I wasn’t convinced Cyberpunk: Edgerunners could have a sadder ending until I read its writer’s other pitches—and boy did we get off easy
This article will contain spoilers for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is an excellent anime, and it’s also very sad—its ending does a great job of reaching into your chest, busting past your ribs, grabbing your heart and ripping it out. It’s a genuinely thoughtful examination of the cyberpunk genre’s dystopia, the corrupt ideas of success and legacy we can get in a society that views people as disposable.
David’s fate at the end of it (along with the unceremonious stomping of Rebecca mid heart-to-heart) is a prime example of that—there aren’t any happy endings in Night City, just a staving off of entropy and cyberpsychosis, or a meaningless life in a dead-end gutter somewhere.
Basically, its ending is heartbreaking. But did you know it could be even worse? That’s per an animecorner interview with the show’s writer and producer, Bartosz Sztybor, who spoke to the publication about its potential endings:
“There was never a happy ending,” Sztybor says, then follows up that light jab with the haymaker: “There were even worse endings. There was one ending in which David doesn’t die entirely. Arasaka gets him and [he] ends up fighting in Africa or South America in corporate wars as a robot.”
The word ‘grim’ feels like an understatement. The idea of David’s consciousness being torn off his dead body and placed inside a military robot to fight some corporate war for capital, all while his love is powerless to stop it—or worse, the idea that he might become some sort of reprogrammed Adam Smasher cyborg?
That’s a bad ending that would’ve turned Edgerunners from a Shakespearian tragedy into a straight-up existential horror, even if it would’ve been deeply setting-appropriate. Good thing we aren’t tainting the memories of deceased people with AI facsimiles in real life. That’d totally never happen.
Either way, Sztybor’s adamant about keeping David dead and buried: “Yeah, I think it would be disappointing. If David is resurrected, finds Lucy and has seven babies, people would be like ‘you destroyed those feelings.'”
Anyway—we’re going to be getting round 2 of emotional devastation in Night City coming this fall, so Sztybor has plenty of other opportunities to roundhouse kick our little hearts into even mushier pulps.
