TLDR: I finished a new video essay about themes in Cyberpunk: 2077 (and, well, the genre of Cyberpunk in general really) that's kind of a follow up to last year's Edgerunner's video essay. A lot of people got upset that I mentioned political themes in that one and I was confused, since the genre is inherently political. This is my response:
So, last year I made a video essay about Cyberpunk Edgerunners - I talked about the idea of fear in the genre of Cyberpunk and how fear of the future is a constant theme in the genre, and at one point I got really choked up talking about kids shooting each other (I had written the script right after one of the USA's many school shootings) - it was a very small part of the essay, and I wasn't even calling for gun control or anything, but a certain group of people got SUPER upset in my comments. We got everything from people whining about me bringing up politics to people calling my partner really nasty names, and because of all the fighting in my comments, the essay blew up. To this day, it's by far my most successful video and it feels really weird that it was all the nasty comments that really skyrocketed it.
Here's that video, for reference:
I'm still pretty proud of my work on that one! (and also I really wish my other essays would do that well lol)
My friend group and I were all really confused though - how could you get mad about someone bringing up political themes in a video about something in the Cyberpunk genre? Cyberpunk as a genre is INHERENTLY political! That's like, where the whole genre comes from!
I was going to rush out and make a response right away, but I got super anxious and stressed out and canned all my notes and outlines for that video and didn't make anything for two months when I eventually made a Pokemon video essay lol.
But with Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 and Phantom Liberty coming out, I thought it was time to finally revisit the idea and come up with a response. I did a TON of research and got my script together, and my partner helped cowrite it (she's credited with editing most of my recent work, and she's so cool and brilliant and I begged her to take a bigger role with this one because my script was such a mess lol) and we did a ton of pre work...
AND THEN I GOT COVID AGAIN.
I'm all vaxed up, thankfully, but holy cow it kicked my butt. I'm not sure I was even this sick the very first time I caught it. My lungs were wrecked, I had the craziest fevers, and I was depressed and miserable.
But I still managed to get the video done and released on Phantom Liberty release day.
I'm so proud of it, and folks are saying it's my best work yet!
But no one is watching it. It's a huge flop compared to just about all the other videos on my channel, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't super bummed about it. We're doing some title and thumbnail A/B testing to see if we can get some more views and such, but things don't look great.
I'm pretty sure it's my intro - it's hard to kill the English Major in me and do a snappy, YouTube-optimized introduction, and I'm pretty sure that's what's killing this video's performance.
This one also made a bunch of people angry though, which is funny. A lot of folks looked at the title and thumbnail and then left angry diatribes in the comments section without watching the essay, which sucks lol.
Anyway, if you think exploring the idea of political (not in terms of right or left, but in existing as human being inherently political) themes in Cyberpunk, the video is linked up above in the TLDR and I would be so stoked if you checked it out.
