I was playing Taste Kid with AI recently, looking for books or media, when I noticed a pattern.
I love Space Westerns.
- Cowboy Bebop
- Firefly / Serenity
- The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers
These all occupy a warm place in my heart, yet when I hear Trigun, I nope out. I tried to understand why. And there are two common threads in the ones I love that stood out to me.
- It has to be a "found family"; relation by choice or blood.
- It has to be a ship out in the frontier. Rangers is marginal here, but they do spend a lot of time on "away missions", and the travel is part of the narrative.
And all at once it hit me. I gravitate towards these works because that's how I grew up.
Dad married in. He wasn't a blood relation, but he raised me as if I were, and his family (for the most part) accepted me.
And we moved dozens of times. I cannot tell you how many times we packed our crap and took yet another U-Haul through the Shenandoah Valley from New England to the Carolinas and back again. Even if we weren't relocating, summer trips happened on the same lines. My wife can't understand how I can read in a car and not get sick. Same way you get to the Met. Practice, baby.
Life at my age stops giving and starts taking. I'm staring down the barrel of losing them both, my parents, and unlike those old days, I can no longer solve my problems by simply waiting for the complete reset of moving. It's funny how carefree life can be, how ephemeral problems are, when every one of them is an episode long, and win or lose, we fly off to elsewhere. There's no witty reply to ease the tension. There's no throat to choke for a bounty. There's just here, and now.. and then there's soon.
Soon I'll be orphaned. Soon I'll run out of chances to say what need be said.
Tell your loved ones that you do.
See you later, space cowboy.