What started out as a plan for a single article has turned by some process into an informal series blog; I won’t be religiously writing about each episode as I watch the series, but as and when sections of it stand out as interesting I will write about them, bringing in my views on the series as a whole.

The opening two episodes of Eureka Seven, as discussed in the previous article, work hard to provide a detailed introduction to the setting; one which is established as a living, developed world. It does this through a tight focus on character and relationships, letting the less relateable elements be introduced naturally by simple depiction rather than explanation. There is a strong viewpoint in the form of Renton, who is presented as character and narrator in a visual equivalent of the first-person narrative voice. With the introduction completed, the main plot arc begins and the viewer is launched into Renton’s story. The contrast between his confident internal monologue and awkwardness around Eureka is expanded via the blurring of the distinction between narration and spoken dialogue; what seems to be at first another lengthy digression about his insecurities around women turns out to be him thinking aloud – most of episode 3 plays on his confident facade being broken down by uncertainty about what happens next. The climax of the episode, a tense escape from an occupied airport which introduces a number of new characters, emphasises clearly how passive and naïve Renton is. It is the apparently innocent and docile Eureka who is shown to be prepared to fight to protect him and others, while despite all his arrogance he is reduced to holding on as she flies the Nirvash.

If episode 3 marks the true conclusion of the introductory section of the plot, episode 4 provides a fresh start for Renton. He has achieved his aim stated at the very start of the series – to escape boring town life and travel with Holland – but is immediately disillusioned. His introduction to the crew of Holland’s personal aircraft, the Gekko, is a humiliating one, with him known only as someone who makes Eureka laugh and fixed the Nirvash – while in his dreams he hopes to be accepted as a peer by his idols, the reality is quite different and he is seen only as a nuisance. His first conversation with Holland following his arrival on the Gekko makes this clear, as Holland reminds Renton that it is his ship and his home, and that Renton is only a guest. This provides a stark lesson which will define future plot arcs – that independence, and rejection of authority and family, is not as easy as it first seems.

As an outsider unfamiliar with the closed society which he now inhabits, Renton becomes driven by two things as a defence mechanism – trying to convince himself that Holland and his crew are as he imagined, and trying to remain close to Eureka. This unwillingness to accept reality means he does not integrate well, and creates conflict in a realistic fashion. Viewers can clearly see how this awkwardness, uncertainty and ultimately lack of respect for a new community is realistic behaviour for someone suddenly given both freedom and responsibility, and the focus of the plot becomes more about Renton’s learning process and maturing. The difference is made clear between a familial relationship and a peer relationship; while Renton opposed his grandfather and felt oppressed by him, the environment was still a supportive one. Opposing Holland and Talho, the Gekko’s first officer, leads to him being punished and further ostracised and enforces his outsider status.

The combination of this anti-authority petulance and genuine naivete as shown by his awkwardness around Eureka and Talho (who plays on his sexual frustration and inexperience) fosters a sense of resentment, and this leads to him rejecting genuine offers of kindness. The conflict is then heightened by the introduction of three children Eureka acts as a surrogate mother to, who with natural childishness tease and reject the newcomer. Renton’s own immaturity and delusions of importance immediately set him in conflict with the children as he tries increasingly hard to ingratiate himself with Eureka. A conflict is established between his imposing on the Gekko’s society, and the functional importance that Holland recognises in him; while he does not try to integrate as part of the closed society, he exists only as a tool in the form of the Nirvash’s copilot, sleeping in the hangar. Over the course of these four episodes, the viewer is thus presented with an idealised view of the world through the dreams and delusions of a self-important teenager, and then sees them shattered to make way for a truer depiction. The climax of episode 4, when Renton is told that a risky mission to ship organs for donation which he was sent on in place of attending a “lifting” tournament was likely to have involved people selling body parts to pay debts to organised criminals, provides the absolute end to his idealised world. The crew of the Gekko, and Holland their leader, will not fly the trapars to pay their way, but will aid the mafia.

To conclude, episodes 3 and 4 mark the end of Renton’s ideals and dreams, and provide a more realistic yet depiction of the world of Eureka Seven; the Gekko’s crew, and Holland, are an almost amoral and lawless society but at the same time a closed and closely-regulated one. Renton’s naïve insistance on clinging to the ideals he has built up, and unwillingness to fit in and be treated as an adult and peer, means that he remains a poor fit for them. His inability even to complete a training flight in the Nirvash without suffering from airsickness makes this especially clear; if episodes 1 and 2 showed us the world according to Renton, these episodes show the insignificance of Renton within the world.

With regard to science fiction, I hold that setting should not overshadow plot, and exposition should be limited to the minimum necessary for the story. The 2005-06 series Eureka Seven, in its opening two episodes, effectively creates a sci-fi universe that is entirely believable, populated with characters who are similarly credible. While the setting is fantastical in nature, it is nevertheless convincingly portrayed and the viewer is able to easily accept it because those parts of it which are instantly relatable are realistic.

Realism in science fiction need not mean the technology featured is purely that which is currently existent, or even that which is within the bounds of reality; it is as much about the depiction of the impossible as whether or not something could exist. The central conceit of Eureka Seven is that a newly discovered kind of particle, the trapar, allows for anti-gravity technology to function in a fashion equivalent to surfing on ocean waves. Where the series excels is in making the viewer instantly accepting of the concept of trapars and thus able to understand how they relate to the narrative without needing lengthy exposition. This is done to an extent through context – there is no specific explanation in the first two episodes of how any of the technology functions, simply depictions of it working. The opening sequence features LFOs, military craft designed to use trapars for flight, and by showing the dogfighting style that the technology necessitates, the viewer is furnished with the context needed to understand the setting.

