listen as an nb fellow who has had this haircut let me just tell you this is not the hair of a cis person

Watching tristamp: oh vash has mommy issues

Watching trigun 98: oh vash has MOMMY ISSUES

Reading Trimax: Actually Vash went through an extremely traumatising event at a young age and had to face the realities of humans. Rem was there, as the twins' mother figure, to represent the good. Reconciling humanity's differences is what made him how he is, and he projects that onto Rem. In this essay I will-

can’t talk about it

[ID: Black and white comic of Vash and Wolfwood from Trigun Maximum. The comic starts with the sounds "thud, thud, click". Vash, mid-action of peeling an apple, turns to the sound, noticing who it was that entered, and says, "Oh, Wolfwood, you're back." He resumes back to his apple in the next panel as he speaks, "Where'd you go? You snuck out of bed quickly this morning..." Wolfwood's hand then enters the panel, hovering over Vash's cheek and Vash looks up as Wolfwood asks, "Can I?" Vash responds, "Not going to talk about it?" while using a hand to gently hold Wolfwood's hovering hand and presses a kiss to his inner palm.

Vash then gets up fully, setting down the knife down on the table and the apple onto a plate, He leans into Wolfwood as Wolfwood explains, "Had to meet someone. Nothing interesting to talk about." Vash kisses Wolfwood's left cheek and a hand moves to cup his other cheek while muttering, "You're being vague." Wolfwood says neutrally, "If yer really that curious, keep askin'. We  can talk about that instead of doing this." Vash leans back and responds, "Let's talk after, since... You look so tired."

The panel pans to a close up of Wolfwood's downcast eyes, bags heavy underneath his eyes. He doesn't allow Vash to sit in that moment for long though, then saying, "Yer not helping, Spikey. Being all slow with it... I could fall asleep right now." He moves his hand to start unclasping Vash's coat, starting from his collar. Vash with red cheeks, responds briskly, "Oh, shut up. I'm worried about you. I can't be worried?"

The final shot shows Wolfwood's back to the viewer while Vash's softened expression can be seen as he holds gently onto the side of Wolfwood's face and a hand firm on his waist. Wolfwood responds, "I'm fine, seriously," pausing for a moment before continuing, "Is it okay to still..?" Vash responds, "Yeah, it's okay."

The next image is a shot from later that night after the previous comic. Vash and Wolfwood are now in bed, half naked. Wolfwood's buries his face into Vash's chest, his arms wrapped around him, while Vash is petting at his hair. Vash reminds him, "Hey. You said we'd talk about it." Wolfwood pauses for a moment before piping up, "In the morning? I'm sleepy." Vash says, "Okay..."

The next two pages start from the morning after. Wolfwood is already fully awake, pulling on his outer jacket as he says to Vash, whos' still bundled in his blankets, "Breakfast is on the table. Make sure to eat it. I'm going to grab some things in town and then we're leavin'. Got it?" Vash says, "Mh." Wolfwood responds, "Good. See ya in a bit." The dialogue starts to shift into Vash's inner thoughts now, as he gets up and eats toast, thinking, "Wait. Weren't we supposed to... talk about it?" The next shot then shows him fully up, meeting Wolfwood in town. He carries a half worried expression with him while Wolfwood slides on his glasses for him. A quick panel shows Wolfwood's tired expression from the night before and quickly juxtaposes with Wolfwood in front of him who's smiling gently, the shades covering his eye bags. Wolfwood asks him, "Still not awake yet?" Vash pauses, his thoughts stirring, thinking, "Oh. I guess I was getting ahead of myself... thinking you owe me that kind of honesty." He smiles at Wolfwood and responds, "I'm awake!" His thoughts continue, "Maybe one day, you'd trust me enough to share your burdens."

The final image shows Wolfwood pulling at Vash's cheek and Vash complains, "Owwwww why..." Wolfwood quickly says, "You were thinking something stupid, right? It's all over yer face." Vash mutters, "Nooo, I wasn't..." END ID]

uh oh

I'm too tired to write the full Essay™, but someone said in the tags that Stampede took away Knives' fear and it made me realize that the core issue I have with Trigun Stampede is the fact that the characters lack the emotional depth of Trigun Maximum. Like, I'm enjoying Stampede, and it's emotional, but Knives and Vash especially have had their emotional complexity watered down in comparison to the manga.

