Emily Nguyen, Week #12: I really wanna stay at your house
I love jumping into shows, books, and movies I haven’t a single clue about. The experience feels untainted and raw, and every cliche or ending that unfolds still feels novel to me. Even reading the synopsis on the back of a book or hearing a fleeting opinion about a series will mold how I will experience it—and I hate that feeling. My mind is too malleable, so other influences easily corrupt my own take on things. In this way, I’ll always be chasing some sort of freedom in what I consume.
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Saturdays. The optimal time for binging things. Every Sunday, I come to regret all that I did on Saturday—or rather, everything I didn’t do. On Saturdays, I go through an absolute marathon of catching up on weekly airing episodes, or just mow through an entire series at once. Last week, I thought I’d learned my lesson with letting myself go, running free with my desires amidst my unchecked to-do lists…yet here I found myself again! I watched an incredibly depressing series last time, thinking I wouldn’t go through that next time. Something nice and lighthearted this week.
Somehow, I screwed up again.
I watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022) and of course, I gingerly stepped into the first episode not knowing what I’d make of the series.
…I was NOT having a good time by the end of the 10th episode, which is an unusually short runtime for a typical 12 episode anime series. I thought maybe this was since Netflix Animation was helping produce it and they can be a bit cheap with their budget. Wrong.
Some series finish with an ending the story deserves, not what the audience longs for; Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a great example of that. It does have its cliches. But it makes you grovel and wish so badly for these people (characters) to just live. In the marvelously spunky and corrupted world of Cyberpunk 2077 by Mike Pondsmith, protagonist David Martinez was a 17 year old “cyberpunk” turned mercenary, an “edgerunner,” and you follow his story to its the very end. These types of shows have a one-of-a-kind first watch. You’ll never have these moments of thrill, pure horror, and instantly hitting “next episode,” to see how it all ends, fresh again. You’ll never rewind time to that particular self where you knew nothing else. I definitely don’t regret finishing it though. I can’t rate this on a scale, but it hurt like nothing else.
In the final scenes, a peculiar song plays: “I couldn’t wait for you to come and clear the cupboard.” (spoilers)
Every Edgerunners fan knows the unadulterated sorrow of this song. Still recovering from my binge of it, I see the devastating scenes in my head all over again. I practically relive them every time I hear this song and its brain numbing synth. I do love this series very much, despite the short time everyone has with it. It’s just so bittersweet, the feeling you can get from overlaying a song over a montage of all that you watched and experienced, from the power of the crew who put it all together and made these characters simply alive in your heart. Even after they die, they burn a wispy feeling deep in your chest and you can’t help but want to immortalize them in your thoughts.
Every Edgerunners fan knows the unadulterated sorrow of this song. Still recovering from my binge of it, I see the devastating scenes in my head all over again. I practically relive them every time I hear this song and its brain numbing synth. I do love this series very much, despite the short time everyone has with it. It’s just so bittersweet, the feeling you can get from overlaying a song over a montage of all that you watched and experienced, from the power of the crew who put it all together and made these characters simply alive in your heart. Even after they die, they burn a wispy feeling deep in your chest and you can’t help but want to immortalize them in your thoughts.
I really hate Saturdays. Always leaving me with regrets about homework, but more importantly: allowing me the opportunity to watch this accursed show, twining some song with the trauma of ten episodes.
Image: @gintokisimp on pixiv
Oh Emily! This is exactly how I feel when I watch K-Dramas. Those producers have perfected the concept of keeping me hooked for a long time. I am currently watching Our Universe and the main character was about to get hit with a glass bottle and then the dreaded closing music began to play. I agree with you; Saturdays are the best time to binge-watch but I rarely have the patience to wait until the weekend to watch my beloved shows.
ReplyDeleteI liked how you mentioned the importance of the ending being what “the story deserves, not what the audience longs for.” I struggle coming to terms with this. Because what do you mean she got with the stable childhood friend and not her toxic office romance when he was clearly better-looking.
There are certain dramas I mourn once I finish, just like you have with Cyberpunk; the most notable example, which I highly highly recommend you watch is 2521. It is the perfect mix of classic rom-com and drama, except it made me feel like I just watched a horror film, rightfully earning the title of K-Trauma. It is genuinely the weirdest feeling to feel hollow after watching such masterful television, but it also reminds me that I am not as stone-cold as some people say I am. For these reasons, my favorite line that you wrote was “you can’t help but want to immortalize them”—just perfection.
From the beginning of your blog all the way till the end I could not agree more. Although Saturdays are the most free day out of my week, instead of utilizing it to be productive I too often sit down to binge a show or play a game. I always use the excuse of “I worked hard last week I deserve a break” but that probably won’t happen as much if I worked before the week. Despite that, the ability to binge is so interesting, it will be the whole day until you realize that there’s no more day left, which is kind of funny to me. It shows as humans we have created this concept of time and then fully neglected it.
ReplyDeleteWhen I saw you mention Cyberpunk: Edgerunners I was taken aback. Despite my brother’s pleas, I have not yet watched the show but it has definitely made my list of “shows to watch eventually.” However I completely agree with the feeling of a “one-of-a-kind” first watch. A show that can achieve that status is, in my opinion, a well-made show. One that comes to mind is Arcane. I can go on and on about how amazing that show is, and as a result the works of art that are the fan edits, but I have never brought myself to watch it once more. This is because I know that it will never live up to the first time I was enthralled by that show.
Overall I don’t think I’ve ever related more closely with the takes from a blog and I’m really glad you chose to talk about this.
Just a couple days ago I saw a Tumblr post that stated that science fiction short stories are so efficient because you spend 15 minutes reading them and the next 5 years thinking of them. Of course, great media is supposed to stay in one’s memory for a very long time, but, in particular, shows like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners seem to have the same effect, inflicting devastating trauma on unsuspecting victims in a profoundly short amount of time. From the description of the harrowing side effects, I can only compare it to the video game Omori, where, despite its playful pastel visuals, there’s a reason why Steam lists it as 17+ and “psychological horror.”
ReplyDeleteI often find myself avoiding starting any new series or reading new books out of fear that I’ll get so terribly affected by the events of the story, and for a good reason. One unspecified school night very recently, I was up for an embarrassing amount of time reading an entire comic series when I should have definitely been sleeping (it was my finger clicking the “next” button, not me). The genre itself was nothing particularly noteworthy—the only container I can reasonably fit it in is “fluff”—but the setting was what really shook me. The characters lived more or less human lives, but inside a sealed habitat dome in a radioactive wasteland United States; it’s first revealed offhandedly in minute visuals or passing conversations, but becomes a key part of the characters’ backstories and motivations. I went to sleep that night pondering the implications of this, and, after coming home from school, woke up from a 5 p.m. nap genuinely thinking I was going to die and the world was going to end. TL;DR: never again.