However, the focus is subsequently shown over the course of the first two episodes to be more on the characters than the machines or the technology; the conversation as the scene starts gives more of a clue about who the viewer is seeing rather than any details about the future they inhabit, setting the tone for the rest of the series. Eureka Seven is a science fiction series that is about its cast of characters, rather than setting. The juxtaposition of a dogfight in inexplicable machines with what follows, a scene of daily life for the ordinary people who inhabit the created world, highlights this believability. The viewer is introduced to the protagonist, Renton, and his pervasive narrative voice; the series will be about him first and foremost. A key part of a believable science fiction setting is that it appears to exist beyond those characters immediately featured in it, and Renton’s inner monologue and personality, shown both contextually through his bedroom and explicitly through his descriptions of daily life. By describing the world through the voice of a character who will be central to the plot, the viewer is given three pieces of information in one process – firstly, information about Renton, secondly, information about the world Renton inhabits and thirdly, what Renton feels about this; he is established as an unreliable, self-centred narrator who complains about his life, and most of all a realistically depicted teenage boy.

A scene where Renton is at school provides further exposition in a natural fashion; the response to his family apparently being celebrities is realistically handled, with fellow students remaining sceptical that their unremarkable classmate has a famous background. The pervading sense through Renton’s interactions with his classmates and grandfather is that his absent father and sister are not the simple heroes that the glimpses of the setting’s history present them as – but yet Renton’s obsession with living up to their example is what drives him to make all his early decisions. The viewer learns much about the context and motivations of the characters through seeing how they act in the present, and for this to be effective the characters must act believably.   So from only a few scenes, Eureka Seven has imparted a lot of information about its setting; the level of technology, and the way in which these innovations have affected daily life. Renton’s obsession with lifting, an extreme sport using the trapars to surf on skateboard-like devices, is set against the LFOs fighting in the sky and it is this intersection of his obsession – both with the sport itself and the celebrity Holland – that by the end of the second episode has defined the course of the storyline. When the mysterious LFO called the Nirvash is introduced, and its pilot Eureka, the two become even more closely linked; dangerous lifting stunts like Holland’s trademark “Cutback Drop Turn” are now a means of fighting. Again, future plot developments are being foreshadowed in a way which focuses on creating a credible setting rather than simply providing exposition.

If, then, the setting and leading characters are so believably drawn up that the viewer is able to learn from naturalistic rather than self-consciously expository dialogue large amounts about the setting and their motivations, the character of Eureka becomes even more interesting. Her dialogue with Renton shows an innate familiarity with the setting from an entirely different perspective, one which is quite unrelatable for the viewer; the interplay between the two characters proceeds to change the viewer’s perception of what has gone before. She is presented as an otherworldly figure, detached from the materialistic and immature aims that have driven Renton’s petulance, and his response to this (perceiving it as vulnerability, reflected in his unwitting patronising of her) is used for comic effect. The viewer may initially share Renton’s perception of her but as her character develops, the distance that emerges between the two viewpoints moves from simple comedy to its own form of implicit exposition; we have seen Renton the petulant, materialistic teenager, wishing for control of his own life and rebelling against authority in his desire to emulate the counterculture hero Holland. This is then shattered at the first sight of a pretty girl; he is human in more ways than one.

To conclude, it is the focus first and foremost on interactions between characters, and the lessened emphasis on technology in the crucial opening sections of Eureka Seven that set it apart and establish the tone of the whole series. A character who has become complacent in his life and seeks to rebel is presented with a truly incomprehensible and untouchable object of desire, and the motivations which his voice has set forward (to fight what he perceives as boring town life and emulate his own idols while also living up to the expectations of his absent family) become changed; it is clear from the opening that the main focus of the series, despite the dogfighting LFOs and mysterious alien corals that emerge, is on Renton as a character and his relationship with his grandfather, Eureka and Holland. This emphasis on character, and the concise and natural exposition, makes it easier for the viewer to believe in the world the characters inhabit; even the simple act of juxtaposing Renton’s attempts at lifting with the visceral combat in the opening sequence (and the simultaneous juxtaposition of the photojournalist in his LFO turning war into a stylish spectator sport) contributes to the ease of suspension of disbelief; the trapars which are key to the plot are presented not as a convenient gimmick but as an integral part of a believable world.

In essence, it’s a relic. Perhaps it held meaning once, but now it’s a rusty reminder of bygone times. … We use it constantly, and it’s created a plethora of negative, oftentimes limiting connotations.

Eh. Basically what happened to “indie,” as in indie games, is the same as what happened to “indie,” as in indie rock. The term was chosen because those whose work it applied to were actually independent creators, once. But because these independent creators produced work with certain things in common, “indie” came to suggest a way of doing things, a toolset of tropes and choices. And I’m sure you know what we call such a word. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen — it’s a genre.

So, yeah, it’s “limiting.” By necessity. A genre is whichever genre it is by virtue of not being another genre.

If you object to the genrefication of indie (and part of me does, actually), here’s what I’d suggest: let’s come up with a way to differentiate between self-published games with no budgets (i.e. indie games) and games whose experience either 1. results from the direction of one or very few creators, and/or 2. relies partly upon your acknowledging the agency of an individual creator or small team. Because that’s what we mean now when we brand games indie. Minecraft isn’t independent anymore by most metrics — hell, it’s an industry these days — but Notch remains an important part of the whole Minecraft thing, even if he’s stepped away from the project in a literal sense.

This would allow for the existence of seeming oxymora like the EA “Indie” Bundle. It wouldn’t seem so objectionable if we called it the EA Auteur Bundle, which, practically speaking, is what it’s called already.

