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[ohwolfling]

#11 for Johnny Silverhand (or another Cyberpunk 2077 character you want to talk about) :)

11. How did you “fall in love” with this character?

from honest favorite character asks

YOUR HONOR, I HAD NO CHOICE . This will be a little long, a little rambly, but baby, it's about ✨the trauma✨.

I tend to play my first character in a new game pretty much as close to how I think I'd handle it myself. I have C-PTSD from a very violent upbringing and environment so for me... I don't know, Johnny Silverhand was almost a mirror? When violence feels too big in your body, it has to go somewhere. Robert John Linder died at war and Johnny Silverhand tried so hard to run that violence off.

Imagine you are at the PEAK of your pain. You have lived an entire life of having your ideals stomped into pieces, you're a walking defense mechanism, and then on top of that guilt and grief swoop in, you try to force that into the shape of your ideals, to reclaim them, to make that guilt and grief into action. You destroy yourself, you destroy the world... but you change nothing. And something brings you back to look at it. more below the cut.

Thinking about who I was before and after a big moment of self destruction that led me to EMDR therapy is really like... thinking of another person. Johnny Silverhand doesn't even have that. He has life and death. He has no guide to where he was or wasn't guilty. Your first interaction with him ricochets between disrespect, heartache, and terror...

And then he shows up in your car, making a little joke. Making peace in the only way he knows how to. That made me go, "ok, this is not my enemy."

Then as you go through the game, if you take the risk of trusting Johnny you find him to be deeply sensitive, sincere, remorseful, just as he remains suspicious, spiteful, and judgemental. He's a person at the crossroads of who he is. What you do with V's time with him chooses that path for him. His agency is surrendered to you, even as he's overwriting you.

I think Johnny Silverhand leans bitter and mean but ultimately he's the worst version of a person who cares about things. Johnny Silverhand gives so many fucks and every one of them hurts him. He wants how hateful he is to mean something so bad that he's selfish in pursuit of stopping what he sees as the bad guy (and I mean, I agree, everything he says about capitalism and corporations is babystepped to you in game and that made me LOL because my political heroes were executed or ran underground, iykyk).