The Gaming Den

A_Cynic wrote:Cowboy bebop

The rest of your post is nothing but garbage pretending to be a point.

But please don't mention Coboy Bebop again.

I might have to end this discussion about Buffy and Space Whores to tell you how much I despise THAT god damn terrible show instead.

PhoneLobster wrote:But emasculation through sex and sex with a woman corrupting a man into a monster is very much in keeping with misogynistic ideas rather than the opposite.

I guess other people feel differently, but I can honestly say that those two portrayals doesn't say anything negative about women to me. What I get out of it is "men are selfish children".

Random: The argument about Jayne's hrribleness as misogyny goes like this:

Jayne is an evil and dangerous person, who callously abuses what trust his crew gives him and repeatedly endangers them. Yet they put up with him, and with less fuss, seemingly, then it took for Mal to dal with the Tam's and other liabilities. There's no reason to believe that the characters would tolerate a woman of such specatcularly loathsomeness and evil.

Therefore, the characters are sexist. Now, sexist characters don't necessarily equate to a sexist writer: it's only when sexist behavior is protrayed positively you have a clear case; but some sexism is so noxious that even portraying it neutrally, or without comment, is misogynistic.

To look at it from a social perspective, PL's assertion is that Whedon encourages readers to indulge Jayne and cut him slack, which feeds into a negative trait of our overall society of tolerating boorish behavior from men.

I still don't know what his point is about the name. I don't disupte his claim that the name was chosen deliberatley and that it probably means something, but unless he's willing to actually say what he thinks it means, I can't agree or disagree.

Boolean wrote: Jayne is an evil and dangerous person, who callously abuses what trust his crew gives him and repeatedly endangers them. Yet they put up with him, and with less fuss, seemingly, then it took for Mal to dal with the Tam's and other liabilities. There's no reason to believe that the characters would tolerate a woman of such specatcularly loathsomeness and evil.

Ok, well that's certainly a way of looking at it that I personally just wouldn't think of. I always saw Jayne as representing the worst of male traits, and generally the fact that he's seen as a hero by accident is a parody on society, which often places vicious, selfish men as role models.

But nowhere do I really see where Joss actively endorses this as being a good way to act. If anything, Joss' deeper purpose (assuming he had one) may well have been to try to cast a spotlight on the sexism in society. But based on his prior work, I'm quite certain a misogynistic message was not what he was trying to achieve there. There's a difference between saying "This is what happens in society" and saying "This is right, and we should encourage it."

A_Cynic wrote: Cowboy bebop: Edward - now that's a fvcker who is messed up. i don't even know ed's gender. ed just likes ramen.

Radical Edward is female.

Now, you want a real trap? Bridget

RandomCasualty2 wrote:

Boolean wrote: Jayne is an evil and dangerous person, who callously abuses what trust his crew gives him and repeatedly endangers them. Yet they put up with him, and with less fuss, seemingly, then it took for Mal to dal with the Tam's and other liabilities. There's no reason to believe that the characters would tolerate a woman of such specatcularly loathsomeness and evil.

Ok, well that's certainly a way of looking at it that I personally just wouldn't think of. I always saw Jayne as representing the worst of male traits, and generally the fact that he's seen as a hero by accident is a parody on society, which often places vicious, selfish men as role models.

But nowhere do I really see where Joss actively endorses this as being a good way to act. If anything, Joss' deeper purpose (assuming he had one) may well have been to try to cast a spotlight on the sexism in society. But based on his prior work, I'm quite certain a misogynistic message was not what he was trying to achieve there. There's a difference between saying "This is what happens in society" and saying "This is right, and we should encourage it."

The thing about Jayne is that he's an idiot, in fact in the episode where River is reading everyone's mind, he says "I got stupid and the money was too good." Hell, everyone on the ship realizes that Jayne is a sexist pig, and they usually give him hell for it, but they know they have to stick together, hell, they also know that if they did anything short of kill him (which Mal threatened on at least one occasion), they'd just have another enemy. He's too dangerous, he's the kind of dangerous you'd rather have at your side than across from you.