Let us be clear about this from the outset. A vote (in the, you know) for We Remember Love on Monday is a vote for two posts by me. It’s a vote for two posts by Cuchlann. It’s a vote for dialogues in which lelangir and Shance play considerable parts. It is of course a vote for a whole goddamn lot of posts by Ghostlightning, who has contributed to Super Fanicom posts both thoughtfully imaginative and imaginatively thoughtful. GL comments here often, and WRL is one of the few places I comment with any semi-regularity.

I won’t play the part of the angsty underdog because 1) my enterprise and Ghost’s are pretty well entwined, and 2) owing to Ghost’s considerable skill at writing, forming webs of connections between bloggers, and somehow finding the time to blog while working and having a kid, he deserves the win. He’s invested more into blogging than I have — it’s as simple as that.

Or maybe it isn’t. I have another, somewhat more selfish reason for appreciating Mr. GL.

When he came upon this blog back in the Dark Blogoages, he was immediately sympathetic to what we did here. Let’s call it cerebral blogging — it is not by necessity academic or intellectual; it’s letting your mind take detours. Sometimes long detours through things not many other people enjoy. But that’s what we like to do.

I was content simply to keep doing it, to keep putting it out there for people to find and judge as they saw fit. Ghostlightning would walk up to you, shake your hand, and recommend a whole bouquet of blog posts, some of which might seem inaccessible if it weren’t for his suggesting them as one friend suggests things to another.

I think his way was better. His way opened minds. His reach meant that he could open a lot of minds.

And now cerebral bloggers are everywhere. A whole host of people contributed to this — IKnight, 2DT, Michael, 8C, animekritik, etc., etc. — but I give Ghost a lot of credit, networker that he is, for helping some of us realize that we weren’t the only ones doing what we did, that we didn’t have to be isolated pockets of bloggers writing about anime and lit theory, or anime and philosophy, or porn anime and linguistics. We could all get together and be the “anime and stuff” crowd.

Maybe this getting-together is what germinated The Untold Story of Altair and Vega.

What pisses me off about this blog is that it came to be when I was on involuntary hiatus, and so I didn’t even know about it until a few months ago.

No. What pisses me off about this blog is that it didn’t exist in 2008.

As an example of what goes down over there, I could point to a post with a long, descriptive title implying an involved examination to follow. One of the most recent is called “Acchi Kocchi, Ben-Day Dots, and the American Comic Style.” There’s, holy Jesus, there’s a post comparing Eureka Seven to the novels of Lloyd Alexander.

I’m not going to offer you any of those, though. I want you to take a look at a post innocuously titled “Mysterious Girlfriend X Episode 3.”

It seems typical enough when you encounter it on the front page. Bitmap expresses opinions, and I like Bitmap, so I give his opinions some thought — that’s what episodic blogging is. Then you view the post in full, and, wait, okay, we’re talking about magic realism now? That’s a pretty tough topic, there. It’s not an uncontroversial genre by any means. It’s about as good as a five-paragraph summation can be, though, relating magic realism to the show at hand while — no, now we’re talking about fanservice. While perhaps more straightforward a topic (or perhaps not), it’s certainly big.

I like this topical jumping-around. It challenges you to rethink the use and usefulness of the episodic format (something Ghostlightning has also done). But, really, it’s not as though these writers are wholly reconfiguring episodic blogging. I suspect they’re still being somewhat faithful to it. I suspect that, for them, an account of the experience of watching an episode necessarily includes these other topics. That’s how they consume. That’s how I consume, too.

The thing about Altair and Vega, though, is that I would’ve devoted some time to it anyway, tourney or no tourney. I follow several of the eight(!!!) writers on Twitter; I already pay attention to what they have to say. I should point out a few other mental-detours-style blogs that I found because of the tournament itself — the point being that, though it can get nasty, the thing at least serves its primary purpose.

Here’s one I didn’t quite expect: Beneath the Tangles.

I shouldn’t be able to get much out of this blog. Right? “It is,” says the sidebar, “the meeting point between anime and Christian spirituality.” In case you haven’t been counting, I’ve used the Lord’s name in vain twice already, once even before the break. Suffice to say that the faith and I had a falling out some years ago.

Well, give it a chance. It’s often more compelling than you might think.

First of all, many posts are thoughtful recommendations of other posts. They’re goddamn gosh darn useful. I wish only that these posts were more easily searchable — say, if there were a dedicated “Spirituality in the Anime Blogosphere” tag.

Second, the posts here are often concerned with people. And that doesn’t mean only consumers of [anime x] or [manga y]. Maybe this is because TWWK, unlike many Christians I’ve known, has bothered to learn the Gospels; you may remember that Jesus Christ also concerned himself with people. It’s an interesting perspective, at any rate, and one I often like. Sometimes this results in humble anecdotes; other times posts spring up at the intersections between art and personal theology. Many posts deal with problems, and I like problems. In fiction, I mean.

I can’t really agree with the proposed solutions to those problems. But, again, if the bloggers at Beneath the Tangles bring Christian ideas to the experience of watching anime, that’s what I want to see in the posts.

You want something a little more eclectic? Here’s Anime B&B.

In the interest of fairness, you should know that Marina is a grad student focusing in children’s lit. She could be a serial murderer (though she probably isn’t) and I’d still think of her as a kindred soul.

But, yeah, these posts are all over the place. I mean that in a good way. People with too many passions interest me.

There’s a whole section about food, for example. Sometimes recipes are included, but this isn’t a cookbook. Everybody has to eat, and people’s interactions with and attitudes toward food can say a lot about them. Anime is fertile ground for someone interested in food culture. Marina digs deep, makes connections, and brings in a fair but not distracting amount of personal experience.

