#although poor yorinobu

[aceghosts]

Rooney Shepard (They/Them)/Yorinobu Arasaka Screenshots (11/X)

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[pestopascal]

sorry if it's not too mcuh to ask but are you able to share the endings? ive seen a lot of mixed reviews in regards to them and player choices and i wanted to hear your opinion

uhhh pfft okay spoilers below... but there are like “five″ endings, each with variations and reflections on choices that you go through

devil ending (arasaka)

so assuming you have done nothing game wise (no side missions, no friendships), this is the most basic ending you will get besides one other. this has several differences based on whether you saved takemura or not (yes, you can save him in search and destroy, and he doesn’t like an outcome of this ending if you save him. quite frankly, it’s hilarious).

this ending basically ends the arasaka story of the game, which was the heist section, as well as takemura’s general story direction. you realise along the way that yorinobu wasn’t just the antagonist but an antihero in hating his father’s stance on separating the rich and poor further, as well as attaining immortality via the relic. he wanted to give it to everyone. saburo had uploaded his soul to mikoshi (think along the lines of the stacks in altered carbon), knowing that yorinobu was going to make an attempt. turns out hanako knew all this. there is more backstory with hanako’s connection to alt explained. saburo’s relic is installed in yorinobu’s body.

- variation 1: goro died, hellman takes you to the facility

after the choice, hellman will be the one to escort v to arasaka, having survived conveniently. after some other missions involve a hostile takeover of arasaka, hanako fulfills her promise of removing johnny, but in the process v’s mind is practically destroyed beyond saving. there is a sequence of testing, with the scientists and lots of psychological implications. hellman will arrive to give the choice of whether to upload v’s mind to mikoshi in an attempt to save them in some years time (because, as it turns out, there are stipulations in that cloning is not near the level of science it needs to be, saburo and yorinobu obviously had close enough genetic material it made transfer easier. also johnny’s relic has apparently ‘changed’ v’s dna enough (which is questioned and evaded). that and it is arasaka. they could just be lying, and v knows this). so v can sign a contract to be uploaded to mikoshi, or can return to earth with 6 months to potentially live, although is speculated to have less time than that.

the credits roll with dialogue from those you may have befriended in some capacity discussing either the fact you have signed on to arasaka, or you have disappeared/returned to earth. hanako offers v a job if they had chosen to return to earth to die. your love interest makes reference to not having heard from you/wishes to see you soon.

- variation 2: goro survives, also escorts v to arasaka

takemura fills the roll of hellman, and ultimately proves that he is arasaka until the day he dies, even after the apparent ‘wavering’ dialogue. he didn’t make it this far in life without being able to lie the way he does. he’s a lot more gentle in the approach compared to hellman in asking v to return to mikoshi, there is some reminiscing dialogue, and also promises of visiting in the future if they manage to find v a body.

the biggest difference is should v choose to return to earth, takemura tells v to rot in hell for refusing arasaka’s help.

the sun (rogue)

this ending relies on side missions being completed for rogue (NOT just a good relationship with johnny, that is another ending as well that will be mentioned after). blistering love is the last one for rogue.

what happens is that you give johnny and rogue their last attempt at the assault on arasaka tower. johnny will be in control for the duration of this mission. rogue dies during the assault when adam smasher arrives. at mikoshi, johnny is the point of view character for the decision on who remains in v’s body. alt recognises that the relic has altered v’s body too much for v to remain there, but johnny would survive without problem.

- variation 1: v remains in control

johnny assimilates with alt in cyberspace and v returns to the world as a living legend. your love interest can potentially appear in the suite, but they recognise that v has become incredibly distant as a person (implied only a few months to live, that only they know of), and is taking on one last gig like no other. the love interest may potentially break up with v. ends with v eventually going to attack the crystal palace (casino in space).

- variation 2: johnny remains in control

vastly different, and i recommend playing this ending out at least once. johnny appears some time after the events of arasaka leaving the city, with collecting belongings and also going to visit the columbarium and deposit the bullet in v’s grave. it also gives a lot of insight into other memorials to characters you may have met in other side missions, there is jackie’s, rogue’s (per this ending), etc. johnny leaves night city.

- VARIATION 3: TECHNICALLY THE SECRET ENDING and in some cases considered ending 5

DIFFERENT in that it has a set of requirements that include maintaining a relationship with johnny ABOVE 70% (which can happen in the missions for him). need to wait and not decide on an ending for johnny to personally suggest this, so that no one else will die for them. it goes the same route as the rogue/johnny ending but instead v/johnny assault arasaka tower themselves. this is the HARDEST mission in the game, there is NO save option, you have to complete it in one go. if you die it is treated as an ending, and the end credits will even reference this with other characters talking about this. should you make it through, it plays out similarly following on from the other variations, save for the fact rogue will actually be alive, and the afterlife sequence will reflect her survival.

the star (aldecaldos)

should you befriend panam, including completing all of her lines (queen of the highway being the last), there is the offer to join them. it follows a very similar path in terms of attacking arasaka tower per rogue/johnny, but with the aldecaldos, and saul dies when adam smasher appears for the fight. this is one of the endings where you can choose who stays in v’s body however, but played from v’s point of view.

