This shit is pretty unambiguously pretentious and I don’t like it. But I don’t really hold it against the show. It isn’t just the creators jerking off. Opinionated metafiction is one convention in a set of conventions that Bebop calls upon, then shows us through the eyes of a cast that doesn’t hail from the same set of conventions — this technique is a large part of why I like the way Bebop does references so much.

The aforementioned set of conventions is, despite the year in which Bebop came into being, modernism, and it’s easy to understand why the show feels so modernist. Many of Bebop’s references and remembrances hail from the early 20th century, modernism’s heyday. I don’t intend to do a lecture on modernism here — probably we’ve done that already, and you’re sure to find it in the archives. I mean to talk about one general trend within modernism that, though it’s been present in Bebop since the beginning, began to stand out to me at about the midway point.

It’s funny, actually, to find this trend in a show like Bebop. A good deal of science fiction is, as William Gibson put it once, agnostic with regard to technology. The fictional future isn’t unambiguously good or bad — in fact, because it has people in it, it remains entirely ambiguous. Not so much in Cowboy Bebop, whose characters are indeed complex, but whose future is pretty grim. We’ve got a ruined Earth and a sequence of colonies afflicted by relative squalor. If I remember correctly, the only characters we’ve seen wearing expensive clothes have been criminals and warp gate CEOs.

The modernists, too, were nostalgic. Eventually the postmodernists would come along and dispel that, would claim that the past was never any fuller or richer than the present and we only pretended it was, but sometimes Bebop doesn’t acknowledge this. It’s funny because Bebop is nostalgic for a better past that hasn’t happened yet, but it evokes the mood of modernist works so well that it almost has to be.

tl;dr: Bebop’s present sucks and its past was better. I’ll review how each episode from 12 to 19 either reinforces or riffs upon this. Some episodes do both.

Sessions 12-13 (“Jupiter Jazz”)

Setting: a grungy city in which there are only men. These episodes are fairly straightforward, as there’s a lot of Spike angsting over his lost girlfriend and confronting his friend-turned-nemesis. Whenever Spike gets an opportunity to chase after his past, he takes it, consequences be damned.

Interestingly, it’s here that Cowboy Bebop (in all its Americana) chooses to nod toward war fiction.

When war fiction’s nostalgic, it tends to pine for the time before the war in question became inevitable, the time before the world went mad. For obvious reasons, I suppose.

Not so, in this case. Instead we get a character who seems not to mind having been shot at, as it meant he could participate in the camaraderie he holds in such high regard. He thinks of the past as better, though his is a past that might have killed him. It’s not the same, certainly, but it’s a little reminiscent of war propaganda, quite a lot of which coincided with the modernist days (because, you know, imperialism and World Wars). We don’t really see the opposition, nor do we get any political background; we see one group of soldiers shooting at nothing, dodging explosions with relative ease, and kicking back in camp. It’s creepy, and, while Gren does maintain the nostalgia thing in an odd way, he’s creepy as a consequence.

Session 14 (“Bohemian Rhapsody”)

This episode does and doesn’t invert the trend. On one hand, Hex was at the top of his game in his youth. He was a genius programmer and a chess prodigy, and now he’s a senile old man. On the other hand, the entire episode relates the much-delayed resolution of Hex’s striking back at the sorts of things he had to worry about when at the forefront of space innovation. He may well be happier in his senility. His biggest concern now is losing at chess. And death, maybe, though he doesn’t seem the sort to ruminate upon his own mortality. His happiness may be of an empty or involuntary variety, but that doesn’t seem to bother him any.

Session 15 (“My Funny Valentine”)

A strange episode for the purposes of this post, as Faye has no past, in a way. She remembers only the grim universe of the present, in which twenty-year-old amnesiac women are played for all they’re worth, even when they don’t own the clothes on their backs. And yet she retains a certain affection toward Whitney. Con man though he may be, he was briefly a part of her life, and she feels she owes him something for that.

Or we could think of it this way: Whitney was always lying to Faye, but she experienced a brief period of happiness, and that was his doing. This doesn’t let him off the hook, by any means; he’s still an asshole. But she was happy. But…this is complicated.

Session 16 (“Black Dog Serenade”)

This episode is more postmodern (maybe the last was, too). Yes, Jet was happier in the past, and now he’s something of a lonely old man. We learn here that some of his fond memories depend upon fabrications, that in fact his partner was responsible for the loss of his arm. Like Faye, any nostalgia he might express for a past happiness dependent upon his limited point of view or his lack of information would feel somewhat inauthentic. This sort of story cuts to the heart of nostalgia, and I appreciate that Bebop takes the time to do this even while weaving about itself a distinctly modernist vibe.

Session 17 (“Mushroom Samba”)

I can’t decide whether this episode isn’t terribly relevant to my present purposes, or whether it’s so relevant that I experienced an initial sensory overload that led me to conclude that it isn’t terribly relevant.

It continues an occasional, distinctly un-nostalgic theme, a general disdain for the drug culture of the 60s and 70s. Users of traditionally illegal drugs in Bebop aren’t terrible people, necessarily, but they’re depicted as pretty ridiculous. We saw this back in episode 14, too. It’s a stronger indictment if you choose to include all the Red Eye stuff as part of this.

It nods toward colonialism. See the screencap above; “Western World Development” makes me think of nothing so much as Manifest Destiny.

Giant flying blonde white woman bringing the light of pastoralism to the brown-skinned peoples of the frontier! Except instead of a giant flying blonde white woman it was a bunch of white dudes with guns and smallpox, and instead of bringing the “light” of pastoralism they just killed a lot of people. It’d be hard to sympathize with anyone who felt particularly nostalgic about this.

In “Mushroom Samba,” though, space-Kansas is where two or three blaxploitation movies collide. I thought there’d be something to say about this (sub)genre having been removed from its usual urban setting — nostalgia for the city, in other words — but, as it turns out, there’s a western (sub-)subgenre within. Suffice to say that the space-frontier isn’t wholly dominated by white people.

I guess this episode is an inversion, if it’s anything.

Session 18 (“Speak Like a Child”)

If not for the crazy space shuttle business of the following episode, I would’ve ended this post here, as, after a whole handful of variations, it brings the earnest nostalgia back. For all intents and purposes, our heroes spend the entire episode (hilariously) chasing after the means of unlocking Faye’s past, the time when she was happy. Because, remember, her present troubles began only a short while after she awoke from suspended animation. Arguably they began immediately after she awoke, or a little earlier, as she was the victim of a scam all along. And, again, that’s all she knows. She’s lost the good times completely and irrevocably.

We also get a 20th-century-tech otaku. Nice.

Session 19 (“Wild Horses”)

Easy. The space shuttle, one of the earliest reusable spacecraft, saves the day! And with an old man at the helm, no less.

Coda

Nothing in Bebop is simple — clearly, as it took me over a thousand words to justify the statement “Cowboy Bebop is nostalgic,” and to try to finesse my way through those instances in which it doesn’t entirely apply. The variations are the point, though. I’m happy to have discovered that the sense of nostalgia about the show doesn’t come across as an accident or a reference to a bygone movement simply for the sake of reference. What we get instead is a kind of dialogue between the time in which the show was made and the period that it nods toward so often — another example of Bebop’s catechismal quality, its talking to itself.

I wanted to get around to writing about the characters before I knew too much about them, hence my stopping myself before that big two-part thing in the middle and forcing myself to do this post (“forcing” because, goddammit, Bebop is a hard show not to watch). Is that strange? Maybe. I think it might help me track both changes in the characters and changes in how I feel about them.

I expected something like Star Trek, the original space western, in which the core cast isn’t really who you’re invested in on an episode-to-episode basis. In the original series especially, there’s never much at stake for the Enterprise crew. You know that the last five minutes of any given episode will bring them back to the status quo. As a consequence, you’re often invested in the “side” characters, those who show up for a single episode and then disappear, as these are the people whose planets are destroyed and such. These are the characters strong enough to carry a movie. Star Trek is long enough that this begins to change a little; there exist episodes largely about the bridge crew, and it’s hard not to become attached to characters after 79 episodes. But, generally speaking, it’s quite episodic.

Bebop isn’t like that. Episodic it is, in a way, but it’s much more of an adventure through the identities of its protagonists. They haven’t changed dramatically as of yet, but this is the sort of show in which the magic happens in the silences between (and sometimes during) fights. Spike exercising at the beginning and the end of the first episode. Jet speaking with his former lady friend in her bar — the “camera” jumps over to her and away, over and away, as if he can’t keep his eyes on her — and his reconciliation at the end of episode ten not so much with her as with himself. We care about some of the one-off characters, but so many of them are cliches for the sake of being cliches (this is not a criticism; more on this later). Mostly we’re watching to see, which is to say that I’m watching to see, what the events of each episode do to our heroes.

Again, if you’re tracking change, it helps to have a place to start. I realize that eleven episodes constitute quite a broad starting point, but only since the ninth have we been able to say that the gang’s all here. Blame the show for introducing Ed so late.

The team mom

Superficially, Jet seems like the manliest of the gang. He’s got an epic beard — a beard so epic that he has eyebrows under his eyes. He has a metal arm that may actually not be quite as muscular as his real arm. He’s always making uncomfortable comments about women.

