Oh man, so I can count on one hand the number of people who actually like Maiko Maeda in Cyberpunk 2077. She's a minor antagonist and former-prostitute-turned-madam whose only real role is to cause problems for her ex-girlfriend, canon romance option Judy Alvarez. Here's what I had to say about her in one of my posts:
We get very little information on them and their relationship, but it's juuuuust enough to be like catnip to me. There's clearly fundamental differences between them: Judy is a hotheaded idealist who chafes at restrictions and never looks before she leaps. Maiko is a frosty pragmatist with a cynical streak a mile wide who prefers to work within the system rather than risk her safety breaking it. These differences tear them apart, and by the time they meet in the game, forced to work together to achieve a mutual goal, it's all well-worn vitriol between them.
Maiko herself is fascinating. At the surface level, she's... well, a self-serving bitch. But dig a little deeper into the missable content in the game, and consider the context of the world she lives in, and suddenly she's a whole lot more. For example, check her easily-missed laptop, and you'll see right away that she's not over Judy at all. Other notes and files scattered around the game indicate that maybe she really does give a shit about things, she just recognizes that what little power she has is incredibly fragile, and that pushing the envelope too much is likely to backfire on her in a very deadly way.
Like it's hard to understate how much people HATE Maiko, especially players who romance Judy. In the fic-writing side of fandom, 99% of the time, if she shows up at all in a fic, it's to be a two-dimensional mustache-twirling villain. In the non-fic side, it's even worse. There are a couple different ways to end the questline involving Maiko, and one of them lets you kill her. You can probably imagine how much of a downer it is to constantly hear people gleefully describe the ways they murder one of your favorite characters.
Sorry for the wall of text lol I just have so many feelings about her and so few opportunities to express them T_T
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Oh man, so I can count on one hand the number of people who actually like Maiko Maeda in Cyberpunk 2077. She's a minor antagonist and former-prostitute-turned-madam whose only real role is to cause problems for her ex-girlfriend, canon romance option Judy Alvarez. Here's what I had to say about her in one of my posts:
Like it's hard to understate how much people HATE Maiko, especially players who romance Judy. In the fic-writing side of fandom, 99% of the time, if she shows up at all in a fic, it's to be a two-dimensional mustache-twirling villain. In the non-fic side, it's even worse. There are a couple different ways to end the questline involving Maiko, and one of them lets you kill her. You can probably imagine how much of a downer it is to constantly hear people gleefully describe the ways they murder one of your favorite characters.
Sorry for the wall of text lol I just have so many feelings about her and so few opportunities to express them T_T