Assuming
Everill and
KillLaCam are still interested about the whole Katana thing:
The Link Everill posted made me do a deep dive into the thing, after doing some research i ended up in a one hour long group conference with these people:
They have a pretty big community on discord and we had a very nice conversation.
The short of it is: no, bringing a katana to a gunfight is not racist in the least and saying so is wrong.
The slightly longer version is: "A katana in that context is a cultural identifier, for it to be considered racist or racially stereotyped in a bad way it would need to come with a lot of extra baggage and it would have to be very specifically contextualized in a racist way. The fact of bringing a Katana to a cyber-futuristic gun fight doesn't signify that the person is stupid, but rather that he/she can hold their own even with seemingly impossible odds. To be considered racially charged it would have to be in the context of showing or mocking how clearly stupid this person is by making that choice, in the context of the narrative itself. Even then it would need extra baggage in a very spiecific way."
Anyway, they got interested in this whole thing and at the end of the group call they were talking about the possibility of making a Cyberpunk dedicated episode of their podcast and such, so if anyone is interested i guess give them a follow ^_^
Peace.
P.S. If there are asianera members in this thread i'd love for them to chime in with their takes on this thing, or to shoot me a PVT.