Present Day; Present Time

"It's about bounty hunters."

"What's she supposed to be, the bait?"

 

So snarked I upon being introduced to Cowboy Bebop via Faye Valentine's cleavage. But Bebop's well-earned fame for raising the bar on not just anime but TV series in general also applies to gradually redeeming an otherwise flat bombshell fanservice extra to a memorable protagonist.

I'd forgotten, until rewatching the series in order, the Faye is initially presented in one-shot episodic fashion riding off into the proverbial sunset at the end... until the Bebop unceremoniously fishes her back up out of space in the next episode. I addressed her character advancement vis-a-vis cyberpunk's crucial "loser" aesthetic, but for my first run through the show in 2001 I didn't think much of her, having seen many other such cartoon characters go absolutely nowhere... until this:

call me, caall meee.....

Along with Jet, Faye's character arc blows into focus mid-series, Speak Like a Child revealing not only that her past is not entirely lost, but that her pre-amnesia peppy teen personality had been drastically, unrecognizably different from her current rough cobble of hair-trigger temper, devil-may-care compulsive gambling, alternating nihilism/vanity/greed and petty vandalism. It's not just a convenient linking mechanism from a series writing perspective, but a neat little twist that in contrast to Jet (the stalwart leader who deals with both of his blasts from the past by slightly passive yet unflinching direct confrontation) Faye dithers and hides away and seems to avoid thinking about her newly recovered information for several episodes, or at least avoid letting on it's affecting her.

 

Another of the series' quirks, if you pay attention, is that it ends before the end. To allow the two-parter Real Folk Blues to focus on resolving Spike's plot, Hard Luck Woman serves as the true dissolution to the main routine of space cowboying. Though Faye appears later, it's solely as messenger and obviously no longer full participant. It's in Hard Luck Woman that the gang breaks up. Ed follows her father, taking Ein with her, and Faye overnights in the past. In a bookend to the first episode and their repeated concern with food expenses, the two men are shown silently drowning their sorrows in albumen, having secured subsistence at the loss of their companions.

That brilliant four-minute montage has stuck in pretty much everyone's memory, not only for its bittersweet tone but for not striking a single tone. Independent individuals instead strike their own courses. The men are grimly resigned, Ein's just happy to be with a now hopeful and more focused Ed, and Faye... stops to think. For the first time since we've seen her. Discovering the past hollow, she finds that hollow no less a part of herself for it. Does all that could have been belie her personal fable as a hot-to-trot damsel of fortune? If it's the future that matters, then what matters when you've been prematurely catapulted into it? Is it even worth having an identity conflict over a barely remembered and now irrevocably ruined past, a virtual life that never was?

As single scenes go, Faye laying to rest in the ruins of her life is a world-class classic, not least because instead of being performed by some personification of either wisdom or innocence, it instead falls to an energetic but uncertain clever fool, a mind caught in the moment of becoming.

Mononoke

(minus the Hime)

I ran across this anime while wiki-walking 'round TVTropes. Twelve episodes, subdivided into five stories, with all but the fourth playing up damsels in distress for cheap pathos, cheaper moralism and feminist bonus points. After a glance at its Wikipedia page I was about to dismiss it... until hitting upon Chiaki J. Konaka's name. Sure enough, plot-wise, the two stories credited to him move less predictably, with characters displaying more diverse motivations beyond crimes against the ovary, and the old animist angle of Japanese folklore played more poignantly. Still, this ain't Lain, Paranoia Agent or Bebop. Don't expect much else than young adult ghost stories.

The series' main claim to fame is of course its visual style mainly suggesting 19th-century prints, and I will admit quite a few scenes come across as striking. But were I to call the animation "stylized" or "minimalist" you would be on solid ground to read that in its all too common usage as code for "cheap" despite the occasional fancy layering effect. Between the usual anime 0.5 FPS routine and single-frame panning shots, gawping reaction shots, etc., plus slow credits and other filler like reiterating the hero's shape/truth/reason gimmick and redefining mononoke every single time, each 23-minute episode has maybe 10mins of actual content.

They're good enough minutes at that. Worth a gander. Particularly interesting to note the use of distortion and smash cuts to emphasize the magical realist coextension of the supernatural athwart the mundane, to mystify the viewer between the seen and unseen worlds. Most often it's unclear until the end of the episode (if even then) whether events happen in order, happen in reality, or whether ontology is being rewritten as you watch. A bit forced, but rare's the show where such confusion works at all instead of merely being aggravating.

Supposedly a movie follow-up's coming out soon, and I have to wonder why this wasn't cut down to one or two long-form adventures in the first place. Over the years I've repeatedly been struck by the sheer amount of padding in the movie/TV industry (regardless of continent) especially in 2007 when games had not yet overtaken film in profitability and you'd think air time would be at a premium. I've remarked before that for example Netflix' best offerings come in the form of short sub-season miniseries, with longer shows that should've been allowed to die after their first season degenerating into trite pandering. Granted I watch little TV these days, but it's hard to think of a modern show like MASH or ST:TNG running season after season and still having something to say, much less improving. Isn't it odd that as on-demand binge-watching became more common, the length of our most noteworthy serials appears to be shortening instead of lengthening? Long-runners tend more and more toward the "Fast and Furious" or superhero movie intellectual level, with soap operas still going strong. Is this just market dilution no longer supporting ambitious long-term projects, "reality" TV taking over longer formats, is it another symptom of our short attention span, or are more of the better of us less motivated to veg out every single evening in front of the same endlessly reiterated setting, endlessly reiterated cast, endlessly reiterated running gags? Is the middle class (young or old, east or west) now more or less prone to let itself be passively inundated by the laugh track, night after night, in that comforting place where everybody knows your name?