- variation 1: v remains in control

again, similarly follows the sun route, however v will wake up later with the aldecaldos en route to tucson. judy if romanced will join v, panam will obviously have a continuing romance, but river stays behind due to his family commitments with promises of maybe someday if they return, and kerry i believe at this stage, doesn’t want to give up night city just yet, but again similarly to river, promises.. it ends on a more hopeful note.

- variation 2: johnny remains in control

plays out like the sun ending.

path of least resistance (suicide)

easily the most heartbreaking. depending on how you may have played v, it is the one time they feel the most in control. johnny and v have an incredibly emotional discussion about death and life and rebirth. the credits will roll, and any relationships you have established will have a spoken part. i sobbed during the credits. it is.. yeah. well.

my opinion

the endings are confronting, or hopeful, depending on what is chosen. siding with arasaka goes against your better instincts, especially as a corporat. even after believing that perhaps takemura has changed, v realises that to his heart, that man will never leave. becoming a living legend just like jackie wanted leaves v feeling quite empty, as they have made it to the heights and there’s nothing for them. the aldecaldos are viewed as the best simply because there is that hope that in arizona, someone might be able to help, but potentially at the cost of your own relationship. and then... after seeing how much v has been punched down... the last ending just truly hurts. both in terms of characters understanding and being so angry at themselves and at v. i personally don’t know what specific ending i would choose for my v as i’m still working it out, but they all do punch in some way i personally think, especially if you have... actually played the story, and it does like tie off specific ends here and there. also like... finding out what happens to the peralezes and other people you might’ve met... yeah. i recommend playing through all of them + variations at least once (granted.. if you are comfortable with it. the arasaka ending is very invasive and well, the suicide ending can be incredibly uncomfortable).

[thefortyeightlawsofpower-blog]

LAW # 30 : MAKE YOUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS SEEM EFFORTLESS

JUDGEMENT

Your actions must seem natural and executed with ease. All the toil and practice that go into them, and also all the clever tricks, must be concealed. When you act, act effortlessly, as if you could do much more. Avoid the temptation of revealing how hard you work—it only raises questions. Teach no one your tricks or they will be used against you.

KANO TANNYU. MASTER ARTIST

Date Masamune once sent for Tannyu to decorate a pair of gold screens seven feet high. The artist said he thought black-and-white sketches would suit them, and went home again after considering them carefully. The next morning he came early and made a large quantity of ink into which he dipped a horseshoe he had brought with him, and then proceeded to make impressions of this all over one of the screens. Then, with a large brush, he drew a number of lines across them. Meanwhile Masamune had come in to watch his work, and at this he could contain his irritation no longer, and muttering, “What a beastly mess!” he strode away to his own apartments. The retainers told Tannyu he was in a very bad temper indeed. “He shouldn’t look on while I am at work, then,” replied the painter, “he should wait till it is finished.” Then he took up a smaller brush and dashed in touches here and there, and as he did so the prints of the horse-shoe turned into crabs, while the big broad strokes became rushes. He then turned to the other screen and splashed drops of ink all over it, and when he had added a few brush-strokes here and there they became a flight of swallows over willow trees. When Masamune saw the finished work he was as overjoyed at the artist’s skill as he had previously been annoyed at the apparent mess he was making of the screens.

CHA-NO-YU: THE JAPANESE TEA CEREMONY A. L. SADLER, 1962

OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW I

The Japanese tea ceremony called Cha-no-yu (“Hot Water for Tea”) has origins in ancient times, but it reached its peak of refinement in the sixteenth century under its most renowned practitioner, Sen no Rikyu. Although not from a noble family, Rikyu rose to great power, becoming the preferred tea master of the Emperor Hideyoshi, and an important adviser on aesthetic and even political matters. For Rikyu, the secret of success consisted in appearing natural, concealing the effort behind one’s work.

One day Rikyu and his son went to an acquaintance’s house for a tea ceremony. On the way in, the son remarked that the lovely antique-looking gate at their host’s house gave it an evocatively lonely appearance. “I don’t think so,” replied his father, “it looks as though it had been brought from some mountain temple a long way off, and as if the labor required to import it must have cost a lot of money.” If the owner of the house had put this much effort into one gate, it would show in his tea ceremony—and indeed Sen no Rikyu had to leave the ceremony early, unable to endure the affectation and effort it inadvertently revealed.

On another evening, while having tea at a friend’s house, Rikyu saw his host go outside, hold up a lantern in the darkness, cut a lemon off a tree, and bring it in. This charmed Rikyu—the host needed a relish for the dish he was serving, and had spontaneously gone outside to get one. But when the man offered the lemon with some Osaka rice cake, Rikyu realized that he had planned the cutting of the lemon all along, to go with this expensive delicacy. The gesture no longer seemed spontaneous—it was a way for the host to prove his cleverness. He had accidentally revealed how hard he was trying. Having seen enough, Rikyu politely declined the cake, excused himself, and left.