Anyway, eclectic. It’s hard to recommend one post. On the front page is a post about mythology and seduction, and one about improvisation, and — hey, Hemingway! Now that’s within my sphere of expertise.

But I won’t elaborate. To focus on one post might obscure the real strength of this blog. Marina knows a lot about a lot of things. She appears willing to learn what she doesn’t know. Blogging is learning. That makes her more of a kindred soul than her degree program.

I’ll let the next blog introduce itself.

Lemma (Greek λήμμα; from mathematics) is a proposition proved or accepted for immediate use in the proof of some other proposition.

Submodality is the smallest building block of our thoughts something that helps us remember what we have seen, heard, felt, smelt, and tasted both externally and imagined.

So, Lemmas and Submodalities.

It’s a high-concept title for a blog that’s quite accessible. I don’t know what SnippetTee’s background is, but L&S is another eclectic affair. Here’s the philosophy:

… [M]y themes were usually taken from a small content, and then explored and amplified based on my understanding of the world and my senses.

Yes! This is a great one-sentence definition of what I mean by “cerebral blogging.” I also like the idea of focusing on minutiae; if 99% of life is inconsequential, the amount of inconsequential things is…consequential. Or something. The point being that I like SnippetTee’s posts about everyday things in anime.

For example, here’s a post about coffee culture. I realize that’s not exactly a small matter, depending on how you look at it, and the post doesn’t neglect to mention that. But drinking coffee is also a personal act. I don’t exactly judge people based on how they make their coffee in the morning, but that information does give me a kind of benign impression. It’s something I’m curious about, in other words. The post in question has a nice way of moving from the global to the local.

You might also like that SnippetTee’s posts aren’t text-heavy. You could read one at work without getting caught, which you may not be able to do with a post by, say, myself.

Regrettably, the blogothon has nearly ended. There’s only one blog left, and it’s called Baka Laureate.

Krizzlybear fancies himself a writer, and he comes at anime from the perspective of someone who constructs fiction. This is true of me, actually, though the amount of writing I’ve managed to do lately might suggest otherwise. This is why you’ll sometimes see posts here about storytelling choices that work for me. I’m taking notes.

It’s more explicit over there, though. There’s even a Writing category. This isn’t the entirety of Baka Laureate — there’s episodic content, too — but the writing bits interest me most. It’s not always easy to communicate thoughts on the creative process. Note that so much writing advice, professional, academic, or amateur, lands on the spectrum between hot air and bullshit. Best to learn by doing.

These aren’t really advice posts, fortunately. “Finding your Voice through Fanfiction” might seem advisory, but I read it more as an account of personal experience, and it’s a nice overview of the fanfic endeavor. I always appreciate it when bloggers take on fan fiction; I suspect it’s more significant an activity than its representation on the blogs would suggest. And, concerned as I am with structures, I also like the posts about discrete storytelling elements — here’s one about premise.

Hang on. Let me catch my breath.

Okay.

It took a while because I wanted to do these bloggers some shred of justice, but I mean to say simply that, while I always felt like I was in good company writing the way I did, the good company has expanded. The Aniblog Tourney inevitably forments drama, yes, but it also forms networks in a Ghostlightningian way. And if I failed to discover you via the tourney but you think I’d be interested in your blog, please do introduce yourself.

One more thing: a salute to Sir Ghost on the eve of battle. I only have an axe, but I’m proud to face the Gundam.

One of my favorite depictions of far-future space travel comes from Dan Simmons’s Hyperion (or it might be Fall of Hyperion, which takes place five minutes later, so it doesn’t matter). Therein, your average ship of the line has a crew of about ten, all packed into a relatively small room full of consoles. You tell the computers what to do and the computers tell the ship what to do.

Of course! Right? Why wouldn’t spacecraft work like this? Why, on anything but a passenger ship, would you need more than a dozen crew members? Our computers can drive cars, and presumably they’ll improve in the next thousand years.

I was happy to find that Mouretsu Pirates embraces this kind of practicality. In fact, I suspect it’s a lot more sensible a show than its ridiculous (bodacious?) anime veneer would lead you to believe.

Yes, okay, I suppose we should address that veneer first. In this universe, piracy is regulated and benign — it’s no kind of piracy at all, really. In this universe, the heroes are 16. In this universe, you put a high school yacht club in charge of a decommissioned war machine. All seemingly par for the anime course. Teenagers run the place.

But Mouretsu Pirates does something that Macross Frontier at least began to do. You may recall that the latter takes care to set up an environment in which kids with recognizable sensibilities can reasonably fly expensive space-planes and shoot intergalactic bugs. The teenage pilot is an institution — there’s a high school for them, complete with a monument, Hikaru Ichijou’s VF-1, there to remind us that people in the Macross-verse have been doing this since 2009 or so. And in the last 50 years, “normal” human society has taken in and adapted to a people for whom war was all of culture. You can almost believe that Alto Saotome acts reasonably, given his environment. He isn’t thrown into mercenary defense contractor work as a plot convenience. This is just something that people do.

Mouretsu Pirates does this. It gives us an anime setting with internal consistency.

Piracy (privateering, actually) has a historical precedent. It’s been declawed by years of peace, meaning that a teenage pirate isn’t always in mortal danger. It has become so highly formalized, its inheritance laws so unbending, that either Marika Katou inherits the Benten-maru or nobody does. Explanations are always forthcoming. The setting and the plot points work together, which is far more important than their making real-world sense.

But there is, after all, a kind of sense to things. The show does engage with our sense of…sensibility.

Exhibit A: electronic warfare.

While giant lasers aren’t exactly weapons of last resort, nobody seems eager to use them to kill anyone. They are, as Ririka says, most useful as tools of intimidation. You might wave your guns around to scare the passengers of a luxury liner, you might burn away an enemy ship’s armor to convince it to flee or surrender, but you generally aren’t trying to scuttle a ship full of people.

