Netflix Got Faye Valentine from ‘Cowboy Bebop’ All Wrong
If you know people who are incredibly well-versed in anime, odds are you’ve seen the name Cowboy Bebop pop into the conversation, and for good reason at that. The original anime series, which became a huge hit in the United States and also became a gateway for many English-speaking audiences into watching anime. And if you’ve seen the original show, it’d be really easy to see why Cowboy Bebop has stuck with many for this long.
When I saw Netflix was adapting Cowboy Bebop into a live-action series, there’s always the question being asked about what good could come from adapting what was already successful within the medium of animation into a live-action series. Over years, we’ve seen Disney do this with their own movies and the results have been less than satisfactory, but a live-action adaptation of an anime series isn’t a first for Netflix: we’d already seen the disastrous results of the 2017 Death Note film adaptation. Surely enough, it would be easy enough to get on board with most of the casting, but it was the casting of Daniella Pineda that got me to shift my eyes at least a little bit.
None of this has anything to do with the new outfit that she’s donning in the picture above; if anything, it’s not even close to what didn’t entirely work about this new take on a familiar character. To delve into spoilers for the later half of the original Cowboy Bebop series, the episode “Speak Like a Child” unveils some crucial details about Faye Valentine’s past. Throughout the series, we’re seeing traces of the circumstances that ultimately turned Faye Valentine into the person that she became; a femme fatale ridden with debt and seeking the opportunity to find pleasure while she can.
For many reasons, she had always been my favourite character in the original Cowboy Bebop. But there was one crucial aspect about Daniella Pineda’s casting that didn’t sit well with me — because Faye Valentine was Singaporean. Going back into the details of what takes place in “Speak Like a Child,” we see a videotape that details a crucial moment from her childhood and it’s hard not to take note of the Merlion landmark within the background. Considering the fact that Merlion is the official mascot of Singapore, you’d think that this ended up being an important note for Faye’s backstory that Netflix would also bring up, but it’s ignored entirely.
I don’t have anything against Daniella Pineda; I think she’s a fine actress although I can’t really say that I’ve seen her in much. But considering the fact that Faye Valentine was a character of Singaporean descent, it just left me wondering why this was left out entirely when adapting Cowboy Bebop in the live action format, let alone in her casting. But to think that a crucial part of her backstory would end up widely ignored has always been so baffling to me, because of the fact that the original Cowboy Bebop anime had maintained the fact that its entire team was a group of diverse races. Fittingly enough, most of the casting choices in this new rendition can perfectly represent this but I can’t help but feel as if the way such a crucial aspect of Faye Valentine’s entire background has been erased just ignores a part of what made the character so special to some of us.
Though I’m willing to accept that this new take on Cowboy Bebop is part of a new entity entirely separate from the original, there’s a lot about this that simply doesn’t work for me. I think that erasing the details about Faye’s background were already bad enough to try and do away with the fact that she wasn’t Singaporean anymore, but it was ultimately the way in which she was characterized that never stuck the landing for me. Spike and Jet seem to be the same as they’ve always been, but for me, Faye just only ever came off like she was stripped of the personality that made her my favourite character on the original series.
I’ve always viewed Faye Valentine as someone who knew that she was seen as a femme fatale and was able to use that to her advantage, even giving herself the upper hand when it came to her own relationships with Spike and Jet. She’s been described in some wiki pages as arrogant or lazy, but there’s definitely a clever side to her beneath her need to experience pleasure again after the tragic circumstances that she was made to endure. Yet here, that wasn’t so much the case anymore.
Faye’s origins still remain mysterious, retaining the aspect about her being cryogenically frozen as the result of a space shuttle accident which ended up sending her into a massive amount of debt. In this version, the same personality that we all fell in love with in the original anime series is not the same anymore. She seemed reduced down to the stereotype of a “girlboss,” and became the one character here I found most annoying. But I think that what’s most egregious about the way that she’s characterized comes from the fact that it seems she was boxed into a checklist for what modern audiences would want to see out of her. By a certain point, she started to feel less like Faye Valentine and more a version of her that was written by teenage fans — supposedly the sort that would have complained about her appearance on social media.
Of the many things that have been said about Faye Valentine in the new series, it’s pretty damning that there was almost no talk whatsoever of Faye’s Singaporean roots with regards to the casting. Instead, the talks seemed to focus on the unfairly misogynistic comments that were headed Daniella Pineda’s way for the fact that she didn’t wear the skimpy outfit that most people would associate her with in the original series. These comments were ridiculous, and they rightfully deserve to be condemned, but I feel like it says a lot about where we are now, when these comments were the ones that got more widespread attention than it was ever brought attention to that Faye Valentine was Asian in the anime series, whereas Pineda is not.
There’s a whole other thing I feel like I could write about with how much the people behind this show seem to have missed the mark on what it is that allowed Cowboy Bebop to stick in our minds the way it did. But that’d be a talk for another day — because this isn’t at all the same Faye Valentine that I remember falling in love with in my early teens, rather just a pastiche of what some people thought she was, and the way that certain fans have turned this away from being a nuanced talk is just heartbreaking to me. Because the way they’ve remembered Faye Valentine certainly isn’t the way that I did, nor why she was always my favourite of the Bebop crew.