Emperor Hideyoshi once planned to visit Rikyu for a tea ceremony. On the night before he was to come, snow began to fall. Thinking quickly, Rikyu laid round cushions that fit exactly on each of the stepping-stones that led through the garden to his house. Just before dawn, he rose, saw that it had stopped snowing, and carefully removed the cushions. When Hideyoshi arrived, he marveled at the simple beauty of the sight—the perfectly round stepping stones, unencumbered by snow—and noticed how it called no attention to the manner in which Rikyu had accomplished it, but only to the polite gesture itself.

After Sen no Rikyu died, his ideas had a profound influence on the practice of the tea ceremony. The Tokugawa shogun Yorinobu, son of the great Emperor Ieyasu, was a student of Rikyu’s teachings. In his garden he had a stone lantern made by a famous master, and Lord Sakai Tadakatsu asked if he could come by one day to see it. Yorinobu replied that he would be honored, and commanded his gardeners to put everything in order for the visit. These gardeners, unfamiliar with the precepts of Cha-no-yu, thought the stone lantern misshapen, its windows being too small for the present taste. They had a local workman enlarge the windows. A few days before Lord Sakai’s visit, Yorinobu toured the garden. When he saw the altered windows he exploded with rage, ready to impale on his sword the fool who had ruined the lantern, upsetting its natural grace and destroying the whole purpose of Lord Sakai’s visit.

When Yorinobu calmed down, however, he remembered that he had originally bought two of the lanterns, and that the second was in his garden on the island of Kishu. At great expense, he hired a whale boat and the finest rowers he could find, ordering them to bring the lantern to him within two days—a difficult feat at best. But the sailors rowed day and night, and with the luck of a good wind they arrived just in time. To Yorinobu’s delight, this stone lantern was more magnificent than the first, for it had stood untouched for twenty years in a bamboo thicket, acquiring a brilliant antique appearance and a delicate covering of moss. When Lord Sakai arrived, later that same day, he was awed by the lantern, which was more magnificent than he had imagined—so graceful and at one with the elements. Fortunately he had no idea what time and effort it had cost Yorinobu to create this sublime effect.

THE RESILING MASTER

There was once a wrestling master who was versed in 360 feints and holds. He took a special liking to one of his pupils, to whom he taught 359 of them over a period of time. Somehow he never got around to the last trick. As months went by the young man became so proficient in the art that he bested everyone who dared to face him in the ring. He was so proud of his prowess that one day he boasted before the sultan that he could readily whip his master, were it not out of respect for his age and gratitude for his tutelage.

The sultan became incensed at this irreverence and ordered an immediate match with the royal court in attendance.

At the gong the youth barged forward with a lusty yell, only to be confronted with the unfamiliar 360th feint. The master seized his former pupil, lifted him high above his head, and flung him crashing to the ground. The sultan and the assembly let out a loud cheer. When the sultan asked the master how he was able to overcome such a strong opponent, the master confessed that he had reserved a secret technique for himself for just such a contingency. Then he related the lamentation of a master of archery, who taught everything he knew. “No one has learned archery from me,” the poor fellow complained, “who has not tried to use me as a butt in the end.”

A STORY OF SAADI, AS TOLD IN THE CRAFT OF POWER, R.G. H. SIU, 1979

Interpretation

To Sen no Rikyu, the sudden appearance of something naturally, almost accidentally graceful was the height of beauty. This beauty came without warning and seemed effortless. Nature created such things by its own laws and processes, but men had to create their effects through labor and contrivance. And when they showed the effort of producing the effect, the effect was spoiled. The gate came from too far away, the cutting of the lemon looked contrived.

You will often have to use tricks and ingenuity to create your effects—the cushions in the snow, the men rowing all night—but your audience must never suspect the work or the thinking that has gone into them. Nature does not reveal its tricks, and what imitates nature by appearing effortless approximates nature’s power.

OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW II

The great escape artist Harry Houdini once advertised his act as “The Impossible Possible.” And indeed those who witnessed his dramatic escapes felt that what he did onstage contradicted commonsense ideas of human capacity.

One evening in 1904, an audience of 4,000 Londoners filled a theater to watch Houdini accept a challenge: to escape from a pair of manacles billed as the strongest ever invented. They contained six sets of locks and nine tumblers in each cuff; a Birmingham maker had spent five years constructing them. Experts who examined them said they had never seen anything so intricate, and this intricacy was thought to make them impossible to escape.

