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So for me everybody that likes anime finds cowboy bebop to be one of the greatest anime of all time. However one of the things I think people might not understand is with the main baddie dead and other baddie leaders all dead who is going to handle the inevitable power vacuum from all these crime organizations or whatever. I get vicious seemed horrible but what's worse a horrible leader or no leading to yet another gang war.

Can we say songs too? I don't think Born in the USA is as patriotic as some people think.

 lifeafter wrote:
Can we say songs too? I don't think Born in the USA is as patriotic as some people think.

Similar how it took some people until 2019 to realise what Rage Against the Machine songs were about. Stuff like this, just eight years later: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/tom-morello-paul-ryan-is-the-embodiment-of-the-machine-our-music-rages-against-246033/

Seriously? The band name didn't tip them off?

Back to OT:

Magneto and Xavier are pursuing the same goal. Their difference and conflict is in the means, not the end.

flamingkillamajig wrote:So for me everybody that likes anime finds cowboy bebop to be one of the greatest anime of all time. However one of the things I think people might not understand is with the main baddie dead and other baddie leaders all dead who is going to handle the inevitable power vacuum from all these crime organizations or whatever. I get vicious seemed horrible but what's worse a horrible leader or no leading to yet another gang war.

True, but then the story was never really about the major crime groups until the very end. Also we got a distinct impression that the whole "big crime lord gun slinging wild west" aspects of the whole setting was dwindling. Don't forget the "cowboy" show was wound up in the last episodes as well. So chances are whilst there was a crime vacuum, it wasn't going to be a major gang war. Vicious had already taken out most of the competition, but at the same time there wasn't the fertile ground to actually grow new ones.

Bran Dawri wrote:

Magneto and Xavier are pursuing the same goal. Their difference and conflict is in the means, not the end.

Actually I always got the impression that Xavier was seeking equality with humanity whilst Magneto began there, but steadily slipped further and further into wanting dominance over humanity, not just equality. Understandable due to the oppression. He basically wanted to reverse the oppression whilst Xavier wanted to end it.

 lifeafter wrote:
Can we say songs too? I don't think Born in the USA is as patriotic as some people think.

Oh gods no! If you actually listen to the lyrics, it's a song protesting the way America treats many of the people living there. You could change the title to Boned in the USA and it would be just as accurate.

The music of Phil Collins is much the same. I listened to No Jacket Required recently, and despite the upbeat music, there's not one happy song to be found on the album.

Another good one. The Police, 'Every Breath You Take' is NOT meant to be romantic in the slightest. It's about a stalker...

I feel like even in film, you can simply say "most of them". Some are tongue-in-cheek, some are ham-fisted politico films...others are more subtle or heavily hidden. Sadly modern film is more ham-fisted "in your face" because subtlety seems to be a lost art. I don't mind a subtle or clever message in a film - even a message I disagree with, but when you start just shouting political rhetoric or agenda at me with a bullhorn - you can feth off.

 Overread wrote:

flamingkillamajig wrote:So for me everybody that likes anime finds cowboy bebop to be one of the greatest anime of all time. However one of the things I think people might not understand is with the main baddie dead and other baddie leaders all dead who is going to handle the inevitable power vacuum from all these crime organizations or whatever. I get vicious seemed horrible but what's worse a horrible leader or no leading to yet another gang war.

True, but then the story was never really about the major crime groups until the very end. Also we got a distinct impression that the whole "big crime lord gun slinging wild west" aspects of the whole setting was dwindling. Don't forget the "cowboy" show was wound up in the last episodes as well. So chances are whilst there was a crime vacuum, it wasn't going to be a major gang war. Vicious had already taken out most of the competition, but at the same time there wasn't the fertile ground to actually grow new ones.

Bran Dawri wrote:

Magneto and Xavier are pursuing the same goal. Their difference and conflict is in the means, not the end.

Actually I always got the impression that Xavier was seeking equality with humanity whilst Magneto began there, but steadily slipped further and further into wanting dominance over humanity, not just equality. Understandable due to the oppression. He basically wanted to reverse the oppression whilst Xavier wanted to end it.