In the manga, they were as much at war with themselves as they were with each other and world around them. Knives was expressive, animated, and always playing up the megalomaniac god complex in public, but in private he was exhausted and scared and even expressed guilt towards his sisters for being careless in how he orchestrated the fall. Vash was an upbeat pacifist who was constantly fighting his own urge to take the "easy" way out and kill to solve problems.

It's what made the manga so heartbreaking. Neither of them were entirely right, but neither of them were entirely wrong. Knives shouldn't try a genocide, but he was also a deeply traumatized child who was shown how cruel humans could be to plants. Vash should try to do as much good in the world as he can, but holding onto the ideals of pacifism in a hostile environment does more harm than good and he learns that when he's finally pushed to the point where he has to choose between killing and saving someone important to him.

I don't think it's impossible for Stampede to recover in Season 2, but the foundations aren't great. Changing Nai to being cold as child seems like such a small change, but Knives starting out as the optimist who loved humanity is so central to that internal conflict... I don't know. Maybe they'll come back to the point of Rem being important to Knives and make use of the fact that he intended for her to survive and that might save it. We'll have to see.

Slowly reading through trimax made me think about vash’s scars again. Less about his feelings towards his scars (how they are a reminder, the price he pays and all that), I have seen many posts and takes about that but more abut, well, how he treats his scars. I try to put my thoughts in coherent text.

Vash doesn’t like showing his scars too much. He generally keeps all of his body covered up when he is out and about. He knows his scars are off-putting to others and that they are not pretty to look at. Both in trimax and 98, vash does this squirmy ‘kyaaa’ thing and all that puts a funny twist to the situation.

he does make remarks about how he doesn’t like people to see, though they are more of the ‘girls wont like it because its not pretty and that lowers my chances’ kind. Which really is more a deflection from the horrifying implications of HOW someone got scars like that.

In stampede, vash is also a little sheepish and makes a comment on how wolfwood seeing is scars is ‘embarrassing’.

But other than that, he doesn’t actually seem all that embarrassed about it. He doesn’t even bother covering up after milly and meryl saw him. Especially in trimax when he is traveling with wolfwood he does his training and stuff in just a sleeveless shirt and all. Like, vash genuinely doesn’t seem insecure about his scars (or his lost arm for that matter). Him covering up seems really more a habit than anything else, not because he himself feels any shame about how it looks but to avoid peoples reaction to what they see.

(yeah yeah, we all like to think we wouldn’t be judgmental, mind our own business, not be rude and stare but scares like vashs? With metal sticking out? You sure would look and you sure would wonder at least.) and vash likes just being some dude and not drawing attention.

Like, vash covering up his scares has more to do with him not wanting the extra attention than with him being self-conscious about them. I just thought that was kind of interesting.

(so far, vash also doesn’t seem particularly hesitant to let people get their hands on him to patch him up)

Vash going

Episode Eight

Yes I finally watched Trigun

WAIT ONE MOMENT, YOU'RE INTO TRIGUN??? I love your bsd art and scrolled through you blog and I saw trigun art and the actual gasp I let out xD!

Although as someone who loves Bsd and Trigun hear me out, I don't know how to explain it but Chuuya and Wolfwood would be friends somehow. If not friends, I'm sure they would understand each other to an extent and the thought of them sharing similar experiences and pains make me so :'DD

unfortunately I havent found a lot of trigun and bsd fans here so hope you don't mind me dropping by your inbox to drop this ask and thanks for letting me as well!