The crowd watched the experts secure the manacles on Houdini’s wrists. Then the escape artist entered a black cabinet on stage. The minutes went by; the more time passed, the more certain it seemed that these manacles would be the first to defeat him. At one point he emerged from the cabinet, and asked that the cuffs be temporarily removed so that he could take off his coat—it was hot inside. The challengers refused, suspecting his request was a trick to find out how the locks worked. Undeterred, and without using his hands, Houdini managed to lift the coat over his shoulders, turn it inside out, remove a penknife from his vest pocket with his teeth, and, by moving his head, cut the coat off his arms. Freed from the coat, he stepped back into the cabinet, the audience roaring with approval at his grace and dexterity.

Finally, having kept the audience waiting long enough, Houdini emerged from the cabinet a second time, now with his hands free, the manacles raised high in triumph. To this day no one knows how he managed the escape. Although he had taken close to an hour to free himself, he had never looked concerned, had shown no sign of doubt. Indeed it seemed by the end that he had drawn out the escape as a way to heighten the drama, to make the audience worry—for there was no other sign that the performance had been anything but easy. The complaint about the heat was equally part of the act. The spectators of this and other Houdini performances must have felt he was toying with them: These manacles are nothing, he seemed to say, I could have freed myself a lot sooner, and from a lot worse.

Over the years, Houdini escaped from the chained carcass of an embalmed “sea monster” (a half octopus, half whalelike beast that had beached near Boston); he had himself sealed inside an enormous envelope from which he emerged without breaking the paper; he passed through brick walls; he wriggled free from straitjackets while dangling high in the air; he leaped from bridges into icy waters, his hands manacled and his legs in chains; he had himself submerged in glass cases full of water, hands pad-locked, while the audience watched in amazement as he worked himself free, struggling for close to an hour apparently without breathing. Each time he seemed to court certain death yet survived with superhuman aplomb. Meanwhile, he said nothing about his methods, gave no clues as to how he accomplished any of his tricks—he left his audiences and critics speculating, his power and reputation enhanced by their struggles with the inexplicable. Perhaps the most baffling trick of all was making a ten-thousand-pound elephant disappear before an audience’s eyes, a feat he repeated on stage for over nineteen weeks. No one has ever really explained how he did this, for in the auditorium where he performed the trick, there was simply nowhere for an elephant to hide.

The effortlessness of Houdini’s escapes led some to think he used occult forces, his superior psychic abilities giving him special control over his body. But a German escape artist named Kleppini claimed to know Houdini’s secret: He simply used elaborate gadgets. Kleppini also claimed to have defeated Houdini in a handcuff challenge in Holland.

Houdini did not mind all kinds of speculation floating around about his methods, but he would not tolerate an outright lie, and in 1902 he challenged Kleppini to a handcuff duel. Kleppini accepted. Through a spy, he found out the secret word to unlock a pair of French combination-lock cuffs that Houdini liked to use. His plan was to choose these cuffs to escape from onstage. This would definitively debunk Houdini—his “genius” simply lay in his use of mechanical gadgets.

On the night of the challenge, just as Kleppini had planned, Houdini offered him a choice of cuffs and he selected the ones with the combination lock. He was even able to disappear with them behind a screen to make a quick test, and reemerged seconds later, confident of victory.

Acting as if he sensed fraud, Houdini refused to lock Kleppini in the cuffs. The two men argued and began to fight, even wrestling with each other onstage. After a few minutes of this, an apparently angry, frustrated Houdini gave up and locked Kleppini in the cuffs. For the next few minutes Kleppini strained to get free. Something was wrong—minutes earlier he had opened the cuffs behind the screen; now the same code no longer worked. He sweated, racking his brains. Hours went by, the audience left, and finally an exhausted and humiliated Kleppini gave up and asked to be released.

The cuffs that Kleppini himself had opened behind the screen with the word “C-L-E-F-S” (French for “keys”) now clicked open only with the word “F-R-A-U-D.” Kleppini never figured out how Houdini had accomplished this uncanny feat.

Keep the extent of your abilities unknown. The wise man does not allow his knowledge and abilities to be sounded to the bottom, if he desires to be honored by all. He allows you to know them but not to comprehend them. No one must know the extent of his abilities, lest he be disappointed. No one ever has an opportunity of fathoming him entirely. For guesses and doubts about the extent of his talents arouse more veneration than accurate knowledge of them, be they ever so great.

BALTASAR GRACIÁN. 1601-1658

Interpretation

Although we do not know for certain how Houdini accomplished many of his most ingenious escapes, one thing is clear: It was not the occult, or any kind of magic, that gave him his powers, but hard work and endless practice, all of which he carefully concealed from the world. Houdini never left anything to chance—day and night he studied the workings of locks, researched centuries-old sleight-of-hand tricks, pored over books on mechanics, whatever he could use. Every moment not spent researching he spent working his body, keeping himself exceptionally limber, and learning how to control his muscles and his breathing.