But despite that, the most traditionally feminine activities on the ship are relegated to him. He’s the cook and the nurse. The kids make a mess and he cleans up after them. In fact, he seems to live for Spike, in a strange sort of way. I don’t mean that he’s attracted to the dudes, but when there are bounties to be had, he usually plays a peripheral role in acquiring them. He leaves the Jeet Kune Do and the dogfights to Spike; he stays out of the spotlight so Spike can have it all. One wonders whether the Bebop crew might be a little wealthier if Jet took charge more often, but that isn’t his style. He’s the medic — he doesn’t solve problems, he fixes them.

Just as planned, I’d say. Cowboy Bebop has this tendency to render its characters considerably less cool (and somewhat more likable) than they seem, and Jet might be the most obvious example of that trend.

The prodigal son

Spike is a trying character, one whom it’s possible to have a fairly strong reaction toward or against. This applies to we the viewers, I suppose, but it’s especially true of those he encounters throughout his adventures. A few characters admire him (Rocco Bonnaro), some come to like him (V.T.), but quite a few are annoyed by him. In fact, those who come to like him are often annoyed by him.

In that sense, he’s really not an unusual anime protagonist.

I thought I might have trouble with this show because it wouldn’t be “anime” enough. This was a dumb thing to worry about, it turns out; for all its film references, it’s quite firmly rooted in the animated tradition. We know Spike Spiegel. He’s that hero who tends to be rather lucky with regard to his own personal safety, and certainly possessed of several degrees of competence, but who has a knack for getting himself into trouble. Jet’s warning Spike not to gamble (because he’d win too much, and so cause problems with the casino management) seems like a nod to this. He’s a little Lina Inverse, a little Vash the Stampede, and a little Justy Tylor.

The action in many episodes amounts to a conflict of fortunes. Often Spike must leverage his considerable survival ability against his unmatched talent for landing in bad situations. As Jet stays out of the way most of the time and Faye spends the first fifteen minutes of each episode doing her own thing, that frenetic action that Bebop is known for generally springs from Spike himself.

I like him. I like that character. So does anyone in the show who gets to know him. That’s what makes him the prodigal son — he isn’t exactly “prodigal” in the dictionary sense, but, like the son of the parable, people cut him a break.

We know that he was involved with organized crime at one point. The way he talks about it with Vicious leads me to believe that he did some not-very-nice things. He’s also pretty good at getting his marks killed (or chasing after marks who get themselves killed), and so missing out on some hefty bounties. Nobody holds grudges about this, though. I certainly don’t, but I have the convenience of being a viewer. I still get to eat when Spike messes up.

One could suggest that the rest of the crew should drop Spike off somewhere and go about their lives, but that doesn’t seem at all reasonable. He is quite useful, when he gets around to it. And, true to his name (“spiegel” = “mirror”), he’s always able to make people reflect upon themselves, to self-interrogate. He’s got a variation upon that healing aura that we’ve learned to associate with slice of life protagonists. He follows his material errors with redeeming emotional acts. I don’t mean that he’s always nice to people — he isn’t — but the way he relates to people is generally of benefit to both the secondary characters and the viewers.

We could debate whether the show’s “about” Spike, but I definitely see him as the glue that holds it together.

The middle child

I hesitate to assign concrete ages to the members of this metaphoric family (pay no mind to the fact that the prodigal son of the parable was the younger of two). When I call Faye the middle child, I mean that she doesn’t stand out much, which is what makes her stand out.

Alright, yes, there are the bright yellow hotpants, the bewbs, and, between them, the improbably narrow waist. And we know as soon as she’s introduced that she’s by no means useless, however much she chooses to bum around thereafter. She has the skills required to remain on the run from both the law and various(?) criminal elements. On a mostly unrelated note, she’s also the reason I chose Japanese audio over English — as good as the dub may be, it suffers from a severe lack of Megumi Hayashibara.

But she lacks specialization. She hasn’t the beatdown ability of Spike nor the hackmagic of Ed. She may well be cleverer than either of them, but Spike and Jet are plenty capable of formulating reasonably effective plans. There’s something to be said for feminine wiles in the gritty world of bounty hunting, but otherwise she seems not to bring much in the way of unique skills to the party — seems because we don’t actually see her do that much.

So she acts cool, in every sense of the word. She won’t get her hands dirty chasing after bounties unless she knows there’s a tangible and substantial reward in it for her. She acts cool when facing down gunmen and negotiating with a dangerous casino magnate — actually it isn’t a negotiation, but she’s cool enough that her lack of leverage hardly seems to matter.

In any other show she’d be the resident Action Girl. In Cowboy Bebop she eats dog food.

Again, Bebop has a tendency to peel away coolness. I’m not impressed when Jet’s a misogynist or Faye taunts the dog. But these are the things that make me believe in these characters. And with Faye there’s an added critical angle — often in actiony, generally male-oriented, “cool” art the so-called Action Girl really isn’t. If Faye’s not going to be allowed to show her particular strengths, then fine, she’ll give a big middle finger to the world and sunbathe while the manly men chase after the bounty. Because that’s what they want, isn’t it? Never mind that she was integral to the resolution of the fourth, seventh, and ninth episodes. Never mind that she’s always carrying half a dozen Bond gadgets in the form of feminine accessories. She’ll be just over here if you need her.

The baby

The oldest and youngest children in a given family occupy unique positions. Often the oldest is saddled with expectations, asked to serve as an example, and is rewarded with authority over younger siblings and a certain degree of freedom — this would be Spike, or Jet, if you don’t want him to be the parent.

The youngest has a kind of immunity, an ability to get away with things. The youngest remains the baby in the eyes of anyone old enough to remember them as an infant. I haven’t known her that long, but this seems to be the general gist of Ed.

Trope-wise, Ed’s the cyberpunk kid. Not the young female badass, mind; that’s a different character. I mean she’s the kid who likes computers and such, who knows some not-quite-socially-acceptable tricks involving networks and AIs, but who doesn’t seem to have much direction in life quite yet. Maybe she’ll grow up to partake in cyberpunk-esque intrigues, but now’s the time for having fun. She’s kind of a female, less broody Bobby Newmark, a.k.a. Count Zero — she muscles her way into the adult world of the Bebop, but she doesn’t know what she’s in for.

That makes her a nice alternative point of view. And it’d seem that, until she is fully involved in things, she has that aforementioned immunity. She eats the monster that stalks the ship throughout the eleventh episode, in a scene of pure comic anime ridiculousness. Or, alternately, maybe she’s the innocent character put in a position where she’s likely to see horrible things, the character whose innocence we’d protect if we could.

So then maybe she’s…

…On second thought, this post is long enough already.

And your little dog, too

I get a sense of dread when a story introduces a dog.

I mean, I rather like animals. They’re also useful. I mentioned the dog food scene already — you can use a pet to humanize characters, whether the characters feed their pets or tell their pets they’ll have to work for their food. Humans have pets. It’s an especially human thing to do.

But dogs are easy targets. Bad things happen to dogs. There’s the Old Yeller contingency, and sometimes villains go after dogs to show how evil they are.

So I cringe a little whenever Ein’s onscreen. I try not to get attached.

Goddammit!

I offer you a quote from Ghostlightning, whose ongoing effort to engage with Cowboy Bebop’s love-remembering elements is one of the most meticulous and goddamn heroic blog activities I’ve ever seen:

We won’t find anything in Cowboy Bebop that has a reference that figures so significantly in the narrative so as to be the primary source of meaning and value. Cowboy Bebop can be fully enjoyed not knowing a single reference or allusion the show is making.

“A Masterpiece of Remembering Love: Cowboy Bebop; Episode 01 ‘Asteroid Blues’”

I’m certain that’s true. I’m enjoying Cowboy Bebop quite a lot despite being lazy about music and film (as mentioned before). I might be intimidated by the prospect of doing a series like this at the same time as Ghostlightning — walking in the shadows of giants and all, though he of all bloggers wouldn’t want anyone to feel that way — if not for my being reasonably confident that I won’t cover too much of the same ground. This is my first viewing of the show, for one thing. And, where GL’s Bebop posts are love songs to the act of remembering love, I like to write about and fangasm over structural points of interest and masterful acts of manipulation moments of emotional resonance.

Good thing, too. For someone like me, Cowboy Bebop is downright meaty.

As I began, I remembered a time when cartoons from Japan were exciting and alluring and new. A very specific time, I mean. I was in the fourth grade — this was before Cowboy Bebop existed, incidentally — and somehow or another I’d managed to acquire the first few episodes of the Record of Lodoss War OVA from the local video rental place. What I remember most from that viewing isn’t Lodoss War itself (which I had to rewatch to recall in any detail), but the trailers preceding it, complete with cheesy narrator (“This isn’t animation…it’s JAPANAMATION!”). I can’t remember what specifically was previewed. Things like Bubblegum Crisis and Project A-Ko, I guess. But I remember that these trailers must have sampled the most stylish, violent and/or sexy scenes from their respective shows or movies. I was nine or ten years old and infinitely impressed. I interpreted the trailers as a promise.

