I know people quibble about it not being as good as the og anime, but it just boggles me, tbh. It literally feels like a story that would have been told in the series, just in a longer, higher-budget format. Sure, it's not the best story out of the series, but it's also not the worst. What did people want? Except more stuff from the manga, maybe? But
The only real quibble I had with it was just how hard they leaned into Vash's womanizing at the beginning, but I will again point to him knowing more about people than he lets on and seeming to always latch onto women that were up to something and say that he literally was just keeping an eye on her so she couldn't cause too much trouble.
ALL THAT BEING SAID. A Trigun story with this animation instead of the honestly often-crunchy, janky animation from the 1998 anime? WHAT'S NOT TO LOVE???
All shots of the babyboy because obviously. Babyboy. But the point still stands, the animation is so good, it's obvious that Madhouse got so much better in that 15 year gap!
I am very confused by the color of Vash's eyes in the first cap, though. He was very well established as having green eyes until Stampede, and the other BR shots have them as green, too, so I am just...wat?
Also, uh, Vash, sweetie. Can we talk about this problem you have, smiling at inappropriate times? That's legit a thing, and he does it when he's McFuckin' Losing It.
Also, the fact that one of the things that broke him the hardest was when, immediately after killing Legato, he remembered calling Wolfwilood a coward for killing people, and it's just like. He can't apologize, anymore. He wants to, but Nicholas is gone, and he'll never get to.
There'a a part earlier where people are trying to stome him, they actually clock him in the head! And Meryl looks at him and he'a just smiling! And she's like "How can you smile?" and he just straight up admits he doesn't know how to react.
Which is exactly what inappropriate affect is about; the body learns to associate the affect with the wrong emotion and starts doing it automatically ;;
developing your personality in situations where it's not safe to show various kinds of negativity, and the body goes "oh, this is where we smile so we don't get screamed at or aggressively gaslit! cool cool cool c:"
(also if we learn the appropriate affect simply won't be responded to appropriately -- emotional neglect and coldness is just a different kind of violence to a developing nervous system)
Yeeeep. People don't respond in a good way when he's showing his real self, so he buries that and just focuses on HAPPY DUMB BLOND GUY, LOOK, NOBODY CARES ABOUT ME BEING THIS WAY, IT'S SAFE, NO NEED TO LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN! Which is interesting, how anger is one of the few things he shows genuinely, and doesn't that make you wonder?
Either 1) All those years spent traveling with Knives, who's own emotions tended towards anger and therefore That Is The Appropriate Response unless it's directed at Vash, and then Quiet And Sweet And A Pushover is more appropriate, or 2) His depression is so severe that he doesn't ever feel anger strong enough to learn the wrong response to it, until
Granted, he did the Inapropriate Smiling when he was a baby, too, just once. When he thought for a second he'd accidentally killed Rem. But then Tessla trauma. His head was very much not screwed on properly at that moment.
And I think that was less "inappropriate emotional expression" and more "Actually enjoyed the violence" before the horror set in and he realized what he'd done and who those impulses had actually hurt.
Makes perfect sense to me. Growing up around others' anger, Vash would have had plenty of opportunities to think about whether the way people took opportunities to express anger was hurting everyone unnecessarily, and even if it's not all conscious or intentional, he developed strong personal values about it and can show it genuinely,
Yeah, honestly. He still doesn't like to show anger, he prefers to find ways of fixing problems that don't end up with him being angry because people are happier when he's not. But he understands anger.
He does. He knows the difference between honest anger that things are not okay and petulant self-centered blowups, and when he does the latter, it's as a joke.
Hooded Figure
: Naw, honestly, it does make sense, manga or anime, doesn't matter. The things I'm mentioning here are the fact that after the crash, he exclusively wandered the desert with no one but Knives and his crazy, deranged self. For 80 fucking years.