Early on in Houdini’s career, an old Japanese performer whom he toured with taught him an ancient trick: how to swallow an ivory ball, then bring it back up. He practiced this endlessly with a small peeled potato tied to a string—up and down he would manipulate the potato with his throat muscles, until they were strong enough to move it without the string. The organizers of the London handcuff challenge had searched Houdini’s body thoroughly beforehand, but no one could check the inside of his throat, where he could have concealed small tools to help him escape. Even so, Kleppini was fundamentally wrong: It was not Houdini’s tools but his practice, work, and research that made his escapes possible.

Kleppini, in fact, was completely outwitted by Houdini, who set the whole thing up. He let his opponent learn the code to the French cuffs, then baited him into choosing those cuffs onstage. Then, during the two men’s tussle, the dexterous Houdini was able to change the code to “F-R-A-U-D.” He had spent weeks practicing this trick, but the audience saw none of the sweat and toil behind the scenes. Nor was Houdini ever nervous; he induced nervousness in others. (He deliberately dragged out the time it would take to escape, as a way of heightening the drama, and making the audience squirm.) His escapes from death, always graceful and easy, made him look like a superman.

As a person of power, you must research and practice endlessly before appearing in public, onstage or anywhere else. Never expose the sweat and labor behind your poise. Some think such exposure will demonstrate their diligence and honesty, but it actually just makes them look weaker—as if anyone who practiced and worked at it could do what they had done, or as if they weren’t really up to the job. Keep your effort and your tricks to yourself and you seem to have the grace and ease of a god. One never sees the source of a god’s power revealed; one only sees its effects.

A line [of poetry] will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Adam’s Curse, William Buller Yeats, 1865-1939

KEYS TO POWER

Humanity’s first notions of power came from primitive encounters with nature—the flash of lightning in the sky, a sudden flood, the speed and ferocity of a wild animal. These forces required no thinking, no planning—they awed us by their sudden appearance, their gracefulness, and their power over life and death. And this remains the kind of power we have always wanted to imitate. Through science and technology we have re-created the speed and sublime power of nature, but something is missing: Our machines are noisy and jerky, they reveal their effort. Even the very best creations of technology cannot root out our admiration for things that move easily and effortlessly. The power of children to bend us to their will comes from a kind of seductive charm that we feel in the presence of a creature less reflective and more graceful than we are. We cannot return to such a state, but if we can create the appearance of this kind of ease, we elicit in others the kind of primitive awe that nature has always evoked in hu mankind.

One of the first European writers to expound on this principle came from that most unnatural of environments, the Renaissance court. In The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528, Baldassare Castiglione describes the highly elaborate and codified manners of the perfect court citizen. And yet, Castiglione explains, the courtier must execute these gestures with what he calls sprezzatura, the capacity to make the difficult seem easy. He urges the courtier to “practice in all things a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless.” We all admire the achievement of some unusual feat, but if it is accomplished naturally and gracefully, our admiration increases tenfold—“whereas ... to labor at what one is doing and ... to make bones over it, shows an extreme lack of grace and causes everything, whatever its worth, to be discounted.”

Much of the idea of sprezzatura came from the world of art. All the great Renaissance artists carefully kept their works under wraps. Only the finished masterpiece could be shown to the public. Michelangelo forbade even popes to view his work in process. A Renaissance artist was always careful to keep his studios shut to patrons and public alike, not out of fear of imitation, but because to see the making of the works would mar the magic of their effect, and their studied atmosphere of ease and natural beauty.

The Renaissance painter Vasari, also the first great art critic, ridiculed the work of Paolo Uccello, who was obsessed with the laws of perspective. The effort Uccello spent on improving the appearance of perspective was too obvious in his work—it made his paintings ugly and labored, overwhelmed by the effort of their effects. We have the same response when we watch performers who put too much effort into their act: Seeing them trying so hard breaks the illusion. It also makes us uncomfortable. Calm, graceful performers, on the other hand, set us at ease, creating the illusion that they are not acting but being natural and themselves, even when everything they are doing involves labor and practice.

The idea of sprezzatura is relevant to all forms of power, for power depends vitally on appearances and the illusions you create. Your public actions are like artworks: They must have visual appeal, must create anticipation, even entertain. When you reveal the inner workings of your creation, you become just one more mortal among others. What is understandable is not awe-inspiring—we tell ourselves we could do as well if we had the money and time. Avoid the temptation of showing how clever you are—it is far more clever to conceal the mechanisms of your cleverness.

Talleyrand’s application of this concept to his daily life greatly enhanced the aura of power that surrounded him. He never liked to work too hard, so he made others do the work for him—the spying, the research, the detailed analyses. With all this labor at his disposal, he himself never seemed to strain. When his spies revealed that a certain event was about to take place, he would talk in social conversation as if he sensed its imminence. The result was that people thought he was clairvoyant. His short pithy statements and witticisms always seemed to summarize a situation perfectly, but they were based on much research and thought. To those in government, including Napoleon himself, Talleyrand gave the impression of immense power—an effect entirely dependent on the apparent ease with which he accomplished his feats.

