#old trigun

Plants come in three "types": dependent, independent-generator, and independent-gateborn. (The last two are just me giving a name to what we saw in Tristamp.)

(ID: a screenshot from the anime Trigun Stampede. A small human-looking blond child stands in front of a very non-human creature in a pink tank of some kind of fluid. The child's back is to the viewer; this is Vash. The creature faces the viewer. She is adult-sized, and generally looks like a nude, elongated human woman. In lieu of hair she has fleshy petal-like things on her head. Four larger petal things, each about 1 or 2 meters long, emerge from her back. It's difficult to see, but she is covered in strange, fractal skin-patterns. Labels on each indicate that the creature is a dependent plant, and the child is an independent.)

Dependent plants: What you see in Tristamp. Not remotely human-looking. Soulless and lacking individual minds or identity, though they seem to have formed a natural hive mind within the higher dimension. They have an interdimensional gate within them, but it's one-way. They have fleshy petals attached to their backs; we don't know what they're for. As far as we can tell, they have no need to ingest food/water, they don't rest, and they do not grow old (at least not as quickly as humans; all or most of the ones on the SEEDS ships were at least 200 years old). We're not sure they're "born," frankly, since Luida mentions at one point that plants are "cloned from an original cell," probably with some genetic engineering involved. They appear to all be female-sexed and have working female reproductive organs, though they clearly don't work much like human girlbits. (More on this later.) They seem to be designed for life in a containment unit -- elongated limbs and digits that look too frail to support their weight under gravity/non-fluid conditions, skin so pale they'd burn in seconds if they could go outside, etc. Built for captivity. Their minds cannot be contained, however.

(ID: screenshot from Trigun Stampede. The image is dark, taking place at night, and backlit by fire. Knives stands in profile. His face is in shadow. His heavily muscled upper body seems to be bare, or covered in a skintight white garment. His lower body is covered by a kind of draping skirt or robe. At the top of the garment, however, it's clear that the garment is unraveling into long chainlike objects, which have metallic-looking spear tips. There are sharp-edged protrusions all along the chains' length. Later in the series it becomes clear that the chains are coming from Knives' back, and he controls them.)

Independent-generators: Souled. Individual minds. Unknown if they have visible human sex organs, but they do have apparent human genders. This is basically just camouflage like every other part of their human appearance, and irrelevant to their actual role in reproduction. Like the dependents, generators have a one-way gate within them, which sustains all their life functions -- they don't need to eat or drink, don't need to sleep, and they can regenerate their own flesh. Like dependent plants, they have unique organs/appendages rooted in their backs. The independent-generators' weird organs are specialized generator sites -- kind of like biological 3d printers that can crank out massive amounts of whatever at speed, and maintain a mental connection to whatever they generate. (More on this later.) Independent-generators have these "tendril roots" from birth, but they don't come online until maturity. The maturation process can be painful bc the awakening roots tap the spinal cord and then the first tendrils tear their way out through muscle and skin; once the plant has gone through this, however, they gain a degree of mental control over their own flesh which allows them to reshape it and/or regenerate any damage, so that it no longer hurts. The tendrils are extensions of their nervous system and can even operate while fully detached from the independent's body, if the independent wills them to stay connected.

Independent-gateborn: Same as generators for most things, but they have a two-way gate within them, which (at maturity) they can physically manifest. They cannot sustain themselves on the energy of their gate, for some reason; they must consume food and water, and they have to sleep. Also, they cannot regenerate their own flesh, so their injuries can scar. Gateborn tendril-roots are made to transfer energy, not to generate. The gateborn maturation process is much less dramatic, to the degree that they might not even realize their power has reached a new level (until they accidentally open a black-hole-like gate to the higher dimension and kill everything in a fifty-foot radius, anyway). While gateborn cannot generate, they can reshape their roots and manifested gateways in any way necessary -- a "wing" that's really just a bunch of microscopic gates in a containment web; an orbital cannon, etc. Their tendrils (really just reshaping/lengthening of their tendril-roots, and very rootlike in appearance) aren't like those of generators -- much less versatile, but potentially infinite in length. Also, gateborn are so energy-costly to produce that they're extremely rare.

I believe Tristamp Tesla must have been a gateborn, because she doesn't seem to have been able to defend herself against what the humans did to her. So I headcanoned that after what happened to Tesla, the dependent hive mind decided to make sure all gateborn get created with a generator as a protector and provider. Which leads us tooooooooo...

