Originally Posted by bjon045
It is part the genre. Not the act of sex as such but sex as a vice. I.e. in Blade runner you see hookers on street corners, and Zhora is a exotic dancer replicant that works in a sex club. In GitS2 a hooker android goes crazy and murders people.

I can drive down to Sunset Blvd right now and find hookers standing on street corners, and I have heard stories of drugged up hookers going crazy and killing people. And wasn't there a prostitute serial killer in Florida in the 1990s that made international headlines? The difference in your examples is that one is a replicant and the other is an android. That's not related to sex. It's related to tech.

Originally Posted by bjon045
I'm not sure the exact point you are trying to make? Yes society may have these elements now but that doesn't mean it is not part of the definition of the genre. If the streets were clean and law and order prevailed and cyborgs were upstanding citizens - it would not be cyberpunk.

It would not be dystopia, and that's why it would not be cyberpunk. And that is the exact point I am trying to make

Originally Posted by bjon045
I see it more as humanity losing itself under the layers of technology, primarily cybernetics. Things like Virtual reality/drugs are often used to escape the reality of the world. I would consider both your examples very good examples of the cyberpunk genre.

Blade Runner and Matrix?I watched Blade Runner the year it was released and I read Neuromancer the year it was published. It never occurred to me back then that Blade Runner was cyberpunk, though it seems now that it is almost considered the definitive example. I'd agree the setting and the presentation of Blade Runner are pretty much spot on for what I think a cyberpunk dystopia would be like (Matrix is not), but where are the actual cyberpunks in that movie?