We Liked: That It’s Gory, But Doesn’t Revel in It
This might be a weird thing to say about a show where people repeatedly explode into splotches of red and crumpled piles of viscera and cybernetics, but for such a violent show, Edgerunners is surprisingly tasteful in its approach to hyperviolence. Despite its repeated presence in the series, whether it’s the deaths of swaths of background characters or for the deaths of, by the end of the show, almost the entirety of the main cast, violence in the series never feels like it’s taken too far for the sake of edginess.
If anything, there’s a point to Edgerunner’s approach to violence being so overexaggerated—like we said, people don’t just get shot and keel over, they are blown open, teared by hails of gunfire, exploded as firearms are thrust into their bodies at close range. But as gory and as brutal as it is, deaths come quick and are rarely lingered on. The show doesn’t feel like it’s slowing down to show you suffering and blood spurts to just go “look at us, we’re a gritty streaming service anime that can get away with this for no reason at all,” but instead making a point about the harsh world that its characters operate. No one in Night City is special enough to get a lingering, heroic, “perfect” death—people blink in and out of existence regardless of status, gone in horrifying instants.
