Ben Adams, Peter Fenzel, Shana Mlawski, and Matthew Wrather overthink the end of the Overthinking Cowboy Bebop series and the ethics of storytelling in Serial and Into The Woods.
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Your Panel
- benadams: @badamsnavy
- Peter Fenzel: @fenzelian
- Shana Mlawski: @ShanaMlawski
- Matthew Wrather: @mwrather
Further Reading
- Overthinking Cowboy Bebop: the first post and the final one
- Shana and Doctor Who: Is Doctor Who Bad for Women? and Fixing Doctor Who, Season Five Edition
- PodcastOne
- Into The Woods
- Serial
- Comprehensive Criminal Procedure, 3rd Edition
- Rabia’s Blog
- “Adversary System” on Wikipedia
- This American Life
- The Moth
- Sadly, Not Bernadette Peters
It’s probably clear to everyone that given my druthers I would have hijacked the whole show to talk about Into the Woods. Who’s with me? Let’s head over to the OTI forum and talk there.
Will we get a podcast on Serie 2 of Black Mirror or it’s Christmas special?
Hold on, there’s a Snooki podcast? How have I not been told of this hidden American treasure already?
Cowboy Bebop: music, space/scifi, anime
Into the Woods: music, fairy tales, film adaptations
Serial: spoken word, criminal justice, podcasting
Music is missing from the third topic, or else it would have been a neat unifying element. Instead, there are a couple little hidden musical references sprinkled throughout the conversation. Was Wrather saying “odds and sods” instead of “odds and ends” an intentional reference to the The Who album, for example? We may never know the truth, if there even is such a thing.
I’m out of my depth with this one, didn’t watch Into the Woods or hear Serial but I did read the Cowboy Bebop finale for X-Mas! :)
Well we’ll be sure to send all the hatemail to Wrather now XD
Congratulations on moving on to the big boy podcast network!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfRrazJDARk
I think the Fenz’ is right Wrather, you need to “let it go” in the most pedantic way possible, in Classical Latin
No, you don’t have a right to be entertained by it. No one can stop you, but you don’t have the right.
A real world case of murder and incompetence is taken and made into a side show for entertainment. Delegitimizing the horror and dehumanizing the victims.
And you don’t weight life, let alone education and crime by how “entertaining” it is. Are you going to give less weight to a crime or educational field because it’s “less entertaining”? How about you condition towards ignoring “entertainment” and focus on what matters. We’re not animals or machines that just “fall” in what ever direction we’re innately pointing at. Yeah it might be “hard” but it’s “right”.
I’d rather have people approach the nitty gritty of child rape out of despair than say someone who is entertained by little girl diddling.
I’m writing some time later, and so this is just what stuck with me. Not representative of the entire podcast.
Obviously you’re invested in this on an emotional level, so I don’t want to insult that right by being too callous and intellectual.
But I feel that saying “we don’t weight life, education, and crime by how entertaining it is” risks misjudging a lot of human nature. Despair only collapses, it does not strive. We are driven either for or against anything by the degree to which we are engaged, fascinated, provoked, or obsessed.
The extent to which the “entertained” question was asked had full and appropriate context, by questioning whether our obsessive provoked engagement with reality can be seperated from our obsessive provoked engagement with fiction.
Dispassionately and objectively, those seperations have never existed. Personally and subjectively I hope you read this in peace and goodwill.
You make me so happy when you talk about musicals. You could have gone on as long as you wanted to. I would have been here. ;)