Anyway, do watch at least episodes eight and nine of Mononoke. Apropos of nothing, it has a lovely example of a wampeter and granfalloonery.

Bebop's Elevator Pitches

"I don't feel a thing and I've stopped remembering"

 

(Spoilert for Cowboy Bebop.)

 

As speculative "genre" fiction has been mainstreamed the past couple of decades, we've all gotten more prone to expecting our entertainment to provide entire imaginary worlds instead of single narratives. But fleshing out supplemental material, be it side-quests, backstory chapters or a good, old-fashioned bottle episode is hard to do without diluting or derailing your main plot. So I got to thinking, hey, you know who did a good job keeping its filler filling? That old anime I keep yammering on about!

About a third of Cowboy Bebop's episodes were one-shots having little direct impact on the main character's development arcs, but they're nonetheless remembered quite fondly even when they diverged from the setting's accepted tone and phlebotina. Mushroom Samba set a brisk pace while owning its designation as the most obvious comic relief chapter. Toys in the Attic is a creature feature with a deliberately nonsensical (yet classic!) ScieFie justification. Wild Horses gives a nod to golden age SF rocket jockeying. Cowboy Funk turns a bit of fun at the genre's pretenses, posturing and space western tendencies into a character study of the main protagonist. If fact, even seemingly random "villain of the week" installments tended to reflect somehow on the team's personal fables, like the opening's parallel to Spike/Julia, Waltz for Venus' futile mentorship or Heavy Metal Queen obliquely addressing the free-roaming cowboy mindset.

 

But let's look at three in particular:

Brain Scratch features a transhumanist Matrix cult promising digital transcendence via Heaven's Gate quality web design.

Sympathy for the Devil an unaging, murderous child.

Pierrot le Fou frequently sneaks its way into ads for the show due to its stylish visuals, being one of the few episodes named not for music but in this case French cinema. Granted, it's hard to do the killer clown routine wrong, as our visually oriented species is quite sensitive to facial disfigurement as a sign of inherent wrongness. However:

Pierrot's character design stands out for its overt simplicity, lacking the usual pancake makeup or any scars or growths or prostheses or the other gimmicks by which Hollywood adorns its horror clowns. His costume, from Penguin-ish top hat, suit and cane to his absurd ruffle, rather than terrifying, looks ineptly buffoonish, failed even as parody. All of which actually enhances Pierrot's intrinsic menace and weirdness, his unselfconscious over-the-hill foppery feeding into his gradually revealed infantile mania.

 

That infantilism I would argue links all three examples together. The villain in Brain Scratch is a comatose tween hacker cobbling himself a clique by any means necessary without regard for consequences. Sympathy for the Devil's titular devil is frozen not only in time but in sociopathic juvenile entitlement. Whether intended by the various writers or not, you do get a sense of repeatedly calling into question childish innocence. Innocence is also irresponsibility, a misnomer for the harm caused by unfettered id, inherently morally incapable.

 

That point dovetails nicely with the show's main theme, of the crews facing their pasts. Facing is not the same as regressing, and while Jet shows some basic understanding of this, Faye and Spike can only complete their arcs once they have grown to contain their past selves. You could, if so inclined, see an added comment on this point briefly in the finale, when a former presenter of the cancelled bounty hunter show appears as a background event, in almost unrecognizable calm and mundane counterpoint to his hyperactive stage persona, returning to take care of his family. Boy howdy, for a show about happy-go-lucky gunslingers, Bebop sure carried a hefty dose of "grow the fuck up" didn't it?

Stink for Venus

Even all these years later, it's weird to rediscover that Waltz for Venus remains my favorite Cowboy Bebop episode -

biostatic

- and I don't know exactly why.

It's melodramatic, sure. I am hardly immune to melodrama. But then Bebop dedicated about a third of its episodes to decomposing lives and lost hopes. What makes this different? I suppose, true to its title, it's slow. Soft. Low key. But more than most, via Spike's reluctant mentorship it reiterated the first episode's likeness of the hunter to his bounty, ensuring the heroes' continuity with the rest of their world instead of elevating them to the status of HEROES writ large and in charge, invincible and unstoppable. There's also something about the deadly weed theme that hits me personally. Several of my own attempts at fiction harp on "suicide by plant" or the terror of vegetative encroachment, of... growth. Growths. Growth-ing.

But I hadn't remembered the ending's pretty good as well. Take a Futurama episode, The Sting, for comparison. The bulk of it revolves around Leela, poisoned, thinking she'd gotten her infatuated subordinate Fry killed, gradually drifting into insanity with recurring fantasies of Fry telling her to wake up. Eventually she does... to discover she's been in a coma all the time since getting poisoned, with Fry never leaving her side. They embrace, we fade to black - and hear their voices whispering to each other:

"You could really use a shower."

"You too."

