#He did some things badly in Trigun Maximum too

[duncanor]

I don't disagree with you. Again, I'm not saying Orange did a bad job. That's probably on me for phrasing it badly. Stampede is different ( tho, I stand by it being sanitized compared to Trimax). I don't think it was without reason either. (and I suspect it was also due to technical limitations. I remember them sayin' they tried other designs for Vash but it was too difficult to animate. Which is fair 👍)

I think the change can lead to good things too. I complained earlier about the plants going from angel to flower imagery. But that can be interesting plotwise if they take a more ecological path with the story. (which was only hinted at in Trimax unfortunately). I also said Orange did put a lot of thoughts in their designs (and everything else tbh), I don't claim other wise.

Just like ya, I'm expressing a personal opinion, badly phrased perhaps, but I just think if we gained some things symbolism-wise with these changes we also did lose some things along the way. We did lose the queerer, dirtier aspect of it. It would be a lie to say otherwise.

I'm not saying Trimax is better in every way or that Stampede is not just as carefully crafted. It dares to do something fresh and different and I respect that, but I also think the new coat of paint is a bit blander than the original. Ir doesn't gut you like maximum did. It's far from empty, nor is it meaningless but it's not better. Which it does not have to be, but I personally am not as fond of it.

I'm still a firm believer Orange made a mistake by changing the sci-fi esthetic of trimax. They lost so much man. Like the raw mix between flesh and metal. The Biopunk disturbance of it all. It mattered.

And It's still there don't get me wrong (you could not fully remove it if you tried) but it's not as.. disturbing, as deviant ? Even though, it's supposed to be! It's the core of the story isn't it?

Living beings used as machines and treated even worst!

[rainbow-pop-arts]

This is part 1 of my Trigun Maximum vol 14 thoughts for @trigunbookclub!

Some thoughts on TriMax chap 90-92  under the cut!

Vash’s life journey ๑(◕‿◕)๑

Oh um….Chronica didn’t make it, did she? （´皿｀���）

Knives you bastard

WOAH WOAH WOAH GUYS, IT’S KID ELENDIRA……what’s with this page all of a sudden?

He’s controlling Elendira’s corpse to choke Livio! Legato you bastard! ヾ( ･`⌓´･)ﾉﾞ

WOLFWOOD

No way he actually shot Legato (just like ep 24 of ’98 trigun fr!!!)

｡ﾟ( ﾟஇ‸இﾟ)ﾟ｡

Yeah, looks like Chronica didn’t make it ( -_-)

Hoo boy, the look on Meryl’s face

STAWP

This is basically the “You are not alone” part of the song You Will Be Found from Dear Evan Hansen

Oh um……. looks like the crash was that bad. It’s a miracle lots of humans survived the fall

POLICE, WE HAVE YOU SURROUNDED

Let’s see how Knives is doing……….hm.

Feathers are falling and it seems to be the plants’ way to communicate

Ohohohooo, we get to see the humans’ progress since the fall

Plants have seen the horrific stuff of humanity but there’s lots of good ones too, like LOOK AT THIS!! (ᗒᗨᗕ) Kids going on a field trip, guys cleaning the bulb, an old lady praying (woah, it’s Kuroneko), LIKE ALL THESE IMAGES JUST MAKE ME FEEL…

(Beetlejuice the Musical)

Scold him, scold him, scold him! Scold his egotistical ass! -`д´-

That’s all for part 1! ♡(ﾐ ᵕ̣̣̣̣̣̣ ﻌ ᵕ̣̣̣̣̣̣ ﾐ)ﾉ

Bonus thoughts: ……Wow, things are starting to come together! （＾ω＾）So, Vash took Legato out of his misery and Chronica’s probably dead. I really like the part  where Meryl and Milly came for Vash, especially when Vash was on Meryl’s lap. (◕∀◕) Like, seriously, Vash needs some comfort and a break! They’re also trying their best to communicate with the plants and I think it’s working? I dunno, humans treated badly for lots of years so they’re very upset about that, but cool feathers are falling! I wonder how that glasses guy gonna deal with Knives?

(Anime: Skip to Loafer) Also, I kinda made a counting mistake with the chapters, sorry about that, and I just found out that vol 13 had an omake this whole time when I was checking out the other website where I first read Trigun & Trimax. The current website I’m using now doesn’t have the omake for some reason.

