The Cyberpunk Hellscape Where Your Favorite Childhood Characters Have Fully Lost It
The cyberpunk future, where the flickering neon signs are but the last gasps of a dying economy, where crime is less a problem and more a career with a promising future, and where the air is probably 40% smog and 60% corporate propaganda. Sort of makes you nostalgic for the good old days of the good ol’ console. But even more disturbing than that is the apparent complete and utter moral collapse of the video game characters we grew up with.
A City Where Nostalgia Is a Criminal Enterprise
Examine this unchecked capitalism nightmare closely, and you will find Homer Simpson sitting on a rooftop, dangerously armed, with a gun in hand and far too much ease in looking like a would-be hit man. Is Moe’s Tavern out of business? Did Marge leave him after one too many dumb stunts or death-defying lapses in judgment? Or is it, as I suspect, just a piece of cyberpunk fan art in which Homer participates, along with all of us, in a capitalistic death trip?
At the same time, Lois Griffin, once the ideal suburban mother, seems to have completely forsaken family values and now lives in what can only be called a cyberpunk sex dungeon. Indeed, your favorite cartoon mom has determined that if society is going to go to hell, she might as well profit from the process.
Consider Tom from Tom & Jerry. The cat who used to spend his existence in harmless slapstick chases. Now? He’s lurking on a rooftop, staring into the neon abyss like a mafia enforcer contemplating his next job. Somewhere along the way from cartoonish chases to crime, he stopped caring about catching that mouse and started caring about getting paid.
When the Ghostbusters Drive a Questionable Hotdog Cart
Our favorite characters going rogue is one thing, but now even cherished institutions are being transformed into dystopian nonsense. Take, for example, the yellow car that’s rolling around in the streets. It looks just like the Ghostbusters vehicle should look, except it’s somehow now a glorified food truck with a giant hotdog on top.
Indeed, Ghostbusters has now become a corporation. No longer are its characters engaging spectral entities in battle; they’re engaging in a pie fight in Manhattan. This is what happens when a brand is inflated beyond all sense and reason. And either you embrace their embrace of the “iconic Ghostbusters logo” or you don’t. And it’s not free if you’re engaging in any kind of embrace, though we couldn’t, in good conscience, encourage either the embrace or the pies.
Even Waldo Has Had Enough
Then there’s Waldo. The eternal wanderer. The man we’ve spent decades trying to find. And you know what? He’s been right here this whole time, camouflaging himself in the neon jungle, mixing into the madness.
You must ponder, what is the deal? Did he get entangled in some illegal operation? Did he offend some powerful person? Or did he come to the realization that if he remained in a single location for any duration, someone was bound to ensure he remained on the up-and-up with the IRS?
However it may be, this is precisely where a runaway would come to be swallowed up.
A Future Where Even Your Favorite Characters Sell Out, Go Rogue, or Get Lost
Listen, the cyberpunk genre has always been intended to serve as a cautionary tale. Its dystopian stories warn about what unchecked capitalism, authoritarian governance, and tech obsession might lead to someday. But what I think this series is trying to do, and what makes it worthwhile, is to get at the very real question of: what if it all happened tomorrow instead of some distant day after next?
This is a world where childhood icons are not just victims of dystopia, they actually thrive in it. They do not resist the corporate overlords or lead rebellions. They run black-market operations and commit felonies, hustling their way through the madness like everyone else. At best, they are doing what workers in all sectors of the economy are doing, trying to keep the U.S. economy from tipping into a second Great Depression.
If you ever find yourself reminiscing about the past, when animated shows were pure and companies didn’t have such a tight grip on our lives, know this: The cyberpunk future has even made Waldo give up.
