#ohhhhh the brainworms are bad again y'all THEY'RE BAD AGAIN

[astromechs]

what's honestly brilliant about cowboy bebop, among the infinite things that are brilliant about it, is that a lesser show would've developed a romance between spike and faye just because they're the male and female leads, and in a lesser show that would've been tropey, boring nonsense.

but because this series is better than that, it takes its time to really develop these two characters as mirrors of each other — or, as i keep saying, the same person in different font. faye who doesn't have a past, spike who doesn't have a future, each ghosts existing and hovering outside of time in some way, occasionally colliding (clashing) somewhere in the middle. that ghost parallel is even made explicit, as well as many others (e.g., "i'm not the cautious/delicate type"). faye and spike are the only characters who meet gren; it's faye who meets julia, not jet, and it's spike who chases after faye when she's trying to get the truth out of whitney.

the movie adds to this with vincent, who is a foil for both spike and faye, and it's no accident that they're the two characters who actually spend significant screentime with him (and also both get their shit rocked by him, so that's fun).

and it's in this, the ways that the stories of these two are inextricably linked by the narrative, the way that this is given time, space, and care to develop, the way that plays out in how they interact with each other, that you begin to see the potential for something there. part of the tragedy, of course, is that this potential will never be realized — and this is how i still have brainworms about this approximately 15 years after i watched cowboy bebop for the first time.