Then, some years later, I finally did get into anime, and my tastes leaned well away from the realities of the kinds of shows previewed on the Lodoss War VHS tapes. But there was still that promise. Cowboy Bebop seems to have remembered it. In many ways it’s the un-show I constructed to illustrate “anime” in my mental dictionary.

The second thing I noticed was the pacing.

The pacing is weird, which is to say that it’s a little atypical of anime. Often you’re lulled into believing that you’re watching a movie, and you’re surprised when the ending theme kicks in after 22 minutes. Speaking purely practically, it’s a damn effective way of getting people to keep watching.

But it can be disorienting if you come in with expectations. You aren’t always watching people talk or fight or otherwise interact. Sometimes there are no people onscreen, and during many of these scenes the characters don’t bother interjecting via voice-over. There may not even be any music.

The first episode especially shows us a lot of space.

I found myself wondering about the point of it all. It reminded me of the first Star Trek movie — you know, the one in which there’s about ten minutes of plot and 300 hours of pretty lights and spaceships moving really slowly.

That might be an unfair comparison, but I don’t mean it as a criticism. The spaceships-moving-slowly thing works so much better in Bebop. It doesn’t take up that much time, in the grand 26-episode scheme. And it occurs to me that, when I said that Bebop shows us space, I probably should’ve said that it shows us spaces.

Environment (visual, aural) is important in this show in a way that it wasn’t in the Star Trek movie. A comparison with the original Star Trek TV run would be more apt (though not perfect; I’ll get to that when I talk about the cast). Place is a force or “character” here, though not in the same way as in, say, Kino’s Journey. Here it’s less immediately, directly powerful and far more talkative.

If, like me, you pay more attention to the scenes and their transitions than to the dialogue (resulting in many a rewind, let me tell you), you might get the impression that Cowboy Bebop is a show in constant conversation with itself. I don’t mean that it’s “meta” (that it talks to relevant things outside itself), which certainly it is (and does). I mean that its consistency reminds me of an active thought process or an internal monologue. It’s a little like catechism, in other words, albeit considerably cooler.

In the first seven episodes, I notice at least two distinct models for scenes in conversation. There seem to be others, but the following are the most sustained and least personal, and I can make the strongest cases for them.

Q. Does [x] have value? A. Yes.

Ghostlightning again:

I hesitate to use the term “middlebrow” because it is generally used negatively or even derisively, for people or works who “put on highbrow airs” while remaining populist and accessible. Put in a clumsier way, it’s a kind of pretentiousness. But I will use it here for Cowboy Bebop, not only because it has excellent episodes “to balance” lowbrow content as one would classify “Heavy Metal Queen” [episode seven] of being, but rather because the execution of this episode is on a high level.

“Raising the Brow: B-Movie Goodness in Cowboy Bebop 07 ‘Heavy Metal Queen’”

I sympathize quite a lot with the use of “middlebrow” as a nonjudgmental descriptor, but maybe Cowboy Bebop resists such classifications altogether. It almost has no choice but to do so. Some of the creators seem to be the sorts of people who set out to make “art,” but they’re working in a medium that gets panned in the evening news as a gathering of pornographers (and, remember, Bebop aired in 1998). Several avenues of argument are available to people in that position. They could try to topple the canon, at which point all art is low; they could try to expand the canon, at which point more art is high. They could redefine the canon, even. But the real problem is that people talk and think about art in these terms to begin with — that people are inclined to distrust any medium that isn’t 400 years old, and, when such a medium finally earns some “legitimacy,” that its practitioners insist upon rewarding themselves by setting up new divisions of their devising and under their control. The child abused by its parent responds by abusing smaller children.

Cowboy Bebop looks into the eyes of those with brows lowered and those with brows raised high. I don’t think it seeks a compromise so much as it shaves its own brows clean away.

Nowhere early in the show is this more explicit than in the fifth episode, which juxtaposes, in subsequent scenes, an opera house and a convenience store, (religious) opera and porno.

There’s much to be gleaned from the contrast here, but what interests me most is that, by the time all’s said and done at each of these locations, the lines between them have been blurred. The opera house becomes a stage for smut, location of rather messy murder and fanservice vehicle Faye Valentine (who is more than that, yes, but she is a fanservice vehicle). The convenience store with its racks of porn hosts a meeting of old friends the likes of which you might find in a Hemingway story, a brand of narrative with the cultural seal of approval. In any given story there is pondering and pandering. Cowboy Bebop doesn’t try to obscure that by arranging its brows in a particular way; it throws its trenchcoat open and invites you to look.

Oh, also: that fight in the Chartres Cathedral facsimile.

Among other things, Chartres Cathedral is an enduring example of French Gothic architecture, a demonstration of the power of symbols cited by Joseph Campbell, and a launchpad for philosophizing about art, art-making, and authority for Orson Welles and other filmmakers.

Spike Spiegel blows it up with a hand grenade.

Q. Does [x] belong to [y]? A. You’d be surprised.

Cowboy Bebop is really quite American, in the United States sense (apologies in advance if you object to the U.S. appropriation of a word that means two continents; for my purposes, it’s just convenient). You’ve got things like long-distance trucking and hitchhiking, staples of American literature and film thanks to the breadth of the country and the highway system.

You’ve got a Mexican/Tijuanan cantina, “American” by virtue of its being little more than a site of activity for people who aren’t necessarily Mexican (i.e. Asimov Solensen), as in film westerns. (Incidentally, “El Rey” is the name of a fictional town inhabited by American expatriates.)

And you’ve got the music — jazz, blues, occasionally metal. The first in particular represents a mashup of cultural traditions from throughout the world, but it’s generally thought to be distinctly American because the U.S. is where the synthesis happened.

Jet Black is a fan of jazz and blues. We can understand this. He’s (kind of) a cool guy, for one thing. He’s an adult, and he doesn’t seem to be young anymore at that. Lacking the left arm with which he was born, he’s clearly seen and done some things. We’re not surprised that this is the character who dreams about Charlie Parker quoting Goethe.

He makes a comment about singing the blues in the womb or something. But in seven eleven episodes we don’t see him act upon that. He’s lived the blues, sure, but he never gets around to playing them.

In Cowboy Bebop, this is the face of the blues:

Yep, a little white kid. He’s in the news and everything. This image is made jarring by its providing a source for the soundtrack of Spike’s weird episode-opening daydreaming, and then for Jet’s deferring to the kid’s harmonica mastery.

We learn as the sixth episode carries on that this isn’t technically a kid. He “suffers” from a peculiar kind of illness. But despite the episode’s being called “Sympathy for the Devil,” we’re never really shown how hard it is to live as he does, apart from one scene in which his parents/guardians die. Mostly he just makes life difficult for people around him — in a literal way, he is the blues, or he brings them. Being the episode’s titular devil, he might interface with the devil stuff in blues mythology, but I don’t know much about that.

It’s worth bearing in mind that, though I may be inventing a correlation between screencaps here, the whole sixth episode has to do with expectations defied. I’m not going forward without prompting.

Now, how to untangle this?

I suppose it’s partly cautionary. In other words, be careful when making assumptions about the art that a particular person might find enjoyable, applicable, or otherwise useful. Maybe the corollary is that paying attention to the art that a person actually, actively finds useful can tell you something about them, but I’m not so sure about that. Taste is slippery.

I tend to think of it as a nod toward Cowboy Bebop’s appropriating as much as it does from the U.S. and elsewhere. Art may have cultural boundaries in terms of the knowledge it requires of you, but it has no physical boundaries, especially in a setting including both the internet and FTL travel. Jazz doesn’t belong to the United States (or to cool people, or whomever), nor do trucking or hitchhiking as tropes (or as activities, really). The jazz song is an object that transcends physicality and ownership, whatever the IP barons would like you to believe. You hear it and it’s yours. It doesn’t matter if you’re Charlie Parker or a little white kid or a Japanese anime director.

Much like a Haruki Murakami novel, Cowboy Bebop exemplifies or performs this idea even when the scenes aren’t riffing off of each other to that effect. This is almost inevitably what happens as you watch; unless you’re familiar with every culture and every nuance thrown into the mix, you’re appropriating things or being asked to — and I always did appreciate stories that ask you to learn something.

You may wonder how I ended up with a sample group of seven episodes here. Post length, partly. And also because these won’t exactly be “episodic” posts — the episode progression won’t entirely determine the order in which I do things. I’ll have points to make. There will be overlap.

Next up: episodes 1-7 again, plus 8-11, and characters. I may do something about Gibsonian hackermancy, too. We’ll see.

When I write about these things, I’d very much prefer to focus on what I like about them. And I fully expect to like them overall. Enough people like them. In fact, quite a lot of people whose opinions I hold in high regard (mostly because they tend to like the same general sorts of things I do) like these things.

Cowboy Bebop, though, requires some qualification. It might help you to know a few things about my art preferences and foreknowledge before we begin (and, once we’ve begun, I’ll have other things to talk about). After all, the show enjoys a strange sort of cultural cache here in the west. It’s one of the very, very few Japanese cartoons that non-fan Americans are allowed to watch; it’s the absolute favorite of many a film-snob-type fan.

Not super-long ago, tight compadre OGT related himself to the problem thus:

… I manage to evade the extremes of opinions about Cowboy Bebop: I neither worship it as the feather of truth that the hearts of other anime must be weighed against, nor do I revile it as some kind of impure anime too tainted by Western influences to qualify as “true anime”.