CONGRATULATIONS ANON YOU HAVE JUST OPENED MY EYES BC YES THEY WOULD DEFINITELY BE DRINKING/SMOKING BUDDIES AND WOULD DEFINITELY RANT ABOUT THAT ONE IDIOT IN THEIR LIFE

And yeah omg they did have such similar parallels in their past I’m—

Also yes hi I like trigun. I watched the rebooted one only tho,,, but I will—no, I shall—find the time to read the manga or watch the og anime :,3

thank you for dropping by! I appreciate this hehehe I hope you like the humble doodle :3 this post is officially calling out to any bsd and trigun enjoyers I hope anon finds more people through this :3!! It’s such an amazing series aaaaaaaaaa

honeymoon phase! (ID in alt)

Thinking about the fact that Knives loved western movies as a kid and liked the idea of gunslingers and how after the crash he took the gun from a man he killed and gave it to vash, not only because he wanted his brother to protect himself and join him in killing humans, but because he thought gunslingers were cool. He gave Vash a gun cause he thought having his brother be a gunslinger on a desert planet would be cool. Just like a western movie.

Im dying

ok i'll say it vash is a pacifist but he isn't passive. he does stuff. i think it's pretty unfair when ppl reduce his ideology to "he doesn't kill so he just lets ppl get away with stuff" i mean he's not perfect but he hardly just lets terrible people off with a slap to the wrist

Anytime I think about how much Vash loves to play with kids, I go a little bit insane

And then I think about how soft Wolfwood is towards kids & how protective he is of them. And I go even more insane.

These two really go so well together...

CAN YOU GUYS FUCKING HEAR ME.

In defense of the original, while I do agree the episodic vibes were a bit much at times, and it was something I kinda had to work my way through slowly rather than binging all in one...

I do kinda prefer the more gradual approach to laying out the information; getting to know both the setting and who Vash is as a person and the different facets of both, before getting the context that lets it all click into place. Plus the main quartet having ample time to grow together so that later developments have stronger emotional weight.

I will agree that Knives definitely suffered in focus, and I am interested in how Stampede handles him, but admittedly he wasn't really what I watched Trigun for in the first place. ^^;

yeah my gripe is less with the way the setting and characters were handled and more with the way the. actual plot was handled. it honest to god felt to me like they realized about halfway through their run that they didnt have enough episodes left to get the backstory in in a cohesive way so they just shoved it all into one episode and pretended that that explanation didn't create more questions than it answered. you spend 20 episodes teasing your audience like "ooooh what is vash?? clearly hes not human!! clearly there's something going on!!! don't you want to know whats going on?? keep watching and you'll totally understand whats going on!!" and then your big reveal is that. He Is Not Human. which is something that any idiot who has watched the last 20 episodes has already figured out. the question the audience ACTUALLY has at that point in the runtime is what, EXACTLY, is vash, and what the context is behind the conflict he and knives are in. the backstory episode explains that Knives Is Here, and it gives context to the setting and everything, but it pissed me off that it STILL didn't answer the actual mysteries i cared about, i.e. vash's real identity and the thing with the gun and his fucking arm and knives's motivations and everything. maybe that gets answered in the last episode that i neglected to watch but personally I prefer a story where i UNDERSTAND WHAT'S GOING ON by the time the final confrontation hits. with trigun it got to a point where vash was going out for the final battle with knives and i STILL didn't know who vash was, who knives was, where they came from, or what the hell their motivations were. that just made that final confrontation seem so wholly uninteresting to me that i didn't even feel like watching it. it was like "hey look vash is fighting a cardboard cutout that he is Afraid Of. Why? lmao idk man. probably has something to do with that weird spaceship that shows up in one whole episode before this point. not going to tell you how tho." I think some writers have this tendency to think that mystery = good writing and that not revealing anything to your audience will consistently draw them in for more, but that only works for so long. after 20 episodes of virtually net 0 information it got to feel like I was being strung along and like my questions were never going to be answered, so I gave up on the show in the final hour. Again, i'm not saying it was BAD necessarily and i understand the context in terms of writing and production that led to the show being produced that way but i think it really noticeably suffers due to the fact that it refuses to give the audience ANYTHING but crumbs of information for about 80% of it's runtime. that being said. i did genuinely like a lot of it. it has its moments. im not trying to discourage anyone from watching it or anything lol i just think stampede is a little more successful in keeping the viewer engaged in the story throughout by constantly feeding you bits of information and actually answering your questions as they become plot-relevant.