Personal media consumption may not define one’s identity, but it can provide a hell of a signpost towards one. Those of us who realized that we were trans during the covid-19 pandemic, in the absence of a proximate community of queer friends, had little choice. As the distinction between people we talked to mainly in person versus the internet collapsed, the characters we saw in television, movies, video games, and other moving pictures stepped in to simulate some of the lost social interaction. In short order, we were looking at these characters for clothing, gestures, ways of carrying oneself, and other factors that might inspire our gender presentation. We revisited familiar media with an eye for subtext and allegory that might understand, or even just acknowledge, our experiences. We simply liked to see trans characters on screen, who did not exist as gross punchlines or as physical manifestations of societal neuroses.
Cowboy Bebop has existed at the margins of my awareness for nearly two decades. I was a Toonami kid from late elementary school, a burgeoning Japanophile in high school and college, and an associate of 90s rememberers since thereafter, so the show spent at least fifteen years crushed atop a stack of recommendations in my mental pile. Seeking a potentially emotionally low-key show, and being aware of Cowboy Bebop’s cool aesthetics and jazz soundtrack, I decided to retrieve it last summer.
Cowboy Bebop follows a crew of down-and-out bounty hunters on a spaceship patrolling a futuristic Solar System colonized by humanity. The show establishes itself and builds its world iteratively through a familiar format. As it starts, the effortlessly carefree Spike Spiegel runs with the pragmatic and hardened Jet Black. Through a series of initial “adventure of the week”-style episodes set in different planets and moons, the crew pursues bounties, mostly burns through money, and builds its roster, first adding Ein, a Welsh corgi with experimentally enhanced intelligence, and then Faye Valentine, compulsive gambler and famously hot woman with a gun. As befits a collection of bounty hunters, these characters start out as self-interested vagabonds who run together purely out of convenience. Spike and Faye flit in and out of the crew over the course of the show. But gradually, bonds form between them: Spike’s propensity to run off on his own for perilous missions in which he has a personal stake, and his emotional distance, worries and irritates Jet and Faye. Faye always seems to exist at the periphery even within this tentative arrangement, leaving the crew without bidding farewell seemingly at her whim, eliciting hurt from Spike and Jet, couched as it is as misogynistic relief at being rid of this shrew. When they do collect bounties, there is a sense that their earnings, though awarded individually, belong to them collectively, feeding them and repairing the Bebop and each of their own ships. The Bebop crew, therefore, functions not dissimilarly from a cohabiting queer found family, the only kind that they each have left.
The final member of the Bebop ensemble is introduced in the show’s ninth episode, “Jamming with Edward.” Onto the surface of a blasted-out Earth, a network of satellites suddenly laser-etches a set of geoglyphs resembling the Nazca lines in Peru. A bounty is announced for the hacker responsible, which Earth authorities presume to be an unknown cyberterrorist named “Radical Edward.” Jet strolls down a marketplace to collect information about Edward, and is told in turn that he’s a two-meter tall basketball player, she’s a beautiful woman, they’re a gay alien. Meanwhile, Earth police seeking Edward burst in on a house where a child plays with a remote-controlled toy; their suspicions are soon confirmed when the child begins piloting their police cruiser with the remote, crashing it. Radical Edward, or Ed for short, is a pre-adolescent kid with boundless playful energy, whose hacking prowess is a means to satiate an unbridled curiosity about the surrounding world. Ed is of indeterminate gender, specifically because of a lack of interest shown in presenting in a certain gendered way. One sense in which Ed truly is “radical” is as an experiment in depicting what it might be like for a child to be allowed to develop in the absence of a specifically gendered socialization. It is not until the final seconds before the episode’s credits roll, through incidental fade-out dialogue, that we learn that Ed is a girl, a revelation with minimal importance thereafter.
Space in Cowboy Bebop’s imagination is filled with towns and ports and dives populated by characters of different ethnicities, sexualities, and genders. The show takes care not to unrealistically concentrate flattering portrayals in its gay and trans characters -- the only appearance of a pair of soldiers, for instance, is when Spike walks in on them fucking. The net effect is that queer and trans characters at all levels of importance to the story are well-integrated into the reality of life in this universe. This is best seen in the seventh episode, “Heavy Metal Queen,” in which the crew pursues a mark with the help of the butch-y trucker V.T., despite her initial distaste of bounty hunters. As part of a long-standing bet arising from amused curiosity, truckers line up to wager on what “V.T.” stands for. The eternally-charmed Spike eventually solves the riddle, having found a locket displaying a picture of V.T.’s younger, more feminine self alongside her husband, who had died while pursuing a bounty. To move on from his death, V.T. finds honest work as a trucker, changes her name to a genderless initialism, and embraces a less feminine expression. This adds up to a chronologically-inverted depiction of a social transition, which is made more interesting by V.T. humoring the truckers’ parlor game, although never initiating it. Though she has put distance between herself and her past, she has attained so much emotional peace with it that she does not feel weighed down by its burden, and is capable of approaching it with a sort of joking lightness. This levity is the apotheosis of the ways many of us navigate the inherent absurdity of many bodily, sexual, and emotional aspects of transition by joking amongst our trans peers.