That's trust. And it puts the whole rest of the episode into perspective, making you wonder how much of Fry's intrusion upon Leela's coma dreams resulted from his calling to her to wake up, and how much merely proves his pre-existing role as her emotional anchor, the trust she did not even realize she held in him, and not merely guilt as she'd thought.

And that's what makes Waltz for Venus doubly tragic. It's easy to assume the hero's wisdom, but ultimately we don't know whether Spike is right or wrong in his final decision not to divulge Rocco's secret. Maybe it would just be needlessly cruel. Letting one sibling hate the other may be a smaller burden than guilt. But truth is a far more important burden which those close to each other should, ideally, by definition, share. The siblings' devotion is not in question. But Spike's secrecy, if insightful, projects a lack of trust in each other's decisions upon them which in turn calls into question the validity of Rocco's efforts and risks. Were they really that close, or was it all societal guilt and duty and heroic fantasies? Would they trust each other for a sniff test?

Spike Spanked; Punk Junk

"Perhaps they'll die, oh yeah"

Ramones - Judy Is a Punk

________________________________________

 

"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

________________________________________

 

 

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 neophile-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.

Cowboy Bebop: You All Meet in a Tavern

Though I'd watched the show in order from beginning to end at least one full run, I'd forgotten an unusual detail: Ed, the cast's most obvious source of comic relief, only shows up in episode 9 of 26. Not to say Cowboy Bebop lacked humor until then, but it relied on the three more important cast members poking fun at themselves or each other, or bit players in Stray Dog Strut, Gateway Shuffle and Heavy Metal Queen, all relatively lighthearted to offset the heavier installments. You can see this most obviously in Ballad of Fallen Angels, the start of Bebop's core dramatic arc, where it falls to Faye to lighten the mood at least marginally by stumbling around handcuffed with her tits ready to pop out of her marvelously impractical evening gown - and to absorb the punchline. The comic relief's arrival frees the core three to shift toward bleaker plots, with the very next episode, #10, diving into jilted Jet's backstory.

 

I would certainly expect late arrivals in a longer series. When you're playing with thousands of pages of fantasy epic or decades' worth of comic books, dropping heroes in and out of the adventuring party is expected. Conversely, a formerly minor TV series basking in unexpected success will add to its roster as the seasons wear on. But a show scripted for exactly one season should logically have crammed the main cast into the first episode and most episodes after that, whether to tantalize the audience with the series' full spectrum of possibilities or to maximize their bought and paid for character designs and animation, or just because the cast wouldn't function split off from each other, every character being a flat hero / jokester / love interest / plucky ingenue / mascot / nerd / sex symbol / antihero, all relying on the others to spout their inane catchphrases to form some semblance of conversation.

One result of spacing out the entrances is that Cowboy Bebop's core trio get more time to be goofy, relaxed, and generally at home before they're required to crank up the pathos. They're far more multifaceted than expected, with Hard Luck Woman counting as one of the few times I've ever truly improved my opinion of a fictional character.

Another is that you would never quite be sure (opening credits aside) which new faces are here to stay. I noted the tragic damsel from the very first episode was teased for a good ten minutes as a possible addition. Faye herself looks like a comic relief one-shot in episode #3 and only joins the crew in #4. The eager young martial artist from Waltz for Venus again looks ready to fill the plucky comic relief role exactly one episode before Ed shows up. Spike and Faye are simply left to linger in the audience's imagination as the default power couple until late in the series.

 

In overall effect, the visible universe is not bounded by the protagonists' adventure. There really is no designated five-man band with fixed roles. Comings and goings are part of life not bookends to it, and the immensity of the world is left to weigh more poignantly upon our semi-competent underdogs. But we'll have to talk about the cyberpunk angle next time.

Cowboy Bebop: Adios for Starters

Watch Cowboy Bebop (the original, not the idiotic live action adaptation)

Spoilers implied.

_______________________________________

 

If Cowboy Bebop's fame should save me the trouble of an introduction it may still be worthwhile, after a quarter century, to try remembering why this show made such a splash in the first place, why it came as such a revelation to those of us catching it in '99. While I won't be taking it episode by episode, the first installment helps clarify that issue.

For one thing, anime at the time was still occasionally called "japanimation" in the U.S. and had rightly earned its (still fitting) reputation as low-budget, lazily dubbed, mass-produced 2FPS schlock for six-year-olds: loud, colorful, over-emoted, distorted, goofy, simplistic, etc. Akira raised a few eyebrows but quickly faded from conversation, and though Princess Mononoke argued this point rather pointedly a year prior, most of us teens simply did not consider anime worthy of continued attention, and even if we'd watched Gundam and so forth, did not consider them part of a larger subculture. Bebop spurred conversation to a large extent for NOT matching anime thereto seen in the west.

For another, in Disney's second golden age animation in general was still derided and discounted as inextricably childish, with The Simpsons only very gradually shifting public attitude on the matter. While the '90s moved beyond '80s over-the-top heroic goofiness with the more sober Batman / X-Men cartoons or especially Gargoyles, these still narrowly catered to a tween audience.

 

For yet another, television as a whole has never earned much respect for its obnoxious attention-grabbing (this was the heyday of Urkel after all) shallow comedy dominated the airwaves and drama fixated on a handful of topics like murder mysteries or cop shows with a growing side interest in hospitals thanks to ER. Shows stuck to strict formulas, usually a core cast of two or three reiterating the same weekly plot with the same running gags for as long as their ratings held up.

