The popular anime series, "Cowboy Bebop", was originally created and released in Japan in 1998 and later gained an intense overseas following. The show owes its phenomenal international acclaim to successful conventions of hegemonic masculinity represented by the imaginary characters. The social semiotics of desire depicted in "Cowboy Bebop" cater to a general heterosexual market in which hero and babe characters are represented by archetypes of heterosexual normativity. In this study, the idea of inter-indexicality, or "the movement between two distinctive indexical systems as a semiotic mode of subject formation" (Inoue 2003: 317), will be employed in the discussion of data derived from the Japanese and American English dubbing of "Cowboy Bebop." The analysis will focus on how ideas including heterosexual normativity are reproduced in order to negotiate the intertextual distances that link the characters and audience. Inter-indexical notions help to construct interpretive voices familiar to the cross-cultural audience's social world. (Contains 3 figures and 4 footnotes.)