[While Mlawski's analysis of Battlestar Galactica is on indefinite hiatus, another Overthinker is surging into the gap, with another series of posts on a geek-friendly science fiction franchise.]

Cowboy Bebop and I have something of a troubled past.  I had been hearing great things about the show pretty much since it came out (and I mean, like, freaking rapturous things), but I somehow managed to avoid watching it until the summer of 2008.  Even then, all that I saw was the credits sequence.  But what a credits sequence it is:

Judging from that credits sequence, Coyboy Bebop was some kind of hundred-year-storm combination of things I think are awesome.  Jazz!  Kung Fu! Animation! Spaceships! Pop Art! -- and while I prefer an interesting female character to a pin-up any day of the week, I am not immune to the attractions of -- Cheesecake! My appetite was whetted.  Scratch that:  my appetite was honed down to razor sharp keenness in one of those Williams-Sonoma electric home knife sharpener dealies, to the point where I could use it to do all the fancy tricks like chopping a can of tomatoes in half or slicing really thin and perfect slices of bread.  Based on the strength of the credits alone, I was damn near ready to buy the DVD box set one day when I came across it on sale.  But since I don’t have a lot of disposable income (buy a shirt, dammit!), I just decided to Netflix it, one DVD at a time.  And at first, I was glad I did, because when I started watching the series, I was distinctly underwhelmed.

It's about the bomb.

[This is the first in what may be a series.  Should I have started with a more well-known anime like Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball or Pokemon?  Maybe.  But I just watched Paranoia Agent, and you should, too.  You can stream the full 13 episode series for free on Veoh.com.  You won’t regret it.]

[Also: this is a SPOILER FREE! article.  Hopefully it’ll make you want to watch the show.]

First, a story…

Back in college, a friend of mine asked me to take a course on modern Japanese literature with her.  Being my snarky self, I said, “Why should I do that?  I already know the answer to all the books.  If I took this class, I guarantee all of the essays would have the same exact thesis:

‘It’s about the bomb.’”

Whether or not I was right about modern Japanese literature, the interesting thing to me is how little this thesis applies to anime and manga.  There’s the odd exception, of course; Grave of the Fireflies jumps to mind, as does Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress.  (Grave of the Fireflies is about two children trying to survive through World War II; Millennium Actress is about an aging actress who lived through the war.)

For the most part, though, anime goes out of its way not to mention nuclear weaponry.  Never never never.  The most blatant example is the famed Neon Genesis Evangelion, in which the main characters continually use nukes but never refer to them by name.  No, they’re “N-2 mines!”  Nothing nuclear about ‘em!  Those mushroom clouds over there?  Just a trick of the light!  (In case you don’t believe me about the nuclear weapons taboo in anime, here’s an article about it on TVTropes, appropriately titled “Nuclear Weapons Taboo.”)

So I was shocked by Satoshi Kon’s anime series, Paranoia Agent, for two reasons:

1.    It is clearly about the bomb.

2.    None of the reviews or articles I read about the show acknowledged this fact.

From the “old news but new news to me” file comes this interesting tidbit: Hollywood is in pre-pre-production for a live-action Cowboy Bebop movie.  (It’s an anime.)  This news, of course, initiated my brain’s usual protocol:

10: Become excited
20: Wait
30: Frown and realize this is Hollywood we’re talking about
40: GOTO Wikipedia
50: Read related article
60: If famous and good production company/director/actor/writer is attached, GOTO 10
70: If famous and bad production company/director/actor/writer is attached, GOTO 30

For instance, I recently learned that a live-action film of Avatar: The Last Airbender was in the works.  Then I learned M. Night Shyamalan was attached to direct.  GOTO 30.

Well, take that mild disappointment and magnify by twelve and you get my feelings about the Cowboy Bebop movie.  Because Cowboy Bebop is my favorite anime.  Because it reeks of style and is clever and witty and has wonderful dialogue and character development.

And because Keanu Reeves is attached.

Shakespeare won't read your fanfic, either.

Embarrassing admission of the day: I read fanfiction.  It’s hard to tell over the Internet, but that word “read” is in the present tense.  I read fanfiction.  Today.

But only sometimes!  Once or twice a year – at most, I swear! – I indulge in what I admit is a very guilty pleasure.  Some of you watch Gossip Girl; some of you unironically enjoy The Chronicles of Riddick.  Me, I read amateur versions of anime and children’s books.

99% of fanfiction is terrible, of course.  95% of anything is terrible, and I added 4% because this is the Internet we’re talking about.  But every so often I find a fanfic I can’t keep my eyes off.  It might capture the feeling of the original source, or attack the premise from an interesting and new point of view.  I get to see my favorite characters come back to life through the power of words.  The puppeteer might be different, but, in the best fics, anyway, my beloved puppets are back and better than ever.

Before you sneer, I should probably remind you that many great pieces of “real” literature are just glorified fanfics.  Every other year the Pulitzer or Man Booker Prize goes to a retelling of a some old text; the only difference is that they use stuff in the public domain so they can’t get sued.  Fanfic isn’t new, either.  See anything by Shakespeare, anything by the any of the Ancient Greeks, and the entire New Testament, for instance, and you’ll understand what I mean.  Although the New Testament did get the character of “God” all wrong and also was a little too G-rated in comparison to the original text.  Still, points for using the postmodern techniques of using “found documents” and not one but four unreliable narrators.  That’s a good fanfic.

The trouble is that it is very difficult to find good fanfic.  Sometimes I go dumpster diving at Fanfiction.net, but it just takes too long.  Why in the world doesn’t that site have a “sort by rating” feature or “sort by number of reviews” feature, anyway?  Seeing as I am too lazy to wade through the slush, as those in the publishing world like to say, I’m just going to have to make every fanfiction writer on the Internet better.  That means you.  In my spare time away from this blog I teach writing, so I do this more out of habit than anything else.  And, yes, I’m going to make the assumption that stories that meet my personal tastes are objectively better stories than those that don’t.

You guys better step it up.

A list of five thou shalt nots and five thou shalts below.  While some of these tips will be about writing in general, most are specifically about writing fanfiction, a form with its own quirks and issues.  And even if you don’t write fanfiction yourself, maybe you’ll enjoy reading a deconstruction of the medium.

Well, it’s official.  According to A.O. Scott, one of the main film critics of the New York Times, superheroes are SO OVER.  Well.  I guess there won’t be anymore superhero movies, then.

Okay, so we all know that’s not going to happen.  But I kind of have to agree with Scott on some level.  The Dark Knight may have been so good that it ended a certain type of superhero movie thread.  This is the thread that Scott describes in his article: the one where the superhero runs after the villain for the first two-thirds of the movie, then they finally have a showdown in which the villain and superhero are revealed to be “not so different,” and then the superhero kicks the villain’s ass.  I agree with Scott that the ass-kicking part is the least interesting part of this kind of film.

So where does this leave superhero movies?  Are they so over?  If not, what kind of superhero film will replace the Dark Knight model?  If so, what will take their place?  My ideas are below the fold…