There is another reason for concealing your shortcuts and tricks: When you let this information out, you give people ideas they can use against you. You lose the advantages of keeping silent. We tend to want the world to know what we have done—we want our vanity gratified by having our hard work and cleverness applauded, and we may even want sympathy for the hours it has taken to reach our point of artistry. Learn to control this propensity to blab, for its effect is often the opposite of what you expected. Remember: The more mystery surrounds your actions, the more awesome your power seems. You appear to be the only one who can do what you do—and the appearance of having an exclusive gift is immensely powerful. Finally, because you achieve your accomplishments with grace and ease, people believe that you could always do more if you tried harder. This elicits not only admiration but a touch of fear. Your powers are untapped—no one can fathom their limits.

Image: The Racehorse. From up close we would see the strain, the effort to control the horse, the labored, painful breathing. But from the distance where we sit and watch, it is all gracefulness, flying through the air. Keep others at a distance and they will only see the ease with which you move.

Authority: For whatever action [nonchalance] accompanies, no matter how trivial it is, it not only reveals the skill of the person doing it but also very often causes it to be considered far greater than it really is. This is because it makes the onlookers believe that a man who performs well with so much facility must possess even greater skill than he does. (Baldassare Castiglione, 1478-1529)

REVERSAL

The secrecy with which you surround your actions must seem lighthearted in spirit. A zeal to conceal your work creates an unpleasant, almost paranoiac impression: you are taking the game too seriously. Houdini was careful to make the concealment of his tricks seem a game, all part of the show. Never show your work until it is finished, but if you put too much effort into keeping it under wraps you will be like the painter Pontormo, who spent the last years of his life hiding his frescoes from the public eye and only succeeded in driving himself mad. Always keep your sense of humor about yourself.

There are also times when revealing the inner workings of your projects can prove worthwhile. It all depends on your audience’s taste, and on the times in which you operate. P. T. Barnum recognized that his public wanted to feel involved in his shows, and that understanding his tricks delighted them, partly, perhaps, because implicitly debunking people who kept their sources of power hidden from the masses appealed to America’s democratic spirit. The public also appreciated the showman’s humor and honesty. Barnum took this to the extreme of publicizing his own humbuggery in his popular autobiography, written when his career was at its height.

As long as the partial disclosure of tricks and techniques is carefully planned, rather than the result of an uncontrollable need to blab, it is the ultimate in cleverness. It gives the audience the illusion of being superior and involved, even while much of what you do remains concealed from them.

[seth-sieben]

Oooh then I’m glad my answer suits you /o

What kind of body modification are possible ? 

Almost everything I’d say. Look at that big guy, I don’t think there’s any ‘original content’ left on him. Still he’s very much alive and dangerous. (Also, everyone think he’s a freak.)

They don’t exactly draw the line on what can and can’t be done. But, seeing that man, it can easily be assume a heart is not something you absolutely need. My guess is that they went with the usual ‘as long as the brain remains’.

Although there’s a counterpart to that; it’s called Cyberpsychosis. It’s caused by an overload of cybernetic augmentations to the body and basically drives you crazy. We cross the road of several cyberpsychos along the game, usually they’re people who’s had too many enhancements at once, or at poor quality, or at some it was just too much. And when your mental state’s at its lowest, that’s when cyberpsychosis strikes.

That means you can have as much cyberware as you wish, but you stil gotta be careful because there’s no remedy yet.

How the different class react to it ? 

Fairly well. It’s really something common, my take is that seeing someone without any enhancement (be it visible or not) is what’s uncommon these days.

Also, they have different purposes. For instance that Kerry Eurodyne from my last post, he’s a famous rockerboy whose throat implant also helps him sing. Almost everyone that has to battle on a daily basis has cyberwares, and you see some people with specific enhancements designed for their line of work. We also meet several character who’s lost limbs during wartime and had them replaced with synthetic ones.

Although I’d ponder that a little bit, because there seems to be a line: for instance Royce and Dum Dum, their gang’s well known for being ‘all about cyber, the flesh means nothing’ and more people are disturbed/confused/disgusted by them. (There’s also another good reason which is they just tend to be psychos and the gang’s known to…… recycle you cybers without caring if you were still alive when they kidnapped you.)

But, despite Adam Smasher, they’re the only ones I know who’s criticized for their bodmods. So I guess it’s okay as long as you stay human shaped.

Bbbbbbbuuuutttt… Lemme introduce to you the Arasaka family. They’re the head of that powerful corpo I talked you about, the one for which Takemura works. I couldn’t find a picture with them three, so in order that’s Saburo Arasaka and his children, Yorinobu and Hanako Arasaka.

Surely yo’uve noticed? Close to no apparent cyberwares. And I’m fairly sure Hanako’s only deserve an esthetic purpose. Sometimes you see Yorinobu with two silver lines on his neck, but I think it’s for the same reason.

