Soul Kitchen

I am a mango who lives on Pluto...Things to do with anime...mostly articles, some art; all content at soulkitchen8.com; Bebop article tag: #bebop_mango; Other anime article tag: #Plutomango

[plutomango]

Sorry I’ve not been around and I took down the blog. While it got a lot of love, I eventually got tired of random hateful comments too.

I was going through a gruesome time personally and didn’t need it. An online blog was like the last thing on my radar at that time.

Things are kind of better now so I’ll get the stuff I wrote earlier back up even if I may not be back to full time writing yet…or ever.

Don’t know yet but I really appreciate all the messages from people checking up on me and requesting for the content back.

In the meantime you can find the Cowboy Bebop essays below:

https://soulkitchen8.wordpress.com/

[plutomango]

Hi. Sorry I took it down because occasionally I’d get pretty hateful comments on it and I didn’t need that at the moment.

I was going through a tough time personally. I guess I’ll get it back up. Will link it below once I do.

[plutomango]

I’ve been too busy with personal stuff to really be active online but logged into my website today for some notification clearing and found some really lovely reviews. ❤️

Also found two rants from someone asking why I wrote the blog. Because I did. Lol if you don’t like it click on something else bro. WTF? 🤣🤣

[eugeniedanglars]

anyway i’m not the first person to say this but i do not buy for even half a second that sam would be cool with frodo sailing off to the undying lands and never seeing him again. sam WOULD have followed frodo onto that boat and if the elves didn’t let him aboard he would have invented water skiing right then and there so he could skitch

[plutomango]

You ever read “a clean well lighted place” by Hemingway? I can’t help but now see the bebop as the cafe, the old waiter man as spike, the young waiter as Faye, and the old man as jet.

@louieseemsgay Um…well I only wrote one long essay on Bebop and Hemingway featuring the specific example of “A Clean Well-lighted Place” and how the nada/nothing in it is exactly as much not a nothing as the blank spaces in Bebop are not blank at all. :) Linking that below.

I love the parallels you come up with honestly and it’s very refreshing to see someone bring up Hemingway in this context. Though maybe I don’t see the young waiter as Faye because he had something to go home to while she has nothing. He would be Jet for me and how he keeps telling Spike to let go of his past etc. because he had the option to let go of his while Spike doesn’t. Spike’s past refuses to let go of him. In the story the young waiter wants the cafe to be closed because he has something to go home to while the older one doesn’t. Jet is still well-adjusted.

For me Spike and Faye are more parallels of each other and hence closer to the old man and the waiter who both had nothing. Like Spike can’t get away from his past to build a new life, Faye can’t do anything about her circumstances. Her insurmountable debt makes her a victim to doing the best she can but she can never get away from it and it keeps her from having any chance at a “normal” life.

Bebop also keeps building how similar both of them are to each other and of course I personally see a hell lot more in their relationship than people generally believe.

Why You May Need Hemingway to Understand Cowboy Bebop - Soul Kitchen

In the same way that you need a microscope to understand an amoeba, you need an understanding of Ernest Hemingway to understand Cowboy Bebop

[plutomango]

Bebop but Ed and ein were adopted by vicious

@louieseemsgay Very plausible scenario. Broken man with not a whole lot adopts kid who’s not got anyone else (assuming she never meets the Bebop crew in this scenario).

It would then proceed to be the wholesome story of a single Dad who finds something to live for with his innocent, loves-everyone daughter and dog. They’d probably go to parks a lot, take Ein for walks. He’d learn to cook her nutritious meals. She’d take care of the bird and read him stupid stories she wrote.

All his “nothing in the world worth believing in” would probably fade away and he’d get to dial himself back to a more human self.

10/10 would watch that.

