#trigun meta

In 98 anime his motivation for that is largely centered around grief. If he kills a person, then the last thing of Rem he has would be lost. And the way Rem didn't even talk to him directly about her personal convictions back in his childhood, Vash saw her pacify a violent crew member (presented as a rather unpleasant guy in fact) and internalised it as the ultimate essence of her.

In Trimax the flashback goes quite differently. There's no violent crew members present - the source of violence in that scene is Vash himself, and I think this shift of perspective is vital to understand the entire framework of the manga. Rem talks directly to him, and the final decision on whether he would actually commit murder is ultimately left to him. And then he doesn't. And him and Rem actually talk, have a heart to heart, Rem explains to him her own trauma and motivation for joining the SEEDS crew. It is very raw, intimate, and Vash comes out of it with an understanding of why killing a person is wrong - because all that interiority, all that potential to live again, it will be lost forever if a death occurs. And having been the one who lashed out, attacked another person (and himself!) out of his own anger, fear and grief, he also gains a perspective on how violence is perpetuated between people. His pacifism in Trimax is no longer about Rem, but about his own experience with facing violence and perpetuating it in turn.

Man, I love Trimax.

im not even surprised my posts dont hit the top searches in the trigun tag

i am talking about history, massacres, imperialism and geopolitics on the pacific theater side. things that get reduced to metrics of how white or correct the cast are and how characters have been done dirty because the beats are not 1:1. not everyone can stomach the violence in the whole thing and ive even purposely omitted going into full details.

engage if you want to or don't. what i'm trying to do is interpretation, nothing else.

read Overseas Shinto Shrines: Religion, Secularity and the Japanese Empire by Karli Shimizu if anyone wants more academically accurate and cited information. i'm just a nerd. also, please do not treat me as a monolith or an authority on this topic. i am at best 4th gen downwards of these events who knows some japanese and lives in the region.

asia is huge. the accounts and opinions are too numerous to sum up.

i might write how the current geopolitics in this region is where relevant, but seeing as it's only <2 days before the new episode hits (and surely the ensuing shitstorm plus ignorantly made racist comments against SEAsians/polynesians that will hit as people gather their thoughts) i'll hit the pause for now

in so far as to what ive vomited out:

the echoes of eugenics and 731, and how knives and vash are standins for the 2 sides of the japanese society. also wolfwood reads like a darker skin asian

the ghg in stampgaze's iterations are quislings

(New) The nutting burger trigun stargaze meta post, or, Trigun Stargaze read through the lens of the Pacific War in WW2 and the response to Western Imperialism

stampede/ general

Wolfwood is an underdog character screwed by social hierarchy and Japanese cultural subtext more ways than one: a messy half-assed write up.

scattershot cultural elements present in stampede thoughts

trigunbookclub

main tag

part 1: reading trigun in japanese - baseball and nuclear warheads thoughts

nuts reading trigun in japanese 2 - slight tonal change

nuts reading trigun in japanese 3 - "weirdo" and vash's pronoun switching

nuts reading trigun 4 - i sniffed out the spirit of leiji matsumoto and his galaxy express 999

nuts reading trigun in japanese 5 - vash is. super good with kids

nuts reading trigun in japanese 6 - kaite's foreshadowing. plant synchronization's downside

nuts reading trigun in japanese 7 - filial piety, and meryl

nuts reading in jp 8 - vash quacks like an old japanese man sometimes

nuts reading in jp 9 - introduction scenes of legato, rem.

nuts reading in jp 10 - i think vash is stressed + wolfwood's debut

nuts reading in jp 11 - wrap up for vol 2 + i can talk about TriStamp undertaker wolfwood a little!!! whooo!!!

nuts reading in jp 12 - trimax ch 1 and 2 time HBRBRHBRHBRHBR

nuts reading in jp 13 - woowoo is not beating the marriage proposal allegations, featuring @eldritchneuro

This is Knives’s story and y’all can’t convince me otherwise.

He didn’t just take Vash’s choice to kill Legato—he also took his choice to know. The choice to face the truth about Rem, and decide what to do with it.

In Trigun Maximum, Vash never tried to deny Knives that knowledge. Even when he briefly thought it might be better for him to remain unaware—since his mind had already blocked that memory—Vash still believed he had the right to know.

When the story was from Vash’s perspective, he gave Knives the chance to hear the truth from Rem, because that’s who Vash is at his core. He believes in choices and second chances. Because yes, Rem sinned—but she also tried to redeem herself with the twins and do right by them, at least in Vash’s eyes.

But because Trigun Stampede and Stargaze are more focused on Knives’s side of the story, the outcome is different.

Here, Knives takes control of everything. He decides what Vash should and shouldn’t know. He chooses to keep him in the dark, carries the burden alone, and shapes the narrative around his own suffering. And because of that, the story leans toward him—frames him as the tragic savior, the one who bore everything for over a century alone.

Knives tried to shoulder everything alone in the manga too, but my issue is the lack of balance between the two. Let me explain!

In the manga, both brothers carried their own burdens and their own sins. They were both, in their own way, the heroes of their own story. Their divergence came from how they responded to the same truth—not from one being denied half of it. They equally carried the knowledge and the weight of that trauma.

But here, Knives is given more narrative weight. His suffering is explored, emphasized, it even almost feels justified. Meanwhile, Vash is… softened.

Even when Vash has JuLai and the Fifth Moon sit heavy on his back, the narrative didn’t sit with it the same way it does with Knives.

And I understand where all of this is coming from. It comes from the idea that Vash is surrounded by people who love him, who are welling to share his burdens with him because he’s no longer alone. He has friends now who care for him and who forgave him. Unlike Knives who is alone. So the story compensates—it gives Knives more depth, more attention, more emotional focus.