Somewhat. Xavier sometimes comes off as supporting a 'separate-but-equal,' assimilate and pass, a society hidden from Muggles or some form of Apartheid, depending on who is doing the writing and not thinking about the consequences.
The assimilate and pass stuff really comes up whenever a Morlock storyline comes up- ie, mutants that can't simply pass for human, unlike most of the Xmen, and the hypocrisy starts to leak out.

The language Xavier uses (particularly early on) and hiding the school as one for 'gifted students' rather than publicly being for mutants has unfortunate implications as well. There's less pretense of equality and more a sense of just being more patient than Magneto (in the sense that humans will eventually be bred out of the genepool and their superior children will replace them)

Like how just about every Pixar movie is telling kids the things you love will not matter to you 5 years from now. You can achieve your dreams, but in stranger aeons, dreams too will die.

It's been a while for me for Bebop, but as I recall the Vicious gang was more of a personal issue for Spike, and certainly not because the Red Dragons were the only gang in town. Weren't most of their stories unrelated to them? I'd assume each colony has at least one gang, and if you really managed to wipe them all off of one rock, a neighboring group would work its way right back in. I could be wrong about the ubiquity of the Red Dragons.

 Gitzbitah wrote:
Like how just about every Pixar movie is telling kids the things you love will not matter to you 5 years from now. You can achieve your dreams, but in stranger aeons, dreams too will die.

It's been a while for me for Bebop, but as I recall the Vicious gang was more of a personal issue for Spike, and certainly not because the Red Dragons were the only gang in town. Weren't most of their stories unrelated to them? I'd assume each colony has at least one gang, and if you really managed to wipe them all off of one rock, a neighboring group would work its way right back in. I could be wrong about the ubiquity of the Red Dragons.

No, you're correct. The gang itself comes up in one episode outside the two-part finale, and Vicious comes up in a mid-season two-parter while Spike is trying to track down his ex. That its personal is rather the point.

Honestly, Faye's backstory comes up more than Spike's, as do a bunch of one-off cults, pirates and assorted idiots.

Yeah all those points seem valid for cowboy bebop. All I'm saying is outside of that depressing personal vendetta brought up in fairly few episodes outside of that scenario the grand scheme of things remains unchanged after. There are cults, crime bosses and terrorists all over. They stopped some but as ever bounty hunting was brutal, depressing and considering the ending of that one bounty hunting channel not very profitable and very much starving till the next paycheck.

If anything the story ended with most people being in debt and being a good guy didn't always pay which led people to doing crime to try to afford what they needed. In fact that's probably one of the big take aways of that anime. It's not the only thing to take away though.

So yeah nothing they really did by the end of it changed much of any of those things.

Movies: Mad Max, First Knight
Shows: Punisher
Games: Warhammer 40,000

These are observations, I'm not saying most people do not get these, they can say if they do or not, likely they do:

The camera angle suggests in Mad Max that the "Bronze" (the cops) are bad guys. This was a standard thing in Batman of the 1960s when showing the crooks in their hideout.

Arthur in First Knight remarks "My God makes"..."strong enough, long enough for us to help one another." This was made in response to, "Your God is weak." The Bible says that God's strength is made perfect in weakness.

Frank Castle is not a hero. He is a what if supporting character. What happens when -apparent- justice fails? The author commented on a police dept that was using the Punisher skull motif.

Warhammer 40,000 is about the futility of man. The Bible says that which is highly exalted among men is an abomination to God.

I would argue that a lot of people often miss a major point of The Godfather. It wasn't about glorifying/glamorizing the Mafia, but about humanizing them. Showing Michael go down that dark path he was never meant to take, but he did so, initially, out of a sense of duty/desire to protect his family. How many of us wouldn't want to make the same choice to go after the people who tried to kill our father? Who killed our brother? Who killed our wife?

