"Perhaps they'll die, oh yeah"
Ramones - Judy Is a Punk
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"She had it: the thing, the moves. And she'd pulled it all together for her entrance. Pulled it together around the pain in her leg and marched down 3Jane's stairs like she owned the place, elbow of her gun arm at her hip, forearm up, wrist relaxed, swaying the muzzle of the fletcher with the studied nonchalance of a Regency duelist. It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a life-time's observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up on. For a few seconds, he knew, she was every bad-ass hero, Sony Mao in the old Shaw videos, Mickey Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and Eastwood. She was walking it the way she talked it."
Molly Millions' moment of glory, from Neuromancer
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The term "punk" usually comes bundled with an idiomatic descriptor: little. As in you "little" punk! Therein you may read both the early success of cyberpunk and where the whole "punk" aesthetic went off the rails.
"The work, which becomes a new genre itself, will be called COWBOY BEBOP"
The text, which became an old joke itself, would flash across your screen during the opening credits and Bebop's commercial breaks, a self-indulgent display of artiste bombast to rival Ayn Rand's claim that she was the only one writing anything original. Despite its undeniable quality and creativity, Cowboy Bebop did not become a genre unto itself, nor founded any new genres. It falls solidly into cyberpunk with even its authors' preferred designation of "neo-noir" just cementing the label. Cyberpunk was film noir with a neophyte-friendly techno spin from its inception. From that noir inspiration cyberpunk inherited the low-class and/or criminal protagonist, and few remark how important it was that Bebop's crew remained little. Small fry. Bottomfeeders. Punks. While their skills and deeds do improve along the show's run, they never balloon in importance as we expect of traditional heroes.
When I saw the show in my late teens I was struck by how often Spike especially got his ass handed to him, in contrast to typical movie martial artists kicking entire cities into submission face by face. Yet amazingly this never made him any less impressive.
I did not remember that Faye as well grows into her new life gradually. In Ballad of Fallen Angels, Sympathy for the Devil and Heavy Metal Queen she's naive, overconfident. By Waltz for Venus she gets to show off her gunnery and the next episode introduces Ed as comic relief, freeing Faye to shift more toward action and drama. Becoming a full member of the team, taking on contracts and coordinating with the others, nevertheless her self-improvement is repeatedly undercut by lingering adolescent brashness. When she gloves up to fistfight half a dozen guys at once in Jupiter Jazz, she
demonstrates a couple of slick moves but is pulled away to safety before
she gets herself killed, and a subsequent conversation highlights her
outing's self-destructive tone.
Jet as well, though he's introduced as the stable leader of the group, makes subtle use of his tactical experience but is arguably the worst suited of all of them to the moral compromises their lifestyle entails. He loses duels, lacks the control freak qualities to keep the younger two in line and generally displays virtue in merely enduring a life which drives others into desperate suicidal gambits. Interestingly, he's the only one of the main three not truly running from his past, but the fatalistic way he awaits it coming back to bite him fits perfectly with their morbid tendencies.
Even Ed, the adorable kid genius superhacker tech wizard, loses the chess game in Bohemian Rhapsody and as often as not shows her very narrow skillset isn't truly enough to survive in their world.
By all of this, Cowboy Bebop held more successfully to the core of cyberpunk than most works which deliberately cling to the label. Remember this is a genre about losers, and this is precisely why it gained such traction, a harsh dose of realism belying the '80s and '90s naive fables of upward mobility and infinite improvement, fed by survivorship bias. Cyberpunk initially appealed to those who realized no amount of personal worth or ability or effort would make the lions share, who saw they would be left in the dust no matter how fast they can run in a world where others can simply buy racecars, and the dust may never again settle. Philip K. Dick grasped the public's subconscious need to acknowledge the increasing futility of personal competition beautifully in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the hollow victories in impossibly mismatched conflicts. The genre's most famous iteration, Neuromancer, confirmed the centrality of loser protagonists. Skilled losers, smart losers, wise losers, determined losers... but nonetheless losers.
Just remember how Molly's grand entrance is resolved, and realize THAT, not her chrome peepers or slick manicure, made her one of the most memorable characters in fiction.
Punks don't save the world. When later entries like Snow Crash deconstructed the genre to death, it was in no small measure by falling back on heroics and comfortable emotional anchors, or recasting loserdom as something to be redeemed instead of a framework to be grokked and acted within.
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