And you wouldn’t really need to. If your hackers are good enough, you could seize control of your enemy’s life support system and turn it off. That’d take much less energy than carving them up with lasers, and the result is the same — or better, as you’d have a wholly intact prize to tow home.

I appreciate that, most of the time, the fights are won or lost during the electronic warfare stage. Only when the two sides reach an impasse, or when one side or the other doesn’t feel like sitting around waiting for the hacking to happen, are shots fired, and usually these shots look more dangerous than they are.

I know someone will want me to acknowledge that the hacking in Mouretsu Pirates doesn’t look like hacking. But I guess I don’t care much about that. Actual hacking is much more utilitarian, and I like pretty holo-screens.

Exhibit B: detail.

I’m of the opinion that the science in science fiction doesn’t have to look correct to someone with a relevant doctorate (I’m the kind of person who usually finds hard SF tedious). The purpose of detail isn’t to convince us that this universe might be possible in a few hundred years. As long as they aren’t irreconcilably ridiculous, little details make a setting feel richer and more fully realized simply by existing.

Places and objects in Mouretsu Pirates feel like physical spaces and things. Space suits are complex devices. Solar sails get caught on things while deploying. I especially like the scene in which, to get around a crowd, Marika and Mami use stairs and hallways.

Because, yeah, that’s how buildings work. Can we just assume that this happens? Sure, but sometimes you want to have an idea of how a place is laid out.

I have one complaint in this regard: I wish we could see more of what Bentenmaru looks like between the bridge and the captain’s quarters. Presumably other rooms contribute to the performance of the ship.

But I can wait. Slow pace doesn’t bother me. 98% of any enterprise is busywork and waiting, and maybe I’m strange, but I like to see some of that 98%.

But it’s good to meet new people, right? So I didn’t object when informed that my blog would be thrown into a cage with other blogs and invited to eat their souls or whatever it is blogs do to one another. The whole thing makes me a little uncomfortable, but I agreed to it, I’m complicit. Which I suppose means I should be friendly and write a post about it.

Let’s go about it this way. Prior to about a week ago, I’d never heard of Assorted Explorations. The author has more Twitter followers than me, so maybe you have heard of it. But I figure it’s not enough to have heard of it. This is my monstrous zombie pet blog’s erstwhile rival. Let’s familiarize ourselves with those bits of it that I consider to be pretty good.

For a general overview, you may want to start here — this is the aniblogging credo in play. Actually, it’s a credo that hasn’t been in play for long; author Jay has blogged anime in earnest only since winter. His being pitted against a blog that came about in summer 2008 is evidence of the randomness of the matchups, I suppose, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that his newness is a handicap. Plenty of bloggers with hefty readerships started after I did — it’s a matter of breadth of appeal, something I only became interested in well beyond my start date.

Newness can be used to one’s advantage. You’ve got a truckload of blogs to consider when designing and focusing your own. You can keep what worked for other people and toss out what didn’t. If I had to identify a singular problem with Assorted Explorations, I’d say that it hasn’t finished doing this yet, or reads as such. And this is fine; Jay should take as much time as he needs to refine his voice.

With that said, we can certainly begin to discern a shape. Here’s a quote from the page linked above:

This is *probably* the only anime blog in the Aniblog Tourney that is powered by @tumblr.

This is exciting to me. I realize it defeats the explicit purpose, but I want to see more people use tumblr as a long(er)-form platform, or at least push the perceived boundaries of the tumblelog. The simplicity of the platform might offer certain advantages over others. It’s easier to customize — WordPress.com demands payment for CSS access — and it comes with its own social ecosystem.

And another thing:

Jay is confirmed for bad taste.

This is a good foundation, barring an assertion that “taste” shouldn’t be ranked at all. Maybe the former is a better foundation in that it’s less activist, and therefore less potentially offputting. It’s a simple acknowledgement that Jay writes about what he writes about, whatever the greater weebiverse thinks of it, and he feels no particular need to insist that the things he likes are better than the things you like.

This makes him useful. His best posts (that is, my personal favorites) don’t appeal to the desire to see products and their fans torn down, nor do they fit neatly into anyone’s confirmation bias. They aggregate in an almost lelangirian way. They point to amusing, insightful, complementary, contrary, and/or tangential opinions, and they allow you to choose among them as you see fit, in a suggested but not mandatory sequence. They resemble meeting minutes more than essays, only the meetings are fabricated, are in fact the “art” of the posts.

Which brings us to the important part –

Before you vote on Sunday, read “Watchlist: Symphogear #3. Tsubasa is still in…” and “Tweets of the Day: Against Symphogear (as per Episode 2).”

Full disclosure: I know approximately fuckall about Symphogear. I never even read a season preview for it. And the posts linked above aren’t examples of pushing tumblr boundaries; that’s something I’d like to see in general, an unrealized potential that may prove to be a product of my imagination, rather than something Jay actually does (or even needs to do).

But, when I’m not in the mood for extended analyses, this is almost exactly what I want out of episodic blogging.

I mentioned the lelangirian metawankery already. They also remind me of how Cuchlann approached the task of blogging shows reaction-by-reaction, episode-by-episode. The first post begins as a simple list of observations, then blooms out in many hypertextual directions — it even ends with links specifically for people who aren’t satisfied yet. The second is more of an addendum, but it demonstrates Jay’s willingness to track down opinions of all kinds for fun and profit and science.