Mal's an ass. But he's a good ass. He takes care of his family, which is his crew, including the Tams, and he protects them.

Everyone on the crew, short of Walsh and Preacher at least border on sexism, and they all tend to be rather dirty minded, or at least make a lot of sexual jokes, and that's probably what the average crew of a smuggling ship would be like. I know that if I and my five closest friends were in that situation, we'd be pretty similar, except that I'd smack upside the head anyone who acted as sexist and misogynistic as Jayne.

...course so would my female friends...

PhoneLobster wrote:I might have to end this discussion about Buffy and Space Whores to tell you how much I despise THAT god damn terrible show instead.

I'd be interested in that viewpoint.

TOZ wrote:

PhoneLobster wrote:I might have to end this discussion about Buffy and Space Whores to tell you how much I despise THAT god damn terrible show instead.

I'd be interested in that viewpoint.

Ditto. Is it Faye being a swindling, B-league gypsy analogue with more boobs than brains at times?

TOZ wrote:

PhoneLobster wrote:I might have to end this discussion about Buffy and Space Whores to tell you how much I despise THAT god damn terrible show instead.

I'd be interested in that viewpoint.

Every time PL complains about something, I just remind myself that he has terrible taste in everything. Like, "things PL doesn't like" is a recommendation of quality.

Cowboy Bebop is badass and fun to watch, but it's not very authentic. There's no core theme or heart to the show other than an underbaked revenge and redemption theme that gets shoehorned in at the last two episodes. Except for that excellent episode where Jet meets his old flame, I never really felt as though I could actually relate to these characters; it didn't convince me that the show was about anything more than four badasses doing badass things, which is a shame, because I feel that if the show put in the effort it could have pulled it off.

Let's compare it to its cousin, Outlaw Star. Cowboy Bebop does pretty much everything better than that show but I like Outlaw Star more, for the aforementioned reasons.

I don't know where PhoneLobster is coming from or what he has to say about it, but I definitely think it's a valid opinion that the show wasn't all that.

I'm the guy who's seen everything Neek. And the few pieces of entertainment I recommend to various people are unfailingly popular with their audiences.

Now if you want to tell us why you like Cowboy fucking Bebop A show that is seriously an Anime/Trashy Sci Fi/Spaghetti-Western hybrid with bad writing, shit characters and an incredibly annoying focus on it's own BAD JAZZ SOUND TRACK, well. Tell us all why you think that was so great!

Hell you manage to explain the Jazz to me on it's own and I'll be impressed.

But anyway, for the whole "moment it lost me theme", Cowboy Bebop wasn't ever going to win me over. I mean. I fucking hate Spaghetti Westerns. I've seen a lot of them, the good, the bad AND the fucking ugly. I find the characters and the morality alienating an unlikable, the stories poorly paced, bleak and dreary and the whole thing trashy and unworkable.

And Cowboy Bebop is VERY spaghetti western. In fact I find it quiet remarkable (and a general indictment of the entire genre) that it manages to compress story lines that in a REAL spaghetti western would take an hour or two down to short anime style episodes. And yet STILL manage to have the pacing of a psychopathic retarded tortoise that couldn't deduce his way out of a story about a wet paper bag and that has occasional 5 second spurts of ADD murdering sprees.

The animation was reasonable quality but the character and vehicle designs pissed me right off. The characters were annoying, uninteresting, unlikable and totally cardboard (Well, it IS a spaghetti western) they are mind numbingly stupid in their decision making and considering all the annoying noirish mystery shit they deal with as plot lines they have the deductive reasoning skills of a retarded primary school kid. No really, they actually have a retarded primary school kid character hanging around that they actually use to solve mysteries.

Anyway. That's not the moment it lost me. All that was just why I was never going to like it.

The reason I suddenly and very vehemently HATED it was it's fucking pretentiousness.

See most anime the cut to and from ad break might be some character still or a little jokey mini animation or some shit.