And when I mention the Tessla thing, it's where the twins discovered that they had had an older sister. Born about 50 years before them. Who the humans had vivisected and experimented on so much that she was riddled with cancer and died before she was a year. And they found her preserved, dismembered remains in preservation tubes.
They were only a year old themselves. It's what drove Knives to do what he did, made him ho from someone as sweet and loving as Vash to the monster he became. But before he hit that point, he went unconscious. Just completely catatonic. And Vash, terrified that the humans would do the same thing to them, locked the two of them in the same room with the
remains. For days, at least. Rem kept begging him to open the door. He was starving himself when she finally got him to open up. He was literally wasting away and told her to just kill him She's like "HAH NNNNNOPE OH GOD GOTTA HELP MY POOR SON Q_Q" and kept trying to talk him down and get him to eat. One day, she brought in a piece of fruit and is
peeling it with a pairing knife for him, and he straight up grabs the knife to try and kill himself. She grabs it by the blade, he yanks it, and cuts her wide open, and she passes out. And for a split second, he was as axe-crazy as Knives is later on, looking at the blood on his hands and just grinning. And then he snaps out of it and is horrified.
The next pages show Rem waking up in the medical wing, patched up, Knives is still unconscious across the room on his own bed, and Vash is sitting all the way across the room from her, all by himself, just staring. But he's got a space-food packet in his mouth and just sloooooowly drinking it.
She really was. She had her own traumas she was working with, (one being that she had been on that previous science team. She carried that guilt, and she hid the boys from the rest of the crew because of it. She was going to forge them documents and put them into cryosleep with her when her shift was over.) and it effected the way she raised them that may
But yeah, that's also why in Stampede, they show Vash very blatently refusing to eat when he's at his lowest. MR. Pizza Toast and Donuts and Spaghetti Fiend actually has some very bad coping mechanisms regarding food, too.
Not least of which because they show him also being upset about not being able to produce things like a plant should, though they say Knives can, and Knives doesn't want nor need to eat, and he thinks it's a waste if he does. Vash sees himself as a waste of resources, he internalizes when he hears, as a child, the humans calling him a monster, treating him
Honestly, if you wanted to read it, I could link you to the manga online. I never in a million years expected it to be as deep and real as it is, having only watched the og anime years ago. It touches on so much stuff, and I'm glad they're touching on that stuff in the new show.
Hooded Figure
: And also yeaaaah, when I think about those 80 years he was with Knives, it's honestly a miracle to me that he's as well-adjusted as he is. And that's saying something. Because HOO BOY, babyboy should be just completely unhinged, but he managed to hang onto his sense of self really well for enduring that much trauma and
And there have been lots of fans talking about wanting an AU where Tess lives, and I'm like "YES. PLEASE. LET US SEE THE AU WHERE THEIR SISTER LIVES AND HELPS RAISE THEM WHEN REM FINDS THEM. ;_;"
all this because he'd just...grown a feather out of his arm that caught a bullet headed for his face. So he was already not feeling very great, anyway. It's one of the first times his Plant form had started manifesting, and he was obviously rattled by it. So then that happened, and WELP. VASH IS NOT HAVING A GREAT DAY.
Also, the part with Meryl is because he can be legitimately terrifying when he transforms. She has an entire character arc where she has to overcome her fear of him. It's upsetting for them both, because she really does care about him, but literal eldritch horrors happen.
Like. They always joke about how much of a crybaby he is, but it really is just a symptom of how bad things are in his head. It's probably not even that he's a legitimate crybaby, he's probably just 24/7 at his breaking point. Never gets to calm down or have a break. It's implied that the Plants are in general a species that feels things more
Like. I appreciate that Nightow didn't write him as a stereotypical stoic, no emotions alpha male type hero. Showing a heroic man in media who isn't afraid to cry is great. But oh boy does Vash cry so much that it's very obviously a sign of Not Great Things.