 

For yet yet another, Science Fiction itself was considered a fringe interest to which few would openly admit, not helped by the antics of Trekkies and the like. If you wanted TV SF your choice lay primarily between Star Trek or X-Files, whose quality varied wildly to put it mildly.

So, into this media landscape enter Cowboy Bebop #1: Asteroid Blues.

We're introduced to Spike and Jet looking for a paying job, broke enough to scrimp on food, a recurring theme over the show's course which would eventually form an emphatic bookend with the end of Hard Luck Woman toward the series finale. The future looks dingy. Spaceflight does nothing to change human nature; monkeys in space are still monkeys. The solar system benefits from interplanetary FTL travel but true to cyberpunk themes most of society wallows in its disrepair. Asteroid Blues makes an oft-overlooked mark in deliberately setting the series' tone without simply establishing an episodic formula.

 

Characters in serial works too often prove pirates who don't do anything, their original occupations, quirks or life histories thrown to the wayside as each installment focuses on the way their lives diverge from a norm the series failed to establish in the first place. See ST:TNG's first episode after the pilot, The Naked Now, for the confusion that can cause. Here we get a deliberate first impression of Spike and Jet's "cowboy" lifestyle set among the general criminality making it a necessity, plus the Bebop itself and Spike's martial prowess, but it's the world itself which receives most of our attention, refraining from the impulse to over-populate the cast from the get-go. Where normally the pilot would serve as a "you all meet in a tavern" moment fixing the core cast, Asteroid Blues teases the audience halfway through during the female mark's conversation with Spike, appearing for a moment ready to join our heroes on their adventures.

Then it ends. She and her male companion die. Brutally and unfairly, as they lived. He by her own hand to cease his suffering and struggling against the inevitable.

 

"adios"

Not until late in the show's second half would the audience learn why the couple's plight put Spike especially in such a thoughtful mood, but even ignoring personal symbolism, opening with a bitter end established overall mood, and the mood meant business. To say mercy kills did not feature prominently on television (even in the goth '90s) would be putting it mildly, and I'd bet they still do not. Hollywood's obsession with happy endings and heroic triumph precludes such unpalatable choices. But the eagerness with which many youths across generations have leapt on Cowboy Bebop for 25 years witnesses the need for such themes to be acknowledged in entertainment.

 

The next several episodes adopt a distinctively more lighthearted atmosphere, but the tone had been quite skillfully set, and it was nothing like what we'd seen before.

Adios, space cowboys, and welcome to the show.

That Voodoo That You Rarely Do

"The roaches, the rats, the strays, the cats
The guns, knives and bats
Every time we scrap"

DMX - Who We Be


So there's this anime called Darker than Black about murderous secret agents with superpowers. It's less guilty of pushing its big cool gimmick than most other shows of its type. Nonetheless, said superpowers get predictably overused, especially since they sound cool on paper but in most situations don't accomplish anything that a pistol slug, taser or closed-circuit camera wouldn't do just as easily.

Seriously, in the time it took you to slash your own forearm and fling your disintegrating blood at your opponent, you could've unloaded five rounds of buckshot in his direction, with greater spread, range and accuracy and without sending yourself into hypovolemic shock.
Dumbass.

Three posts ago I was talking about party sizes in computer role-playing games and the importance of small hunting pack dynamics, a.k.a. the five-man band. I ended up mentioning the X-Men. Superhero teams make an interesting counterpoint to regular superheroics. A loner hero tends to need a bit of everything: strength, resilience, mobility, problem-solving ability. Try to think of a single superpower that Superman doesn't have or can't duplicate somehow. The X-Men were allowed more individual personality.

Angel flies. He doesn't tear tanks apart with his bare hands or summon hurricanes. He has wings and he flies and he flies using his wings. It's his thing that he does. Cyclops shoots eye-beams and Marvel Girl levitates things. Those are their things that they do. Oh, sure, over time the comic acquired more multi-purpose characters, but the original concept allowed for such counter-intuitive greatness as a wheelchair-bound superhero. Of course, you still have to ask yourself why Angel's not dropping tear gas canisters onto his antagonists' heads in that panel (dumbass) or why not a one of the many X-men ever carries a first aid kit. I don't know if you guys noticed, but you tend to draw attention in the form of bullets and energy blasts. Boo-boos happen!

In terms of roleplaying games, super and/or magic powers almost have to be expanded to all-purpose sets or schools. After all, so as not to sound hypocritical, let me admit I'd be the first to complain about a lack of complexity or versatility. However, it does get a bit annoying when everything you do revolves around your core gimmick. You fast-travel using your ice skill and shield yourself using your ice skill and crowd-control enemies using your ice skill and heal yourself using your ice skill and fry hamburgers somehow by using your ice skill. Secondly, it's also annoying to see a pyromancer doing 54 damage at 30 meters with a fire bolt and cryomancer doing 54 damage at 30 meters using an ice bolt. Quit milking it. If it's the same magic missile across the board stop trying to re-brand it. Thirdly, flapping his wings should not be the only thing Angel does. Would it kill you to toss a few grenades? Maybe carry a pair of binoculars? A net? Could you not at least shit on people while you're up there, you overgrown pigeon?