[severalspoons]

Long Rambling Trigun Meta Discussion 2

I *hate* the reply function in Tumblr. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t function. It doesn’t even open up a findable page so I can respond, and I can’t directly answer the reply. That’s why I reblog.

So, here’s the next best thing:

tiggymalvern

I don't recall anything like that fic you mention from either canon. It's a lovely idea, if only I could imagine Vash and Knives stopping arguing with each other for long enough to do it.

This fic I’m remembering was surprisingly hard to find, and now I’m wondering if it’s from FF.net rather than AO3. Will share once I find it!

The twins argue while doing it, IIRC, and have very different approaches. Luckily for the humans, in this fic the engineer likes the plant and takes care of it well, given how little is actually known about how to do so post-crash. Even so, Knives almost kills the engineer, but Vash stops him and leaves behind a little journal full of advice and encouragement. 

IMO, I feel like this is something Vash would be motivated to do more than Knives:

-- to repair his relationship with Knives

-- because he feels responsible for the people Rem saved

-- because he wants the bulb plants to be safe and happy

(listed in the order I thought of them)

But Knives would see this as slight progress towards Vash seeing things his way, so he’d go with it. What do you think?

tiggymalvern

I've never been entirely clear on the manga ending myself, and I think Nightow left it somewhat ambiguous deliberately. Vash and Knives are fighting, and then the earth forces attack them both, Livia intevenes and Vash and Knives fly off and

six months later we find Vash in hiding with the people who saved him, because Knives convinced them to, and then Knives plants an apple tree to help feed the peopl looking after Vash, and then he vanishes...

I assume he chose not to stay with humans and just went off somewhere, but it's left open

Interesting! Yeah, I got the sense it was supposed to be deliberately ambiguous, too. 

Many people say that Knives died giving his last energy to save Vash, to the point where I thought that was canon. 

No matter what happened with Knives and the tree, I have questions. If Knives planted the tree before dying or disappearing or whatever, I’d want to know where he got the apple seeds, and if providing the energy to make that tree survive on Gunsmoke killed him. If he turned into a tree (which I thought was the canon, but maybe not?), how? I can see why you didn’t interpret Knives as turning into a tree.

All I know for sure is, if Knives were dying, he’d want to do it on his own terms. Ideally in a way that would express his point and make an impression on Vash. I was going to say that creating a tree doesn’t seem like Knives’ style, but then I thought about the apple tree scenes in the anime. However that tree came to be, Vash would most likely associate it with happier times on the ship. Maybe he’d be fucked up enough to see it as a gesture of love. 

Maybe it was the closest thing to a gesture of love someone as manipulative and self-absorbed as Knives could manage...

tiggymalvern  Knives really is a person with no middle ground. When he believed Rem's teachings, he believed them wholeheartedly, that everything would turn out fine and people just needed to be given a chance. When he rejected those teachings and decided it was all just rubbish, he went maximum speed to the other extreme. Reject ALL humans, not just the individuals who had proven that they suck. And reject as in eradicate, not just avoid... 

I love Knives’ all-or-nothing way of being. Maybe because I know and love so many people with a little streak of that. And it’s so believable. Reminds me of a quote I read somewhere about how a misanthrope is a disillusioned idealist.

Knives thinks in utilitarian terms (”the greatest good for the greatest number with the least possible sacrifice”) as a kid for the few short scenes before he turns evil. He also seems to think in terms of groups rather than individuals (”humans,” “spiders,” “butterflies”). It saves him the grief Vash goes through at coming to know and lose so many people, but it also helps him justify a racist ideology. I love that about him, actually. If I were to write a Knives redemption fic, a key arc would be helping him learn to see others as individuals. I have a few paragraphs of something like that written...

Kids definitely need wonder and to see the beauty in the world, but it's also a good idea to mention the possibility of weird strangers offering candy that are best avoided. For these bizarre new non-human children, those warnings would have been extra pertinent, and maybe would have reduced the shock of what came after. Knives is definitely more mature than Vash in those flashbacks. Like you say, he wants to discuss issues with Vash, and Vash just parrots Rem. 

Agree.

I have a theory. Earth, in Trigunverse, seems a lot like our world, only worse.

