Funnily enough, it used to be even more overt until there was substantial rewrites, which Dick roasted the hell out of.

There's an interesting dynamic in Johnny being stand-in for the noirish loner that's typical to American Cyberpunk, while Fem!V takes a role not dissimilar to Japanese Cyberpunk protags in finding themselves in a parasitic dyadic relationship with a male character that could lead to a merger.

Mesque culture is a composite of Iberia *and* LatAM. He's appropriated an ethical code that feels more reminiscent of someone like Pancho Villa or a kind of agrarian/frontier socialist that's adjacent to but still considers themselves distant to proletarians.

Isn't this an extension of his thesis about anti-universalism that he takes from Nietzsche?

markonreview.com/2022/10/07/i... There's still a tie in since Johnny's pretty clearly supposed to be at the thematic heart of the whole focus on the nature of death, since he's explicitly based on the Byronic mold and V's whole idealized martyrdom is paralleled against his reality.

Every day Sharon's obession with Cyberpunk gets vindicated lmao

Per the devs, Johnny's takes more than a little inspiration from the Byronic Hero (imo seems to be an extension of the Superfluous Man and Dostoyevsky's take on it w/ the Underground Man) markonreview.com/2022/10/07/i...

to allow players to put together their own distinct story. It's better to think of it as a tabletop game gone wild rather than a more linear, cinematic experience. Larian seems to think as much at least.

There's a great intro from Richard Wright's "The Republic for Which It Stands" which uses the cultural anxieties expressed in true crime and pulp stories to help color in the real fears of society then, which funnily enough you can still see as tropes in many modern noir works.

Alberto Toscano actually brought this up in his recent book on contemporary fascism, as a way for fascists to seize transgressive territory.

We're really just going to be relitigating the 60s for the rest of our lives

Also, while trying to track down these tidbits I half-remembered, I also found pretty interesting piece about Vincke's obsession with Ultima 7 and a remark about Disco from Larian's lead writer that's pretty revealing of a view that considers games like DE an almost distinct genealogy of RPG.

Tangent here, but there's probably an interesting history of Larian to be written and how it plays into their internal culture/design philosophy, given how heavily Vincke considers the failure of Ego Draconis + the breakout success of DOS1 to be the formative event of modern Larian

I think there's genuinely some kind of mandate to write everything as a bizarre, quippy Whedonesque way. It even appears in codex entries and notes depicting Solas's rebellion thousands of years earlier