“Cowboy Bebop THE REWATCHENING”

The problem being that, very generally speaking, we are kind of expected to feel one way or the other about it. Or maybe it’s that one extreme begets the other, at which point they become symbiotes, devouring or at least overshadowing the moderate stance.

I don’t imagine I’ll takes sides here and I’d rather not. But if you know me, you could make certain reasonable assumptions about how I’m likely to feel about the show, however much I end up enjoying it. I’m a bit of an apologist for the anime mainstream — I maintain that, while sometimes problematic, this or that formula can be very effective when it isn’t simply regurgitated wholesale for its own sake. Cowboy Bebop eschews the anime formulae we know so well in favor of western film conventions — conventions in which I’ve never been especially interested, to be perfectly honest.

See, I’m probably not among this show’s ideal audience. I’m not much of a film fan; young Pontifus discovered anime via video games and Saturday morning cartoons. And, though I’m reluctant to call myself a hipster, per se, I’ve always been attracted to idiosyncrasy. Those anime conventions I defend so ardently may be conventional for a given population, but I’m not exactly a member of that population. I could name ten chiptune/FM synth musicians or ten indie/post rock bands faster than I could name ten famous jazz musicians.

If Cowboy Bebop is “for” anyone, it may well be for people steeped in mainstream western culture. My own culture, ostensibly. I like jazz well enough and I respect the innovations of early filmmakers, but I’m afraid I never had much use for a mainstream that largely excluded the things I liked.

And yet I feel an affinity with Cowboy Bebop’s “author.”

Being a TV production, there’s no one person responsible for how it turned out. We could sort out the group effort, if we really wanted to. Director Shinichiro Watanabe is known for his cultural mashups. Writer Dai Sato is an outspoken opponent of the moe movement. And so on, I’m sure, but Cowboy Bebop conflates and contorts the contributions of these individuals into a single product. When I say that I can relate to the show’s “author,” I’m not talking about any one member of the production crew; I’m talking about the author-concept suggested by the show itself. Something like the Barthesian implied author.

Let’s call him/her/it Author-san.

Cowboy Bebop seems tailor-made for us, by whom I mean westerners, and western SF fans in particular. It’s easy for us to enjoy it. From our point of view, it seems well in line with the sorts of things it’s socially acceptable to call “good” or “well-wrought” or “classic,” and it’s no wonder that we aren’t hassled too much by our peers if we profess to like it. It’s like enjoying a Miyazaki film (which, while sometimes more thoroughly “Japanese,” usually has the Disney stamp of approval).

Consider, though, the Japanese otaku culture that gave Author-san authority in the first place, the culture out of and into which s/he made Cowboy Bebop.

Hiroki Azuma points out that this is a reactionary bunch. They distance themselves from their fellow citizens, who appropriate and enjoy western culture, by positing themselves as especially Japanese. Azuma problematizes this (“Between the otaku and Japan,” he writes, “lies the United States”), but it doesn’t matter much with regard to Author-san whether it’s problematic or not. Author-san happens to like jazz and film noir. S/he also happens to like cartoons — happens to like them so much that s/he has made a career in the industry that produces them. But, just as some friends of mine would laugh at me for extolling Aria as a grand human achievement, some of Author-san’s friends simply cannot understand why western imports speak to him/her as they do.

“Why?” Author-san asks. “I’ll show you why!”

Thence Cowboy Bebop.

Clearly this is fictional — it’s a series of assumptions based on a show I haven’t even seen yet (apart from bits and pieces on TV, anyway). The point is that I’m disinclined to bemoan Cowboy Bebop for courting the western mainstream. As far as I can tell, it does and it doesn’t — and what interests me more than either proposition is the tension between them. It’s a tension that I hope to find in the show itself, albeit not one that I feel much like lingering upon or arguing about. I’m more concerned with simply enjoying the show, and I’m reasonably confident in my ability to find something to like about it, even if I do suffer from the occasional hipster tendency.

Who lives here?

Every once in a while Cuchlann mentions that he wants to write more about video games. And he has — over here. (Did you know he set up a new solo blog? Rather than talking about nerd stuff how he’d talk about classic literature, he talks about classic literature how he’d talk about nerd stuff. If even there’s a difference. Which is kind of the point.) But resurrected dinosaur Super Fanicom needs more video game content, I say!

So, Proteus. Is it a game? The IGF seems to think so.

Developer Ed Key isn’t so sure you’ll agree. He mentions his early trepidation in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

I wasn’t sure how it’d be recieved without any traditional goals or rewards but many people loved it enough to make me remove any remaining hints of goals. I’m happy and a little suprised that it seems to be so refreshing to so many people. There are a bunch of philosophical things I was trying to do, but I’ll spare you the exposition.

Alec Meer (interviewer), “IGF Factor 2012: Proteus”

True, you have no predefined goals in Proteus (granting that only a basic demo is currently available, but Key doesn’t seem eager to change this). It’s like pre-Beta Minecraft in that way. Minus even a character progression system to motivate you, you wander around a random landscape doing whatever you feel like doing.

In other words, you see/hear things. You have almost no real means of interacting with your environment. You can control Proteus with only the mouse, if you want to. Sometimes the environment reacts to you, but there are no puzzles to solve, no resources to gather, certainly no monsters to kill. There are only weird teleporter obelisk things and creatures/objects whose proximity makes the (really, really fantastic) music change.

Proteus is by no means the first entertainment product that sets you down in a strange place and lets you wonder at it for a while. This is a key component of adventure games, and pretty much has been since Zork. It’s a relatively common tactic in fantasy and SF of all kinds. Mundane literature puts it to use with some regularity; Proteus might remind you of the third chapter of Ulysses, which shares its name. And we anime/manga types with our Aria and Mushishi and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou should be quite used to it by now — we’ve even imported a vocabulary for describing this kind of experience: iyashikei, mono no aware.

But to what degree is it a game? How much interaction does a thing need before it’s a game? How much in the way of goals? I don’t know. I never know how to answer that question. I could quote a definition from game theory or something, but I doubt it’d be applicable, as indie games seem to be shredding every solid definition at our disposal (for which I love them, of course). Is a visual novel a game? Is Dwarf Fortress a game when you generate a world just to read its history? I do have a cop-out answer — it depends on how you use it — but, frankly, I don’t care; I enjoy these things, and that’s all I need to know.

I can tell you what the maybe-game does, or what it might do to you.

Let’s assume for the sake of convenience that you’re exactly like me. You’re dropped into Proteus’s colorful, musical, pixelly world, and immediately you set out to find something to do. Because that’s what you do in video games. If there is no goal, you at least need to determine what you’re capable of here, so you can then proceed to do it.

This doesn’t take long. You can’t punch trees until they drop wood. Sometimes you’ll run into packs of little sound-creatures, but you can’t do anything about them. You can make the day/night cycle speed up, you can change the season, but this requires no more effort than walking into the appropriate area.

Here you’ll think about quitting. You won’t. You’ll keep walking around, necessarily covering the same ground. It isn’t a massive world.

You’ll start to notice things. Why’s the ground a different color here? Why’s that tree different from all surrounding?

Well, why not?

What does this or that difference signify?

It must have some significance. Things in video games have significance. Your surroundings aren’t accidental; they constitute a playing field. Even when the field results from random numbers fed into an algorithm, someone had to write that algorithm.

The more you tromp about, the less your preconceptions nag.

Here’s a nice-looking area. It’s nice because, who cares? It’s nice. And, look, a house! Who decided to build a house there?

Maybe you’ll want to share this place with someone. Like showing off a strange Minecraft seed on a multiplayer server, or simply sharing the seed among friends. Only you can’t; Proteus lacks the means by which to do those things. It’s just you and trees and mountains and water and a house. You’re hiking through the woods alone and you stop to rest in a calm and peaceful clearing. You contemplate a nearby obelisk. How do you communicate this feeling? And why, after all, do you feel such a need to? It wouldn’t even be a significant sort of feeling (how many virtual landscapes have you experienced, after all?) if not for its transience — you know that when you quit the game, as inevitably you’ll have to do, you’ll never stroll through this particular landscape again. Proteus doesn’t save its worlds. It’s, well, protean.

It’s not that this sense of benign melancholy is unique to Proteus. But it’s one of the few games I can think of that elevates the act of being there to the status of primary objective.

As someone who, in my World of Warcraft days, would hold up dungeon runs so I could read the books of lore scattered throughout, I can appreciate that.

Which, incidentally, is a good thing.

Here are some things to expect, to know, and to cherish:

• Lots of broken links at the moment. I think some of this will go away when the old domain is properly mapped, but I’ll be on the lookout for stragglers. Sorry for the bother in the meantime.
• Damn near every Super Fanicom tract of yore and quite a few pontif.us screeds can be found here, with a few notable exceptions. Such as all the audio content. And, most unfortunately, the Strike Witches posts — that’ll be a long-term project (had I tried to include them today, I’d be far from done). I actually do still have the raw materials of the eight(?) we never did finish, though…
• Wonder of wonders, we have post ideas! Or I should say that I have one post “idea” (which…well, you’ll see), and otherwise Cuchlann and I have a few post aspirations. Maybe some video sorts of things. Since the last time we tried audio I’ve procured a better headset and a hard drive that doesn’t lurch violently every three seconds.
• If your name isn’t on the authors list to the right, rest assured that I’ve credited you for your posts in-text, and probably tried to get you signed up here properly; just shoot me an email with your WordPress.com username if you want that straightened out, and watch for the subsequent invite.