You begin to realize that soapboxing isn’t what Jay’s about. He doesn’t really summarize, he doesn’t praise or complain with great voracity. Instead, he mentions things and invites you to think about them.

let’s take a look at the Nethustan armor

let’s look at the story rather then the art styles and the thingamajigs out there

Then he offers you examples of other people’s pursuits of these lines of inquiry. I called the posts meeting minutes, but maybe they’re more like transcripts of recordings of seminars.

They aren’t perfect. Being new and comparatively young has its disadvantages. But if Jay continues to work at prompting consideration and tying threads together, he could end up with a vast archive of diverse fan activity punctuated by personal insights. An exciting prospect.

And all the men and women merely…yeah. That bit from As You Like It remains quotable in all circumstances. It’s particularly applicable to Utena, though, and in this post I think I’ll manage to address something that Ryan A. brought up in a comment to the last.

He made two salient points, actually. Let’s start with this one:

…[M]uch of Utena is almost presented as if it were a play. Particularly, extraneous characters/bodies are few to none, especially outside the school. Anyone in-frame is likely a named character, and in my opinion, this lends to the idea that the presentation is specific and similar to a staged presentation.

Yes, there’s this. Several theater traditions make the most of only a few characters. Greek theater comes to mind immediately (not least because of the J. A. Seazer chorus). There’s also Commedia dell’arte, which, with its relatively fixed pool of character types shared among multiple authors, reminds me more of anime the more I think about it.

But I have to be honest: this isn’t something I noticed until Ryan mentioned it. I was more stricken by the characters, however many there are at a time, acting like entertainers of all kinds.

Maybe the fanservice would be a good entry point.

Clearly — it seems clear to me, anyway — stuff like this partly amounts to the characters showing off for the audience, whatever other purpose it might serve. I suspect that Akio could exposit with his shirt on, that he and Touga could watch the fights from somewhere other than in bed. Akio’s chest has aesthetic value (which opens a can of worms to be addressed later). Whether he’s acting like a model or a porn star is for you to decide, but either way he’s putting on a show.

Now, you might argue that I’m co-opting something that happens in all anime ever to make an Utena-specific argument. Fair enough, but the performing doesn’t end with the titillation we’re so used to.

We’ve got the shadow plays, which are explicitly dramatic performances. We’ve got Touga’s obligatory monologue about the car, along with other repeating acts. Miki is a musician, and maybe you could argue that Juri and Saionji “perform” with their swordfighting — they’re shown to attract audiences, anyway. Some of these things are logically necessary or plot-relevant; others are more symbolic or simply cool; but there’s so much of it going on that it’d be hard to document every instance in a post of moderate length.

One thing that interests me is how the student council’s balcony is so often a site of exposition backed by performance or entertainment. The knife-throwing bit shown above is probably my favorite, but there are many other examples. In one carnival-esque case, the dialogue is accented with balloons of relevant color:

In another case, a baseball announcer provides commentary, and a scoreboard keeps track of things:

Now let’s bring it home. Ryan again:

…I’m not sure if I’d call many of the locations a literal stage.

What is a stage? I’d suggest that a stage is defined by the drama done or meant to be done upon it. Until the rise of professional theater, it wasn’t uncommon for dramatists to bring their stages with them or make stages of any area broad enough to hold an audience. This is what Utena’s characters seem to do. They increase the sense of artifice that hangs over Ohtori Academy by staging performances throughout the school. The balcony stands out in its ability to react to dialogue with its own props, and even then you could argue that the characters must go up there and talk before it turns stagelike.

But it’s not as if the cast’s hamming it up serves only the setting. It’s often funny. It’s postmodern transparency, I suppose, ever reminding us that this is anime.

And it’s thematic. Making such a big production out of things is a luxury (or affliction?) of youth. I’m guessing you’ve been there and know what I’m talking about. Most notably: 1. Akio can participate because of his strange, static position between childhood and adulthood; 2. Anthy doesn’t seem to know how to do it, instead underplaying everything; and 3. some characters (Utena, Nanami) do it less and less as the show heaps troubles upon them. This is something that children stand to lose.

Utena is somewhat less clear about what children stand to gain.

I can’t think of Utena’s dueling arena as anything but a stage. It reminds me of the classical Greek chorus, which isn’t necessarily where all the acting would’ve happened, but the duels are musical enough for it to be appropriate anyway.

Consider:

The whole show is aggressively theatrical, thanks in part to the elaborate setting and the angles from which we see it. Often we’re looking at things from the side, as if peering through the fourth wall into a stage. The screencap above the break gives one example. Here’s another:

We’ll cover the use of shadows in more detail later, but the Kashira Players, those shadowy expositors, become relevant here, too. In the first arc they’re a duet performing independent of the “real” characters, summarizing things before each fight. The Black Rose arc’s solo act complicates the scenery, introducing a level of interaction between Utena and backdrop. C-ko gets up to some crazy business; Utena comments or delivers a punchline.

I think it might be embarrassing to like The Glass Menagerie as much as I do, what with its classic Tennessee-Williamsian unsubtlety and all. But so it is, and that’s what the Black Rose shadow plays remind me of. Directors usually leave it out, but Williams intended for there to be a screen behind the stage on which would be projected thematically relevant images — it seems over-the-top until you remember that The Glass Menagerie is supposed to be a memory play, that the exaggeration is the point.

Utena also capitalizes on exaggeration. But it doesn’t tell us outright, as The Glass Menagerie did, that the unreal things aren’t real. We don’t even know whether C-ko exists until much later.

Unreality becomes a trend: first Utena talks to a wall, then the ending of the Black Rose arc reveals that Nemuro Hall was a kind of artifice and that Mamiya never existed as shown in the present. It’s not that surprising when, following this sort of thing, Akio turns off the planetarium projector.