Plant Reproduction: It's complicated

Dependents: We don't know what triggers it, but at times they asexually (or by some sexual process we cannot perceive) get pregnant and pop out a baby, or twins. Humans in Trimax were surprised to discover the babies (we haven't seen the twins' birth in Tristamp), so I'm guessing the gestation doesn't take long. I headcanon the dependents aren't so much gestating as generating these children -- i.e. instantly materializing them as ready-to-yeet fetuses, with none of that "9 months" silliness.

If so, then what the dependents are doing has absolutely nothing to do with sexual reproduction. Their uteruses are actually more like tendril-roots, just 3d printing babies instead of metal. This is why Trimax!Knives could "regenerate" in a dependent's uterus. And this suggests plants don't need sperm and egg, or even time, to make a baby. They need three things: energy, a spare soul, and the ability to generate matter. (All dependents can generate matter. Among independents, gateborn can't.)

Souls exist in the higher dimension, a place of pure energy, and right there we've got two of the 3 requirements. So plant reproduction requires two sexual roles: someone who transfers energy (including the soul, since we might as well consider the soul just another form of energy) from the higher plane, and someone who generates that energy into a new plant. Regardless of their gender identity or apparent human sex, "generator" and "energy transfer-er" are the actual plant sexes.

Note that I haven't made the above paragraph purple. I think that's canonically what we saw happen in Tristamp eps 11 and 12; Vash and Knives made thirty or so bouncing baby independents together. S2 is gonna be so potentially traumatizing lit!

So re this headcanon, I mostly just slapped my own label on the "generator" (independent-generator) and "energy transfer-er" (independent-gateborn) roles that we seem to see in canon. I'm also starting to think of the dependents as a third sex, mostly because the whole arrangement resembles how plants -- the botanical kind -- reproduce. Many plant species use multiple reproductive strategies. Some have male and female morphs which practice sexual reproduction. Some have those plus a third form which can fertilize itself -- a hermaphroditic flower. (Very simplified; there are multiple kinds of sexual reproduction and multiple kinds of hermaphroditic reproduction.) So Vash & Knives are the sexual repros, and the dependents are the hermaphroditic repros. Independent-generators can become cosmetically hermaphroditic if a gateborn awakens the ability to flower within them, but they cannot transfer energy without the gateborn's help, so their flowers are just pretty/sexy.

So plants have the full range of human genders, and three sexes. Buuuuut I am not a biologist so the count of sexes might not make scientific sense, so I'm going to stick to "at least two" for now.

(::record scratch:: ...I just realized Tristamp!Knives is canonically trans. Human genders don't mean much to him, but he's treating the dependents like a plant gender that he identifies with -- wearing his patterned bodysuit to look like them, showing off his "girlish" crotch, wearing his hood up so it looks like a dependent's closed bubble of petals. Hmmmm. I wonder why he doesn't also make himself look more femme? If he can literally rebuild his body as it's getting fried by the Angel Arm, he can grow tits and a vulva (and flesh-petals and whatever those hair things the dependents have are called). Maybe because taking on a femme appearance would also increase his human-adjacency, and I guess his species dysphoria? Given how he mistreats the dependents himself... is there some self-hatred, maybe? Maybe it's more accurate to consider him a plant-crossdresser, or plant-genderqueer...? Aaaand that's a meta for another day. Back to this long-ass essay.

To make plant children, the gateborn opens a gateway to draw energy from the higher plane. This energy manifests as a transdimensional flower, appearing anywhere on the gateborn's body. Gateborn can also bestow these on any other independents, and they'll be able to flower forever afterward -- it's a permanent change. Anyway, when stimulated enough, this flower collapses into a condensed packet of energy containing build instructions (basically DNA) and one (1) soul. This is the seed -- a potential child. The gateborn can transfer as many flowers into our plane as they like, but if no one uses them, the flowers and seeds dissipate harmlessly, their energy returning to the higher realm. Note that the gateborn can't actually generate a seed into a child, themselves, but hopefully their sibling or another independent will do it for them -- or, with gateborn tendrils, the soul can be transferred to any nearby dependent, who will generate a child within her body and then give vaginal birth to it. Again, this was what we saw in eps 11&12.

