Rem Saverem was a real one. Imagine being like between 28 and 30 and witnessing your crewmates torture a little girl to death, unable to stop them or rescue her. She’s not human but she looks and acts like a suffering child. She dies, horrifically and incompletely (frozen, status: alive). Your crewmates aren’t done with her even when she’s in pieces, and they put her in a jar to save for later. You keep her resting place clean and leave her flowers, knowing she never once got to see the miraculous geo-dome where you grow those flowers. Her siblings(?) or aunts(?) or mothers(?) support that geo-dome, each in a jar of their own, a torture and exploitation even slower than hers. You’re giving her little bits of them, but there’s nothing on the ship that isn’t created or maintained by slavery. There is no viable alternative you can come up with that doesn’t involve an overhaul of everything currently keeping humanity alive in suspended animation without waking up everyone and having a UN-floor-style shitshow of a discussion. You’re not an ethicist or a politician or even a community leader or systems engineer. You’re a navigator with a good head on your shoulders and an unequivocal stance on torturing children: it’s the worst kind of wrong. You don’t really know enough about Plants to understand what the alternatives to their exploitation are, if there are any. You just know it’s wrong, and the complicity eats at your bones and at your sanity via your conscience. How did you ever think that this expedition was the best use of your blank ticket? What would Alex say? (He would hold you and remind you that you are one human woman, and that you protested as much as you could, made your moral stand as best you could, and pushing harder might have resulted in your enforced return to cryo-sleep until the ships reached their destination, and then who would leave the poor child flowers? Who would think of her kindly? Who would be awake instead of you now, continuing to ruin her even after death?)

Then, the universe coughs up two more Independent Plants, and you know exactly why you’re on this expedition and how to make the best possible use of your blank ticket. Never again. You name the children, you treat them like people, you love them - and you’re barely 30 and traumatized as hell and you know you’re fucking things up, but there’s no one else and you cannot allow there to be anyone else, or everything goes back to square one and the twins go to the dissection table. You hide them in plain sight. They love you. You’re happier for their company, less lonely, and you never expected to have children. (You were planning, with Alex. If those plans had worked out, you would not be here to do your flawed best for these twins.) They are so smart, and you cannot bring yourself to tell them anything about the girl who came before them. You can barely put that experience into words for yourself, much less communicate the scope of it to two children. (They are so smart, growing inhumanly fast, and they are still less than a year old. You really should have fucking tried anyway.)

They discover their sister. They’re about one year old, and they fall away from you and from each other and from hope. One-year-olds shouldn’t be actively suicidal. You feel just like you did when you dragged yourself back to your room after screaming at your crewmates decades ago. You still think it was pure cowardice that you volunteered to go back into cryo-sleep so you could wake up years later and avoid spending time with mutilators and murderers. If you checked out, chose to sleep, volunteered for a solo navigation shift, how could you blame Knives for pushing everything down and ignoring it? After your own sick depression, feeling so powerless, how could you blame Vash for wanting to be done with everything?

But they’re barely over a year old. All you really know is that dead people don’t get to make decisions for themselves, death is the end of change for a person. (Alex will always be 27, love you more than anything, and will never meet the children who have become your family.) Things don’t get better for dead people. You want so, so much for things to get better for the twins.

One of them kills you, driving everything into the ground, humanity and Plants alike, because living means change means uncertainty means fear, and he is so afraid and humanity taught him his life was cheap, so why should he value theirs? The other plays the letter but not the spirit of your hopes; he lives for other people and never for himself, internalizes your insistence on the value of life and pays flesh by the pound to preserve it. He won’t follow you into death because your purchased his life (and so many other lives) with yours (he won’t squander that), but in a way he will never forgive you for choosing to die for others, and he’ll take that anger out on himself. You save lives and you doom Plants and you doom humanity trying to save humanity and Plants from their doom. Everyone’s on a rock again, back to where it all started on an inhospitable world, just a new one. But you kept things from ending. It all could have ended.

And you were like 30 and clinging to an imperfect but determined philosophy that kept you from flinging yourself into the grave after Alex, and you weren’t a mother or an educator or a spiritual guide or even particularly suited to raise children, and you fucked these kids up irreparably, but you were all they had and you were better than anyone who would have made them into tissue samples. You tried so hard, and both twins will carry you like a millstone and like a talisman for the rest of their very, very long lives.

And you named one of them Knives. What the fuck, Rem. Knives??

What I want more than anything for a post-series Knives would be him having to live with all the little struggles he's foisted on Vash and all the changes Vash has undergone. Him having to watch Vash make a sandwich with one hand while his prosthetic is in the shop. Him going to wake Vash up one day, and there's a split second where Vash is looking at him with utter terror because his sleeping brain forgot they're on good terms again. Him realizing that Vash's favorite food is something they never had on the spaceship. Him going to wake Vash up in the next room over, not realizing that Vash has already been up for like 3 hours training. Him realizing that Vash does this every single day and that he didn't just trip into being a legendary gunman. Vash reminiscing with old friends about people Knives has never met. Knives walking in on Vash and the others having a good time in the saloon, and Vash is acting completely differently when he isn't around vs when he is around because he feels that he has to put on an act for Knives so that he doesn't go full mass-murderer again. He playfully bickers with the girls, but is overly friendly with Knives like he would be with a casual acquaintance. Knives putting his hand on Vash's shoulder, and Vash tries to casually break the contact without being obvious, except Knives notices anyway. Just. Knives realizing that Vash is genuinely suicidal. They don't have anything in common anymore. It's been over 100 years since they were brothers.