How much could one get done with ordinary implements of war and peace by adding one simple superpower? Just one. Could you build an online game around this? Maybe not a skill or class-based RPG, as it would kill such genres' core attraction of character development. It might, however, be the perfect way to spice up FPS games. Build an online MMOFPS with a decent physics engine and all the usual pistols or swords, horses or tanks, what have you. Then allow each individual player one, just one (1) singular superpower. Flight or x-ray vision or super strength or juggernuttery or teleportation or regeneration or whatever you want. Darker than Black's agents usually made rather more liberal use of mundane gear than the X-men did. Why not build a game around such agents instead of all-purpose Kryptonians?

If everyone needs to shoot each other, if that's a core ability, then it doesn't need to be re-iterated a dozen times over for every single playable class with different colored effects. Just let everyone pick their medieval or modern or futuristic weapons of choice from a common pool, bought and sold and crafted and looted like gear in any other game. Let every individual's superpower be a game-changer instead. In fact, we already have one endlessly recurring example in multiplayer: invisibility. Rogues / assassins / infiltraitors / spies have been retardedly overpowered in World of Warcraft, Team Fortress 2 or any other PvP game due largely to their stealth ability, and such classes have been predictably popular and over-played due to being overpowered since before Y2K. Flight, though more rarely featured, is similarly popular for much the same reason. Paired with even relatively weak weapons, these gimmicks routinely make players unbeatable.

Giving every player a choice of one game-breaking gimmick should be a way to both avoid the stereotypical five-man band or nuker / tank / healer archetypes and to prevent magic from becoming trivialized and homogenized. Guns, knives and bats (and band-aids) are all-purpose. Superpowers should be situational. Shoot your way through your enemies. When you reach a reinforced bunker wall, then you can spray your magic disintegration blood all over it, to achieve what guns alone cannot. Let superpowers take the place of five-minute-cooldown "ultimate" abilities. With a clever enough system of bonuses and weaknesses, it should even be possible to allow players to each design their own individual superpower at character creation. A Hulk-like jump followed by decreased movement speed, a self-damaging speed power or a flight ability paired with hampered aiming, regeneration paired with lethargy, etc.

Just stick to the core rule: you only get one.

Paranoia Agent

"Build a fortress and shield your beliefs
Touch the divine as we fall in line

Destroy this city of delusion
Break these walls down"

Muse - City of Delusion


Satoshi Kon didn't amass a very extensive resume by his untimely demise but he did leave animation with a few raised bars. As much as I liked Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers or Paprika though, Paranoia Agent seems ultimately more memorable, beyond just the hypnotic repetitive screeching in the opening credits. Shonen Bat is after all a viral meme even in-universe.

For a mishmash of leftover plots that wouldn't fit into full-length movies it holds together surprisingly well, though it takes a second viewing to really catch the multitudinous characters' interconnection and cameos in each others' episodes. A graphic designer gets mugged by a tween boy with a bent baseball bat. Supposedly. The story goes viral. From there on through young, old, male, female, cops and robbers, every episode draws a tangent to this growing urban legend. The vignettes vary wildly in the objective seriousness of their subject matter though they all adopt a generally tragicomic tone, from schoolyard popularity contests to life and death decisions. In fact, by the end, you'll probably be wondering what exactly the show was even about.

But it's obviously about something. Even the most common recurring characters, the two cops investigating the bludgeonings, view Shonen Bat as something like a walking mark of torment seducing the tormented psyches of Tokyo. At least on a superficial level, the series' central theme might be Japanese workaholism, that obsequious shikataganai sarariman devotion to drudgery and putative success which drives so many into hikkikomorbidity. But that's not giving it enough credit. Like the other examples above, Paranoia Agent concerns itself with self-delusion and characters losing themselves to fantasy worlds.

Unlike the more sympathetic hippy-dippy "to each his own" personal empowerment attitude found in Paprika or Tokyo Godfathers, though, Paranoia Agent progresses toward a fairly strong statement in favor of intellectual integrity. It's not the crime, it's the psychological cover-up that gets you, and coming clean about one's faults, inadequacies, errors or transgressive desires would be preferable to fomenting an oncogenic deception. As Ursula Le Guin's character in The Dispossessed put it "Reality is terrible. It can kill you. But it's the lies that make you want to kill yourself."

Paranoia Agent ran in 2004. How much more apt is it now (at least in North America) as snowflake mass hysteria has gripped civilized society? Look at all the kawaii degenerates claiming to be victimized by "institutionalized prejudice" and therefore to be immune from accountability for their own choices and entitled to retribution against their preferred targets of abuse. Observe their pretense of sainthood and martyrdom. Watch the mass hysteria spread, as more and more of the population becomes caught up in the oppression olympics and tell me these idiots wouldn't be improved by a bat upside the head.

 

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2022/12/19: edited out a common misconception

Sin-Bound Lycanthrope who Gnaws Truths

"You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream"

E.A. Poe - A Dream Within A Dream


Caution: might want to watch Haibane Renmei before reading this, lest mine insights bespoil thine viewing pleasure. Thou'st been warned-ed.