No, not Cowboy fucking Bebop, Cowboy Bebop is too damn special for that. Instead it had a mish-mash of dancing text and more FUCKING JAZZ.

And what did that dancing text say? It said things like "Ground breaking revolutionary new Genre!" and shit, describing itself as a show that was somehow unique, new, special, different to all that came before, a "Unique Fusion of Jazz and..." fucking something, I can't remember word for word the wank text that appeared in the material. But yeah, it was along those lines.

And that's what really lost me. Every damn time an episode hit that moment I'd be sitting there thinking to myself. What the Fuck? It's just a Spaghetti western. That's been so fucking done they stopped fucking doing it decades ago.

Cowboy Bebop is a fucking stupid show for stupid people who've never seen anything else. Go watch some trashy 1970's Italian films and alternate with 1980's Astro Boy episodes until you've worked it out of your system.

Do not listen to Jazz at the same time as doing it though. You will summon the devil.

I like Westerns, though. Unforgiven, Back to the Future III, and A Fistful of Dollars would be the best fucking movies ever if the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly didn't exist. Now I'm not saying that the GtBatU is the best movie of all time, but I strongly feel that it should be in any top ten movie list.

Lago, some of those things are westerns, not all of them are spaghetti westerns, a very specific sort of western.

And Back to The Future III isn't even what I would call a Western at all, it's just set in the wild west, and makes the occasional gag that references Westerns. It really doesn't actually follow typical Western genre conventions in any particular way.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I like Westerns, though. Unforgiven, Back to the Future III, and A Fistful of Dollars would be the best fucking movies ever if the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly didn't exist. Now I'm not saying that the GtBatU is the best movie of all time, but I strongly feel that it should be in any top ten movie list.

You're not alone with that opinion: http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/s ... hp?t=73299

I totally consider BTTF3 a western. Not strictly a western (I think it's a dual-genre film), but unlike Spaceballs the setting is just more than a source of jokes. Yes it's approached at with modern sensibilities but the plot structure and conflict up until the train climax totally follows that of a Western without irony.

It's like GalaxyQuest. Yes, it's a loving parody when you get down to it, but it is also totally a science-fiction movie.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:totally follows that of a Western without irony.

He calls himself Clint Eastwood and he survives the final shoot out by pulling a trick he saw in a movie.

And that is barely the tip of the irony ice berg.

Meanwhile basically no one dies, no one abandons everything and walks off into the sunset, no one kills out of hate and vengeance, the guys get all the girls and it's all a wild romp of gags, slapstick and high adventure.

That is NOT a Western.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I like Westerns, though. Unforgiven, Back to the Future III, and A Fistful of Dollars would be the best fucking movies ever if the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly didn't exist. Now I'm not saying that the GtBatU is the best movie of all time, but I strongly feel that it should be in any top ten movie list.

Saaaay, do we have a Top 10 Gamer Den Movie List thread?

I'm not sure I'd put GtBatU on my top 10, but it'd be in the neighborhood methinks. Favorite Western would be Tombstone, though I love The Quick and the Dead as a guilty pleasure (I find the acting, directing and writing all to be sub-par, but I cannot resist a movie full of quickdraw duels and fun characters).

PhoneLobster wrote:I'm the guy who's seen everything Neek.

-- it stopped mattering after this sentence because that first sentence made me laugh so hard my already aching chest suddenly got a hernia which is not humanly possible --

WTF are you talking about? When someone says they know everything or have seen everything or an all-out statement like that, it's ridiculous in itself.

But when you make it, it's even more tragic.

Seriously, go watch a varied list of westerns. I still haven't watched enough to say I've seen EVERYTHING. I just saw a Wayne movie this morning and it was terrible. I can't even remember the name anymore.

Let us start with not with Clint eastwood as people suggest.

I won't go in order though. I'm just going off the top of my head.

Wild bunch -- it's a little crude and controversial about a cowboy gang that's near the end of the cowboy/gang way of life at the mexico border as they deteriorate.

