Session 24: Hard Luck Woman
For one month, The Dot and Line is publishing essays, interviews, and discussions about each episode of Cowboy Bebop, which turns 20 this April.
“Belonging is the very best thing there is.”
These are Faye Valentine’s last words to Ed, after she’s finally recovered her memory and is ready to leave the Bebop for good in hopes of returning to the long-lost home she finally remembers. Faye tells Ed that someone is waiting for her somewhere, too, and encourages her to find where she belongs as well. It’s bittersweet for many reasons, but not the least for this—on the Bebop or off, that answer is true. Either way, they both have to make a choice.
There’s a reason Cowboy Bebop is often either the first or favorite anime for many fans of the medium. It speaks eloquently to universal truths of the human condition: the pain of the past, the difficulty of relationships, and the general struggle of existence.
“Hard Luck Woman” is perhaps the session where Bebop’s melancholy poignance comes through in the most striking detail, untainted by unrequited romance or dramatic vendettas. This deceptively calm episode provides Faye with closure, of a sort, over her mysterious past, while wrapping up Ed’s narrative arc for the series entirely.
While few anime fans can directly relate to Faye’s amnesia, or much about the extremely idiosyncratic Ed at all, the fact that they come together with Spike, Jet, and Ein to form a chosen family for the duration of the series undoubtedly hits close to home for most. Being an otaku used to be a lonely existence, in which even the term itself provoked derision. But as anime has become more widespread and accepted throughout the U.S., it’s yielded the growth of a specific subculture, which comes with all the complex social rules of engagement that accompany any culture that diverges from the mainstream.
Banding around an underappreciated art form helps give a sense of belonging and community that can be lacking for those of us uninterested in team sports or other cultural touchpoints. And seeing similar bands of misfits in the very medium that you’ve come together for only strengthens that connection.
Unfortunately, these friend groups aren’t always destined for long-term success. People grow and change—or, sometimes, they refuse to do so. This is true no matter how friendships are formed, but it can seem particularly bittersweet for groups who base at least part of their relationships with each other on their mutual exclusion from the mainstream.
That’s just the ways it goes for the crew of the Bebop, that group of loners brought together by need, loneliness, and circumstance. After silently leaving a pinwheel she pinched from her old orphanage as a gift for a bemused Spike, Ed packs her things and wanders away from the Bebop for good.
Her departure, along with Faye’s return to the ruins of the Singapore mansion that was once her home, can be seen as symbolic. Both certainly reflect the dissolution of many anime clubs or friend groups drawn together initially by the medium they love, only to be eventually pulled away by life or pushed apart by tricky social dynamics.
Some of us live life in the present. Others actively push toward the future. Still others are only running from the past. But all of us need comrades at some point in our lives, and those needs rarely end for all parties at exactly the same time.
In “Hard Luck Woman,” this is portrayed with heart-breaking accuracy, when Jet calls out to the empty living room to invite the crew to dinner. Hearing nothing, he goes to meet Spike by the window near the ship’s cockpit, only to find Ed’s goodbye message on the launch deck.
Instead of going after her, Jet and Spike devour hard-boiled eggs in silence. Their bitterness at having let people in only to get hurt again is almost palpable, but never addressed by either of them. Meanwhile, the English-language Yoko Kanno tune “Call Me Call Me” pleads away in the background for “peace of mind,” while the two men recede deeper into their apathetic pretenses in a failed attempt to cope with yet another loss.
Upon leaving, Ed takes one last look back at Bebop before running off into her unknown future with Ein in tow. And of course. It’s tempting to look back in nostalgic longing to memories of people with whom you once shared a deep connection. But most relationships aren’t forever—they can only live on in memory, or tokens, like Ed’s pinwheel markin the Bebop as a place that mattered for her as long as it could.
Then again, fate’s a funny thing. You never know when an old friend from back in the day will “see you, cowgirl, someday, somewhere!”
Hopefully, if they do, they’ll find you right where you belong.
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