Vicious Quotes

The theology is borrowed and the application is precise. Vicious is quoting the oldest fall narrative there is, and the second sentence is the weapon: he is not describing himself, he is filing Spike under the same doctrine and asking for a countersignature. The two of them fell from the same syndicate heaven, and the question dares Spike to claim a different species. What makes the line better than villain poetry is that the series half agrees with it. Spike is not innocent of the past Vicious represents; he was good at it, and the show lets his gunwork say so in every firefight. Where the doctrine fails is the destination. Vicious fell and organized his descent into a career; Spike fell and went sideways, into a ship of other fallen people who cook bell peppers and argue about money. The rebuttal to the devil theory is not a speech, it is the Bebop itself, a place where the fallen simply live instead of ruling anything, and Vicious cannot see it as an answer because from inside the fall, drifting looks like weakness.

A truce with a rival syndicate had just been brokered by Mao Yenrai when Vicious killed him, and the fangs remark is the whole of Vicious's politics: peace is decline, mercy is age, the old man died for negotiating. Read it against what the character was before. The flashbacks in Jupiter Jazz and the finale show a soldier on Titan and a man who shared a woman and a mentor with Spike, someone who once had a friend. What changed him is never dramatized, and that is the choice worth noticing, because the series could have given him a wound and refused. Vicious in session five has already finished becoming what he is; there is no arc left, only a doctrine, and the doctrine is applied to his own boss and his old partner in a single sentence. Spike, three years out, has no doctrine at all. That is the difference the church fight stages, and it is why Vicious, who has a philosophy, loses every conversation to a man who only has a past.

Vicious says it to Gren, the man who followed him on Titan and was framed by him afterwards, and it is the closest the character comes to a creed. As nihilism it is thin. Gren has laid out the specific betrayal, a music box with a transmitter in it and prison, and the answer he gets is a bumper sticker. The show is aware of this and stages the scene at a drug handoff with Gren holding a gun, so that Vicious sounds hollow: the line has nothing in it that responds to what was said. Nihilism in Bebop belongs to Spike, who lives it, and to Julia, who runs from it. Vicious only announces it, which is why he is the least interesting of the three. The quote gets circulated as the philosophy of the villain. It is not a philosophy; it is a man refusing a conversation.