@wackernagels wrote something on similar lines too so looping in the expert for their opinion too :)

[wackernagels]

I think vicious won’t seriously harm any outsiders if they’re not really interfering with his job— even if it’s spike heckling the fuck out of him on Callisto, well, he’s got a shipment of red eye to pick up. If he goes down to earth for some assignment and a funky little kid starts imprinting on him, he’d try his best to drive her off, but I think ‘Ed’s desire to adopt a new dad’ > ‘vicious’s motivation to keep Ed out of his hair’

So uh. Vicious accidentally acquires a child, because it is far more work trying to put them back than just. Being a dad? Some part of him is definitely terrified of what this might mean for Ed, as the adopted kid of a high ranking red dragon. Ed is more of someone who worked behind the lines, they’re never really seen actually participating in physical combat and she gets left behind when the bebop goes out on more dangerous tasks, and I think knowing this a part of vicious does start fixating on keeping Ed safe. I’d guess he rarely talks about Ed to anyone, mostly for this reason. There is no such thing as bring your child to work day, but Ed has free rein of the house and the neighborhood and vicious knows what they booby-trapped, home alone style.

I won’t put it against him being quite overprotective. With all his bad parental figure relationships, both in anime and netbop, I think his way of being a good parent is just ‘let ed do what they want but make sure anyone who thinks of hurting them dies’. Maybe throw some learning to cook in there because unlike him, kids can’t be fed instant ramen. It’s like getting a hobby, except the hobby is full time parenthood but it nevertheless starts distracting vicious from getting in too deep on syndicate things. If he has someone, he can’t be so reckless with his ambitions. He won’t risk a coup if that means it might leave Ed without a guardian or dead. There’s no such thing as truly escaping organized crime but I guess having some kind of attachment can bring you back from being a cog in the machine.

In this scenario I’m guessing one day Ed just comes home with stolen lab experiment ein and is like ‘can we keep him’. Vicious gives the energy of a dad that says he doesn’t like animals but then coddles them, I’m even willing to think he has some kind of soft spot for animals, if his bird is any implication. I think that without the fear of someone leaving or hurting him he’d actually be able to form a healthy, unconditional relationship with them. That person is no longer just a footnote to vicious’s experience as a red dragon, and it becomes more of vicious dividing his time between crime and some resemblance of a family. The reason why he’s Like That in canon is probably because he let himself marinate in his hurt, and not saying you should get a kid to fix yourself, but I think having Ed to look out for lets him move past his grudges.

You know, this energy. Once he accepts that Ed isn’t going anywhere.

[plutomango]

Aww. I knew I was going to get a great answer and I was not disappointed. All of this pretty much. Thank you @wackernagels :)

It’s so much fun treating an anime with the seriousness of a major scientific matter. It’s a good life where you get to do that.

@louieseemsgay The meeting room thing may happen if it’s just him and Ed. He probably won’t bring his foster child out in front of the rest of the Syndicate as per the response above. :)

@louieseemsgay Sure why not. Anything else?

[plutomango]

Bebop but Ed and ein were adopted by vicious

@louieseemsgay Very plausible scenario. Broken man with not a whole lot adopts kid who’s not got anyone else (assuming she never meets the Bebop crew in this scenario).

It would then proceed to be the wholesome story of a single Dad who finds something to live for with his innocent, loves-everyone daughter and dog. They’d probably go to parks a lot, take Ein for walks. He’d learn to cook her nutritious meals. She’d take care of the bird and read him stupid stories she wrote.

All his “nothing in the world worth believing in” would probably fade away and he’d get to dial himself back to a more human self.

10/10 would watch that.

@wackernagels wrote something on similar lines too so looping in the expert for their opinion too :)

[plutomango]

Macross Plus: The Masterpiece Almost-fake Macross - Soul Kitchen

How the influence of Shinichiro Watanabe and Keiko Nobumoto makes Macross Plus a somewhat different creature from the rest of its franchise

How the involvement of Shinichiro Watanabe and Keiko Nobumoto made Macross Plus a masterpiece story of human experience and relationships rather than the typical mecha storylines of the Macross franchise as a whole.