Honestly, Vash trying to get him to stop saying "stupid things" always hurt. Like. He's trying to keep their banter up, but he just can't do it right. He's literally breaking while Nicholas dies and it just comes out flat. He doesn't want Wolfwood to be saying goodbye and apologizing for bullying him, that's just what they did, that was their
banter, they teased each other, they annoyed and ribbed, and they were always there for each other. He doesn't want Wolfwood to apologize for that, he doesn't want him to think that he misunderstood why he did what he did.
Honestly, I think Nicholas dying is one of those things that will have an effect on him for the rest of his life, just as strongly as Rem did. Maybe even more than everything else Knives did to him, taking Wolfwood from him is just...that broke him in ways I don't think he will be able to heal from easily.
I still like to imagine that he's going to have a few good years or decades and hopefully get to see No Man's Land after they've started being able to really thrive and maybe get some peace before he burns himself out. But yeah. He's running on borrowed time, and I honestly don't think he cares.
Even with a ton of therapy, if they even have that in their world because L O L good luck having one of the few survivors fo the Big Fall being a therapist who passed their field onto the next generations, he's been through some very severe traumas that even therapy can't help. Sometimes you just break too hard.
The best I can imagine for him is him finally deciding to settle down in Home after a few years, where people know and trust and want to keep him safe, or Hell, maybe if Independents are born enough before he's gone, there develops a little community of them that he can settle down with. But that's more going into AU territory than legitimate speculation.
Also, the girls are...being a problem, lbh. That's the one thing about the manga that makes me side-eye, and I know you haven't gotten there yet, but they...kind of make things harder for him in a way that I feel like they should know not to do.
It's meant as a jokey sort of callback to the beginning of the manga, and I feel like Nightow was trying to bring some of the levity back to the series after putting the readers through so much trauma, but it just feels a little like a betrayal, what they do.
I feel like at least at Home, the people like him enough not to turn him over. He's a legitimate part of the community, they love him there. TBH, the elders probably see him as one of the community's children, just a really special one that needs extra care because of what he is and has been through. But those elders also won't live forever, sooo... :/
Also Livio won't live very long, either. It's pretty much stated that the Eyes of Michael have shortened life spans, anyway, because of the experimentation and the serum they've been taking. So...that will probably hurt him all over again, when Livio goes.
It's really sad, though, cause it kind of came up in the thread I have with the Livio on DW. They were you know, joking about things that they could do now that all the shit had blown over, if he could just catch a break. He laughed about having a desk job. But he ended up breaking down in the middle of it because he just doesn't know how to stop
running. And also /vague waving at That Couch/ recent trauma and grief they were both dealing with. And also Livio's everything, too. Those two are a mess and they need to both be wrapped up in blankets and patted on the head and told they're good boys and in a purely non-molesty sort of way.
he IS a part of the community but they at least this far consider themselves tied enough to earth so it's less that they would turn him in and more that earth people would be with them
slams her fist down on her growing Wolfwood muse's head, shoves him back down, kicks his knees out so he can't stand back up again, SIT YER ASS BACK DOWN
......lol actually, now that I think about it, that makes me imagine him getting a case of the cute aggression Tristamp Vash has been giving the fandom, and he's so angry about it! He doesn't know how to deal with this!
Though I think it'd be less "cute aggression" and more "aggressively worried because this one is somehow even softer than the man he knows, he's going to get himself killed even faster!"
............./sighs and goes to think about journal names because now Wolfwood is just breathing down her neck like "If you don't let me at him, woman, I will murder you in your sleep."
man, right? And that makes it even worse. Though I also feel like Nicholas probably is aware of that, and...doesn't really blame him. He wishes he didn't, and that the world wasn't such a fucked up place so that someone as stupidly altruistic and kind and caring as he is didn't have to be brutalized so hard. But he literally understands better than
anyone. No Man's Land is a horrible, brutal hellscape and none of them are getting out of it alive, let alone in one piece. Lesser men have killed themselves after only a fraction of the things Vash has been through, so either he's giving him credit for being a lot more resilient than people would expect or questioning if he's some sort of masochist.