I remember seeing a prominent review of the original Highlander movie talking about how the time-travel was really confusing, and how one minute Connor McLeod was in New York and the next he'd jumped back in time and was battling Nazis and so on. Didn't seem to understand the concept of a flashback scene...

People seem to struggle with Robo Cop and Judge Dredd being satires.

40k too, for that matter. However, 40k is of course very British. It was created during an odd epoch, between the last days of post colonial decline, and the first days of New Money as the government reoriented the country to be Service Based, rather than manufacturing.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
People seem to struggle with Robo Cop and Judge Dredd being satires.

40k too, for that matter. However, 40k is of course very British. It was created during an odd epoch, between the last days of post colonial decline, and the first days of New Money as the government reoriented the country to be Service Based, rather than manufacturing.

Hell, people don’t get that the Starship Troopers film is a satire!

Is there any film that can't be interpreted as Satire?

There's no real overarching plot to Bebop. It's very episodic and simply feels greater than the sum of its parts because it ends each character's story in a way that's very true to the people we've gotten attached to over their many adventures. The final episodes are entirely personal conflicts that honestly? leave little real impact on the greater world around them. That's not a criticism; I think its one of the strengths of the series that gives it such a timeless, universal appeal.

Is there any film that can't be interpreted as Satire?

Yes, but Robocop and Starship Troopers are clearly intending to be and that's more than you can say for your Resident Evils and other films who's defenders try to claim the title after the fact.

I think Starship Troopers is pretty terrible. When I tell people this they'll roll their eyes and try to explain the satire, but no, I get it, it's still a bad movie.

(And I'm not entirely sure the original novel isn't actually satire - just with a really scary fanclub.)

But keeping with Verhoeven movies, Robocop has its 'American Jesus' thing going on where a good man is raised from the dead to walk on water and gun down his enemies - not sure if that's news to anyone but entertainment blogs apparently just discovered it early last year despite him saying as much in the DVD commentary.

From that same commentary, through a couple of scenes Verhoeven describes how they did a test screening for actual cops and some of the anecdotes about it range from concerning (cheering as Robo throws a barely conscious Kurtwood Smith through panes of glass over and over and over and over) to heartwarming (chanting 'Murphy' during that iconic 'what's your name' scene), but all suggested that Verhoeven didn't quite understand how much heart the character had.

FactFiend on YouTube have an ace video about Robocop. )

One controversial film that people don’t seem to get is Cannibal Holocaust.

Now it’s indisputably a video nasty. It’s notorious for a scene of genuine animal slaughter, and for its effects being so good, the actors actually had to turn up in court to prove it wasn’t a snuff film!

But the moral gets lost in the gore. What we actually see are some ‘arrogant westerners’ essentially getting their comeuppance. In no way are they presented as sympathetic characters. I mean, to get good footage, they herd villagers into a hut, bar the door, then set it on fire. They use and abuse Natives throughout. And that’s why they’re all killed.

Crispy78 wrote:
I remember seeing a prominent review of the original Highlander movie talking about how the time-travel was really confusing, and how one minute Connor McLeod was in New York and the next he'd jumped back in time and was battling Nazis and so on. Didn't seem to understand the concept of a flashback scene...

sounds like the 'we don't like these new fangled 80's movies so don't really bother actually watching ' twaddle Siskel and Ebert would come up with for movies they considered beneath them (something Bradshaw continues to this day)

Ohhh I got alot.
Mostly about creepy relationships in shows.
Like, Madoka Magica. Most people dont get that the Homura/Madoka relationship is like 100% wrong and toxic and not healthy.
First the Madoka that Homura fell in love with no longer exists.
It isnt a story about love, its about obsessivness.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Yeah all those points seem valid for cowboy bebop. All I'm saying is outside of that depressing personal vendetta brought up in fairly few episodes outside of that scenario the grand scheme of things remains unchanged after. There are cults, crime bosses and terrorists all over. They stopped some but as ever bounty hunting was brutal, depressing and considering the ending of that one bounty hunting channel not very profitable and very much starving till the next paycheck.

