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INTEREST: Ender's Game Author Praises Cowboy Bebop

I do wonder who you would feel it would be appropriate to recommend a title to non-anime fans in some small column of a conservative newspaper.

Shoot, the Civil War, American Westerns, or even Outlaw Star could be said to be more inspirational than CB. Even if CB were inspiration to Whedon, the aforementioned others would clearly be moreso.

Though I wonder why is Orson Scott Card levying his opinion on CB, edifying it above other works of Science Fiction? He does not seem particularly qualified to make such statements.

Cowboy Bebop has next to nothing to do with history.

thenextday wrote:

Orson Scott Card is a bro. Ender's Game is great.

Because it's going to come up eventually... I love the Ender's Game series. They're some of my favorite books. But... I'm not really a fan of Card himself anymore due to some of his political views that he's become very vocal about.

In 2006, one day before the 2006 midterm elections in the United States, Card wrote an opinion piece for RealClearPolitics, in which he (while being a Democrat) encouraged voters to support the Republicans.[18] In the same article he voiced strong condemnation of any government that recognized gay marriage stating, "Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition..." In 2009, Card became a member of the board of directors of the National Organization for Marriage, a group that seeks to prevent the legalization of same-sex marriage.[19]

I guess I'll withhold my full thoughts until i see Firefly and Planetes myself....

xBTAx wrote:

Because it's going to come up eventually... I love the Ender's Game series. They're some of my favorite books. But... I'm not really a fan of Card himself anymore due to some of his political views that he's become very vocal about. :x

Yeah...he just lost a huge amount of respect from me as well. Thanks, xBTAx, for sharing that or else I would have been completely ignorant of his activism.

In the article, Card narrates his own relationship with anime, which he says he was not interested in until his daughter became an "anime snob."

if Civil War influence is that heavy as you mention in the show, then the target audience is clear.

what you see as great because it anchors itself with history may not have the same effect elsewhere

I'll defend Bebop to the last.

EDIT: There's a modicum of merit in comparing CB to Firefly, but Trigun? That's bogus. Trigun was an inferior show to both CB & Firefly, and Outlaw Star. Furthermore, Trigun has nothing to do with Firefly at all. Next you'll be saying that Whedon's Titan AE was obviously influenced by Trigun or Bebop simply because they're all animated.

When I first saw the word "anime" on a schedule at a science fiction convention, I thought it was French – ah-NEEM. It was with utter scorn that a fan (of anime, not of my work) told me it was Japanese, and it was pronounced AH-ni-may.

Having said that, I always find it funny (if not a little sad) that the show that the West holds up as an example of the penultimate anime is a title that is pretty much unknown of in Japan. The only people I've ever met who knew Bebop were in a Japanese Yoko Kanno fan circle.

But here's the thing: about half of the anime fans I encounter today, in 2011, have never seen Cowboy Bebop at all. I explained why that is in more detail here, but the short of it is that 13 years is longer than a lifetime in the realm of anime fandom. Something is "old" if it's "from the last season." People don't really have time to go back to things from "all the way back in the 90s." It's been this way for a while; most of the people who have seen Cowboy Bebop are ones who saw it several years ago, when it was "new."