I’ve seen a lot of people’s sense of wonder, beauty, fun, and curiosity squished. I was the weirdo in preschool, among other four year olds, for being too much like that. Maybe on Trigun Earth, a bleak place to begin with, that’s the norm. (And destroying people’s wonder/curiosity/etc. leads to depression and the ennui of modern life, but that’s another essay).

Some people, like those who run Waldorf schools, overreact by going to the opposite extreme. The worst, most ideologically rigid ones, deliberately wait to teach kids to read so they can explore the world unmediated by words a little longer. (And will even discourage kids who learn to read early, grr). Waldorf philosophy assumes young kids are basically sensing, feeling, and imagining beings, rather than thinking ones. 

I get the sense that Rem is one of these sorts. She was squashed and made to feel worthless for the way she saw the world. Maybe that’s part of the reason she was so depressed and needed Alex’s help. She’s raising the twins the way she wished she had been raised.

That sort of parenting wasn’t appropriate for a plant, of course. But no one had raised independent plants to adulthood before. No one knew what was appropriate. No one knew how to teach them about danger (or how not to). 

Growing up as a neurodivergent person in the Dark Ages, the only kid with allergies and sensory processing problems, etc., I understand all too well how badly things can go when even the most loving parents just don’t know what to do, and can’t find helpful information anywhere. Where helpful information isn’t just hard to find, but it doesn’t exist yet. 

So as critical as I’m being of Rem, I sympathize with her. She really didn’t have much to go on but her own knowledge and experience, and she bravely did the best she could.

Vash isn't thinking for himself yet, but he's a kid, so that's allowable. It does make it harder for Knives, though, who feels he has to be responsible for them both. 

You know, Knives does feel responsible for them both, and I hadn’t thought much about it and about the implications of that. No wonder he was so frustrated and furious. There’s definitely a sense of “something is deeply unfair and wrong” for a child trying to raise not only themselves, but their younger sibling(s).  Perhaps that’s part of the reason I saw Knives as caring about Vash, in his toxic, screwed up way. 

Plant biology is MASSIVELY confusing, and the more you try to piece it together, the more your head hurts LOL. But I think that's almost the point? ...Leaving the readers struggling to figure out the plants is the human perspective.

What do you think about the anime being so much from a human pov, especially considering that the most important characters in it are not?

Wolfwood is the support Vash needs to learn to control his plant powers among other things, the powers that have terrified Vash for so long that he ignored them. But Wolfwood isn't scared of them - or rather, he is, but not scared enough to abandon Vash because of them. He knows all about Vash, he knows all about July and the hole in the moon, he's seen Vash transform into some weird crazy thing with feathers, and Wolfwood still stays. Wolfwood lets Vash know that Vash's mistakes can be forgiven, and Vash is still a worthwhile person despite them. And because Wolfwood believes it, Vash can start to believe it. 

Between how well you put this and the dynamic itself, I’m...blown away and don’t know what to say. 

– “Vash, take care of Knives.” This breaks my heart because so far … he hasn’t. First he follows Knives around. Then abandons him. Then attacks him. I really do think Vash was trying. He followed Knives around for so long while being so angry with him for what he'd done, and yes, part of that was because he didn't want to be alone himself, but part of it was him trying to follow Rem's advice. 

Yeah, true, he did try at first. I undervalued it because by the time the series starts, that was far into the past and Vash probably doesn’t even remember it, but still.

In the manga, Rem specifically says, 'Vash, don't leave Knives alone,' because I think she recognises that Knives is prone to extremes and needs a balance. 

See, that instruction makes so much more sense. And I think the plants would have agreed. (Well, of course they would. They’re a collective consciousness, after all).

Rem probably also knew it’s bad for anyone’s health or sanity to be alone, and an emotionally unstable twin plant even more so. Knives would be in a solitary confinement of his own making.

Vash tried and tried to get Knives to change; he spent so much effort trying to explain why genocide wasn't the answer. But Vash failed, and eventually he recognised that he was always going to fail. So he left Knives, because he needed a life that wasn't that failure. He needed to do something to compensate for Knives. He took upon himself the responsibility of not only protecting the humans from Knives, but protecting the humans from the worst in themselves, which Knives' actions brought to the surface. And that is one hell of a lot to take on, and not a recipe for a happy life.

Yeah, that’s...a heroic life, but not a happy one. In a way, it seems almost as doomed as trying to change Knives.