If anything the story ended with most people being in debt and being a good guy didn't always pay which led people to doing crime to try to afford what they needed. In fact that's probably one of the big take aways of that anime. It's not the only thing to take away though.

So yeah nothing they really did by the end of it changed much of any of those things.

I'm not sure why it would. It was nobody's goal to change the world. The Bebop crew wanted to get by or get out of debt.
You might as well complain that no one built a rocket in Lord of the Rings.


@hotsauceman1- most anime relationships are toxic and unhealthy, with a heavy taint of obsessiveness or co-dependence or outright abuse. Teacher-student relationships are often held up as cute and romantic, rather than criminal. Cheating, groping and gratuitous violence (as punishment for the first two) are cues for laughter, not disapproval.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
People seem to struggle with Robo Cop and Judge Dredd being satires.

40k too, for that matter. However, 40k is of course very British. It was created during an odd epoch, between the last days of post colonial decline, and the first days of New Money as the government reoriented the country to be Service Based, rather than manufacturing.

I actually get all of those. Never read much judge dredd but it was obvious the system in place didn't work and the law was oppressive.

I figured everybody got 40ks message. An imperium whose original goals get perverted and corrupted. I heard in the old version of the story the horus heresy wasn't about half the space marines turning to chaos but once they fled to the eye of terror they did. I think I like that version more.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:


I figured everybody got 40ks message. An imperium whose original goals get perverted and corrupted.

Nope. That's the not-particularly-satirical version that comes with the Horus Heresy novels (imperial truth and all that rot). Prior to those, the extreme nature of the Imperium is the Imperium working as intended.

I heard in the old version of the story the horus heresy wasn't about half the space marines turning to chaos but once they fled to the eye of terror they did. I think I like that version more.

Not sure where you heard this, but it isn't true. The details are different, but in the original Realm of Chaos version Horus is possessed by a daemon, corrupts the five Chapters (Legion wasn't used often originally) under his direct command, then gets the other chaos chapters at Isstvan. Chaos corruption is central to the original story, long before the retreat to the eye.

Yeah, Horus Heresy was there since Rogue Trader. It's just that Marines were more likely to be ex-cons who got brainwashed than genetically engineered since puberty. They were Sardukar from Dune with an English punk spin (slogans painter on their armor, etc).

To be fair I was always more into the gaming side of 40k and very light on most of the lore. I think it's funny people used to say there are different shades of gray with each faction. I'd argue it's more different shades of dark or black. Every faction is bad but there are worse fates in some factions than others.

I do remember hearing people say Big E was often a jerk. Never read enough to confirm though.

Surprising as it may seem, I've legitimately met a number of people who didn't get that Jack/Narrator and Tyler Durden were literally the same person in Fight Club.


The song "Black Sabbath" by black sabbath, is a warning against much of the occultic mysticism that was "popular" among certain people in the 1960s and 70s, not something praising it (as many, particularly religious groups, would have)

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

The song "Black Sabbath" by black sabbath, is a warning against much of the occultic mysticism that was "popular" among certain people in the 1960s and 70s, not something praising it (as many, particularly religious groups, would have)

They've got a lot of misunderstood songs. I knew a lot of metal heads that thought 'Warpigs' was pro-war, and 'Iron Man' is generally positive for the titular character, rather than a song about a murderous mindbreak brought on by alienation.

Then there's "Suicide Solution", where people forget the word 'solution' has a totally different meaning in chemistry. And if you actually listen to the lyrics instead of screaming hysterically, you'll quickly discover he's actually talking about alcoholism and addiction, not literal suicide, and he's CERTAINLY not promoting suicide as the answer to your problems.

"After Forever" goes alongside "Black Sabbath" as an anti-occult statement, and "Rock 'n' Roll Rebel" decries established religion deliberately misinterpreting his works.

"Killer of Giants" and "Thank God For the Bomb" go alongside "War Pigs" in anti-war sentiment.

And throughout his works you'll find lots of references to his own problems with mental illness and addiction. Ozzy Ozborne really is the single MOST misunderstood artist of my generation.