Tired. More anon.

Before we start, I’ll be frank and swift about this: Please take note that we are not trying to define or conclude anything concrete here. The analysis simply investigates and branches out a fan’s, to coin Pontifus’ term, “interpretative strategies”, in order to come up with a proper result. And because interpretations are never always the same, the majority of the basis and processes of this analysis is not concrete, which means results would still remain as an opinionated guess until tested (and, on a more daring note, proven) based on personal (in this case, your) interpretations. Or we could just do a survey and see how it works. I’m not going to go out of my way to say that this is overanalysis. We’re database animals, so feel free to question yourself about it instead. And no, I’m not really mad. Just handing out disclaimers, in case you need to say something about the writing.

Shance: Since I can’t seem to get you on Twitter ot Gtalk, I just made a Gdoc so I can ask your opinion on this Cartesian Plane I made:

Where X = The degree of openness of the fandom to outside stimuli
And Y = The affinity of the fandom in question

Pontifus: Haha, I guess I’d be open/positive, albeit not quite a mindless, rabid fan, but then the extremes are, after all, extreme.

I tend to think of elitists as equally positive and negative, as they’re as confident in the wrongness of your taste as in the rightness of their own, and generally will tell you as much. But then I don’t know what the closed/positive extreme would be. How positive can a closed-minded person be? Closed/positive seems like a weird quadrant.

Same with open/negative, actually. Unless those are people who watch things they know they won’t like. But then, there’s a certain kind of person who enjoys bad things for their being bad…maybe the most relevant part of the graph is the line from the closed/negative corner to the open/positive corner. That seems to be roughly where most people would fall.

Shance: I think I haven’t fully defined what “affinity” in the plane really represents, because affinity in fandom represents a lot of things, like liking bad stuff like porn or fetishes like guro or futanari, or being destructive in a sense like trolling other fans, bashing shows or genres, etc. That’s why I put the elitists in the positive/close quadrant, since they are not willing enough to listen to others’ opinion unless it coincides to their own, or it proves something wrong in the ideals they believe in. The trolls on closed/negative quadrant on the other hand simply just do anything negative like bash shows and disregard opinion just for the hell of it.

But yeah, we could just disregard those two and form the line. Question is, who represents what? Any ideas on that?

Pontifus: Well, I was thinking of something like this:

I mean, I do think that closed/positive people exist. These would probably be the hardcore nostalgiafags –people who really, really like what they like, and aren’t really interested in telling you that what you like is dumb, but what they like is 20 years old and they aren’t really open to anything more recent than that. They aren’t really elitists because they aren’t interested in invalidating what they don’t like; it just isn’t for them. On the other hand, the elitist fans (or film snob fans, as I tend to call them) see themselves as arbiters of good taste, and that job requires equal parts elevating things they think are great and tearing down things they think aren’t so great. These would probably fall toward the center of the y-axis.

The open/negative quadrant still eludes me, though. Are these maybe those people who get great enjoyment out of watching “bad” things while still thinking they’re bad?

Speaking of good/bad, I think this graph has to function independent of any value judgment paradigm. Or, that is, it needs to take into account how fans themselves judge things, without relying upon concrete assumptions about quality. I’ve been assuming that that’s what the y-axis is for; a positive fan likes what they like more than they dislike what they dislike (as suggested by their contribution to fandom discussion/rhetoric), and vice versa for negative fans.

Shance: If we are to go by your definition of elitist fans, doesn’t that make every genre-specific fan fall under this category? Based on observation, mecha fans in particular do this a lot, and so do the moeblob lovers. However some genre-specific fans do have some preferences that are outside the main interest, like fetishes for example. How would you interpret this?

As for the open/negative quadrant, yes, those kinds of people are included. They would love illegal and unethical things like rape, harem, incest, and loliconism, but I think we can disregard if they even think of it as good or bad in any way.

Lastly, do you have a better interpretation for the judgement paradigms? Do we need to include only the important ones, or should we remove everything completely?

Pontifus: Genre-specific fans would be another example of positive/closed people who I wouldn’t call “elitists” — at least, as long as they’re more concerned with liking what they like than disliking what they don’t like (hence positive). To me, an elitist is someone as likely to deprecate things as to appreciate them. I don’t think they’re remarkably positive.

What I’m saying about value judgment is that I don’t think that we should, for the purposes of making the graph, think of anything in terms of legality or ethics. For our purposes, lolicon or rape or whatever is just a thing someone might like or dislike, or be open or closed to. Legality and ethics should have no bearing on the graph; they’re simply too variable. “Negativity” to me would refer to spending more time with one’s dislikes than with one’s likes — say, writing more negative, defamatory blog posts than positive, celebratory posts, regardless of what those posts actually celebrate or defame. It’s all very specific to the individual. The actual, particular objects of fandom shouldn’t matter, at least if we want the graph to be broadly applicable. I’m not saying that we should throw up our hands and approve of people who like toddlercon or whatever; I’m just saying that the graph should function as independently of our opinions as is possible. We open a can of worms when we start passing judgment on what people are into, and I don’t think that’d help anything here.

Shance: I guess the graph needs a major revision:

If we are to denote a certain population for the open/negative quadrant, do you think it’s for people who consume content because they think it’s bad while looking for a reason to like it or call it good? Considering our current outlook on the past seasons and years, this seems to be the case.

And since I don’t have any credible reason as to why the hell I put Trolls on this Cartesian Plane in the first place, I’m taking it out. We’ll have to find a demographic for the closed/negative quadrant, though.

Pontifus: I actually think “trolls” is a pretty good descriptor for the extreme members of that quadrant. I don’t even think they’re all bad, those trolls. Some of them are just mean, I guess, but otherwise they’re the tricksters of the Internet, and tricksters have their uses.

I agree that open/negative people are those who purposefully and systematically consume what they’d call “bad” media, but I’d think that someone who puts effort into trying to like something is more positive than negative. The open/negative person watches Mars of Destruction or Garzey’s Wing because they’re hilariously awful; they find value in those things precisely because they’re “bad.”

For example, the Terribad group of SSCSAV is an entirely open/negative undertaking. They make the “bad” judgment, hence negative, but they still watch a lot of things, hence open.

Shance: Well, for one those guys aren’t really trying to do anything else from those shows, so I guess that’s acceptable.

Time to get a little touchy, then. Since we dodged porn for a bit, I’m going to go back into discussing its part in the plane. If we are to include the perverts and all the tag-frenzied hentai-loving communities in the graph, where would you put it? I initially think they’re negative/positive, but after our discussions I now think they fit in the positive/neutral category (we can’t really say quadrant on this one, can we?). They like their porn, hence positive, but they can be open or closed about it, preference-wise. Of course, preference meaning fetishes and all of the similar sort.

Speaking of which, have you ever thought of a demographic that can actually fit in the center of the graph, i.e. neutral in both affinity and judgment?

Pontifus: Totally agree with you re: porn consumers. That’d be a good characterization of the average viewer who uses porn as porn, anyway.

I don’t know if there’s a distinct demographic I’d peg as perfectly centrist or moderate. Those people probably exist in all the groups we’ve talked about — they’re just less extreme than the really vocal members.

Shance: I guess if we can’t peg a demographic in it we might as well settle with the majority line.

Interestingly, I thought of another demographic during our talk about the open/negative quadrant: Redeemers. They’re people who initially think a show is bad, then watches it to find any factor that would make people think it’s good or passable, hence “redeeming” the show that was watched. I think I’ll add it in here, too.

Anyways, this probably means the graph is good. For now. We’ll just have to wait for further changes. I just hope we’re still around when it happens.

Thekittymeister took this.

Oh yes, for three years ago the beard was born!

(Three years and one day, actually).

In the time since our last gathering together to celebrate, it has been whispered in certain English departments that this beard contains within it the souls of all people alive on this planet — verily, that shaving even one hair would slay a person; one inch, dozens; a goatee would doubtless depopulate a continent.

Neither do I know where its groping, hirsute rampage will end. But those faithful few of us will know it forever beneficent.

I rarely harbor feelings of hate when I play video games. But when I do, I do it with audacity and intensity. So when the concept of incorporating Cash Points in modern gaming came into existence, I was furious. Why, you ask? Because the existence of Cash Points is the most horrific thing to happen in the video game industry.

To know why it’s bad, one must know how it works. Basically, you purchase the points using real world cash, which you can use to unlock rare and powerful items in the game, hence the term. Feeling underpowered with the cheap Longbow you mugged from some random monster? Become a god of archery with this Cash Point-only Super Bow. Fifty inventory slots not enough for you? Purchase fifty more slots using Cash Points. Want to stand out from your guildmates? Get the limited edition Gold Ring.

