Secret Cartography: Internet, please don't shoot me.

Following Zach's post about our own secret posts that never see the light of day, there's one of my own that I wrote about Cowboy Bebop and suicide terrorism at least a half a year ago that wasn't published because I was too close to it to edit it at the time, and now that I'm not taking a terrorism class, I don't remember the details, but this still makes sense to me, so here we go.

I'd call this secret cartography, but the truth is, this makes more sense to me as a b-side, something that should have gone on the site, but for spacial or emotional reasons it didn't make the proverbial record during the mutually assured destruction theme week. Well, here it is for your consumption.

We've come to recognize mutually assured destruction as something having to do with lots of nuclear weapons. Tom, of course, goes one step further, and places it in the context of his own life. We don't really see ourselves as doing these terrible things at the time because we're blinded by how we feel.

Spike from Cowboy Bebop, on the other hand, has a very good idea of what he is. Given two conditions, he is a suicide terrorist. Those two things? Finding his lost love, Julia and then losing her.

The story, if you please.

Spike, an inhumanly talented interstellar bounty hunter and former mob hitman/enforcer loved a woman called Julia. The catch is that Julia at the time of Spike's and Julia's love was the current girlfriend of Spike's best friend, Vicious, who is also Spike's partner in crime. Vicious gave Julia an ultimatum: Either I kill you and Spike for being disloyal to me, or you kill Spike. Spike gets wind of this and fakes his own death in a gun battle with a rival syndicate, dropping off the mob (Red Dragon Syndicate's) radar. Spike told Julia he'd be waiting in the graveyard after it all went down. Julia never showed. Since then, Spike has searched for Julia, while meeting up with a former cop, Jet, turned bounty hunter becoming a loyal, if detached member of Jet's crew.

To be fair, Zach noted something very important: I think you're missing the bit where Vicious is a monster. And it's true. Vicious is a cunning, deadly, monster. He seizes power in the crime syndicate by staging a fake coup, allowing himself to be caught and imprisoned, then has the real coup de'tat by breaking free and killing the top brass of the crime syndicate during the execution and with the aid of turncoats in the syndicate. Vicious also testifies against one of his former soldiers who admired him, framing the soldier for the things Vicious had done.

Three years and some months later, fate has conspired that Julia and Spike find each other again.

Julia and Spike leave, as was their original plan, to get away from the Red Dragon forever. There is a gun battle on a roof. Spike and Julia manage to run away, killing the mob thugs below until one luckier hitman is standing between them and the door. Julia and Spike don't notice him. The thug, predictably, shoots Julia. His job for the entire series completed, the lucky hitman now exits stage getting-shot-by-a-disbelieving-lover.

After a predictably voalitle scene with Spike holding Julia during her last moments, the action eventually heads back to Spike's ship. Spike decides there's nothing left to do but confront Vicious, who is currently sitting at the throne of the Red Dragon. Spike says goodbye to his friend and partner of three years, Jet, who offers to come along despite Jet's broken leg. Spike says no, indicating the coming killing spree is something he must do himself.

Spike, enters the Red Dragon building with a bomb detonating in the lobby, then running up the escalators, killing whatever hapless thugs stuck on security duty remain with the ease of a man possessed. (Speaking of which, I feel bad for these thugs. Very bad, in fact. They just survived one of the most harrowing gun battles of their lives after the Vicious-concocted coup, only to be shot on guard duty by a killing machine with a deathwish.) After another couple running gun scenes, he runs into an old friend, Shin, who saves Spike from getting shot by Red Dragon thug #3578. Shin then tells Spike Vicious was waiting on the top floor and that Shin has been waiting for Spike to return. Shin then gets shot by Red Dragon thug #3579, likely fatally.

After killing his way to the top floor, Vicious (like any good anime villian) is waiting. A fight ensues. The two people are evenly matched, so much so that they both lose their weapons (Spike loses his gun to Vicious and Vicious loses his katana to Spike) to the other. Spike shouts "Julia is dead, let's finish this", to which Vicious replies, "as you wish". The two slide the weapons to the other, and both parties deal their killing blows, Spike shooting Vicious fatally, and Vicious slashing Spike across the chest. Spike, bleeding out of his chest profusely, somehow survives, walks down the stairs of the building to point a finger at the moon, say "Bang", and then falls in a bloody heap on the stairs in front of the confused remains of the Red Dragon Syndicate.

Spike owes more to this battle than is fashionable to admit. Far from being flung into these events, Spike is the catalyst for them. Vicious, knowing that Spike was still alive between episodes 14-23 (I believe...) could have very easily set up bounties for Spike and his friends deaths. He did not. Vicious could have gone after Spike personally, but did not. Bigger fish to fry? Perhaps. Being in jail might have hurt, but I sincerely doubt that it was impossible to get messages out of the prison.

When Vicious does meet Spike on the battleground before Julia's reappearance, Vicious has Lin (yes, Shin's brother, how did you guess?) shoot Spike with a tranquilizer dart and leave him in the snow. Had Vicious wanted Spike to die, Lin could have shot him with a real gun.

Spike continues to go after Julia, with the zeal of a man crazed. That's fine. But once Julia died, Spike was mentally committed to the death of Vicious. It is not as though Spike was out of options. He had friends, a group of people willing to risk their lives for him. He had possessions. It is not as though he did not have standing in the universe. Ultimately, Spike is a suicide bomber, and Vicious was perfectly willing to let him detonate around him. Vicious, in his only line to Spike, after hearing the woman they both at one point or another loved, didn't even attempt to say no, or try to stop fighting. He allowed Spike to shoot him, so he could slash Spike across the chest.

Both their demises could have been spared, Spike, by not going on an inhuman rampage to get to Vicious, and Vicious by at least attempting to continue the dialouge beyond agreeing to kill each other. Both fictional men were committed to death to destroy each other, and that's really the best example of mutually assured desctruction I can think of in an anime.

~

As for secret places, little caves, nooks or crannies to find and be found in, the fun, is not in having a map guide you to them, but instead in having a group of friends that also know where it is, and the excitement that comes in going there. Also, finding these little places where one can have something secret to themselves, or amongst friends is the fun.

I have only recently returned to trips to find my own nooks and my own private headspace that no one else knows about, which you'll understand if I don't spill what or where they are here. It's just not fun, somehow. My adventures aren't really worth posting, because they all occur in my mind, and they require a little more background to my life than I'd like to give here. My eureka moment for the month was when the idea came to me that it wasn't what I was, but what I could be.

If my idea of secret cartography sounds kind of like a treehouse, I apologize for nothing. Furthermore, girls have cooties. All of them, without exception. (Yes, Cathleen, Beth and Jack, this includes you.)

If only it was that simple...