Cowboy Bebop and Writing

I am back with another mostly useless post! This time, I want to discuss the anime series Cowboy Bebop, and how it relates to writing. Yes, it does relate. Well.... it's more stories in general than just writing, but since I write novels, that's what I'm relating it to.

Anyway! So Cowboy Bebop is a 26 episode anime series (if you want to watch it, you can find all the episodes here: http://www.animefreak.tv/anime/cowboy-bebop). It's about a group of bounty hunters, called "cowboys" in this future time, and their travels and adventures aboard the good ship Bebop. They get into all manner of trouble, often quite hilariously. It's an excellent show, one of my favorites. Very funny, good action, interesting characters... the only thing it lacks is a cohesive plot, which isn't bad. It's just episodic, and very well done. The main thing tying it all together is the various revelations of the pasts of the characters. Now, it does have two main flaws: one, an unsatisfactory ending, and two, a main character that isn't developed enough.

Flaw one: the ending of Cowboy Bebop is unsatisfactory largely because it brings closure for the main character, and only for the main character; and because its tone is different from the rest of the show. It was unnecessarily and surprisingly tragic. No one had a happy ending there, and this greatly weakened the series. This relates to writing because... well... it's important to remember that closure for the main character doesn't necessarily mean closure for the reader. In this case, the other characters were left hanging--you never find out what happens to them. A satisfactory reason is never really given. It makes things look very... bleak, which is not a good way to end a story that, before then, had been fairly light-hearted.

Now, flaw two: The main character that was not developed. Her name was Ed, and she was very interesting, as well as slightly annoying. But she was always in the background, except for ONE episode. I always wanted to see her with a bigger role, but she never had one. She was simply dropped in and then never did anything--and honestly, I felt that she detracted from the story and the other characters somewhat. She didn't fit, largely because she was never developed like the other characters. She's there, so you're clearly supposed to care about her. But I cared more for the dog (Ein) than I did for Edward. On reflection, I determined that the reason for this is that Ein was a far less complex character than Edward, being a dog. This brings to light an important principle of writing: the more complex the character, the more time must be spent with them for the reader to understand and care about them. This can be used both ways. For example, if you have a very complex villain, spending less time with him will make him scarier. This is a pretty well-known fact, I think, but I never really considered why before. The mistake the creators of Cowboy Bebop made was in introducing this complex, interesting character, and then leaving her in the background all the time. She was just there niggling at the edges and distracting from the main characters.

So. I'm not sure how useful that will be to anyone. :P Just my thoughts. And I thought this post would be longer. Oh well.

And now to watch Cowboy Bebop: The Movie... let's hope the ending is better than the TV series.

~ Figment