“You know the first rule of combat? Shoot them before they shoot you.”
Faye Valentine Quotes
1 quote from Cowboy Bebop, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Read Faye Valentine's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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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 monetises 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, and the series' cruellest kindness is timing: her memory returns, she finds the childhood home, and it is a patch of dirt where a bed once stood. The past she armoured herself over turns out to be gone, and the family she never admitted wanting is parked in orbit, already hers, on the only vessel she never shot first.