As soon as I cranked up my Torment:Tides of Numenera character, the opening reminded me of Haibane Renmei. After all, there can't be that many stories beginning with an amnesiac falling from the sky, and anime/RPG fanbases share a lot of crossover. Granted, the game's littered with many little outside references, similarities and in-jokes, some more tenuous than others, but this one's reinforced by some NPC commentary partway through your adventures:

Upon visiting the Valley of Dead Heroes, a city-sized mechanized mausoleum, you run across some local cultists who have decided everyone in the world's just a reincarnation or after-image of a corpse memorialized therein, and spend their lives trying to find their true names and their own memorial. This serves on one hand as tongue-in-cheek reference to the mausoleum also listing the names of TToN's wealthier backers.

On the other hand, it gradually becomes apparent as you watch Haibane Renmei that the Haibane are youngsters who died before their time, and the walled microcosm of Glie/Guri some sort of purgatory where they can live a wholesome life until they themselves are ready to move on. This realization lends a deliciously morbid edge to the middle portion of the series, especially given the names these children acquire as Haibane are based on a single solitary past-life memory highly suggestive of different deaths: falling, drowning, coma, falling through ice, even burning alive.

It works a little differently for the two black-winged "sin-bound" heroines of the series, not merely dead before their time but suicides. They cannot move on until they acknowledge and resolve the issue of their self-destructive tendencies, whereupon their true name is revealed to have a hidden meaning relating somehow to their basic personality. So Rakka is not just falling but an "inverted nut" for thinking of herself as alone and Reki's not just a pebble but trampled, having thrown herself in front of a train, thereafter vindicated as a stepping stone for growing into her work helping others. After resolving their internal personality conflict, they're back on track to fly out of Purgatory.

First of all, I have to ask, if it's the Sin-Bound who get True Name reveals, are all of InXile's customers visiting the Valley of Dead Heroes sin-bound?


More importantly, if the Memorialists are right and the Ninth World's basically Glie, how would the core cast of Haibane be classed?

Kuu: Swift Glaive who Flies Before
(plucky little Kuu just seems like a scrapper to me)

Hikari: Charming Jack who Feeds
(the willpower penalty suits her perfectly)

Kana: Mechanical Nano who Swims Against the Current
(she's a tinkerer, and despite her high energy state seems more abrasive than combative)

Nemu: Observant Nano who Waits Patiently
(probably the wisest of the bunch, despite her background role... and the running penalty fits almost too well)

Rakka: Mystical Jack who Translates
(honestly, Rakka doesn't learn much throughout the series; most of her advancement comes as a go-between, her revelations by accident or outside agency)

Reki: Strong-Willed Glaive who Upholds
Look, I freakin' love Reki, especially her thundering declaration that she never had any real interest in helping anyone. Gotta love the grinding, smoldering, tectonic resentment revealed in her character. She's a fighter at heart, but if I were drawing up her character in an RPG, I'd bump up her Intellect before anything else. She represents us half-formed self-defeaters clever enough to outsmart ourselves and stubborn enough to follow through with it. The big tragedy of the series is that her entire universe seems inimical by design to Reki and her ilk.

Ignoring its well-meaning airs, there's actually quite a bit about Haibane Renmei's cosmology and moralizing which could grate. Portraying introversion as sinful and independence as destructive, intellect as irrelevant. The moral of Reki's story seems to be "fake it 'til you make it" or knuckling under until servitude becomes your nature. Not exactly a laudable mindset, though quite in tune with Haibane Renmei's religious fantasy setting.

Me, I think Reki'd be happier in the Necropolis or the Bloom. At least the Great Devourer's not such a tyrant as to forbid the most fundamental right of all, suicide. Some of us really should have ended it when we were teenagers.

Haibane Renmei

"Feather needs the bird, the air"

My Black Heart Machine - Feather


Here's one of those cases where my musical selection can be considered redundant, since Haibane Renmei's own soundtrack was quite captivating in itself, but I digress. Frequently. Also, while the instrumentation in that soundtrack was wonderful, the few English lyrics left a lot to be desired. 

Cheaply animated but lovingly detailed as static drawings, the series contains exactly two bad scenes. The first is in the very first episode, the hatching scene, which went a bit heavy in its standard anime tropes of distorted faces and over-emoting. The second comes much later on, when Rakka collapses in tears by the side of the road. Too abruptly overly-dramatic. Aside from those three minutes or so, though? Haibane Renmei was brilliant, and has more than earned its place as one of westerners' main gateway drugs into -good- anime alongside Ghost in the Shell, Studio Ghibli's old movies and Cowboy Bebop.

And this is what it mostly consists of: teenage girls with wings and halos sharing quiet, soulful conversations in dusty rooms of stained, faded concrete. Old books, old customs, old clothes, old walls, old youngsters bearing old wounds. Old Home. It's beautiful.

It's slow. Probably the main thing you'll notice. Haibane Renmei progresses so subtly, so gradually as to make you question whether anything is happening at all. Fans of mecha mayhem and whirlwind planetary romances will have to settle for such "action" scenes as tidying messy rooms, picking up pancakes at the bakery and riding a bike - too fast! The most painfully mundane, hyper-realistic slice of life scenes mesmerize thanks to their contrast with the protagonists' other-worldliness. By the time Rakka washes her halo in the sink, the viewer's already prepared to empathize.