Saburo’s wiki page even says that: ‘His injuries were so severe that he was permanently blind in his left eye and that his left arm, although not amputated, was damaged beyond use.‘ and ‘Saburo had undergone numerous surgeries to implant various cybernetics as well as a new eye and right arm’.

Which means the man does have cyberwares but, except for the eye, you can’t know at a single glance. It is important to remember that the man was born in 1919 and is highly tradionnalist, still it shows that outrageous cyberwares are more common the lowest you’re on the social scale.

Are there people in the game who are firmly against them ? 

Not so much. There’s this feeling that cyberwares are so common now that people don’t talk about them so much. I haven’t explored the lore from the tabletop game for now, so I can’t tell when they appeared and when they became something common, nor the way people reacted to it at first.

There’s maybe a couple of npc, but I’m not entirely sure. The first one is more of your local apolyptical street preacher, and no one really takes him seriously. The second one is not so firmly against it than it doesn’t suits his ideals given he’s a buddhist monk.

As explained with the example of the Arasaka family, the matter of ‘how transhumanism has affected our daily life’ isn’t directly discussed. Of course you see it’s common, of course some of the impacts are pretty obvious, but I think there’s more subtelty when you see which kind of cyberwares are sporting the uppar class and which the lower class. (And, it’s pure logic that someone with an absolutely badass bodyguard doesn’t need combat enhancement, though it’s still interesting to acknoweldge that it’s a pattern I’ve seen through several upper class characters.)

Oh, but now I realize I’ve forgotten someone! The doctors are now called ripperdocs (charcudocs en français, je trouve ça très parlant :D) and there’s one you meet with absolutely NO cyberware. AT ALL. Which is HELL of a surprise! And when you ask him about that, he points to you that he doesn’t like it and kind of fears the day they’ll be redeemed unusable. Hence he’s staying 100% organic.

In this regard, a game as Deus Ex: Human Revolution revolves entirely around the idea of transhumanism and how it can worsen the condition of poorer people (it’s hard to compete against someone who can lift thrice his weight when you don’t have enough money to buy yourself that new pair of arms). It’s been a long time since I’ve played it, but from what I remember your character works for a famous corpo, and the city’s close to a riot because there’s a new kind of cyberware (oooor something like that) to be release and it’s gonna make the poor lives even shittier. Also you meet a lot of people openly disgusted by your own enhancements.

Are there robots, that could physically pass as human ? 

Not that I’me aware of, at least I don’t remember ever crossing road with an android. Alongst transhumanism, androids and AIs are my favorite tropes in cyberpunk but this game doesn’t adress them. You meet some AIs during your play through, but almost all of them are soft one; despite their algorithms that can be highly convincing they’ve developped consciousness. And the only robots you see are that -robots-, all steel and wires used as guards.

What do the Takemura’s cheekbones implants do ??? 

I’d glaaaaaadly answer that, yet… There is no official explanation of his cyberwares :(

Although I’ve seen several headcanons stating they’re here to solidify his cheeckbones and nose (given his jaw’s already covered by his throat/spine cyber) and I don’t see any better reason. (Except that it suits him a lot :3)

By the way! Did you notice they’re not symmetric ‘cause he’s got a scar on his left cheek??

Welcome back to tumblr ! can you tell me more about those nice looking cyborg mens ? :D

Heeey there! Thank you /o

(I feel like every time I’ve been brought back to this damned site, you’ve been there to greet me haha.)

Sooooooooooo... *cracks knuckles* Are ya ready for some too long rambling ? ‘Cause I can’t do short answers to save my life :D

Welp! I’d assume you’ve heard of Cyberpunk 2077, the game with Keanu Reeves in it, because I don’t know how someone who has spent some time on the internet in the past months couldn’t have heard of it.

And it’s… not everything I’ve dreamt of, sure, but for the sucker of cyberpunk as a genre that I am, I do love that game. It’s not perfect, but it hits a lot of tropes I’ve been wanting to see in a cyberpunk themed universe. And several of thoses tropes are explored through npcs.

(Oh, and, this is really biased. I’ll mostly speak of my favorite characters hehe. And I don’t know how much you know of usual cyberpunk tropes, so maybe I’ll expand a bit on things you already know.)

First of all, let’s start with your character: V.

(These are their official looks, but you can personalize them a lot, so there aren’t two similar Vs in the fandom.)

They can be of any gender, with three chosen paths: corpo, nomad and street kid. But mainly, they’re a brat. :3 I’ll mostly use them to introduce those life paths, which are important social standards:

- In this world, corporations (or mega corporations in full) are the new laws. It’s like capitalism at its finest. The social status is really important, and being a corpo is one of (if not the) most valuable. If you’re high in the ladder, you’re above anyone else. Most of corporations CEOs are far more important people than politicians; because they just own them. Needless to say, it’s a real viper nest. No place for friendship there, it’s all about hard work and profit.