Now that you know how it works, back to why it’s bad. And it’s bad on a number of reasons:

Cash Points Break the Game

Items that are available in Cash Points throw a lot of game semantics out of the window. Now that you have the Super Bow, grinding would always be a breeze. You can have all the items you can get your hands on because you have a hundred inventory slots. And nobody will mistake you for another player now that you wear the Gold Ring. In exchange for convenience and uniqueness, players would simply buy these items. This in turn defeats the purpose of working to get the common but trusty items.

Use of Cash Points is Intensely Exclusive

Rarely will you see a game that will let you sell Cash Point items for ingame currency. Why is that? Simple: If anyone can purchase said Cash Point item using ingame currency, then it defeats the purpose of the item being exclusive to Cash Points. Therefore, to make sure that they can earn a lot of money from players purchasing Cash Points, they make sure that the item stays exclusive. They “lock” or “bind” the items to those who purchased them, you can’t trade them to other players, you can’t sell them, you can’t drop them so other players can pick them up, etc.

Cash Point Items have Time Limits

To keep you purchasing Cash Points, they time the items you purchase. The Super Bow will only last in your inventory slot for a week. After that, you’ll have to purchase it again for another week to be able to use it again. The extra fifty inventory slots you purchased using Cash Points will only last for a month, after which the items in those extra slots will be unusable until you purchase the extra inventory slots for another month. And while some players think of it as one of the ways game designers implement ingame balance (putting you back in the same level as common players), the majority thinks of it as one of the ways game developers make you waste a lot of money (making you purchase more Cash Points to stay on top of the game). I can’t agree on the latter any better.

Constant Obsolescence on Cash Point Items

A lot of online games are constantly updated. The same goes for the plethora of items that you can acquire in the game. Of course, that only means one thing for Cash Point items: What can break the game now won’t break the game later. This is specially painful for those who spend their ten dollar weekly allowance on Cash Points. You should’ve saved the ten dollars you used to purchase the Gold Ring last month. Now you can’t purchase the Platinum Ring that came out this month because it’s worth twenty dollars. Oh, woe.

Cash Point Gambling

This is a recurring trend to a lot of Japanese MMOGs, and is probably the most evil of the marketing strategies they employ. They put the Cash Point items in a lottery box, and you use Cash Points to roll the box. The more rare the prize item is, the lesser the chance you get it. Alas, the frustration can only escalate to uncontrollable heights as players with the capacity to buy Cash Points rage at the fact that they are wasting a lot of money on something they can only get by chance, while those who can’t buy Cash Points gripe and whine at the fact that people who get the items would literally break the game into inconceivable pieces. And oh, did I mention that the game developers can rig the lottery box?

Now we’re on to why I hate it. As an oldschool gamer (I’m from the cartridge/chiptune/8-bit era, and thank heavens most of the guys here are the same as me), I’ve always believed that a gamer’s toil in the game must be well rewarded. I’ve always believed that in order to be overpowered and badass, you need to slave yourself grinding all night like a sleepless insomniac just to get the high levels and cool items the game has to offer. I’ve always believed that a friend or two can make even the most powerful enemy fall. Modern gaming changed all that. Today, rewards are bought by Cash Points, so the need to toil is virtually nonexistent. High levels and cool items can easily be achievable through Cash Points, so you don’t need to go through sleepless nights and grinding marathons. You can’t share Cash Point items to your friends, because Cash Point items can’t be traded or sold. And considering the gullible concept of needs-versus-wants (in this case, real life necessities versus the Cash Point items), it’s a constant battle for your money. Take note that we’re haven’t even talked about promotions and ingame freebies that tempt you into purchasing a great deal of Cash Points. Yet.

Now, I don’t mean to sound like a pretentious idiot, or someone who whines a lot on something that can be merely dismissed as an unimportant feature of any game. If I were to find a purpose as to why I wrote this post, it w0uld be to raise a questionable point in the current era of gaming: Why would game developers make virtual money, and why would they incorporate it to the point that it drastically changes the role and behavior of a player? There are number of reasons that answer to this, like easy access to game consumers and the implementation of content that is relevant to gamers’ interests, but one thing is for sure: They want your money, and they want more. It doesn’t matter if you bought the game since without Cash Points, it’s considered incomplete, obsolete even.

What of the non-Cash Point players, then? What of those who still stick to the tried and tested methods in enjoying the game? They get the common, underpowered items. They aren’t as powerful as those who buy Cash Point items. And yet they can still play and enjoy the game nonetheless. At the most, they possess the most powerful sentiment: They will never have any regrets on playing the game, for they have never spent a single nickel on it. And if the game dies due to bad game developers and management? They’ll wear a smile that goes from ear to ear, tap a Cash Point player and say “Problem, mate?”

So a conversation on Twitter got me to thinking. This is not uncommon. The issue? Notes in translations and other works. The players? Myself, 8C, and LowOnHitPoints.

I won’t try to sum the whole thing up, but 8C started things off with the claim (quoted, I think) that notes during a fansub are an admission that the subber is a failure. Hyperbole, certainly, but let’s clean it up a little now that we’re not limited to the old 140. A note in a fansub fails in its very purpose because the point of the translation is to communicate the story / show / plot / what-have-you.

This claim isn’t too complicated. I joked about scholarly editors apparently being failures as well. LowOnHitPoints rejoined that he insists on no footnotes, even in something like Shakespeare.

There’s a lot more, most on their part – I was in class for part of the discussion. But here I am now. Woo hoo!

We’re actually dealing with two separate issues – translations and scholarly works. Obviously. But there’s a signpost for you. Footnotes during an anime sub can distract from the act of enjoying the anime itself. This is true, given that it’s a qualified statement. It can. Footnotes distract me at times, in all forms (book, show, whatever). But I always – always – prefer footnotes to endnotes. Most of the people I know prefer footnotes to endnotes. Endnotes are just sort-of useless. They have the information you need or want, but they’re somewhere else. So if you want to glean it for your phenomenological experience, during the act of reading or watching, you have to either wait until the end or go to the note right then. Most of us wouldn’t wind through a fansub to read a translator’s note at the end. Neither would most of us page through a book to read an endnote.

By the time you get to an endnote, then, your experience with the text is sort-of over. You can add to it, and maybe even rewatch / re-read it, but you’ll never get the same emotional response as you did the first time through. And your lack of knowledge of something will effect that.

My silly example on Twitter was Hamlet. LowOnHitPoints said he wouldn’t mind if he just missed a few puns or something. But the pun on the word “nunnery” is essential to plumbing Hamlet’s mental state. He tells Ophelia to go to a nunnery in the middle of a speech about both he and she are both horrible, sinful people. So we read the line and are content. He wants her to go somewhere clean and pure. Simple enough. Except during Shakespeare’s time the word “nunnery” was slang for a brothel. So he’s simultaneously telling her to go to a whorehouse – in the middle of a speech about how horrible and sinful they are. It’s a pivotal moment in the play. It helps explain why Ophelia kills herself (if she does – see the years of debate on whether she’s responsible for her death).

These, though, are scholarly footnotes. While my example is a translation aid, most scholarly footnotes aren’t so much. So are the two acts different? Yes, but not by much.

A translation footnote is theoretically meant to help one get what has been lost in the act of translating from one language to another. All translation is the act of producing another work. Works in languages are tied to those languages. It’s why I technically teach a translation of Waiting for Godot to my undergrads: the translation is in English, but the author made it. But he wrote the original in French and then translated it. So I’m not teaching the original, even though the author himself did the translation work. He created a new, second work, titled Waiting for Godot, that is really an adaptation of a French original. The act of translation is the act of adaptation. So the footnotes are in a weird position. 8C rightfully points to this fact when he says the translation is where that information is really supposed to appear. Theoretically, anything necessary to the work must appear in the work, or else it’s by definition not necessary.

Here’s my bold hypothesis: fansubbers aren’t only translating / adapting. Those who include translation footnotes are, in a sense, curating the anime in the same way Greenblatt curates Shakespeare. They are including information not vital to following the show, but vital to interpreting it. They are creating a scholarly document of sorts. This actually helps us understand the fansub wars, the bickering over groups, the long posts by subbers on their art and craft – these things are odd in the light of translations, as people usually only have preferred translations, not translations they go to war over. But scholars have scholarly editions they will bicker, backbite, and fight over. A professor once told me of an honest-to-God social snub he got at a conference because he went with one typical copy-text of a book over another for his scholarly edition of a work. Someone felt strongly enough about this to come up to him, in person, with friends, and call him out over it. Sound familiar?

I still haven’t really weighed in on the debate at hand. Translation footnotes during an episode? Yea or nay? I say yea. I take this form seriously, as I think most of us do who are bothering to do this blogging thing, and I don’t find footnotes intrusive – unless they’re huge, poorly typeset, or something else weird. I pick and choose when to read them, when I already know things (just like I don’t have to look at footnotes on the word “an” in a copy of Shakespeare’s plays any longer). I’ve done translation work myself in the past, in Japanese. I can understand others being distracted, though. What the debate has made me realize, though, post hoc, is that anime fansubbers aren’t engaging in the act of translation just as, say Seamus Heaney did when he translated Beowulf. They’re engaging in the act of translation someone like Greenblatt does when dealing with Shakespeare, or with Goethe – not only translating, but building an edition capable of supporting the scholarly debate and criticism that will rest on it in the future. Because at this point the fansubbers are working for the bloggers too, just as the bloggers are working for the fansubbers.