(Id: Screenshot from Trigun Stampede. The overall image is faintly blue because it's taking place inside a liquid-filled tank. Two dependent plants, their petals unfurled, drift in the liquid. There is a black tendril coming from offscreen, separated into several more, which has attached itself to each of their bellies, and they now look heavily pregnant. Both dependent plants have their mouths open and do not look happy with their sudden forced motherhood. The black tendril is coming from Vash, although he isn't doing this to the dependents voluntarily; he is under Knives' control.)

Most independents will happily raise any "siblings" that their dependent "mothers" produce. Generators and gateborn who produce children themselves tend to regard those as offspring rather than siblings -- even though there's no biological link between parent and child, as there would be with a naturally evolved species. The child's soul has been influenced by everyone involved in producing them -- which could mean anywhere from one to dozens of parents -- but that's it. Plant children rarely look anything like their parents, but they sometimes inherit personality traits, which might be nurture as much as nature.

Making a new gateborn is more complicated because a) the prospective gateborn's seed has to receive much more starter energy than usual from the gateborn parent, and b) this gateborn seed must be produced alongside a second seed, which is tethered to it; the two souls are connected on a quantum level. The generator parent(s) then must generate both seeds into children at the same time, so that they are "born together." Making a gateborn seed without also making a tethered twin simply doesn't work; the lone seed disintegrates, and that energy just returns to the higher plane, unused.

Plant Fuckin' (Bom chicka wtf?)

Plants do not ever need sex to reproduce. Sex is purely a matter of interest, pleasure, and intimacy.

Dependents obviously cannot have consensual sex. They have pretty human-looking vaginas per Trimax (yes, we unfortunately get to see it up close at one point, during an utterly horrific scene), but you can't get consent from an entity that lacks a self. Any attempt at sex would be rape.

As with humans, independents can have sex in a lot of different ways. When aroused, their plant patterns emit light and vibration in various harmonic resonances. Generators' tendrils do this, too. Simple physical contact between pattern and pattern, pattern and tendrils, or tendrils and tendrils, is pleasurable -- so what would look to humans like cuddling or heavy petting is actually them getting down & dirty. More complex resonances, rhythms, and vibration patterns are equivalent to human sex positions. Every individual has their preferences. It's probably not just electromagnetic stuff that's happening; I'm thinking there's some transdimensional string theory going on too? But I don't know enough about that to pull off Sexy String Theory. Anyway, when all the waveforms are hittin', the plants involved don't really experience an orgasmic peak so much as a really intense plateau that can last a while. Hours-long edging.

Then there's floral sex. Gateborn don't have resonating tendrils, but they get something else: they naturally produce flowers when they're really enjoying themselves. (They can summon them without sex, too, through concentration.) They have some control over it, but it's hard to maintain control when your literal back is getting blown out. They can also awaken the ability to flower in any generator; there's only a chance of seed creation if the gateborn has opened a portal nearby. The flowers are not "real" in the sense of actually creating an opening on the plant's body. They are like Shrödinger's Cat; they simultaneously exist and do not exist. Anyway, touching the flower feels good. Getting your flower touched feels good. Penetrating the flower, with digits or tendrils or tongue, feels good -- and resonating with that flower, in exactly the right frequency, is a transcendent experience.

Whiiiiiiiiich can kill you!

See, I figure that all plants are naturally prone to form hive minds. (Again canon, mostly Trimax.) Floral sex is the most likely time for them to accidentally "merge," or attempt to merge, with another plant or with the dependent hive mind. Plants enjoying floral sex will feel as if their souls have left their bodies... because their souls have left their bodies. The risk of that soul getting "lost" in the higher realm is slim, but never zero. If it happens, a gateborn might be able to retrieve the lost soul. If that fails, though, that plant ends up as just a funny-looking dependent. (On the other hand, what a way to go.)

Unfortunately, it's possible for independent plants to commit rape. Since they can use their tendrils to connect to another plant, they can sometimes merge with -- and overpower -- that person's mind. Then the rapist can destroy memories, or force their victim to glow or flower against their will. They can also disable any resistance by stabbing that person's roots with their own tendrils... (Sigh. As in episode 11.) Souls can also be lost during rape -- and they're a lot less likely to come back from it.

I still have elements that I'm trying to work out with this headcanon. Could one have consensual sex with a dependent while in contact with the hive mind, assuming the hive mind says yes? If two gateborn go at it, would they destroy the world when they cum? If somebody licked Knives' robe, would he feel it (probably! and then that person would die horribly). But anyway, that's all I have so far.

(Looks back at the ESSAY she wrote) Hoooooly shit. Sorry.