- Nomads are.......... exactly what it says. Nomads. They live in clans (families) outside of the cities, don’t really blend with anyone else (they’re usually really suspicious of outsiders) and if their way of life means they have less technology that people from the city, they tend to be more interested in mechanics than the new trending gadget. I think it’s one of the closest ‘free bird’ life style you can find.

- And street kids are.......... okay, once again, street kids. Don’t really know what’s more to say. Lived and raised in the streets, poverty, violence and all that shit.

Royce (first pic) & Dum Dum (second pic)

Imma speak of these two together ‘cause they’re from the same gang, and they represent transhumanism at its finest. Personnaly, Royce is one of the only game content I’ve seen before playing it (as I’ve managed to see as few as possible) and DAMN IF THAT ISN’T THE KIND OF TRANSHUMANIST SHIT I MISS IN TONS OF CYBERPUNK CONTENT!

So, yeah, one of the thing with cyberpunk is to make you think about the relationship with human body. If you’ve got nothing more than synthetic flesh on your body to make you look like something vaguely human, are you still human, or something else? Where’s the line between man and machine? What defines you as a human being, your beating heart and the flesh on your muscles or something else? Is your body a temple? (Okay, this one’s an extrapolation from my catholic-raised ass.)

And what I love most with these two is that they just dropped the human-based standards. You seen those damn spidey eyes? I know a lot of cyberpunk themed universe with a new religious or philosophic whose central ideology is that they’re absolutely against any kind of body enhancement alteration. And those are typically the kind of guys they’d absolutely qualify as no longer humans.

(Did I already tell you how much of an absolute sucker I am for anything close to transhumanism?)

The inevitable Johnny Silverhand.

(aka: the absolute asshole.)

He’s like; the street kid by essence. Can’t be tamed. Won’t be tamed. His middle finger is gonna stay paralyzed one day. Beats corporatists for breakfast. Nobody can stand him, yet it’s impossible to not be attracted to him. Like those mosquitoes flying around a light bulb, y’know? (Except he’s very much a mosquito himself.)

He’s that usual battle of the Littles against the Bigs. Those who can’t stand anymore the pretty lies of the technocrats well hidden on the top floors of their skycrapers. And wants to blow their shits once and for all.

Kerry Eurodyne

Pretty pretty pretty lil boi :3 (Dammit look at that throat.)

Honestly, I love that character but I don’t have so much to say about him. It’d mostly be me fanboying. Soooo... I still put him here cuz damn he’s sweet for the eyes.

(More exactly, I’d have several things to say but they’d need too much spoilers, sorry :( )

Jackie Wells

The cutest of badass.

He’s the one who introduces you to the street life of Night City (the town in which you play). It’s hard to find real friendship in this kind of town but damn, Jackie’s your man. Always there to crack a joke or raise a hand when you need it most. He’s the dreamer, the one who wants more, because the street kid that he still is craves for that kind of recognition.

He lets you know what lies in the shadows of the corpos, what a merc’s life feels like, that constant hunting for danger and the extasy of adrenaline it rewards you with.

I couldn’t decide on a single nomad to introduce, and you can’t separate a family, so (from left to right) Panam, Mitch and Saul.

(But really it is Mitch that I like. Sorry Panam, I just can’t stand you.)

So, hey, I’ve already introduced a bit of the nomad lifestyle. That’s the kind of friendship so hard to earn, but so rewarding in the end. They’re the family you chose to have, which come with its lots of hard times but has so much more heart warming moment to offer.

Their path is a difficult life, always have to be cautious because every kind of supply is precious and has to last long, but that’s the closest thing from freedom (and maybe some kind of happiness) you surely can find here.

And last but not least... Goro Takemura ! (Or Takemura Goro, if you prefer it the Japanese way.)

As it is very subtly hinted through my blog, he’s my favorite character by far. I’ve learned a new thing in english which is “Loyal to a fault”, and this suits him very well.

He’s the body guard of the most powerful man in this setting (yeah yeah, a corpo CEO), hence the top grades cyberwares. Takemura’s your entry point to the corporate lifestyle and it’s through discussion with him that the game really introduces that cyberpunk trope: how corporations may badly fuck your life, but how it’s a necessary evil for others. Or... how some people are just really contempt with it. It introduces a bit of duality in this regard, because almost everyone else hates corpos, and now there’s someone who just don’t. Who’s just so loyal to them and even feels grateful for what they’ve done.

Speaking of duality, that’s the point that (despite his looks, I mean oh my god I’m fanboying again) got me really emotionnaly invested in this character. He’s that same guy that could kill you in a beat without you being able to do a thing against that (for obvious reasons, top grade bodyguard who’d readily give his life for his master), yet that loyalty induce some kind of naivety which you wouldn’t have imagined for such a guy.

(Also he’s an absolute boomer who don’t exactly understand how technology works, but that’s part of his charms haha.)

I’m fairly sure you weren’t asking for such details but... He, nah, I don’t feel sorry, I love babbling about anything cyberpunk related :p