But it’s still unsettling. Some of the places that looked like stages really were only stages. How much of what we saw was “real” and how much was elaborate stagecraft? The longer we follow this line of questioning, the easier it is to forget that Utena is anime, that the idea of a physical stage is, on the most literal level, entirely inapplicable.

Let’s consult Aristotle — no, wait, don’t go. This isn’t complicated enough to be boring. It’s just that, in Aristotle’s estimation, spectacle was one of the six essential components of drama.

It’s explained in the Poetics like this:

… [S]pectacle, to be sure, attracts our attention but is the least essential part of the art of poetry. For the power of tragedy is felt even without a dramatic performance and actors. Furthermore, for the realization of spectacle, the art of the costume designer is more effective than that of the poet.

You don’t find spectacle in dialogue. Spectacle is big, loud accoutrements. It’s Ohtori Academy, a walled primary and secondary school built around a fairy tale tower and a magic forest. It’s school uniforms with epaulettes. It’s swords coming out of people’s chests and a tremendous stage beneath an upside-down castle in the sky upon which swordfights happen.

It’s also people turning into cars — I don’t want to get into the movie until later, but this is relevant. If you’re a consumer of media in the 21st century, you’re no stranger to spectacle. We’ve elevated the art of spectacle to new heights. To Aristotle spectacle was fancy costumes; to us it’s grand settings and explosions and weird imagery constructed entirely through the use of calculating machines. So, a far cry. And one of the things we’ve learned from our many experiments in spectacle is that it can be a poetry unto itself, another language atop the language of the dialogue. You can use over-the-top imagery to suggest themes or states of mind, and you can generally count on people paying attention to this imagery because it’s fun. This happens in anime all the time; I don’t think there’s anything quite like anime and manga if you’re looking for crazy bullshit toward an end.

Pointed spectacle happens to be one of my favorite things in any medium, and Utena has a lot of it. Some of it we’ve seen before; extravagant, enormous, confining schools aren’t uncommon in anime by any means. Other images are less common, but we’re familiar enough with the technique that they aren’t too troublesome.

Utena’s spectacle, though, is — pardon the convolution — almost meta-Aristotelian. It acts upon us just fine, and its many contributions to the “power of tragedy” remove it from what Aristotle seems to have had in mind. But the characters themselves regard it, as Aristotle did, as often incidental to dialogue and interaction.

Consider that Utena initially isn’t bothered much by Ohtori Academy. This is explainable: she and it exist on the same Earth, and she’s probably seen pictures of it or toured it before. Stranger is her lack of response to the “special effects” (lol) surrounding the swordfights. I can’t imagine she’s ever been anywhere quite like the dueling arena. But as far as Utena’s concerned, she has more important things to worry about: avenging Wakaba, doing some kind of good for Anthy. Excepting a few acrobatic feats and some swordomancy, the duels themselves are fairly mundane; they don’t even last that long. The characters don’t shoot fireballs at each other. They just swing swords. Sometimes they weave around desks and dodge cars, but note that these things come from “staging” rather than script.

Maybe you could do with Utena what’s done with Sophocles and Shakespeare: you could drop the script in a wholly different setting and, with a few modifications, make it work. Of course, whether your spectacle turned out as well and pulled as much weight as in the show would remain to be seen.

It’s jarring, though not necessarily in a bad way, when characters shrug off things as new to them as to us, things that make us pause and gape or mumble an involuntary “holy shit.” This isn’t the only way that Utena challenges our viewerly sensibilities. And, in a genre-savvy kind of way, it’s consistent with the classical undertone that runs from start to finish.

Arguably Cowboy Bebop is about whichever of the characters you choose to focus on. Or maybe it’s about all of them. The whole crew gets a fair bit of screen time, enough that all the central characters feel…central. In terms of story mechanics, they’re all integral to one another. They’re excellent foils, and you learn quite a lot about them when they interact.

I know this. But as I came into the show’s final stretch, I’d already decided that, for me, during this initial viewing, it was about Spike.

I suppose we should start with “Pierrot le Fou.”

I found this episode deeply troubling, and for a while I didn’t know why. It seemed there was nothing about it that I shouldn’t like. I love the Batman feel of it, the fight with a supervillain in an amusement park. I like bad situations, circumstances in which nobody’s right. The resolution even manages to be as benign as possible: the Mad Pierrot can’t be allowed to go on killing people, whether or not he has any idea what he’s doing, and Spike probably saves many lives by ending one.

But after a few days of thinking about it, I realized that I hate Spike in this episode. I hate that his problem with the villain seems largely personal. I hate that, when given an opportunity to learn about this human being he’s just killed, to accept an inkling of responsibility for ending a life even if that was really the “ideal” outcome, he turns it down. “I don’t need it anymore,” he says, as if the information was only ever useful to him as a weapon, and, now that the battle’s over, why should he care? In practical terms, Spike declines to watch those scenes that, for me, make this such a strong episode, and that’s infuriating.

And the more I considered it, the more I realized that Spike has always been a tremendous pain in the ass and an occasional thoughtless bastard. I still enjoy him as a character — maybe I enjoy him more for this, even. But I don’t “like” him in the sense that I wouldn’t want to have a drink with him.

He does occasionally do things purely for a friend’s sake, as in episode 21 — but he seems to spend most of that episode not caring much. Why shouldn’t there be any smoking on the bridge in the living quarters?

The following episode might be my favorite. Therein Spike meets a bounty hunter who is marginally more stupid than he is, and proceeds to use the episode’s mark merely as a means of getting at said bounty hunter. The rivalry results in quite a lot of nothing getting done — in fact, it’s generally detrimental to everyone within a two-mile radius; the Teddy Bomber is able to keep on bombing, and Spike vs. Andy fights tend to cause a fair amount of collateral damage. In the end, the Bomber comes out looking better than either of the bounty hunters ostensibly dedicated to ending his reign of terror — he’s misguided, but he never wanted to kill anyone, he learns his lesson, and he at least has principles (which, true to form, Spike never lets him express).