Stagecoach - you can't spell western without a white hat john wayne. of course, john wayne is a god damn racist bastitch. but he is a good actor for the western.

The shootist - another good Wayne movie

The man who shot liberty valance

mcabe and mrs. miller
The westerner - cult status western movie from like the 40s maybe the 50s?
Six string samurai - now that's an apocalyptic cult-status western movie.
rio bravo - again wayne and maybe dean martin - singing this time. the musical entered the picture around this time. so they were mixing genres. it was fun. simpsons kinda poked fun of such pictures.

Paint your wagon - that's a fun one - just for the musical effect.
Sabata - now this is an awesome Curry western (it's kinda like a spaghetti western except it plays out really, really close to the mexicano border or in mexico. Spaghettis don't have to be in mexico or right next to it.

Well, Magnificent seven
and then seven samurai
all the clint eastwood movies
oh and one of my favorite westerns is not with any of the usual western actors.

It is Hombre - with Paul newman. He barely speaks. It's kinda like Rambo. mostly with mannerism and shot movement.

If you can get it, there's also a good Hindi western called um....Sholay. It would be subtitled but I doubt that would be a problem for you guys. But the biggest hurdle would probably be not laughing at the song-and-dance numbers :-D.

I think I'm done!

FrankTrollman wrote:But I have a hard time calling that sexism in the pejorative sense. Look, every straight man, bisexual man, lesbian, and bisexual woman wants to have some sort of sex with some sort of woman. That's completely normal, even if the sex in particular desired is unusual. Wanting to have sex with one gender and not with the other is not sexist, and to call that behavior sexist is to undermine real oppression that really happens and really hurts people.

Would you say that reasoning is extendable? Would someone who wants to have sex with only pale-skinned red-heads, or never with Asian women be racist, or do they just leave more for everyone else?

I'm sorry PL, but really all I got from that rant was "It sucks because I don't like it." You said 'tell me why it's good' and then ranted on about how this sucks and that sucks. So all I can draw from this is that you don't like it and I do. But thanks for explaining.

Sir_Neil wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:But I have a hard time calling that sexism in the pejorative sense. Look, every straight man, bisexual man, lesbian, and bisexual woman wants to have some sort of sex with some sort of woman. That's completely normal, even if the sex in particular desired is unusual. Wanting to have sex with one gender and not with the other is not sexist, and to call that behavior sexist is to undermine real oppression that really happens and really hurts people.

Would you say that reasoning is extendable? Would someone who wants to have sex with only pale-skinned red-heads, or never with Asian women be racist, or do they just leave more for everyone else?

People who do or do not want to have sex with Asian women are in the same category as the people who do or do not want to get struck with flogs during sex. It's not racist or sexist or in any other way oppressive, it's just sexual taste. There are over 3 billion people of the opposite gender, and no matter how much of a swinger you are, there are over 3 billion of them that you will never sleep with. As long as the subset you want to sleep with are consenting adults, I don't even care.

Now if you extend that to refusing to hire someone for a job because they don't match the subset of women you want to fuck - that's fucked up. Indeed, if you withhold pretty much anything from someone except the act of you hitting on them, that's fucked up. But yeah, we don't have a lot of control over what our fetishes are. So long as we keep our responses to them within the bounds of ethics and the law there's no reason that anyone should get upset about whatever they are.

---

People can and do even have different tastes in pornography than they do in actual sex. A lot of things are fun to imagine that are not actually that fun to do. Other times, pornography just isn't good at selling something. For example: I think that the high contrast, soft focus film they use in a lot of porn shoots is basically wasted taking pictures of people who already have dark skin. They do that so that the shadows indicating roundness will be accentuated, giving breasts and asses a more three dimensional appearance. But when you're taking pictures of an African woman, you just lose a lot of detail. I think a lot of women who are really beautiful are very poorly treated by the standard pornography photography.