[plutomango]

Ed: jet person, spi-spi has been drinking his sad juice again.

@louieseemsgay I just really hope you’re talking about alcohol here. With that guy you can never be sure…?

[plutomango]

There’s an episode of the sopranos in which 2 of the main characters end up killing a debtor, and they have to get rid of the body, and the debtor is a green beret type and he’s actually alive and they have to run through the Forrest to kill him.

That but with vicious and spike when they were young

@louieseemsgay Huh. Kinda interesting that you picked the Valery episode, another guy whose death is a literal question mark.

Netbop tried to look at this a bit. Their backstory with just bantery conversations and them screwing up on the job. I know they got made fun of for that but I thought that scene was done pretty well.

In the anime they're both larger than life, too cool for school who'd probably not mess up this way by the time we see them, but fun to imagine them as rookies screwing up and getting pulled up by Mao or someone just like Paulie and Chris get pulled up by Tony.

Very fascinating.

[plutomango]

Kotaro Lives Alone: Trauma and Stories - Soul Kitchen

Looking at how Kotaro uses the story of Tonosaman as a coping mechanism in Kotaro Lives Alone to deal with his past abuse

[plutomango]

Vicious: spike, you are gay because you like men. I am gay because I hate women. We are not the same

Spike: Yes but we’re both ultimately obsessed with each other to the exclusion of all other men and women. Can you really say we’re so different?

[plutomango]

Spike insists that he doesn’t care about Ed. But the second she gets chilly he takes off his suit jacket and wraps her in it.

@louieseemsgay Yeah we covered this with the Ein thing. Topic closed. Man loves everyone but doesn’t know how to show it. Fights himself to an inch of death to save them. Next topic. Something around Vicious maybe?

Unless you’re sending me prompts for crack roleplays in which case please know I will only ever RP as the Bebop itself. The ship. Nothing else will do.

[plutomango]

Why say “I’m a clinically depressed man petrified of growing to care about other people and losing them” when “whatever happens happens” is so much quicker?

@louieseemsgay Not sure why anyone would ask these questions of a confused mango residing alone on Pluto given that mangos can’t see televisions and hence I’ve never seen this show. Also we don’t get cable here. But it feels like a quest I must fulfil.

Yes. Pretty much that. What you said.

[plutomango]

Spike, as he’s scratching Eins ears on the sofa: I hate dogs.

@louieseemsgay If Spike was real, the kind of emotionally-repressed, confused-in-the-head, ticking time bomb of a man he is….this has 97.6843% probability of happening.

Please also see under the Sundry Likely Instances section for activities like cleaning the Red Tail for Faye while claiming to hate women and buying Ed piyokos while saying he wishes they could drop her back to Earth.

For additional references, please consult him lighting a cigarette instead of crying and eating his feelings in eggs during Hard Luck Women.

[plutomango]

Ok imagine this

Faye has been taken hostage by the red dragon. She’s at the opera house and has been seated she hears

*blup blup* “you’re trembling.”

Faye: who are you? Tell me!

*she turns to a man whose head is a fish in a tank connected to a human body*

“Fishous.”

@louieseemsgay Um. Ok let me handle this delicately. That’s actually the super-secret elite version of that episode which was only released to a select group of VVIPs. It seems you were there as well though, since all of us were also wearing fish in tanks as our heads, I cannot be sure of course.

Either way I would request you to not speak publicly of this ever again.

I’m also going to draw that because after having put Vicious in maid, clown, and bunny costumes this just seems like the natural next step.

[cowboy-bebop-shots]

Cowboy Bebop Session #15, My Funny Valentine

He really had no reason to go after her if you think about it….

[spike-and-faye]

Like @plutomango said he really was just here waiting in case she needed help. He didn’t interfere or take over the situation but was still there if she needed him. Literally this man is ruining my life.