I know Trigun is good because no matter how many times I go into it knowing what will happen to Wolfwood, I can't help sort of subconsciously having some genuine hope that it won't happen this time. Like when you're hoping Orpheus won't turn around

i know everyone sees him as second fiddle to knives bullshit but legato is Everything he is the reason the manga Works do you understand. wolfwood alone is not an adequate foil to vash bc he wants to be saved. he sees himself as guilty and recognizes the “wrong” in himself and wants to overcome it (nightmare of the orphans, eyes screaming in pain). his arc is more How can someone be better and still survive, not Should someone be better bc wolfwood ultimately does believe what vash is selling. by comparison, legato asks vash what if i dont want to be saved what if im happy here in the death and misery and cruelty what if i want this and vash’s answer is To Kill Him. he is the only person vash intentionally kills. he doesnt even kill knives bc knives’s plant bullshit is not actually vash’s ideological opposite. legato is. knives is kinda incidental to vash’s ultimate struggle against humanity’s ~dark side~ and how to reconcile that with their ability to grow and be better. i am shaking you by the shoulders do you understand do you fucking get it he is load bearing he is EVERYTHING DO YOU GET IT!!!!!!

eng scan team picked this up and I Am Looking, sheltered noble/pirate get stuck on a ghost ship together

Shuro talks a lot of shit for someone who just subjected Laios to one of the funniest examples of emotional whiplash I’ve ever seen.

He went from this:

To this:

Within the span of what?? An hour?? Less??

Yeah, sure. It’s completely normal to swing violently from “you disgust me I hate everything about you,” to “if you’re in danger ring this bell, and I’ll immediately get someone to to transport you to my country—where I have a great amount of power and influence—so that you can be safe forever.”

Poor Laios just went through a mixed signals marathon at the hands of this man, can you possibly blame him for misinterpreting Shuro’s behavior up to this point??

Just found out a blog I liked is run by a zionist the day is going terribly

How the fuck is meta ai not smth u can opt out on Instagram when it can't even fucking tell you that you can’t opt out of it.

"This feature will make ur life so much easier! Ask it anything!"

"I asked it if I can turn it off and it said I can."

"Actually this feature is still a work in progress and may be prone to hallucinating information and generally make shit up-

FINALLY

🧑🏿‍🔬🧪

A POST-TRUTH

CRIME DOCUMENTARY

U know ur probably on the wrong side of History if the police are beating college students for peacefully protesting and ur cheering the cops on.

Dunmeshi is one of the few, if not only anime/manga I've seen where a woman rips her shirt to expose her boobs and the entirety of tumblr rejoices.

I am also rejoicing that was cool as hell.

I still remember the nurses who laughed at me after major spine surgery when I was walking around with my butt out because I didn't know to bring shorts to the hospital and wasn't allowed to double my gowns due to the incision location. I still remember the aid who told me that I smelled after days of being unable to move my limbs or get out of bed while sweating uncontrollably from spinal shock and agonizing pain. I sat and cried after that because I had overcome so much that hospital stay just to be dehumanized. Never did they ask if I wanted something to cover up or assistance bathing. Just laughed at me and joked with each other.

I also remember the nurse who checked on me extra during the night with a hospital stay in the middle of covid because they kicked my mom out and I have trauma about being in the hospital alone. She made extra visits to make sure I was okay just like she promised my mom. I remember the nurse who held my hand and called me honey as my limbs trashed and shook from spinal shock.

Basically being a good nurse and being a bad nurse to patients does stay with a person. It's been years and many other hospital stays since a lot of these instances and I still remember them clearly. I know nurses are burnt out, traumatized, and exhausted. Nurses deserve better treatment. But so do patients.

we still get immediately shoved out of our immersion in tv shows or films when The Girl find a dead body and immediately shrieks - we just don't find it realistic because we're pretty confident most people would gasp rather than shriek (i.e. sharp inhale rather than sharp exhale) and it also feels unnecessarily (and predictably) misogynistic too, as men encountering corpses almost never do the same on screen

also of course please do tell us if you've actually encountered a corpse unexpectedly, because tumblr is absolutely a place where some people have done this thing and we love a good anecdote

suddenly imagining "burst into song" as a potential response

UHMMMMM what if T4T labru

TWO HOURS AGO: an incredible photo taken by a ut austin student capturing something deeply poetic in my opinion, a line of state troopers eagerly waiting to arrest student protesters standing just behind a sign that reads "what starts here changes the world. its starts with you and what you do each day."

okay so heres an au im not sure how to explain- she pilot on my [REDACTED] till i *explosion.sfx* or something idk

extra old stuff below 🔽

first version of peacemaker with extra details

an early attempt at designing the punisher shes the type of aircraft to turn your insides into soup by subjecting you to +20 gs during evasive maneuvering :)

wolfwoods flight suit concept

and a meme redraw

I can't sleep.

Did knives ever try to communicate with his plant sisters on what they wanted? Did he ever ask them what made them happy?? What was his plan past freeing plants from humans because it doesn't look like he was improving the quality of their lives past not sending into a Last Run but what would an improvement on their lives look like??

Do the Plants even know what they want? They must, from the sparse glimpses we get from their perspectives.

Am I focusing on the wrong things in trigun lmao