Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was a depression-fest because its writer is ‘from Poland and people in Poland are sad. They are born sad, they die sad, so I just wanted to make the whole world sad’

I’m always very skeptical of attempts to tie particular themes in literature and film to some sort of ineffable national character. Surely nations are too strange, large and varied to be reduced to something quintessential and eternal. Surely they’re too much changeable beasts of history to possess any attribute that can endure and speak across centuries and millennia. Surely you can’t just say ‘series X is like this because people from Y are like this’.

Except Edgerunners. Edgerunners is sad because Polish people are sad. QED.