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Text of the page (random words):
mething you re not in an attempt to game life to achieve a goal and you must also live with the decisions you make as there is no way to backtrack when you hit a bad end but then at the very end of the series the full conceit of the show is revealed watashi is caught in an endless labyrinth of 4 5 tatami rooms all belonging to slightly different versions of him that seem to be having entirely more fun than the one who wanders the tatami labyrinth it s also crucial that yuasa began to use more live action footage in the sequences with the wandering watashi perhaps it was simply a budget saving move but it implies to us the viewer that this particular watashi is the real watashi and that the show prior to this point has been a hallucination of the wandering watashi a dream that passes for reality or a reality that passed like a dream which brings us to borges because any mention of labyrinths and especially in close conjunction with dreams requires bringing him up i ve been slowly working through the recent penguin retranslation of his works 2 which means that i sort of have borges on the brain one of borges s most famous stories the garden of forking paths is known for its description of an infinite novel a labyrinth that branches in time rather than in space in all fictions each time a man meets diverse alternatives he chooses one and eliminates the others in the work of the virtually impossible to disentangle ts ui pen the character chooses simultaneously all of them he creates thereby several futures several times which themselves proliferate and fork 3 the fictional novel in the story is considered the first instance in 1941 of hypertext and anyone who s gotten lost on wikipedia with twenty tabs open knows without being told how headache inducing this sort of thing is the thing is this is the exact environment visual novels and tatami galaxy operate in even more literally than in the wikipedia example for in these it is time that branches not tab bar space watashi literally makes all the myriad decisions of his college life simultaneously each room of the tatami labyrinth is slightly different reflecting a slightly different choice he made in that particular fork despite the fact that he has been granted the agency to literally do everything in the world apparently through the arcane ritual of locking himself in his room he finds himself rather miserable as he fundamentally can t do everything without simultaneously doing nothing and so he becomes stuck inside the hypertext labyrinth vast stretches of forking possibilities stymieing him into a stagnant life unable to pick a life and go for it at least until he realizes that he s trapped in this paralyzing labyrinth and resolves to escape it by making a very important decision if we want to get really metatext here though it s also possible that the whole of tatami galaxy takes place in a relatively short period of time as watashi puzzles out whether or not he should return the fifth mochiguman toy to akashi here the story takes on the structure of watashi unconsciously reflecting upon past opportunities and missed connections to his current situation finally determining that akashi is the risk he wants to take the tangled dreamlike narratives and labyrinth result from watashi s consideration of what might have been or what will happen if he doesn t make the next move with akashi this also explains the terrible dooms that always befalls watashi before another reload any doom that occurs happens after he consciously rejects returning the toy to akashi which implies that he can t imagine a positive thing that would come from not pursuing akashi he betrays himself in these scenarios the fortune teller needn t be the fate stand in but rather a stand in for the intuitive understanding of watashi s desires that he is unwillfully or perhaps willfully challenging regardless of the level of narrative complexity though the end results are the same watashi accepts his past decisions and regrets bad and good hastily made and carefully thought out and decides to move forward it matters not at this point which past is real or whether any of them are real at all what does matter is the acceptance of their existence or non existence and moving forward with his life as life is defined entirely by limits he can t do everything there is to do in life he can t even do everything he might want to do in life but he can do what seems most important now and take pleasure from or in spite of whatever may result 1 i typoed this as gaol initially i thought at least one of you might be amused by this 2 yes i know the hurley translation isn t as good as the di giovanni translations yes i will track those down and read them no i don t want to listen to your 400 word rant on this topic 3 borges jorge luis trans andrew hurley collected fictions new york penguin books 1998 p 125 cowboy bebop the rewatchening published 11 august 2010 cowboy bebop 14 comments important helpful note it may amuse some of you to imagine me as a tall lanky blonde american bedecked with cowboy hat and riding spurs perched upon a horse which happens to be in an elevator at the current moment you might also want to whistle a bit perhaps this will set you in the correct mood for this post my position and my general capabilities regarding the following as i have promised for approximately five years i have rewatched cowboy bebop a series which has caused me no small amount of largely inexplicable consternation over the eight years it has been since i first watched it on one lonely august day when i probably should have been running around outdoors and overturning rocks to see what sort of disgusting things lie under them either worms or communal copies of playboy depending on who you ask this consternation is largely founded on the fact that i manage to evade the extremes of opinions about cowboy bebop i neither worship it as the feather of truth that the hearts of other anime must be weighed against nor do i revile it as some kind of impure anime too tainted by western influences to qualify as true anime i exaggerate of course but i ve never really felt like i ought to throw my weight behind the why can t we have more anime like cowboy bebop position i m not even sure that the opposite position exists as cowboy bebop seems to be so universally beloved of nearly everyone that assessing it as anything less than a superlative example of the fine art of japanese animation takes on the air of trying to explain to the pope that maybe these indulgence things aren t the best idea part of the problem is of course is that cowboy bebop is actually an extremely polished highly enjoyable series the cast is likable the animation is fluid most every episode is well structured and shinichiro watanabe pulls it all off without batting an eye i had forgotten in the eight year exodus that many of the episodes are just sheer gleeful fun the comic episodes were always my favorites especially stray dog strut and mushroom samba and i noticed this time around that edward wong hau pepelu tivrusky iv is far more horribly underused than i remembered taking a back seat to nearly everything this is a travesty and i demand the spinoff even episodes such as speak like a child and hard luck woman that blend comedy with more dramatic events work well for me although that might just be the peculiarities of the themes they deal with the more dramatic episodes