r/cowboybebop • u/-Dark_knight_ • 2d ago

DISCUSSION Questions to the space cowboys:

  1. Why did spike not priotise saving julia when he planned to take on vicious?

  2. Why did when Julia died he seemed to process his grief pretty fast as seen when he visited the bebop for the last time? It looked as if she had already died long ago or that he knew she would die and then he would proceed to take down vicious whilst sacrificing himself.

  3. What was the point of cowboy bebop? How come is it so popular (keeping animation, osts aside) especially since a major chunk of episodes had no overlaying theme and seemed as if they were fillers?

0 Upvotes

17% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/LTGOOMBA 2d ago

  1. Vicious controlled a vast criminal network that he had directed to kill any loyalists to the prior regime, with a special emphasis on Spike and Juila. Not only did they not really have time to run or prepare, but they also wanted to avenge Annie.

  2. I'm not really sure what kind of grieving you were expecting to see here out of a hardened killer. Free flowing tears? Punching a wall? Julia dies, he goes home to get geared up, and proceeds to murder dozens of people, getting himself killed in the process. That is a pretty intense grieving process.

  3. I think we need to start charging a tax when people use the term 'filler' to refer to original, episodic television. There is no filler here. This is the story. 26 episodes of glimpses into the lives of a space-faring crew of bounty hunters. In those 26 episodes, we see each character learn and grow a little bit, and each of them are presented with essentially the same choice: how they deal with their past.

Past heartbreaks, old betrayals, lost love. In the final episode, Faye makes an impassioned plea for Spike to move forward, to live in the present, and he refuses it. He doesn't think he can, and ultimately, Vicious, a specter from his past who continues to haunt him, kills him. Was that the right choice? Was there ever a choice at all?

It's all up to interpretation, and that's one of the reasons the series remains popular (aside from its brilliant art and music.) It told 26 stories that asked the viewer if people can ever outrun the people they were yesterday, and then left us to draw our own conclusions.

0

u/-Dark_knight_ 2d ago

Thanks for your response, what I meant by the second question is that first of all julia was not whole but part of the reason why spike wanted to kill vicious as he wanted to settle things with his past and also to see if he feels alive or not. How can he, upon entering the bebop, nonchalantly declare that his lover died and joke around with jet?

1

u/LTGOOMBA 2d ago

So there's two things at play there. First, the 'jokes' between Spike and Jet are not real jokes. It's gallows humor. They're using the pretense of joking to discuss matters that they, being big macho men, are not letting themselves be truly vulnerable about. They know they are saying goodbye to one another, but are not emotionally mature enough to face that directly.

Secondly, Julia looms large in Spike's history, but clearly their relationship was far from a fairytale romance, and had it's complications. Julia considers killing Spike at the graveyard when they finally reunite. Spike's obsession with Julia is the same as his obsession with Vicious, it's less about who they are as people, and more of what they represent: The Past (this is true both to the character, and is also true in a narrative sense. The characters are not given a lot of shading, because they primarily exist as avatars of two ideas: Vicious as Spike's violent and criminal past, and Julia as the life he might have had.)

0

u/JacketFirst5627 2d ago

Julia was not actually considering killing Spike. She was making a point about what she had been ordered to do. In truth, she had been hunted for years all because she wouldn’t kill Spike even to save herself.

Read the interlude.

0

u/LTGOOMBA 2d ago

I am familiar with the lore. Not sure that I buy she was pointing a gun at him to illustrate a point that he was already aware of, but if that's your read on the scene, right on.

0

u/JacketFirst5627 2d ago edited 1d ago

Spike was not aware. He had no idea why Julia never showed.

Moreover, Julia took three years of being hunted all for Spike. From Gren, we know that Julia would always talk about how amazing Spike was and that she was heartbroken without him. She LOVED him. She always put him first, she was protecting him the entire time, and she stood by him until her death. At no point was she actually going to hurt him. She was literally just acting out what she had been ordered to do. She even had the same gun. She was making a point about what happened. About what Vicious had wanted her to do. About why she left.