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Recently, while rewatching Cyberpunk: Edgrerunners, I came across a post by Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the Cyberpunk universe, that really changed how I saw David Martinez and the world of Night City. When we first meet David Martinez in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, he seems like a special, one-of-a-kind guy. He’s the main character trying to make it big in the harsh, futuristic world of Night City#ad. With his never-give-up attitude, self-taught skills, and a tight group of loyal friends by his side, David comes across as the classic underdog hero destined to beat the odds. As his story goes on, David’s journey takes him from small-time hustles to the big leagues of Night City – eventually catching the attention of Arasaka. They see his unique ability to handle experimental cyberware upgrades without going insane as something that makes him truly one in a million. To Arasaka, David is the perfect fit for their most advanced project.

But Edgerunners doesn’t let David stay looking like some uniquely gifted person on the heroic path to greatness. By the end, the show makes it clear that in the nightmare world of Night City, David isn’t really all that special or extraordinary. He’s just another victim of harsh circumstances, no more remarkable than the average struggling person in the city just trying to survive. His perceived “specialness” really just exposes how messed up and inhumane the city is for regular people.

At first glance, some qualities about David make him seem like he’s built differently from your average person struggling in Night City’s hellhole. For starters, he grew up with a loving mother who did her best to shield him from some of the worst depravities and struggles in the crime-ridden streets of Night City. While far from a privileged upbringing, just having a nurturing parent’s guidance put David ahead of many around him.

After being struck by tragedy, David demonstrates an ability to quickly form genuine bonds with Maine’s crew of Edgerunners. With them, he finds a tight circle of friends looking out for each other’s backs amid the chaos. This makeshift family provides David with a sense of community and belonging lacking for many loners trying to claw their way up alone in Night City.

Perhaps most pivotal for David is Maine’s mentorship, who takes David under his wing and teaches him how to survive in the city’s underworld. Having an experienced father-like figure to learn from gives David an edge that most solo operators in Night City miss out on.

But David’s biggest perceived advantage is something more innate – his strong psychological fortitude and high level of “Humanity” that allows him to withstand undergoing cutting-edge cyberware upgrades and enhancements without his mind shattering into psychosis.

As David’s story moves towards its tragic conclusion, Edgerunners makes it abundantly clear that his perceived advantages and “specialness” were little more than a skewed perspective caused by Night City’s inhumane conditions. In the final confrontation, Adam Smasher literally mocks the notion that David is anything extraordinary.

“You think you’re special cuz you’re scrappy? Don’t make me laugh.”

Even the creator of the Cyberpunk universe, Mike Pondsmith, has weighed in on this – the qualities making David seem so capable were actually very meager advantages taken for granted by those born outside Night City. Things like having one loving parent doing their best, being able to make some friends, and finding a mentor to learn from may seem remarkable in Night City … but only because the bar is set so unconscionably low.

The sad truth is that David’s upbringing was still defined by poverty and the lack of basic resources considered normal for even a middle-class household today. And whatever slim advantages his mother provided were ripped away when she died, leaving him just as exposed to the unrelenting harshness of the streets as any other struggling citizen.

So, while Arasaka viewed David as a “one-in-a-million” candidate for their insane cyberware experiments, it was only because having any fragment of human decency is an anomaly in Night City’s hellscape. As Pondsmith admits, an average person with good mental health in the real world today could likely handle cyberware augmentation better than David ultimately could in that dystopian setting.

David’s perceived uniqueness says less about any truly extraordinary qualities he possessed and more about the abysmally low standards that pass for “special” when a city has been stripped of nearly all traces of human dignity and hope. In that world, just clinging to the basic ability to form bonds and not IMMEDIATELY descend into psychotic violence made David’s modest resilience seem exceptionally rare.

To understand why David wasn’t an exceptionally gifted outlier, you have to look at the cyberpunk concept of Cyberpsychosis. It happens when someone gets too much cyberware installed in their body – their mind starts degenerating, and they lose their grip on reality and human emotions.

How susceptible someone is to falling into cyberpsychosis depends a lot on their innate level of “Humanity” – representing psychological fortitude, empathy, and ability to resist the dehumanizing effects of replacing too much of your body with machine parts. Much like how some people are more susceptible to addiction than others based on inherent mental makeup, cyberpsychosis impacts individuals differently based on their Humanity levels.

In the classic tabletop RPG that the Cyberpunk universe was initially built on – which is still considered fully canon – the idea of being immune to cyberpsychosis is thrown out the window. Instead, your character has an “Empathy” stat representing their inherent humanity and psychological fortitude. Every piece of cyberware you get installed takes a dice roll “humanity cost” that depletes your Empathy score little by little.

Once your Humanity drops low enough, you’re supposed to role-play your character, starting to seriously lose their grip, becoming dehumanized and paranoid as your character’s empathy fades away. And if your Empathy craters into the gutter, the Gamemaster takes over controlling your character entirely – you’ve officially gone full cyberpsycho at that point, transforming into an NPC villain for the group. There is no immunity, just a gradual descent into psychosis. As my colleague Frankie said it best – 

“In DnD, your player becomes more likely to succeed when they get stronger and obtain more spells. In Cyberpunk Red, the opposite is true. The more cyberware you add, and the more powerful you become, the more likely you are to meet an untimely end.”

According to Pondsmith, David rated pretty high on the Humanity scale compared to most of Night City’s population. His background of having some supportive figures let him start with a stronger mental foundation to resist the strain of getting cybernetically enhanced. For a while, his relatively robust sense of self let him take on more and more upgrades without completely losing it.

But eventually, the cybernetic overdrive and grueling physical/psychological toll caused the breakdown everyone feared. David’s innate Humanity could only shield him for so long before he fell into full-blown Cyberpsychosis like so many others.

So, while David’s resistance bought him time, the fact that he still became a cyberpsycho drives home that his “specialness” was never anywhere near immunity – just a modest buffer against the reality that Night City ultimately crushes everyone beneath its heel.

At its core, the tragedy of David Martinez’s story serves as a harsh commentary on just how abysmally low the standards of human decency and normalcy have plummeted in Night City. In an environment so thoroughly stripped of hope, empathy, and anything resembling a moral foundation, even the most modest semblances of compassion and psychological fortitude start to seem extremely special.

That’s why David’s few advantages – having one loving parent, forming friendships, and not immediately descending into psychosis – are mistaken for signs that he’s some rare outlier born for greatness.

Edgerunners’ underlying thematic statement is that, in the end, no one is truly special – just varying shades of the same tragic victims. David’s perceived “one-in-a-million” status was always an illusion.

In the end, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners drives home the fact that David Martinez was never truly the individual he appeared to be at first.

The show reinforces that in such a systematically oppressive, dehumanizing environment, no one is unique – even heroic individuals get chewed up and discarded like everyone else. David’s hubris in buying into his own mythologized individualism becomes an allegory about the dangers of fetishizing empty ideals of “specialness” in a dystopia. In a world that fundamentally strips humanity, simply being human is special enough.

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