Cyberpunk: Edgerunners' Atrocious Subtitles Make It Almost Unwatchable
The genre and aesthetic of cyberpunk have been on the edges of the mainstream for decades thanks to stories like Neuromancer, Blade Runner, and Ghost in the Shell. It exploded in 2020, however, when CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 hit consoles. Whatever any of us might feel about that game, it was a huge deal. Recently, the promised Cyberpunk anime, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, finally hit Netflix. It is, by any metric, an absolutely gorgeous show. It has a killer voice cast in both English and Japanese. And it's almost unwatchable when you watch it with subtitles.
And no--this is not a subs-versus-dubs argument.
The world of Cyberpunk, created by Mike Pondsmith for the original tabletop role-playing game, is rich with detail, fleshed out with a brain-frying stream of slang that is just barely close enough to understand without keeping a dictionary handy. "You can't trust a corpo to pay you the eddies you earned, choom. Don't be a gonk. A real edgerunner doesn't even trust their ripperdoc. Did you check that BD?"
Let's not pretend that's very good writing, on paper, but it gets the point across: this world is so packed with slang that it might as well be another language. If you make the mistake of watching the show with subtitles on, regardless of whether the voice track is in English or Japanese, you'll leave confused unless you're intimately familiar with the game world's language because the sub track gets more of it wrong than right. When watching the English voice track on its own without subtitles, it's easy to see what a great job the actors did of mastering all of those terms and making them feel natural.
But I habitually keep subtitles on when watching TV just to keep my overall TV volume down in my apartment. Every
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