Ask The Tropers

• While the game does have a number of side-activities known as "Police Scanner Hustles" which could be interpreted by someone not paying attention as you doing contract work for the Police, the majority of them are you using your illegal police scanner to arrive at crime scenes before the cops do, kill the perps, and steal any valuables they have on them before the cops can bag them as evidence.
  • Except that, in-universe, the NCPD encourages vigilante activity because the police are so overworked by the huge amount of crimes (the average homicide cop has fifty cases on his desk) that they don't mind vigilantes hustling on their work. So the fact that the player is doing "illegal" vigilante work is irrelevant — even if the cops are actually on the scene when you arrive, they don't bat an eyelash if you just start mowing down the perps and taking their stuff.
• The only parts of the game where you can directly work for a corporation are the "Corpo" lifepath's prologue, where your corrupt boss makes you a patsy for his crimes and you get fired, a sidequest involving a film production corporation where you're more working for their lead actor than them, and the game's Bad Ending, which frames your decision to side with a corporation as a Deal with the Devil where you've essentially sold your soul for an easy out to your problem.
  • You can briefly do work for Militech, as well, but after that I, I'm honestly blanking.
• Aside from the corporations the only truly wealthy people you ever work for are a struggling politician - the only honest one in the entire city - and his wife, who are actively trying to change things for the better and help the needy; the sidequest involving them ends in tragedy and frames their efforts as pointless in the face of the corrupt, dystopian political system they're a part of.
  • I think this one is flat out incorrect. The vast majority of the people V works for are rich. Many of them are crooks and gangsters, but most of them are wealthy enough to own or lead enterprises, like Dexter Deshawn, Rogue, and Wakako. V is framed as a very recommended mercenary, so a lot of their clientele are people who can afford to hire them. The exceptions are people who claim to be able to help V out of their desperate situation (who are usually lying), friends, or the occasional desperate person who comes to them for help.

Fair enough on the first point, but on the last I'd argue that the article and the entry are framing it as you working for the wealthy, ruling elite, thus undermining the idea of cyberpunk and the themes of rebelling against authority. Like I said the only people from that particular social class you wind up working for are nonconformists, and while most of the fixers are at least somewhat wealthy as you said, they're also mostly criminals - again as you said - and I'd hardly describe any of the things they have you do as conformist or supportive of the ruling class.

There's no point in the story that I can immediately recall, save the Bad Ending I mentioned, in which the player is actively and blatantly working in service to the capitalist staus quo of the game's world, as the entry and article imply. The closest I can think of is moments like you mentioned in the first point where your pursuit of criminal gains or vigilante justice winds up incidentally helping a corporation or the police.

I'll admit that there's an argument to be made for the game having a (potentially unintentional) pro-capitalist/consumerist message due to its focus on acquiring wealth and rising the social ladder, but the way that the entry is written seems to be arguing that the game betrays the very concept of cyberpunk by glorifying police, corporations, and the 1%, which it very much does not. The game doesn't shy away at all from portrayals of police brutality, corporate exploitation, and the cruel apathy of the rich.

Maybe it doesn't, but the story and setting are also very heavy on the "cynical" side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism. It doesn't portray the rich in a flattering light, but it also portrays the only real option as gaining enough power and wealth to benefit from it yourself. The vast majority of personal stories that involve trying to fight for the "little guy" or help the downtrodden usually result in a "Shaggy Dog" Story where nothing really changes or the people V tried to help wind up even worse off than before.

While off the top of my head, I can't recall any time that V directly works with or helps a Corpo (aside from the aforementioned optional Militech deal), Johnny at one point comments that the difference between the Mercs and netrunners of his day and those 50 years later is that in his day, nobody would have dared work for or help Corpos while these days they seem to do it all the time.

This all sounds more like Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy than what the article is actually describing, though.

That said, I think the only reason we disqualify an article from being a valid citation for an Unfortunate Implications entry is if it's blatantly, factually incorrect. Not sure if that's the case here.

What exactly are the Unfortunate Implications here? What is the game unwittingly implying by failing to practice what it preaches? That it's not cyberpunk enough? Sounds more like Broken Aesop to me.

^I agree - if it's anything, it's a Broken Aesop.

But even that is a big if. Even if you accept the premise that a cyberpunk protagonist has to be anti-establishment and anti-rich-people (which I don't think is a given), cyberpunk as a genre tends to be quit cynical and it's entirely expected that the protagonist is not an idealistic hero who tries to right the wrongs of society. So their doing morally questionable things for money and helping the bad guys is par for the course, and doesn't really have any implications.

I think it would only be Unfortunate Implications if the dystopia and the authority ruling it were portrayed positively, and your actions supporting the status quo are explicitly portrayed positively, which it sounds to me like they aren't by nature of this being a very cynical work. If the article is claiming otherwise, that needs to be written into the example. Just because the UI citation is factually correct enough to be valid doesn't necessarily mean the entry itself is a valid Unfortunate Implications entry.

I can concede to the points being made here. The other tropers are making a lot of sense.

It's a weird situation for sure because I'm not sure if Unfortunate Implications is about the claims being made, or if it's us making the definitive claim that "these implications exist, here's a citation for proof". However, it sounds like any implications here were fabricated or exaggerated by the article.

Yeah, the folks above have articulated some of my opinions better than I could have, lmao. Essentially my view is that as it's written now, this entry can only be two things: a complete misunderstanding of what Unfortunate Implications means as a trope, fitting more under Broken Aesop, or a weirdly-worded false claim about the game's stances on social issues. In either case I feel like it should go.

You can ask on the locked pages to remove it. Think you have consensus to cut it.

^ Done and done.

^^^ Unfortunate Implications has to have a high degree of accuracy/truth in order to be valid; that's the entire point to having reputable citations. Otherwise, any random crackpot claim could be added, even if the person has credentials. Even smart/educated person get things wrong sometimes, so if there's good reason to find the claims invalid, that takes precedent.

I know, my point was if we're meant to say we agree that the implications are in the work, or we're just sharing the reaction people had. Either way this particular one is invalid; it just brings up a question of use.

I feel that it always has to be plausible that the UI is in the work. Especially if it's a well known problem (for example, colorism or gender-exclusion). More "questionable" issues (ex: "white genocide") require a heck of a lot more plausible evidence, because in almost all cases, it's overblown fear-mongering.

I mean, unless it's literally, like, a an anti-white propaganda piece, and even then it's hard to really say that those things are "implications" at that point. I agree it should be plausible- not something everyone has to necessarily agree is in the work, but we should at least be able to look at the article and say "they have a point".

I actually thought we had a specific rule about not adding outright propaganda and the like because it's clearly not accidental implications in that case.

We do have such a rule. If outright propaganda were allowed to count, then we'd hardly need a source to confirm things. You don't need a source to confirm that Birth of a Nation is an actively racist movie.

^^I don't think UI needs to be accidental. It can be more or less intentional, as long as it's just implied and not an explicit point.

From that point of view, the reason we don't add outright propaganda as UI is that a propaganda piece about X being bad doesn't just imply that X is bad, it says so explicitly. Propaganda isn't subtle.