Hot Take ; If Johnny Silverhand wasn’t played by likeable person like Keanu i think we would hate Johnny for things he did.
Hot Take ; If Johnny Silverhand wasn’t played by likeable person like Keanu i think we would hate Johnny for things he did.
30 Comments
I do hate Johnny
I think he is an asshole.
Nah bro, he’s an asshole but he’s an anti corpo asshole, so i love him.
Like you hated this guy?
Yeah, I don’t like Johnny. And it’s respectful to Keanu to judge the character he’s portraying by his acting, by the character. And it would be disrespectful to judge the character by who Keanu is in real life.
But this is the based part? Have you seen NCs inhabitants…
It was Morgan Blackhand who nuked the tower and killed the people. Johnny was on the mission but Morgan was the bomb planter. What V sees is a mutated version of reality due to melding the memories together of blackhand and silverhand in conjunction with Johnny’s cyberpsychotic brain and his narcissism. Still.. Perhaps not entirely innocent. The only part that is likely to be faithful to what actually happened is Adam blasting Johnny in the foyer.
Wait, y’all weren’t hating him for what he did?
People who like Johnny are weird.
As a character he is well written but personality wise he is an asshole and he is no better than Arasaka. Arasaka is actually better than Johnny since they don’t drop nukes in the middle of the city.
Hot takes that require ignoring specific dialog that strongly implies (later shown to be true) that how things played out is either not how we’re seeing it in the memory or not as the character intended, or both, are some of my favorite hot takes.
I tried playing it with other languages and it still work…
Not a hot take, it’s by design. Johnny Silverhand is a complete bastard but written to have legendary charisma, Keanu just happened to be someone who could absolutely nail the role. He’s a complete piece of shit that people can’t help but like–until you’re involved with him long enough for you to find your breaking point. Then you hate him. Just like everyone else who knows him well.
We also have a lot more hindsight on him than anyone who knew him at the time did. We’re interacting with his engram nigh on fifty years after the fact he helped detonate a nuke in AHQ, it hadn’t happened yet for everyone who knew him in life.
Johnny didn’t nuke Arasaka, Morgan Blackhand and Militech did. We see his bomb blowing up the building when Arasaka takes him away from the tower and the nuke is seen when he is already with Yorinobu.
See this is what I thought too. So I was an asshole back to him. Which means our friendship never got high enough to have the good dialog options. But like…if you want me to like him…why did you make him so unlikeable?
I think the reason I like Johnny so much is that he’s not some perfect hero, and he’s not a villain either. He’s a person of his own. Some choices he made were good, and others, not so much. I also am a sucker for an unreliable narrator, which he is in some of the flashbacks to his life. My main point is that he is flawed as a person, like we all are. His life is just way more extreme than the average person, and therefore, his choices seem way over the top or shitty at times even. I do love Keanu and his work prior to Cyberpunk, but I believe I would have the same opinion of Johnny if he was played by someone else.
Johnny isn’t likeable in the least, he’s narcissistic rockerboy who has no regards for others, like the way he treated Evelyn was disgusting and nothing can excuse that. You *can* get to understand and even to like him a bit, but he’s still a dipshit at heart.
Johnny is based corpos must die
I mean yeah
He’s a rockerboy, using incredible charisma to get away with bullshit is literally the core mechanic of the role
I think Keanu as a person, as well as his acting, absolutely had an impact on how Johnny was viewed. At least for me it did.
However, even with Keanu, Johnny is still an asshole. He is a great character because he is complex, and has clear ideologies that sometimes conflict with one another.
It is clear as the game goes on the V rubs off on him and Johnny does become slightly less insufferable. All the same, he is an asshole, but I think that’s good because it creates a more dynamic relationship with V.
Having Johnny as a voice in V’s head would not be interesting if Johnny just agreed with everything that V said.
To me, Keanu’s casting was perfect as his own charisma and charm Come through enough that we don’t just write Johnny off as nothing but a bustard and are able to experience and enjoy his story.
Without Keanu in the role, I think a lot of players would have disliked the Johnny and V’s relationship to the point of not playing the game.
Johnny rode that same line in the TTRPG lore long before 2077 brought so much fresh blood into the franchise. Keanu was great casting that captured his duality perfectly.
This is a pretty cold take. He’s literally a terrorist
its a good thing he didnt do any of it then lol
Yeah, but at least he the courage to do something.
Nope. He went in thinking he had a bomb that would level the building and had very few non bastards in it, if at all.
Militec *actually* sent a bomb to make it way worse.
Yeah, but in reality (Cyberpunk lore reality), Johnny isn’t the one who set off the nuke. He was blamed for setting it off, believes he’s the one for setting it off (getting Soul killed and staying within Mikoshi for so long, along with his own guilt and ego made him crazier then normal and gave him fake memories), he honestly can’t help being a giant piece of shit who unfortunately for anyone who has ever met him, also has ridiculous amount of charisma.
I don’t hate a good chunk of his actions, fuck corpos.
1 the memory isnt 100% for alot of reasons. them diving into johnny’s head, the chip combining what V thought went down and what johnny remembers, and also arasaka purposely trying to change everyones memory.
LASTLY. johnny already explained that even though it killed civilians, how much does it really matter compared to what arasaka does?
and HONESTLY, even with things going on today, in the real world, fbi watch list be damned… if i had a shot to end some of the things greed, capitalism, and dumb self righteous “patriots” are doing to both my country and the rest of the world… id take it and stare some victims in the face without blinking.
oh.. shit.. i got serious.. uhh wake up samurai, were almost to skyrim.
OP is not paying attention to the story and made a meme about it lols. Johnny died earlier before the nuke went off his only reason he joined the mission is to rescue Alt and Morgan blackhand was the one nuked arasaka who is in a different team.
I think it depends on how long you’ve been a fan of Cyberpunk. I’ve been a fan since R. Talsorian first published it in 1988 and it was originally set in 2017. The next edition we had was Cyberpunk 2022 that we played for years. In the first edition Johnny was just an up and coming rockerboy and Alt was his gf.
So for a few of us Cyberpunk 2077 is a trip down nostalgia lane and isn’t an entirely “new” story to us. I would have a hard time hating JS regardless who played him and honestly Keanu, though brilliant, was never how I pictured JS. Billy Idol was how I imagined Johnny Silverhand.
That is the thing with Johnny being a Rockerboy, they have so much charisma that it is hard to pin the Villain title on him. So casting Keanu was quite literally the best choice they could have made.