There’s a constant kerfluffle in the otaku-rhombus, and everywhere in nerddom, actually, concerning criticism. Specifically, many nerds want it kept out of their entertainment — despite the fact they engage in it constantly. Academics have similar kerfluffles, honestly; many’s the time I’ve heard a professor complain about “jargon.” Inevitably only the schools of thought they dislike use “jargon;” their preferred schools of thought don’t engage in it. Anyway, this is the first in a series of entries meant to extend an olive branch in the best way a scholar knows how: through teaching and learning together. In this series, we’ll be describing different “schools” of critical thought, how they work, where they came from, what they do, how they’re useful, and so on. We’ll even apply a bit of the theory to familiar texts to illustrate how this is supposed to work from a literary point of view — and remember, literature is just entertainment, so criticism is simply thinking about entertainment. Why? To be further entertained! This post specifically is part of that most dreaded (as most [un]familiar) world, the post-something-or-other. This time, post-structuralism.

Carl Sagan once posited that many Americans (he not having a lot of experience being a citizen of any other countries) distrust science because it requires background reading. To engage in science one must do the up-front work. Literary criticism is similar: many people avoid it simply because they don’t want to do the background reading to know which post-structuralist said what and what we people think of it now. Of course, really, criticism is simply careful and loving thought about something you love, but the background reading provides a platform of similarity from which everyone can begin.

That paragraph serves to introduce this paragraph, specifically, structuralism. As the name implies, post-structuralism is a response to structuralism (these names are awkward yes, but at this point they’ve stuck). So. Ferdinand de Saussure was a French linguist who lectured on the nature of language. If you only take one thing away from Saussure, it must be this: language is arbitrary.

For us, in the year of our flying spaghetti monster 2010, that seems obvious, perhaps even trite. We’ve likely all had that moment of realization, that a word only means something because we decided it does. If you’ve studied a language not native to you, you almost certainly understood this at some level. However, back in the early 1900s this was a little revolutionary. Linguistics was a branch of history, studying where a word came from — all the way back to Latin or Greek if it’s a respectable word. Most people thought of language worked in the way that’s sometimes called the “Adam” principle. That is, Adam named the beasts and the bird and the seas. So a thing’s name was a part of the thing. Think of any fantasy you’ve read or seen where someone’s true name is a handle to the person. It’s the same principle. Saussure described the system of thought on language that, which, with modification, rules today.

Specifically, language is arbitrary. But also specific. Language isn’t simply “made up” in the way nonsense words are. Language is arbitrary, but at the same time everyone must agree on the arbitrary decisions. Imagine a game where a move counts for three points in player A’s rules, but five points in player B’s. A and B can’t play a game until they agree on one common system.

Saussure used a famous diagram that, as a whole, represents a sign — a sign is a language unit, basically. The signified is the thing to which the word is applied, like a tree. The signifier is the word applied to it, such as “tree” or “ki” or “arbor.” Both together actually make the sign, because when we hear the word we designate as appropriate, we think of a tree. Not some Platonic ideal tree, but a tree, maybe one we’ve seen every day, or a special tree (maybe the one you climbed in as a child, or the one that was blasted by lightning in your back yard).

That’s how an individual sign works. All of them work in a system, where each one means something because it doesn’t mean anything else.

That’ s a little weird, but think on it for a moment. “Tree” means a plant with bark and leaves because it does not mean an animal with four legs that chases cars. Without contrasting words, a single word would be useless, as it could expand to be everything. In fact, that’s why we have so many binaries. “Everything” itself is what isn’t “nothing.”

Now, the sign is fine, as far as it goes. But poststructuralist theorists focus their magnifying lenses upon the signifier in particular, assuming in part that signifiers are all we can really work with. This may sound like an almost existentialist argument, but, in “…That Dangerous Supplement…” (or, more affectionately, “…That Highbrow Essay About Masturbation…” or “…That Essay Titled Kind Of Like an Aria Episode…”), Derrida turns it into a matter of “mere” linguistic mechanics.

The basic idea here is that, in attaching a signifier to a signified, or a sound-image to a concept, or what have you, we’re doing two things: 1. creating a relationship between ourselves and the signified, which can only exist via the supplementary signifier, and 2. creating another “terminal” signified, to which we can only relate with another signifier. Of course, your mileage may vary regarding how “basic” an idea this is, but it’s really not that wild, and we can apply it to many fandom concepts with which we’re already familiar.

Consider, for example, one binary that anime often approaches: life/death. Many of us have encountered the idea that death gives meaning to life, and while the idea as it shows up in anime probably has more to do with Eastern philosophy than with Derrida, it’s a good example of what Derrida means by supplementation. A deconstructionist might tell you that death gives meaning to life precisely due to the arrangement of the two words-and-or-ideas in the life/death binary: life happens for a while, and then death substitutes for (absent) life.

We might lament death as the absence of life (as we might lament writing as the absence of speech, or masturbation as the absence of sex, or absence as the absence of presence). But death is useful insofar as it allows us to conceive of life as a thing with certain qualities; sans death, life simply is, but, in light of death, life is z, y, z, etc. As Derrida puts it, when presence becomes absence, the quality and worth of the absent presence becomes apparent. We often say that people lead good or bad lives, but we can only make such judgments — we can only conceive of such a thing as “a life” — with death in mind. This, I imagine, has much to do with the explorations of mortality conducted by such things as Casshern Sins and Bokurano.

So far the territory we’ve crossed hasn’t gotten too thorny. In fact, this all seems like an extension of Saussure — i.e. things “mean” relative to one another. But here’s the strange part: as absence fulfills its role as absence, it becomes another presence. Simply put, death describes the state of a thing as does life. The problem with death specifically is that we can’t exactly substitute something for it — there is no “post-death” at the end of death — and so it’s hard to say anything about death as such other than that it simply is.

Fortunately the hypothetical world of fiction gives us such things as undeath; we might say of a zombie that it had a foreshortened or interrupted death, a death that wasn’t peaceful. And there’s always religious afterlife, I guess. But I digress, and I really shouldn’t in a post that will be long enough anyway. What we end up with is a great chain of supplementation:

This convenient model can be applied to all kinds of things, and it gets particularly interesting when there’s more than one person doing the conceptualizing. Consider translation:

And, as implied however many hundred words ago, this process bears upon Saussure’s basic signified/signifier model, which is, in a sense, a variation on the presence/absence binary. The thing signified is our idea of a “presence” in the world, and we discuss these presences-as-conceived via signifiers, symbols that imply the “absence” of the signified in collective discursive space. Working with signifiers may be about all we can do, but that’s not the whole of it; we also have to consider that the very existence of the signifier gives us a sense of the “form” of the signified — hence the poststructuralist interest in the signifier.

Of course, one of Derrida’s strangest ideas is about the space between the signifier and the signified. Derrida, in his “Différance,” described what one could describe as what Saussure didn’t bother with: how signs work. That is, the actual mechanism of them.

Essentially, différance is that line in the signifier/signified diagram. Here’s the deal: the word différance combines the words “differ” and “defer.” All words both differ and defer, and in doing so they create meaning.

A word differs because, as we saw earlier, a dog is a dog because it’s not a cat. We have lots and lots of different words for things because that’s part of how language works — each signifier is different from every other signifier. That’s the simple part.

A word defers as it sends you both away and back. When you hear the word “dog” you think of a dog, but a dog is not actually summoned into the room with you. You are thrown back in your memory and call up an image of a dog — perhaps a particular dog, perhaps an amalgamation of many dogs — that is in the past, because it is a memory. At the same time, save in rare occasions, the dog(s) you’re thinking of were not in the room you’re in when you hear the word “dog,” so you’re also deferred out to somewhere else.

Now. It is a joke among academics that only two people ever understood deconstruction (the literary lens that grew out of Derridian post-structuralism): Derrida and Cixous (his wife). This is a common joke because Deconstruction is pretty wild, and we’re never sure if we’re doing it the way it was originally meant to be done. But really it doesn’t matter. So.

You may be able to see already how différance is useful when reading a text. A sign in a text, most often a metaphor, symbol, or such-like, works the same way a Derridian sign does. It both differs and defers. I think first of the famous traffic lights and road signs in anime — my favorite examples are from Kare Kano. They are literally things: a traffic light flashing yellow. It is also a representation of a thing, a signifier, as the thing is actually a real traffic light, the thing we’re seeing actually being a series of drawings of a light, and not the light itself. So we’re being sent out and back to traffic lights in our past, and what that meant to us (to slow down). Slowing down, or the need to, is also the import of the sign on the symbolic level, and so we’re being deferred through our deferral into another signified: danger/caution. But the show uses that series of deferments instead of another. We’re constantly sliding back out of the show into our own lives. Coupled with various other elements in the show, such as the shifting art style, the music, the painstakingly realized (and only mildly cliché-ridden) school setting, we can see the show as something that constantly pushes us farther away, with its method, even as it draws us closer with the story and the characters. We’re positioned always as viewers, never as fellows of the characters. There is, in fact, one possible implication in the way the show slides us, defers us, with the sorts of signs and signifiers it chooses: the show could be implying that we are beyond the problems and the timeframe that the characters live in. We can think of other examples of shows that behave as though they’re for one audience and really deal with another (Nanoha springs to mind). Kare Kano acts as though high schoolers are the entire world it deals with, but the signs are both more complex than usual (the art style) and defer us to places that are out of character for high schoolers (traffic lights only mean something that powerful to us when we’re driving, and the typical high schooler hasn’t driven much).