Yet still, somehow, information accumulates. Drip, drip, drip. Much of it has to do with the nature of Glie, the walled town which serves as the story's setting. Some years after I watched Haibane Renmei, I picked up my first Haruki Murakami book - as should happen it was Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and immediately recognized the source of inspiration for Glie, as Yoshitoshi Abe himself confirmed if I'm not mistaken. Aside from a few superficialities however, the two are almost diametrically opposed. Unlike the contracting solipsistic finality of The End of the World, Glie is place where time and experience accumulate, where guidance is sought and freely offered.

I could go into spoilerific detail about the individual "feathers" as the plot consists largely of the interplay of their personalities. As I've mentioned in the past I'm a sucker for broken little girls, so this series could likely moe me into submission without the benefit of a captivating setting, but it just wouldn't be the same. It was created with an obvious sense of nostalgia for idealized traditionalism, for functional, stable social systems. Old Home and the rest of the town emanate that good ole' musty gemeinschaft rightness and purpose, kalon chiseled by generations into the walls and cobblestones, a place of healing where shooting stars can root themselves for a while.

Be patient. Let the drops accumulate, episode by episode, until understanding comes naturally. Pay special attention to names and don't expect full disclosure. Bask in the bittersweet sense of loss and decay and the melancholy string quartet score. This is not what you think of when you think of anime... but in many ways it's what animation could and should encompass.

I'll talk about names and symbolism some other time. For now, set five or six hours aside to watch Haibane Renmei. If you have the patience for it and at least as much empathy as a lone, rabid wolf-man, you won't regret it. If nothing else, you'll always remember Reki and the three meanings of a name.




 
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P.S. - I should not have to give this warning but as everyone should know, get yourself a subtitled version. Never watch dubbed anime.

Samurai Champloo

"Hey, kids, do you like violence?"

Eminem - My Name Is



So I wanted to talk about Into the Woods, which led to wanting to link it to other successful stabs at incorporating our fascination with faerytales and epics into modern storytelling, like Snow White and the Huntsman or Beowulf and Grendel, which made me realize I've never posted my impression of Beowulf and Grendel, which reminded me that I'd meant to write something about Samurai Champloo along that same train of thought and, well, if I'm chasing that many rabbits down so deep a hole, I may as well start with hip-hopping katanas.

I've been meaning to watch Samurai Champloo for years (it's a decade old now) mainly because of Shinichiro Watanabe's name. Cowboy Bebop was the first anime I actually enjoyed. Even when I was young I despised the Ballz of Dragons and Pokey-men and all the rest of the simplistic mass-market tripe flooding out of Japan's thriving consumer-detainment industry. Though I've found myself fascinated by quite a bit of anime over the decade and a half since I first allowed myself to consider it as a viable medium, I still despise anime as an industry... but then again I despise most of most any entertainment industry, from opera to MMOs.
We've all heard of Sturgeon's Law, right?
Wait, does that mean 90% of my blog is crap?
Hey, I'm doing better than I thought I was...
Moving quickly along:

Cowboy Bebop was more than anime. It flowed, it danced, it struck classic Cyberpunk notes in a rock'n'roll rhythm and built an amazing story by developing characters based on seemingly cheap cliches. For instance, I hated the character Faye Valentine as a facile oversexualized lure for (teenage boys like myself at the time) because I don't appreciate being so blatantly manipulated - until the ending of the episode Hard Luck Woman tore up my preconceptions, tying together the hints I'd ignored so far in half a minute of a music montage to elevate the bimbo I'd despised into a truly solid character worthy of the rest of the show.*

For those who expected a repeat performance of such brilliant moments and overall construction, Samurai Champloo might have seemed like a let-down. Then again, it was just a different breed altogether. It's less likely to serve as a "gateway drug" into anime. I doubt that Jin, Mugen and Fuu have remained as memorable to their audience as Spike, Jet, Faye and Ed. It's much more solidly a shonen-aimed tirade of swordfights, not striving for extensive character development or truly deep moments or message - hitting a narrower target audience and prizing style more than substance.
But damnit, the show had style!
If samurai movies are the Japanese version of American westerns, then Samurai Champloo is the equivalent of a neo-western aimed at boys in their early teens, and its fascination lies in modernizing just enough of the setting to make it flow in modern language without tossing out the elements which made that setting so captivating to begin with.

It succeeds wonderfully in this, ladling on way more historical references than my meager knowledge of Japanese culture can place, but the topic of modernization is a touchy one among would-be literati. You may not like seeing a puffed-up self-promoting samurai pimp-strutting about an Edo-period village accompanied by beatboxing hangers-on, or hear a challenge to monster-slaying heroism rapped out like an MTV song introduction, but Watanabe's crew managed to escape self-ridicule by the skin of their teeth to deliver a coherent story in which creative anachronism served mainly to offset, to illustrate a love of older modes of expression.

It's true that Samurai Champloo has much less to offer a mature audience than Cowboy Bebop did. Yet much like some Studio Ghibli movies, it still serves as an example among the others I cited at the start of this post, successfully dredging up an awareness of the essence of historical styles and settings which transcends shallow, slavish adherence to form, a lesson which many Hollywood adaptations and modernizations utterly fail to grasp.



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P.S. Though if you liked Faye, watch Michiko and Hatchin. Michiko was basically an expanded version of Faye.

P.P.S. The ugly-american baseball episode? Alternatively hilarious and overdone, but still worth seeing. A strike back against every shovel-toothed asian stereotype in older American cartoons... and also perhaps unintentionally a somewhat uncomfortable reminder that anime as a whole makes liberal use of racist Japanese stereotypes of Europeans.

