So, today on another forum I mentioned Vash the Stampede. I mentioned him by way of "I don't ask myself WWJD? so much anymore as WWVtSD?" and explained "Vash the Stampede." I said "If anyone is unfamiliar with this name, go ahead and ask and I can fangirl all over you, but be warned, you will be reading all day."
I got a taker. And then another taker who is a person on the forum who is straight up not having a good time right now and needs some distraction I feel - to read someone's dumb fangirling over a fandom they aren't in yet.
So... I wrote up an essay explaining Vash the Stampede in Word and pasted it in shifts on the blog: (uck, looks like I'm gonna have to post this in shifts, too. Dumb tumblr!
*Flashes my fangirl license*
You asked about Vash the Stampede? *Raises eyebrows.* Big mistake. You shall be here all day!
Vash is the protagonist of Trigun, an anime / manga by Yashiro Nightow. Well, the manga is by him and there are two different animes to date, one originally airing in 1998 before the completion of the manga (and it gained the idea enough popularity that Nightow was able to continue the manga and purposefully took a different track to keep the story fresh. Because he had to switch publishers the continuing story was titled Trigun Maximum). As of 2023 there has been a reboot of the anime, Trigun Stampede, done in a cell-shaded CGI style that takes more cues from the manga. It has done its own story elements, too, most notably having the City of July as a part of the story, making it almost a prequel, since the City of July is past tense in the other media. A second set / continuation / completion of it is set for a future release date and as of yesterday, the “final phase” of the new anime will be titled Trigun Stargaze. Additionally, there was a feature-movie made in 2011 based solely upon the first anime titled Badlands Rumble, which is kind of the black sheep of the fandom (personally I enjoy it, find it very funny).
So, anyway, Vash is a tall blonde man with a Bart Simpson hairdo and a long red coat who lives on a desert planet with 10X the guns of ‘Murica. There are two suns and five moons. It’s a scavenger world where people barely eek out a living using a form of lost technology known as “Plants” – which are these energy and materials production entities housed in giant lightbulbs (or something more like tanks in Stampede). No one knows how to create Plants anymore and few know how to maintain them, so everything is slowly dying (except, of course, the native sandworms. Yep, there’s something Dune-like going on). People live a half sci-fi half Old West existence and things are, again, very violent. It’s a world where you have higher chances of making it out better as a bandit than a farmer.
Vash is a pacifist.
He is also an outlaw with Sixty-Billion-Double Dollars ($$) on his head because he has been shown to be capable of incredible destructive power. Now, most of this comes accidentally from trying to weasel out of tough situations and people after him getting themselves hurt, but somehow towns fall apart.
Except for the City of July (or Jul-Ai in Stampede), which he did wipe out. Under circumstances not of his own making or will, but the normal citizens of the planet don’t know that. That was around 24 years ago in the first anime and in the manga. July exists as of the beginning of Stampede.
Early on in the manga’s story, an insurance company that gets a lot of damage claims regarding damage he supposedly caused declares him a “Human Act of God” so as to avoid payouts. He is assigned a pair of insurance agents, Milly Thompson and Meryl Stryfe, to follow him around to attempt to mitigate the damage he might cause. In the anime, it is the same, except that his bounty is not removed for some reason. (In the manga, the government removes his bounty per his “Act of God” status). He is also known as the Humanoid Typhon, putting him in the same category as a destructive storm. Vash-damage is thereafter treated in the same like as hurricane damage!
Honestly, this is one of the most creative things I have seen of any media – having the local superhero / super-cryptid followed by INSURANCE AGENTS. (I am fond of characterizing Trigun as “If Mayhem from the Allstate commercials was followed around by Flo from the Progressive commercials”).
(To Be Continued in Reblog-posts)