and moments though are the ones that stymie me the most the episodes that deal specifically with spike s backstory and ultimate bang tend to leave me constantly checking the time remaining on the episode and wanting to send a letter back in time to the staff that reads yes i get what you re doing here thematically get on with it possibly the worst offender is actually ganymede elegy the second half of the episode felt as though the series were doing everything short of holding up a cue card that reads be sad and emotionally moved here to get the viewer to feel emotion veering dangerously close to blunt force trauma with tragic narrative with thematic resonance it s moments like this where characters are impelled along their paths by the mechanized workings of theme where any subtlety that may or may not be present is lost or disregarded through the blatantly mechanical operations of the plot s thematic ends these episodes tend to feel emotionally flattened and dead to me the mode fits well with the major themes of the work the characters are living a half existence suppressing their emotions as they re thrust forward on the linear rails of fate dictated by the events in their pasts it s also styled with the classic hemingwayean hardboiled style quite common in noir fiction and film depict the actions of the characters truly enough and the audience will perceive and feel the emotions underneath something about the flat deadness of the hardboiled style tends to turn me off it though in cowboy bebop i can perceive the emotions under the surface i can understand from whence they come and i can feel sympathy for the characters but with a few exceptions i can t seem to bring myself to really care a great deal about all of this i don t feel wrenched or even a vague sorrow but as though i am merely abstractly noting that a person feels a certain way the exceptions faye watching the betamax tape from her youth ed leaving the bebop after her prodigal father may be due to similarities from my own experiences or even just thematic familiarity from previous stories i have read and watched still at the end of the day any real issues i have with cowboy bebop are largely dependent on my own personal idiosyncrasies symptomatic not of issues within the series itself but of individual aesthetics i have scarcely a complaint with how the series tends to let the cast pinball around within the confines of an episode the rest seems simply a mismatching of formal aesthetics everything is handled exactly the way watanabe wants it to be handled and it snaps together nicely but the way watanabe handles things and the way i make personal connections to stories just don t jibe well and it s disingenuous to shift responsibility to the series because of that nevertheless it seems to be the dividing line between my reserved but high opinion of the series and the adulation and idolization that i sometimes see for the series i can easily understand why someone might feel so fervently about the series to make it their favorite series or even a benchmark series for quality anime but i cannot feel it for myself it is a conscious knowing appreciation and not a gut level appreciation and that i fear makes all the difference as a sort of last minute parting shot it s also possible i find myself identifying more with the characters who accept the burden of their past and face the future rather than those who are more a prisoner of their pasts i also note with some amusement that the two major characters who resolve to face the future faye and edward wong hau pepelu tivrusky iv alias françoise are female while jet seems to remain in present day stasis and spike well bangs i can t tell if this is an angle worth serious thematic exploration or even if i m qualified to tackle it but it struck me as interesting a brief exploration into why we watch what we watch maybe published 11 june 2010 musings 1 comment the rule of three is unfortunately compelling me to follow up on pontifus s post about the threefold methods of interpreting a text and cuchlann s post about what a text actually is leaving me to pick up the tattered scraps littering the workshop and make some kind of reconstituted wood out of it all by dint of occupation and current educational focus i tend to focus on what pontifus elects to not talk about the set of biases and prejudices which define a readers interactions with a given text we bring these biases to everything we read or watch and whether or not we end up liking what we ve read the process of reading leaves its imprint on our biases somewhere in the unconscious where the foundations for taste lie a new rule is defined a corollary is added a variable is shifted slightly we can never fully know our own complex of biases but we can see the pattern in what we like and dislike and surmise from that i have no doubt that somewhere someone is attempting to derive aesthetic calculus though in my previous post this complex produces originality when given a specific time frame where past experience gives the sense of something being familiar yet radically different here the same complex is the basis for taste itself most likely the development of our individual tastes is fairly simple whenever something deeply affects us we begin to search out things similar to what affected us the child who never missed a single episode of robotech for instance as an adult is gleeful to discover not only super dimensional fortress macross and anime itself but also anime similar to it it s a form of patterning an imposition of order upon complex chaotic streams of information by simplifying and generalizing until we have a concept that can be expressed likely you already understand that at some level however what i want to touch on is the way this process constantly iterated over the course of a lifetime might work taking the above mentioned macross example there are any number of different ways our hypothetical child might pattern the series for example large scale space opera stories romance stories valkyries or robots in general idolization of roy focker maximillian jenius lynn minmay misa hayase captain global milia falyna etc visual aesthetics the early 80s style itano s signature animation writing style and pacing of storyline styles of music featured in series themes love and music transcending intercultural barriers and warmongering i doubt this is an exhaustive list and none of these aspects are mutually exclusive although our hypothetical child will most likely perceive at least some of them as anathema to what they like and may not even be able to consciously grasp others it s also likely that many of these will be converted into simplified tropes to ease the selection of similar things to watch or read this has robots so i like it that has a romance story so i don t like it the impact runs deeper than the superficial tropes but at this early phase only the most basic rules of thumb are likely to be of any use it s at this point where we have a basic but unarticulated internal aesthetic framework that pontifus s interpretation methods likely come into play when learning something new there tends to be a bottoming out faced with overwhelming amounts of conflicting information individuals are forced to use compensating strategies to cope with the overload and attendant anxiety since we are learning about one s own taste here the three interpretive methods arise from different implementations of various coping strategies the focused model wh...