And to an extent, I think that's a direct result of racism. Racism in the industry. I think it's really weird that sex between black people and white people in porn is its own category. And I think it's a shame that porn doesn't seem to bother to spend the effort to make African women look good very often. Contrast that with high fashion photography, which seems to have no problems making Black women look beautiful. But even though I think it's a racist system that makes Blacks in porn look the way they so often do, there's nothing racist about an individual consumer passing up the pornography with African women in it.

-Username17

TOZ wrote:You said 'tell me why it's good' and then ranted on about how this sucks and that sucks. So all I can draw from this is that you don't like it and I do.

Which you apparently cannot explain.

I can explain and to some extent justify my position.

Why can't you explain or justify yours?

edit: also Cynic you dumb ass, spaghetti western. Some of your western list qualifies, some of it doesn't. Why don't you go learn a little something about which is which?

Geez, PL. I didn't know you hated Jazz so much.

-Crissa

As for why I like Cowboy Bebop...The setting, while still fantastical, had a gritty down-to-earth feel that I could get behind. I actually like the aesthetics shown, largely. The fight scenes were enjoyable and better detailed than most anime I've seen. The scale of the plot and the characters wasn't epic and dealt with events that didn't try to change the face of the 'world', which is surprisingly uncommon and refreshing. As for spaghetti westerns as a genre, I've seen little to none of it, so I can't compare the show to something like The Good, The Bad, The Ugly. For the genre pot mixing that was going on, it worked and didn't feel off-putting to me (the episodic nature likely helped). Oh, and I love the translation job it got. From all of the sub sources I've compared it to, the dubbing is downright awesome, especially at conveying emotion and cultural idioms.

PhoneLobster wrote:

TOZ wrote:You said 'tell me why it's good' and then ranted on about how this sucks and that sucks. So all I can draw from this is that you don't like it and I do.

Which you apparently cannot explain.

I can explain and to some extent justify my position.

Why can't you explain or justify yours?

edit: also Cynic you dumb ass, spaghetti western. Some of your western list qualifies, some of it doesn't. Why don't you go learn a little something about which is which?

For the western list that was intentional. : I was basically pointing out your fallacy that you have seen everything. If you want me to go into a spaghetti western list, I can. But, I'm not going to. Enzo morricone, leone, peckinpah, and several have done more than their share of spaghetti westerns, curry westerns, revisionist spaghettis, etc.. Hell, it's been done before Leone and Kurosawa came on the scene. It jsut wasn't recognized with that term because it wasn't done cheap, with italian directors on an italian set. Arthur Penn's first movie "THe Left handed gun" or "The man with the left handed gun" with Paul Newman is pretty much a Spaghetti western well a revisionist spaghetti western. Hombre which I talked about early on is also another but it came before spaghettis. So yes, I will learn a little about which is which all the time. BUt I can teach you, too. So instead of just telling me to learn something, why do you give me information. (LIke I just did :gasp:) Or point me at a source. If you don't know it.

i showed you JOhn ford movies like stagecoach and such , because Kurosawa made Seven samurai, yojimbo, and others cuz of those movies. Ford came first. well others were there but meh. Yeah, samurai movies are westerns except Swords not guns. Kimonos not Chaps. Peasants and maybe feudal settings instead of Indians and mexicanos.

but that's where Spaghettis came from.

---

Now for Jazz -- The creator of bebop likes to mix things together and have them flow. YOu said it was a psychotic pace but Bebop when it's set to a trumpet or horn and drums and going at 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-1 and that beat increasingly seems psychotic but it has rhythm and flow. It suits Gun shots and and chase scenes because they aren't stopped. They aren't spun.

Now his next project was Samurai Champloo. Champloo was apparently the word for turntable remix in some part of Japan or something. the show was decent. It was okay. It's basically a repeat of Bebop in a different scene era with Hip-hop and samurais WHOO! The placement was good for that. And the story was decent not great not horrible. BUt he did the remixing with the sword cuts with the usual anime flashes and stops and there was some decent j-rap (is that the word for japanese hip-hop and japanese rap? I seem to recall silliness from Snowcrash...) in the show but he did it well.

That's his thing.