UPDATE: Schedule Changes

So after  few weeks of trying to see if I can handle weekly reviews, I have come to the conclusion that no. I cannot. If everything I reviewed was a 13 episode anime, I could manage it easily, but alas I watch far too many 26 episode ones as well. As such, I'm making some changes in how often I post.

I will now be putting out a review every 1-2 weeks, instead of trying to stay strictly weekly. If a week passes from my last review and nothing gets put up, then expect it to come the following Monday. I'll still stick to having my posts be on Mondays, so I can at least keep some sort of predictable update schedule, and I don't see myself ever needing more than 2 weeks to finish an anime and get my thoughts down.

As you may have guessed, this also means that there will be no review posted today. The next review will be up next Monday. I'm slowly but surely finding my footing here as I learn what I can and can't manage. I hope any followers I may have will be patient with me until I finally figure out just what the hell I'm doing. Thanks for your time!

- Xort

Anime Assessment: Cowboy Bebop

Howdy all, Xort here for another rambling, mostly incomprehensible review on Anime Assessment. This week, we're gonna be talking about a classic that I, shamefully, had not watched before this week, and yet surprisingly enough I managed to avoid any and all spoilers for: Cowboy Bebop.

In addition to being a classic, Cowboy Bebop is the first anime I've reviewed that isn't adapted from a light novel series. It was developed by Sunrise, Inc. and aired from October 24, 1998 to April 24, 1999. There are 2 manga adaptations: Cowboy Bebop: Shooting Star which ran from May 1998 to October 1998, and Cowboy Bebop which ran from April 1999 to April 2000.

So what is Cowboy Bebop? It's an episodic tale set in the year 2071, a distant future where interplanetary travel is not only possible, it's rather commonplace thanks to hyperspace gates that allow for super-fast flight in an alternate dimension. The show follows the adventures of two space-traveling bounty hunters on a ship named Bebop, Spike Spiegel and Jet Black, as they pick up new members for their crew, try to fix their perpetual lack of money, and confront their pasts as they come back to haunt them. In a way, it's a lot like Joss Whedon's Firefly. Yeah, I know, Bebop came before Firefly so I should be saying that Firefly is like Bebop, but I saw Firefly first so it's my basis for comparison. Sue me. In addition to Spike and Jet we have Faye Valentine, a compulsive gambler with a mountain of debt and no memories of her past, Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV (Ed for short), a child prodigy and hacker who's not entirely right in the head, and Ein, a genetically engineered Welsh Corgi who might even be more intelligent than Ed. Every crew member has some sort of trouble in their past that gets explored in some way, but none of it is ever fully explained. Instead, the viewer gets to see bits and pieces of the past in flashbacks across the course of the series and has to figure things out based on that. Like Dantalian no Shoka, which I talked about last week, the show's episodic nature means that there isn't too much in the way of a big plot thread that the characters follow. The only constant outer conflict the characters face is their inability to hold on to money for any extended period of time.

However, there is an overarching storyline of sorts that gets resolved over the course of the series, even if the resolution just leaves more questions that never get answered, so let's jump right in!