Plenty can be said about Cyberpunk 2077’s performance on older hardware and all of the other issues this game struggled with at launch, but even the staunchest critics of CDPR’s most ambitious project to date have to admit that Cyberpunk is full of great dialogues and thought-provoking plotlines that more than justify the Polish studio’s reputation as one of the industry’s leaders when it comes to creating narrative-focused games.
Some of the very best writing in Cyberpunk 2077 is related to V’s romantic pursuits in Night City. Nearly all of them are presented as side quests, but one of them is completely different from all of the other ones. This is because it revolves around the love story of Johnny Silverhand and Rogue Amendiares, an over 60-year-old affair. Due to V and Johnny’s unusual predicament, this plotline was bound to be exceptionally complicated, but for the most part, the writers handled it very well. Nonetheless, there were some aspects of this love story that left fans scratching their heads in confusion.
10 They’re Both Over 80 Years Old
Johnny’s situation is obviously unique, and given the fact that his engram is stuck in V’s body, it makes it easy to forget his actual age, but it’s worth keeping in mind that when Cyberpunk’s main story is taking place, Johnny Silverhand is 88 years old!
Now, Rogue lived through the majority of the 21st century as a regular human (albeit aided by cyberware). Her exact age is not revealed in the game, but it is safe to assume that she is around Johnny’s age, turning the “Blistering Love” side quest into a love story of two elderly people. While there’s nothing wrong with that per se, the writers didn’t explore that concept deeply enough, making Johnny and Rogue’s dialogue and interactions feel a bit out of place.
9 V’s Voice and Body Type Don’t Matter
All of the other romance options in Cyberpunk 2077 have some specific requirements for V’s voice and body type in order for players to be able to romantically engage with certain characters. For example, in order to romance Panam, players need to be a male V, and to woo Judy, they need to play as a woman. It makes sense. After all, people in the real world have different sexual orientations and don’t just choose to get involved with whoever crosses their path.
When romancing Rogue, the question of V’s gender and voice is non-existent, though. Sure, it is not V who Rogue is romancing, but still, it’s difficult to believe that she could look past her sexuality just because of Johnny’s personality.
8 That Time Johnny Almost Bashed A Reporter’s Head In
The first job that Johnny and Rogue go on together is a raid on Arasaka tower to rescue Alt Cunningham from the corpos. They fail to reach her in time, and when they finally get to where she was being held, all Johnny finds is his lover’s lifeless body. Thompson, the accompanying reporter continued to film Silverhand coming to terms with Alt’s death.
In true Johnny Silverhand fashion, he erupts in a fit of uncontrollable anger and begins to brutally beat Thompson up. If not for Rogue stopping him, he would have surely killed the unfortunate reporter. Having seen how much Alt meant to Johnny and how emotionally unstable he can be, Rogue maintaining her feelings for the rockstar seems questionable, to say the least.
7 Johnny’s In The Body Of Rogue’s Best Merc
Before she found out about the fact that an engram with Johnny Silverhand’s personality is embedded in V’s head, the main character of Cyberpunk 2077 and Rogue Amendiares have enjoyed a fruitful business relationship.
Although the revelation of Johnny’s engram may have led to Rogue perceiving V a lot differently, the game does not go into enough detail when it comes to juxtaposing V and Rogue’s fixer-merc dynamic with her and Johnny’s love story, which in turn makes this whole plotline lose out on some interesting depth.
6 Rogue Kept Risking Her Life For Johnny
In Cyberpunk 2077, players witness Rogue risking her life for Johnny three times. Depending on their choices in the last quest, she may end up sacrificing herself for her ex-lover. Love makes us all do crazy things, but even love has its limits. After Johnny cheated on her (multiple times) and recklessly steered off-course of the plan during the Arasaka tower bombing in 2023, Rogue still pulled through for him fifty years later.
It doesn’t really make sense for a strong, independent person such as Rogue to be so forgiving and forgetful to someone who’s failed and hurt her so many times.
5 Johnny’s Love For Alt Cunningham
Aside from cheating on her multiple times, and recklessly putting her life in danger, there is another thing that should make Rogue reconsider her feelings and abandon all hope for a potential future relationship with Johnny — his love for Alt Cunningham.
The brilliant netrunner was Silverhand’s next major relationship after Rogue, and quite frankly, it seems like he cared for Alt much more than he ever did for the Queen of the Afterlife, as seen in the “Never Fade Away” main quest. As a mature, older woman, Rogue should know better than to pursue a relationship with Johnny, knowing that he’ll never love her as much as he loved Cunningham.
4 When Exactly Did They First Meet?
There seems to be some inconsistency regarding when exactly Johnny and Rogue have met. The timeline of events in Cyberpunk 2077’s universe suggests some time between 2010 and 2013, after Amendiares’s arrival to Night City.
However, during their date in “Blistering Love”, Johnny says that they met in 2015, which would make no sense, given how just a few quests before (“Never Fade Away”), he teamed up with Rogue to break Alt out of Arasaka tower. It is probably a mistake overlooked by the writers, but it’s yet another thing that doesn’t add up when it comes to Johnny and Rogue’s relationship.
3 V In The “Backseat”
By the time the “Blistering Love” side quest rolls around, players will have had plenty of chances to get familiar with how the Relic works and how the two personalities in V’s brain compete for control. Whenever one is in charge of V’s body, the other one doesn’t have any influence on their actions, but can still see, hear, and be aware of what is going on around them.
This means that during Johnny and Rogue’s date, V saw and heard everything. Maybe it’s why Rogue cut the date short as they were about to have sex. Still, the entire sequence did not make much sense in the context of V and Johnny’s predicament.
2 Johnny Is Not The “Real” Johnny And Rogue Should Know That
Even if Rogue could honestly look past the discrepancies between Johnny’s personality and V’s looks, there is one thing that should make her rethink her relationship with Johnny.
After he died in 2023, Arasaka used Soulkiller to transfer Johnny’s engram onto the Relic. The game’s lore explains Soulkiller and what it does pretty well — it destroys the initial personality, or “soul”, and creates an exact digital copy of it. It means that even though the engram talked, behaved, and had the same memories as Silverhand, it wasn’t really him. As the most experienced fixer in Night City, Rogue was probably aware of this, rendering her relationship with Johnny’s engram quite meaningless.
1 Johnny Didn’t Deserve Rogue
Rogue Almendiares was nothing but loving and helpful to Johnny Silverhand all throughout the story of Cyberpunk 2077, even though she had more than one reason to reject him altogether and stop associating herself with the fallen rockstar. He cheated on her, never appreciated her help, and realized his mistakes when it was far too late to do anything about it. On top of all that, he shamelessly asked her to accompany him on a suicide mission to Arasaka tower at the end of the game, which resulted in her death at the hands of Adam Smasher.
Many things didn’t make sense about Rogue and Johnny’s relationship, but the most jarring one of them all was the fact that Silverhand never deserved Rogue’s love in the first place.
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