...>_> Looking for icons, I find this page. And I'm like "Huh, interesting way to do the colors, it might come in handy even though I don't use ps..." and then I get to the part about the skintone they used.
I'm not even one of the people that noticed that Stampede WW was that much lighter than he'd originally been. It never occurred to me until people pointed it out, and I was like "Oh, boo, you're right." But come on, he is at the very least obviously supposed to be...Mediterranean? Latino? Something not White European, at the very least.
Like. The post is 15 years old at this point, so...I guess I should be a bit more lenient and give them the benefit of the doubt, hopefully they learned their lesson since then? But yeah. Mega Oof.
l o l uhhhh oops. Just accidentally spoiled Wolfwood kicking the bucket to someone on tumblr. They were like "Eh, Stampede was ok, but Wolfwood and Vash weren't very gay in that one, so I started watching the original series, and OMG THEY'RE SO GAY HOW IS NOBODY TALKING ABOUT THIS???" and I, assuming they got their info from the fandom and so had
therefore been thoroughly spoiled by now because it's literally everywhere, it's as ubiquitous and hard to dodge as Vash being a Plant, was like "LOL If you think it's bad there, wait until you read the manga! They're soulmates and don't realize it until Wolfwood dies!" and they were like "WAIT WAT??? OMG DON'T JUST DROP THAT BOMB!"
LOL yeah, no, see, I was very confused, because this person doesn't seem to be watching the same stuff I am, anyway. Other than, you know, OG Anime being super gay.
Yeah, I try not to spoil things from this, even though it's a really old fandom, this one just slipped up on me. lol But it's literally just...everywhere. The fandom has collective Couch-Related PTSD. We can't get over it.
The fact that Vash is just sitting there...looking forward...staring, expressionless behind his sunglasses made it even weirder. Like why would he just be hanging out with Wolfwood's body??? Because that's literally the moment it happened, me.
Something that kind of amuses me is people criticizing the new Wolfwood because he's "a terrible priest," because he's unkempt, etc. When like...that was always the point.
Man, this art is so pretty. ;_; It feels like just...a snapshot of one of the few moments when they're just happy for a little bit. Like they've been ribbing each other, but playfully and not bitingly like it can get when they're frustrated with each other, and they just gave each other a bit of the giggles. And of course
Even my sister is like...coming up with AUs where Wolfwood lives because she's like "Nope. The canon is all well and good, great story, respect what it's going for, but GIMME AN ENDING WHERE EVERYONE LIVES" XD
Hell, honestly, in Crack!AU Crossover, I have a feeling that if Vash knew that Nick was still alive, even if he had gotten shunted off to another reality that Vash couldn't get to, he'd be happy. Shit, he's fine, oh God, ok, he's safe, fuck! But you can't ever see him again. THAT IS OK. HE'S ALIVE.
When Nick dies, Vash breaks down, right? You don't see until the next chapter that in his grief, when Knives flew by overhead as it happened, Vash expended a massive amount of energy to shoot at him from below. It's...I think the first time after Eriks gets his hair cut off that you see so much more black hair than you expected. It had been stable for the
Right? He's just hurting, constantly, living on borrowed time when he shouldn't have survived. But he did, so he's going to keep on surviving, and maybe one day it will make sense, or hurt less. He doesn't know. He's just doing the only thing he knows how to do.
Preetty much. Honestly, that's one of the few things I think I liked about the abrupt ending in the old anime. He made a conscious decision to yes, always remember Rem, but to move on, and start living life in a way that he wanted instead of holding himself to the impossible standards his memories of her made him inflict on himself.