But in doing so, it creates an imbalance. Because now, when you compare them, Vash’s suffering feels smaller. Lighter. The one who carries scars not only on his heart but on his body ends up feeling like he carries less, simply because his ignorance spared him from the other half of the truth.

And Vash saying “I didn’t even try to understand” doesn’t help at all.

It makes it feel like Vash’s life is lighter in comparison—that he spent his time as a happy-go-lucky guy who sometimes attracts trouble while wandering around helping others, but he keeps being kind and pure no matter what humans throw at him, while his brother has been planning and working for over a hundred years to build his own version of paradise.

It’s true that Vash’s side gets more screen time, but when it comes to narrative weight, Knives gets the better treatment. He’s the one with clear goals and a purpose that the narrative prefers. He’s the one with more conflict.

I can roll with the fact that this is a new direction and the studio is using the freedom that was given to them. I can accept a version that centers Knives more. But at least give me something balanced. It feels unfair for Vash at this point. He’s just there because he’s the only one who can stop Knives.

What made their story powerful in the first place… was that they stood on equal ground—and still chose different paths. But the equal ground in this show is just about the fact that they are both independent Plants.

And I know I’m not imagining things here or that I got things wrong, because this aligns with director Mutō vision. He focused more on Knives and wanted him to be more than just a villain, but I find Stampede more balanced than Stargaze.

There’s this idea that permeates a lot of Western meda. The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Or, for our purposes, the only way to stop a bad guy with a knife is a good guy with a gun. The Western genre—and much of the American mythos that’s grown up around it, that Trigun is heavily based on—centers the lone hero with a gun as our ultimate savior. He can do anything. He can fight the whole world and win. He can bring justice when nobody else can. 

For all his pacifism and refusal to kill, that’s who Vash is—the Lone Ranger wandering the waste and dispensing his own brand of justice. The story of Trigun really takes the time to show how much he pays for it and how it fucks him up physically and mentally. The scars are one part of it, but the other is his loneliness, his sheer, unbreakable belief that he’s worthless without his gun, without what he can do for others. There are many, many different things that influence Vash’s low opinion of himself, but treating himself as a weapon and not a person is part of it. 

Living his life as a vengeful (albeit oddly non-fatal) weapon doesn’t actually make him more useful. In traditional Westerns, the lone gunman is revered, admired as much as he is feared. But Vash gets none of that reverence. People are afraid of him, they hate him, they mistrust him. Nobody likes a stranger who rolls into town, claims he wants to help, only to leave a trail of destruction in his wake. 

That’s the worst thing for Vash. No matter how many lives he touches and saves, he isn’t loved or cared for. Because all anyone can see is someone other, full of danger. Someone not to be trusted. 

None of this is what Vash wants. He wants to be good. He wants to show people a better path forward. But facing the world alone and being a selfless martyr behind the terrifying facade of his gun doesn’t accomplish that. 

The ending of the manga ultimately proves that. What stops the fighting isn’t Knives’s death. It isn’t Vash finally turning his gun on him. It’s a moment of connection. It’s the plants reaching out to humanity and not being strange, ethereal creatures anymore, but beings with thoughts and feelings. And they never would’ve gotten the chance to do that if Vash didn’t trust his friends to help him. For Meryl and Milly to deal with the Earth Federation, for Luida to rally No Man’s Land’s leadership, for Livio to fight Elendira and keep her out of everyone else’s way. 

Vash's eyes have a subtle glow in Stampede; they look nearly pale white in certain shots, despite the ambient lighting demanding they be darker.

By contrast in the same scene, Zazie who has similarly light eyes and is similarly lit, aren't as light as Vash's, which are lighter than the white of the eyes:

But they're not consistently that light either!

Not doing the thing.

Doing the thing!! Same environment!!

But my favorite:

would it not be in the spirit of trimax if this version of the story ends in an even more hopeful way that takes for granted the existence of the other versions in order to get its message across?

not in an "i won't bother to develop my own story because the audience can depend on the other versions to fill the gaps" way, but in the sense that trigun is a story about resilience and hope prevailing amidst even the worst tragedy. the tragedy won't ever stop, so our hope and our efforts to connect to one another and be kinder than we were yesterday must also never stop, because one day it will, it might pay off

in the story, there are many who doubt this, who doubt vash and his message as the messenger of the story. sometimes they're right - vash carries the scars that prove it; people are sometimes given the option to act kindly and don't pick it; people often can't afford to hope, to remain both moral and alive. everything in this story questions whether we should still try, and neither vash nor the reader has an answer until the very end, until everything that could prove any of the characters' views right or wrong has been accounted for and communicated

some characters have never made it to the end of this story, and we've learned to expect that they won't, just like the people of no-man's land have learned to expect the worst – and they were justified, just like we might be by the end of the story

in the end of trimax, the plants and humans connect through vash – both sides know everything (or the closest we can get to that, which is direct access to memories and experience), and make their decision as to whether or not they should believe in one another, whether or not they should hope, whether or not it's worth it

trimax tells us that, with everything on the table, it is. wouldn't the hope that stargaze instills in us for otherwise doomed characters mean that we, as the audience, also hear the version of the story in which, despite all odds being against them in any other version, these characters make it? and wouldn't that be in line with the original story whose message is that humans might've lost hope a hundred times, but they can still hope anew, because something might change, something can change?

both the witnesses and the creators of this version of the story know that the other versions exist. so, if we think about it, isn't stargaze so far telling us that, with everything on the table, and no matter how things have gone so far, we should still be hoping?