The episode’s climax is an utterly pointless fight resulting in Spike’s being crowned by the king of the dumbasses.

Good stuff. I like when failure is played for laughs.

I don’t want to go through every one of the final episodes like this. To do so might obscure the fact that Spike sucks in almost every episode, and there’s lots of tasty, tasty fail to be gleaned from even the earliest. I’m also hesitant to lay into the guy in any kind of methodical way, as, remember, encounters with Spike sometimes result in self-improvement for the third parties. Whether Spike intends for this to happen doesn’t seem as important as the fact that it does happen. I’m not trying to indict Spike here — but I’ve talked about his good points already, I think, and his flaws do more to move the story forward.

Some bits of the series are more complex and productive in this regard than others. The movie may well be the most convoluted jumble of failure and success of them all. Its resolution — and, actually, let me take a moment to point out that if you haven’t seen the movie, you should go do so immediately; I can wait — its resolution is almost indisputably positive. Vincent has in common with the Mad Pierrot his being out of his right mind through circumstances not of his making, but he comes across as more sinister and deliberate. He’s sane enough to calculate. I’m not really sad to see him (or his plans) go.

Spike’s actions do save quite a lot of people. Bottom line, that pretty definitively makes him one of the good guys. But, again, he doesn’t seem to care much. It’s Faye’s bounty to begin with, more or less; Spike gets involved when the payoff ramps up. And while he at least does some of the legwork this time, he doesn’t seem fully invested in the pursuit of Vincent until it gets personal.

So ridiculous is Spike’s tough guy posturing in the face of mass murder that you have to wonder how much of it is just a front.

It seems crazy to me that Spike can sit here and tell Vincent that he doesn’t give a damn about the world, that he’s just here to pay back a favor. I mean, this isn’t such a strange thing for an action hero to say during the final fight, especially if s/he wants to goad the Big Bad into making a mistake. It’s problematic in this case because the general lack of concern for anyone but himself (and sometimes his very immediate acquaintances) is consistent with things he’s said and done before. We can believe it.

Compare the scene in which Faye has to pull a knife from a corpse.

She didn’t even know this guy, but she at least tells him to rest in peace for the protocol of it. And look at her face: I don’t know about you, but it looks to me like she genuinely regrets having to do this. She’s not taking the death of a stranger (even technically an enemy) lightly. And Faye’s the one who gets shit for being frivolous!

Maybe Spike’s an anti-hero, but I’d expect even an anti-hero to be more outwardly focused, more concerned about the present. That’s really the key to Spike’s failure: he’s not strictly selfish so much as he’s unable to grasp the world around him. He himself admits this: one of his eyes sees the present, he says, and the other sees the past. Both points of view are characterized by a lack of depth perception.

Let me put it this way. He’s not a terrible person, necessarily. He’s just afflicted by the kind of bitterness you can only really experience when you’re young, bitterness born of the conviction that things can never again be as good as they were Back When (compare/contrast Jet’s bitterness, the self-deprecating bitterness of an old man). Unfortunately this is a self-fulfilling prophecy; you certainly won’t find things that make you happy if you don’t look for them. And Spike’s is an egregious case. He fails to see potential sources of happiness in the present, and when he charges headlong at his past, he demonstrates a blindness or ambivalence toward all the bad things he left behind, things he’d really be better off without.

That’s kind of what gets him killed in the end.

Or, technically, the charging headlong is what gets Jet shot in the leg and Julia blown away.

That this was so frustratingly avoidable is what makes it tragic. For me the entire “Real Folk Blues” experience was underscored by a desire to yell at the screen. Leave the past alone! Sometimes circumstances dictate that two people shouldn’t be together!

He can’t learn this lesson, though. His mistakes are too much a part of who he is. He can only decide that he has nothing left to live for (a decision that makes me feel sorrier for Jet than for Faye, to be honest) and head toward death. As long as he takes Vicious with him.

Which he does. So, yay?

It’s my sympathy for Faye and Jet that lets me see this as a net positive end. Spike was a real trainwreck — he was self-destructive, and, left to his own devices long enough, of course he would destroy himself. It’s a wonder that he didn’t take his devotees aboard the Bebop along with him. They’ll miss him, sure, but now they don’t have to deal with his dragging everyone into danger because, for example, he heard the name Julia on the radio.

That sounds callous, but consider that Jet and Faye — Jet especially; Faye more so later — were fixated on Spike. He was often the imperative that drove the plot; he’d either cause trouble, make the plans, or change someone else’s plans. It seems supremely appropriate to me that the show ends the moment Spike does. As Ghostlightning points out again and again, and as the setting indicates, Cowboy Bebop is characterized by stagnation, by a lack of progress over time. Spike embodied this, and, though it may be cruel to say so, I find Spike’s death hopeful in the sense that those of the crew who haven’t done so already can now move on to other things. It’s debatable whether they’d succeed at doing so, but I’m content that the possibility of it exists.

Convenient for them, right? We the consumers live in the eternal narrative present. Everything plot-wise is always happening now, as we think of it. Spike remains lodged in our gullets. His failure is hard to swallow if you’ve failed in the same way.

Maybe this is the point. You’re always being asked to reconcile Spike’s past-and-present point of view with science fiction, traditionally a genre of present-and-future, and with whatever you believe to be true about how happiness works. It was occasionally trying, but I appreciate that dissonance now. It cut me and I bled ideas.

Fail, Spike. For our sake.

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!