ALL signs, according to Derrida, function with différance within them — fortunately for Roland Barthes, who, for a while, made a living analyzing the signs of day-to-day French life. Barthes did literature, too — he wrote “The Death of the Author,” for one thing — but his Mythologies is founded largely upon such miscellanea as advertising campaigns and strippers. This may be notable in itself, as it demonstrates that (post)structural practices have applicability beyond strictly-defined art; we might analyze as symbols or signs such things as vendor booths at conventions, anime-related clothing, and yes, even anime blogs.

But this notion isn’t particularly poststructural. Barthes is, in fact, something of a transitional figure; he became more poststructural with every essay (which, really, may just mean that his position became more nuanced — if we reduce it to its essence, poststructuralism is more like an extension of structuralism than a radical reaction). The post- begins to come into play when Barthes points out the contradictions inherent to things.

You may have surmised at this point that, thanks in large part to Derrida, poststructuralism concerns itself with contradiction and paradox in ways that structuralism did not. We see this in such concepts as différance, which, again, relies upon levels of separation, but we might also call contradiction the motive of the poststructuralist — in short, if the meaning-values of things come from the ways that binaries function, we may as well reveal and scrutinize relevant binaries.

Barthes, for example, demonstrated that the striptease is a fundamentally chaste act, reinforcing the distance between erotic dancer and viewer. And this isn’t in spite of the particular features of the act — it’s a direct result of them. Everything from the layout of the typical gentlemen’s club to the final article of clothing that the dancer does not remove suggests separation (or suggested as much to Barthes in mid-20th-century France). Such elements as partial nudity and the sexualization of the dancer may imply intimacy, but there’s more to consider beyond what seems most obvious.

We might say that striptease demonstrates a structural contradiction, that it is, perhaps, the binary of intimacy/separation in action. And, if we’re Derridean about it, these contradictions are fundamental to everything — they are, as we’ve seen, the reason things are able to mean, so to speak.

But what good does that do us? The life of the fan is, of course, as rife with contradiction as any other sort of life; these contradictions seem to turn up in practically any sustained examination of the fandom, Azuma’s Otaku being a prime example. Azuma (who, by the way, made a name for himself as a Derrida scholar) deals with how fiction can feel more real than reality; he explains how pornographic visual novels really aren’t about sexual gratification; he investigates different parallel ways of engaging with different parts of texts; he even brings up the topic of otaku sexuality, pointing out the gulf between crazy 2D fetishes and relative 3D conservatism. And yet another contradiction emerges in Otaku that the book doesn’t deal with explicitly: the very idea of the postmodern database seems strange when postmodernism is evidently all about doing away with such all-encompassing structures. We could do this all day, really, but the point is that fandom, as anything, is made of binaries — reality/fiction being perhaps the biggest and most visible — and, in revealing and examining these binaries, we stand to learn something about ourselves.

Well then! With poststructuralism out of the way, we’ve handily dealt with the vagaries of mid-to-late-20th-century literary and cultural theory. Haven’t we?

No. No we haven’t. You know we haven’t. For, alas! there’s another feared and reviled body of critical work to consider, one that may prove even more difficult to wrangle than poststructuralism, insofar as it’s considerably vaguer.

I’m speaking, of course, of postmodernism.

…つづく!

This is the part you’re familiar with. Azuma posits that otaku, and postmodern media consumers, have stopped consuming in the traditional manner and have adopted, instead, a kind of database consumption. An aside: if you like Azuma, you’re contractually obligated to be OK with random philosophy/theory references; this chapter is full of them, from Freud and Lacan down to Zizek and Hegel. It was pretty crazy. In fact, Azuma’s theory is indebted to Hegel and readings of Hegel by Kojève. Hegel claimed that once history died (history being the phenemological struggle for self-hood against a similar-in-kind Other), only two routes would be available for the actualized person: animalism and humanism. Hence the database animal. Hegelian animals live in harmonious co-existence with their environments, as contrasted to humans, who fight their environments and shape them.

The database is a collection and collation of material from media, spread out in a kind of nebulous web from which creators and consumers alike draw. Indeed, Azuma claims the database is the fundamental way in which fan artists, such as doujin creators or amv remixers, are able to do their work. Without a sense of connectivity between elements that aren’t actually connected in any way (for instance, at no time does Linkin Park actually do soundtrack work for Naruto), such remixes, fan creations, and even “official” peripheral creations would be impossible. His example of the latter is the Eva spin-offs, created by GAINAX but just as removed from the show as anything else. In fact, remember all that good Baudrillard stuff from last time? Azuma brings him up specifically, and claims the media itself (the show, NGE) and the fan art are equally simulacra – that is, hyperreal, removed from “original” and “real” as opposed to “fake.” He has good reason to say this… but he doesn’t use his good reason – the contemporary manufacture and consumption process. He claims they’re hyperreal because they draw from the database. But he also brings up something that, in Japan, is called “anime realism.” It works on the prevalence of anime ideas. They’re so widespread, the habit of thought goes, that referencing them is like referencing reality. The viewers accept it as something that appears.

This, especially, doesn’t seem like something specific to anime or Japan. It’s the whole of the backing of genre theory, it seems to me – the understanding in the audience that some things simply appear. Suvin’s theory of SF talked about nova, or estranging things. Space ships might be an example. And that makes sense, but the concept of “anime realism” points out that fans of space ship shows or books simply expect the space ships to be there. They’ve read/seen so much of them that it’s simply a facet of the genre that’s true.

The database is supposed to be Azuma’s illustration of how we no longer use grand narratives. And in the nineteenth century way, he’s right – there is nothing comparable to, say, the Victorian grand narrative of one’s duties, privileges, and obligations. But between this chapter and my experience, both personally and with other fans, is that the database allows people to build a different kind of “narrative.” It allows them to build an identity. Think of all the people you know who, as fans, identify themselves with certain database elements. Some people go with whole shows, like giant robot fans, or romance fans. Others identify as loli-con, or glasses fans, or even zettai-ryouiki fans. Instead of grand narratives, society-wide, users of the database build personal (or small in-group) identities based on certain specific cullings of the database. This has a lot to offer the studies of genre, specific genres, and, of course, anime.

Anime is a genre, of course.

Yes yes, don’t boo me just yet. Let me drop the tiniest amount of Derrida on you. He pointed out that the term “genre” had been stretched too far from its original base. Now, in light of that, I’m not trying to reclaim the term. We use it the way we use it. However, the original meaning of the word was a particular kind of media. For instance, in the original sense one couldn’t read more than one genre of novel – novel was the genre. The distinctions of what happens inside them are actually, in the traditional sense, “modes.” So in the classical sense anime is a genre, and there are many modes within it.

So what? There are a lot of arguments about what makes up certain genres. That’s genre in its modern sense; mode, in the traditional vernacular. The distinction allows us to see that there are database markers that have to do with the way something’s made – animation styles, designs, etc., as well as database markers that have to do with content – character behavior (GAR is one example), plot points, so on.

That’s the argument Azuma makes that works but is most alien to me personally – that plot and setting are database elements as much as characters. But it makes sense. Into the database go traditional plots, like the “meatball” structure of a shounen, or the young woman gets pulled into another world thing. The database is basically the undercurrent where our knowledge of tropes lives.

I’m used to thinking of plot as something that emerges from the bringing together of characters and setting, even though I know many plots are shared across stories and even across media.

I do think Azuma goes a little too far in some of his claims. His historical account of the shift from grand narrative to database doesn’t take into account the different reading habits of different sorts of fans over time. That is, no postmodernist would deny that the grand narrative was strong in Regency-era England, yet Catherine Moreland and her friend, in Austen’s Northanger Abbey, read Gothic novels more like database animals than any fusty “grand narrative seeking” reader. I suspect what’s really going on is that fan behavior adheres to the database, no matter when it’s happening. If one is a fan of something, one follows it through all its permutations, even when it looks different or does something out of the ordinary. Scholars trying to define SF in traditional terms have flailed around for years because there’s no single shared element. But there is a database pool of things that are associated with SF, including certain plots. That’s how Peake’s Gormenghast novels can be fantasy even when nothing unrealistic happens (at least, not in the first novel). Because the characters and setting are drawn from the sub-database of fantasy as much as from anything else, and the plot is, well, odd.

Can there be many databases? I think Azuma does imply there is only one, though he is specifically examining otaku culture, so he may not have felt the need to discuss any others. However, in a book claiming otaku culture is a microcosm for all postmodern culture I would have expected at least some work connecting the two in that particular way.

As I said, I suspect this is more fan behavior than any new postmodern thing, though I certainly believe the postmodern condition shaped the rise of mass fandoms. The otaku look like microcosms for everyone simply because, in our postmodern world, most everyone is a “fan” of something. Not just a follower, but a fanatic. C.f. Genshiken.