Faye Valentine Quotes

Grant her the premise before the show refutes it, because her premise is earned. Faye wakes from half a century of cryosleep owning nothing but a debt she did not incur and a past nobody can produce; every institution she meets monetizes her within the hour. A person whose entire biography is a con run by other people is not paranoid for concluding that speed beats trust. The first rule of combat is a survivor's epistemology dressed as swagger, and for most of the series it works exactly as advertised. The refutation, when it comes, is not an argument. It is the slow discovery that she keeps flying back to the one ship where nobody is running a con on her, the only vessel she never shot first.

Faye spends most of the series insisting she wants nothing of the kind. She robs the crew, walks out on them, and treats the ship as a place to sleep between jobs, which is the behavior of somebody protecting themselves rather than somebody who does not care. By this session she has watched a tape of herself as a schoolgirl cheering into a camera, addressed to a future she cannot remember and a family she cannot find. The line arrives after that, which changes what it is. It is not a discovery about belonging in general. It is a woman conceding the thing she has been arguing against for twenty-odd sessions, having finally been shown evidence that she once had it.

It reads as whimsy and it is a con in progress. Faye is inventing an ancestry on the spot for her captors, which is the character in one gesture: she has no past she can reach, having lost fifty-four years to cryogenic sleep and a debt she did not agree to, so she improvises one that sounds better. Every autobiography she offers before the tape is recovered is a fabrication, and this is the prettiest of them.

Cynicism this portable is cheap, and the series knows it, which is why the episode around it quietly disproves the claim. Faye deals in this register whenever a subject gets close to something she has actually lost, and the writing treats it as a tic rather than an insight. Worth having on the page as evidence of how she talks, not as a line to take advice from.

Toys in the Attic hands each crew member a 'lesson' in voice-over, and Faye's is the one that gets quoted as her philosophy, which it is not; it is her contribution to a running gag in which the whole ship draws morals from something Spike left to rot in the fridge. Jet's lesson is about honest work, Spike's is not to leave things in the fridge, and hers is social Darwinism, delivered while she is cheating Jet at dice in the next room. The quote sites strip the frame and print it as a creed. Kept in the frame, the speech is a woman performing hardness for an audience of none, and the series will spend Speak Like a Child and My Funny Valentine dismantling every clause of it: she flourished exactly once, when she trusted a lawyer, and perished for it. It is a good joke about a cynic. It is not a good line, and Faye knows better lines.

Sneeze without being blessed and you turn into a fairy, Gren tells her; it is the local superstition. Her reply is the best line in Jupiter Jazz and the episode gives it to Faye, talking to a man whose body prison drug experiments made into neither one thing nor the other. The structure that makes the reply land is the setting, not the wordplay. Callisto is a place of leftover men; Gren is a saxophonist with a secret and a grudge against Vicious; Faye has just walked out on the Bebop with the crew's money. Everyone in the room has already been turned into something by not being looked after, and she is the only one who says so, as a joke. The line is allowed to be small.

Jet's verdict on women in My Funny Valentine, six sessions earlier, is the same sentence with the pronoun swapped: hopeless, predictable, do not work on reason. The show knows it is running the pair. In Boogie Woogie Feng Shui the joke is that Faye is right, at least about Jet, who has taken Meifa's feng shui seriously enough to change the ship's smoking rules, and the punchline arrives in his own closing narration, when he admits he stopped reading the horoscopes. What separates the two lines is who they are said to. Jet said his about Faye to Spike, in her absence. Faye says hers about Jet to Spike, also in his absence, and then goes and spies on him with Ed and the dog. Neither of them will ever say a line like this to the person it concerns, which is the crew's whole method of caring about each other, and the comparison shows it is symmetrical.

Andy von de Oniyate is a rich cosplayer with a horse who keeps costing Spike his bounty, and the obvious objection to Faye's diagnosis is that the resemblance is a gag. Steelman that. Andy is a parody of the western Spike descends from, and Cowboy Funk is Bebop laughing at its own title; taking the similarity seriously is taking a cosplay seriously. But watch how the episode ends. Andy loses a fight he treats as a duel, decides the cowboy thing is over, and rides off announcing he will be a samurai instead, and the show cuts to Spike wearing the exact expression of a man who has been shown the exit. Spike's whole identity is a genre he chose in preference to the one he was born into. Faye, who reinvents herself every time she has the money, is the one qualified to notice that a persona can be swapped, and the one Spike least wants to hear it from.

A Betamax tape that took a whole session's effort to play, a Betamax player wrecked at an antiques shop, a VHS deck taken from an underground museum by mistake: Speak Like a Child spends its running time on the mechanics of hearing this line so that when it plays it costs something. The girl on the tape is Faye as a teenager, recording a message for a self she assumed would be old. The mechanism is that the message is addressed to exactly the right person and reaches the wrong one. The Faye watching has a gap where the intervening years should be, and the tape's promise to be cheering 'right here' is kept in the only sense that hurts, because the girl is right here and nobody else is. Faye's only reply is that she cannot remember. The line's sentiment is what any teenager would say. Its structure is the cruelest thing the show does to her.