>>150200547
Eh, good points, but I feel like I have an answer as to why the megacorps stuff doesn't seem so oppressive. It's all to do with our perspective: 90% of our time in the show is spent with middle class teenagers, people whose (corpo) parents can afford to put them in decent schools, and the various tech and social maladies that manage to reach them. For us, that would be stuff like drunk driving, cyberbullying, and school shootings. Obviously, what adults and poor people have to deal with gets way worse, and we do see some of that with many of Batman's corpo villains. But I think the implication is that living standards are worse than we're lead to believe, we just don't see how bad it gets except in glimpses.
I compare it to Alita: Battle Angel, which did a fantastic job of starting out with the setting seeming like this almost utopian melting pot where even people who lose limbs can be made whole again, because we're seeing it through the eyes of a "newborn" in a teenage body who's hanging out with other teenagers. Then, over the course of the movie, we're slowly introduced to how fucked up society has become; the violence even penetrates the kid bubble on one occasion.
You could also look at the OG Pokemon games, where the story in the background is, "Organized crime performing illegal animal experiments takes a research facility/corpo HQ hostage and eventually produces a bioweapon," while the vast majority of players are focused on the main story's sports glory narrative.
But, again, a lot of cyberpunk pushes the dystopian elements beyond their logical conclusions for groady points. It's all based on shit like mid-century American slums and housing projects, 19th century company towns, and Kowloon Walled City, and eventually everyone gets fed up with the circumstances in these places that one thing or another ends them. The boot stamping on your head wears out.