Michiko to Hatchin

It's an anime... depending on what you expect when you hear "anime."
Michiko is a reckless, self-centered (but not self-serving) romantic who drags the fair-minded, more grounded young Hana along on her path of destruction. Such juxtapositions are common in literature, especially in the outlaw movies this anime largely emulates. You can watch the series primarily as a buddy-flick, though such reductionism would not do it justice - and its flat refusal to reduce itself to the tropes common to its own medium has unfortunately likely ensured that this excellent piece of work goes overlooked by the public at large. You'll find no giant robots here, nor any fifteen-minute first-kiss scenes under rains of cherry blossoms, no fireball-slinging mages or demonslaying bishonen heroes with white hair down to their ankles.

Instead, contrasting interpersonal central themes with locales which most of the world would consider exotic, Michiko, Hatchin and their transient acquaintances manage to convey real emotion in the sort of "gritty" environment in which children grow up both too quickly and not at all. It is in many ways too human to appeal to my more grandiose transhumanist tastes but within its own focus the series achieves wonderful portraits of individualism struggling through the animalistic baseline of human affairs.

It is not feminist. Though it avoids pigeonholing in most every other way, Michiko and Hatchin is yet in danger of co-optation by chauvinistic interests, given its mostly female core cast. Yet perhaps the reason it has not been claimed by the female supremacist crowd is that it quite decidedly fails to promote that agenda. Feminism is the promotion of women at the expense of any other sexes (of which there mostly happens to be one) and feminist tropes have become easily recognizable over the decades. We too easily swallow the sort of stories in which female characters are pristine, morally unassailable earth goddesses and every male character is a cackling, moustache-twirling embodiment of exploitation belching factory exhaust.

Michicko e Hatchin instead portrays individuality. It tells the story of flawed and admirable, complex characters and the interplay between personal desire and personal growth, inertia, ethics and ambition. That the story is told from a female point of view is ultimately inconsequential and every bit as fitting as it would have been from a male one. The events of the story are shared between male and female characters and at any point we could have switched to viewing them from the Satoshi / Hiroshi plot's standpoint without diminishing the storytelling experience in the slightest. It does not confuse viewpoint with entitlement, right down to the title characters' final confrontation with the object of their obsession. The simple equanimity of Hana's monologue provides a masterful denouement.

Feminism defines women in terms of their moral entitlement over men, indoctrinating both male and female into a culture of victimization, guilt and powermongering, and in truth does nothing to combat gender roles. This series never stoops so low. Call it egalitarian, call it individualist, call it humanist. It is a tale of purposeful, independent individuals who merely happen to be female, and the world would be a better place if more young girls grew up watching Princess Mononoke, Haibane Renmei and Michiko and Hatchin than the manipulative, abusive and ultimately codependent feminist archetypes.

Serial Experiments Lain

Googling the seemingly innocuous phrase "and you don't seem to understand" yields any of a number of videos like this one of an anime's opening theme. It's now been seventeen years since Serial Experiments Lain first aired, and people are still arguing over what the devil the show was about, but we're not going to stop talking about it anytime soon. Apparently it's even drawn some academic attention, though I think it slipped past hard-nosed would-be intellectuals' defenses simply via casually dropping a Proust reference as pass-code.

Given that the primary descriptor (even in the wikipedia article) which anyone can come up with for Lain is "weird" one has to wonder exactly how the show has gained and retained is popularity. It's become one of those artsy staples which certain segments of the population feel obligated to watch so they can nod along to conversations about it, like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Donnie Darko. What made it so captivating to begin with, though? You can take it as a conspiracy-themed adventure, but that's barely scratching the surface and other shows have done that better. It's certainly not action-packed or trendy.

If solipsism were reality, what would you make of yourself? Lain's philosophical leanings get the most attention, inordinately so, I'd say, suspiciously so. Methinks the public doth protest too much. After all, the show's writers sort of bit off more than they could chew and the several episodes of musings on the nature of reality don't come through very clearly, even by the somewhat lax standards of metaphysics. People's desire to focus on Lain as a philosophical piece I think simply masks their more taboo fascination with the title character herself.

Yet Lain is too unstable a character to sustain a realistic accusation of pure moe. Her image as a sexualized waif (embodied quite succinctly in one image during the end credits of each episode) is certainly near the core of the issue, but that alone wouldn't have carried the show so far. Anime is littered with more blatantly exploitative teenaged heroines and Lain occasionally goes out of her way to make herself unlikeable. In addressing the series in terms of transcendentalism, it may be more fruitful to apply the term not to the general assumptions of its world, but to the character herself. Lain the user transposed to embody the network, the ghost haunting static, the oft-vicious recurring demon of our individual psychological projections onto the zeitgeist, now there's a more likely explanation for her appeal. Ultimately, the vulnerable, confused ego caught in that limbo of early adolescence becomes capable of owning her various facets. We like Lain because we envy her that unassailable core of transcendent self-identity, we who cannot scream our desire for inner being loudly enough in a world of seven billion faceless carbon-copies.

Lain is the realization of individuality, the becoming of pure pattern. We project our own abandoned hopes of transcendence onto that innocent seductress pervading the static of human society, and thus remain fascinated by her.