end of episode 10.
Otherwise? Just a quick kid with common sense more than anything. We’re told he’s this kid prodigy, but he doesn’t act like anything special. Which is a big ‘same, bro’ from me.
And he never really says what he wants- if he’s anything like me, he probably doesn’t really know what he wants. We are led to think the only things he gets to want and do anything to achieve are saving Lucy and killing Faraday.
When he goes Psycho, these are the only two motivating factors that can be used to temper his rampage. Even Rebecca can only respond like she was his mother when he says he’s going to the top of Arasaka Tower.
Every other goal he has in the series is the direct result of expectations placed on him by someone else.
Going to the academy to get a good paying job? That’s all his mom, who wants the best for him.
Learning the criminal trade to prove his value with the Sandevistan, even though that was meant for Maine? Well, he had to prove himself to the group.
Taking Lucy to the moon? He only did that because he thought she wanted to go there. And she did, though it’s implied the moon symbolizes freedom from the system Night City works under. Whole other thing.
But what did David really want for himself? He never really says until he can only look minutes ahead before he would almost certainly perish.
We will never know what David wanted for himself ultimately, and I think that’s because he never knew what he wanted either.
And that is such a relatable experience for me.