Ok, you know what? We've already seen all of the adorable chibis for the official Saloon-Owners AU from the popup shop, right? these are apparently a collab with karaoke bars or something? LOOK AT THEIR ADORABLE LITTLE SUITS! THEY'RE SO PRECIOUS! ;w;
Ok, I just wanna talk for a second about how much I love the moment in the first ep of Tristamp, when Vash is up on the cliffside, waving down at Meryl and Roberto before the duel, all "WOOH, HEY! HI! 8'D WOOH!" and then it does a closeup shot of him turning to walk to his spot on the field, and when he's out of sight of the others, his smile drops and he
just is like "...Meh." /Waves dismissively at the city/ Like that was such tired old-man energy, and it's such a funny contrast, and it just perfectly shows Public-Facing Vash vs Actual Vash. XD
Every time I see that part, I just crack up. He really is just a really tired old man with a young man's face. Go take a nap, Grandpa, you've earned it.
Right? ;_; Honestly, I have a feeling people have been misreading that scene when he starts panicking, 'cause they talk about how much of a wimp he is in Stampede or whatever, but like...No, he's always been that way. And he's not pretending there, he's legitimately upset, he thought he could stop this, but now he can't and all those people are gonna
Also Ooooooooh. Oh, ow. Someone mentioned in Badlands Rumble, after Vash "died," Wolfwood was shown in his motel room. Quiet and just...thoughtful. Being contemplative about Vash's ideals and how they'd led to him getting himself killed. And the room is fine. But then it cuts to outside the window, and you hear a smash. And when you see him in the
He doesn't open his mouth wide enough to show them in Stampede, usually. XD The fandom has been a little feral over them and adding them into fanart, but they were always there, just hidden!
Also, you wanna know something that's fuckin' adorable? How close Livio and Vash hit it off pretty much immediately, the first day after Wolfwood's death notwithstanding. Like that first night is rough, Vash is cranky and dealing with so much grief, he's prickly and surly and standoffish. But then after that? They literally just turn into a couple
of giant sad puppies with each other. Vash is obviously so protective of him and wants to take care of him, but they're just...like literally two peas in a pod, both suffering the same sort of guilt and trauma in their own ways, but both just massive sweet teddy bears, and when Vash will try and do something with him and it goes a little awry, Livio is just
It really made the part of that Meteion-Meets-Vash crossover fic, where it talked about them being intimate over the years even if Vash couldn't love him the way an actual lover would because he was still dealing with losing Wolfwood seem really believable. They're both fucked up, they both need companionship and someone to help them forget the fucked up
me threading with the livio Livio I'm good at doing the heavy lifting me, in brackets: ... is that why you're trying to pick up vash's emotional baggage, livio
LOOK. Literally my Vash just now was like, after 30+ tags between the two of us, "Hey, we keep apologizing for everything at each other. Let's just agree to stop, ok?" because they kept making each other break down!
It's amusing to me, istg. XD He couldn't even get through the whole thing without like..."I totally forgive you for everything ever if you'll.....................tell me which thing specifically you want to punch me for now so I can apologize for it and then stop." even though there's literally nothing Livio has blamed him for. It's just his own inner
Except more stuff from the manga, maybe? Butthe anime had already established that it was a very different beast, so again, WHAT DID PEOPLE WANT?!?All shots of the babyboy because obviously. Babyboy. But the point still stands, the animation is so good, it's obvious that Madhouse got so much better in that 15 year gap!To which me and my sister both go "HE PRODUCES SERATONIN. YOU LEAVE HIM ALONE!" XDhe won't stay with them because dangerous
slams her fist down on her growing Wolfwood muse's head, shoves him back down, kicks his knees out so he can't stand back up again, SIT YER ASS BACK DOWN/will be out here casually threadstalking you both though
never say neverRight? B] You just gotta get knocked into another reality by one of your sisters like my TriMax Vash did. Twice. L O L I mean WOT.and then stamp nick poofs and watch the breakage you missed the first timelook that image I linked in my plurk
everyone wants him to live
so he'll live
sort of
Livio I'm good at doing the heavy lifting
me, in brackets: ... is that why you're trying to pick up vash's emotional baggage, livio