“You take women too lightly, my friend.”
Laughing Bull Quotes
2 quotes from Cowboy Bebop, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Do not fear Death. Death is always at our side. When we show fear, it jumps at us faster than light. But, if we do not show fear, it casts its eye upon us gently and then guides us into infinity...”
The night before the syndicate raid, Jet goes to the shaman and gets the series' one purely mystical speech, and it is the least Bebop thing in Bebop. The show's dead die stupidly and specifically: a boy with a harmonica, a woman on a rooftop, a shopkeeper who hid a friend, an old man on his own ship because he signed a truce. None of them were guided gently into anything. Bull's speech is delivered to Jet, not Spike, and Jet has no use for it; what he takes to the finale instead is a cat story and a shared laugh. So the quote sits on top of the ending like a caption somebody else wrote. It is quoted constantly because it is the only thing in the last session that sounds like wisdom, and the last session is built to refuse wisdom: its final words are a gunshot noise and a title card about weight. The shaman was a good device for a prophecy. As a philosopher he is decoration, and the show, to its credit, cuts away from him.
Read Laughing Bull'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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Bull's warning comes right after Spike has made a joke of the prophecy, and the joke, that he was already killed once by a woman, is the one the shaman refuses. The session's structure depends on the refusal. Asteroid Blues is built as a pilot with no arc, a bounty that ends in the sweet thing shooting the bounty and then being shot herself, and the only thread that leaves the episode is this exchange in a tent. Everything Bull says is fulfilled in reverse order: the red-eyed coyote appears in the Zona Norte within the hour, the woman takes twenty-five sessions. 'Too lightly' is the note. Spike, when the prophecy lands, has a way of treating Julia as fate, a story about a cat; Bull's complaint is that fate is a word men use for the women they did not take seriously enough to survive. A shaman who reappears twice more, each time at a death, is the show's way of confirming that he was right the first time.