The main storyline of Cowboy Bebop is delivered to us in bursts in between these worldbuilding episodes. Spike had once worked as a hitman for the Red Dragon criminal syndicate. A bounty violently pulls him back into this former life and into a destructive clash with the homicidal syndicate member Vicious, with whom Spike had been involved in a love triangle. Their first encounter in the show’s present leaves Spike badly wounded and comatose for three days. Their second confrontation spans the two-part episode at the very heart of the show, “Jupiter Jazz.” The episode takes place during one of Faye’s bouts of decampment from the Bebop, which she spends sulking in a bar on the frigid moon Callisto. A silhouetted saxophonist at the bar plays a plaintive melody matching Faye’s mood. As she sits at the bar, she shivers and sneezes, when she hears a man’s voice right behind her:
Gren: “Take care”
Gren: “That was close”
Gren: “When someone sneezes and doesn’t get told to take care, that person becomes a fairy… That’s what they say around here.”
Faye: “Then it’s okay. I’m already a fairy.”
This suggestive exchange is our introduction to Gren, an extremely beautiful man who soon admits to having no interest in women, to Faye’s disappointment. The two depart but are shortly reunited when Gren intervenes in a street fight incited by Faye, whisking her away to his apartment. There, Faye is disarmed enough by Gren’s charm to unload her thoughts: she is exhausted by having to perform the role of a hot woman in spaces dominated by men and is discomfited by the collective loneliness that hangs in the air aboard the Bebop, which feels like too much when she herself is alone. Gren counters that this distancing is her instinctive response to the fear of losing her newfound family. As Gren goes to take a shower (not before boilerplate flirting about not peeking), Faye hears a call from Vicious go to voicemail, revealing that her host is planning a drug deal with the assassin. Faye grabs her gun and approaches the shower, behind which is a silhouette of a feminine figure with waist length hair. When she finally bursts in, she gasps as we are treated to gorgeous pans up Gren’s ass and back, and then up his torso and breasts.
This sequence is obviously interesting for genre-specific reasons, such as its subversion of the usual anime shower scene to have the voyeur be alarmed while the subject invites her gaze, as well as its obvious play upon the usual trope of a man peeping upon a woman. But it was personally exhilarating to see a transfeminine character be in full, complete control of his sexuality in a pop cultural milieu that often conflates male homosexuality, cross-dressing, and transgenderism (1) and then confines such traits to one note comic relief characters, villainous predators, or both (2). Exuding sexiness in the specifically cool manner of the show and rocking a canonically beautiful body, Gren’s arrival was perfectly timed during my personal media consumption for me to develop my first specifically t4t attraction.
The second part of “Jupiter Jazz” fills out Gren’s backstory: he and Vicious served together in a war on Titan, at the end of which Vicious frames Gren for being a spy. In prison, Gren develops terrible insomnia, for which he begins taking experimental treatments that affect his balance of estrogen and testosterone. Although he didn’t explicitly set out to transition, Gren clearly embraces his new body and gender rather than succumbing to internalized shame. This plotline also had the salutary benefit of helping demystify hormonal therapy for me by showing an example of botched, unideal therapy still producing a body that its owner could love and thrive in, a counterpunch to the currently popular narrative of medical transition as irreversible damage.
Although I have focused this discussion on only the most explicitly trans and trans-coded characters on the show, Cowboy Bebop is a fertile playground for subtextual queer and trans readings. When I discussed the idea for this piece with a friend, she reminded me of Faye’s struggle with her notion of womanhood, and the process of past self-discovery featured in her own highly allegorical backstory. Gren is fixated on Titan, and the bonds of comradeship he formed fighting there, and seeks answers from Vicious about his betrayal as a form of queer yearning. Online queer and trans people often lament the shallow, token, or corporatized “representation” of gay and trans characters in media specifically marketed as trans or gay. And so it was remarkable to stumble upon a set of characters reflecting common trans experiences and narratives in what most people remember as a chill show about space bounty hunters, one that was written, directed, and animated entirely by cis people. Just as we have always existed, and will apparently continue to exist post climate-change apocalypse, so too will our stories remain tightly woven into the fabric of the best art that humanity has to offer.
Works Cited:
1. McLelland, Mark. “Gay Men as Women's Ideal Partners in Japanese Popular Culture: Are Gay Men Really a Girl's Best Friends?” U.S.-Japan Women's Journal. English Supplement, no. 17, 1999, pp. 77–110.
2. Dale, Laura. “Atlus tried, and failed, to fix Persona 5’s most controversial scene” Polygon, 31 Mar. 2020