#Like yeah now Vash has a massive guilt complex

[chuthulhu-reads]

[ID: Five panels from Trigun Maximum. The background and borders are solid black instead of solid white. Before the first panel are speech bubbles saying, "Mama. Mama, look!" The second panel shows a small child pointing as his mother, a pretty woman with a kind smile, crouches next to him. In the second panel, the mother looks down at the child and says, "She's pretty, isn't she?" The little boy, still staring up, asks, "Why..." In the third panel, he looks up at his mother and continues, "...Is she in there?" In the fourth panel, the mother puts her hands on the kid's shoulders and looks up as she says, "She's... working." In the fifth panel, the mother smiles back down at her son as she says, "It's thanks to her that you, mama and papa can live here safely." The little boy looks confused. End ID.]

I WEEP over this flashback. They're introducing the plant to their child not as something weird or alien, but pretty. Not as a thing, but a person who's working, who's not just property of the community but a crucial member of it. In the next panels, the mother prompts her child to thank the plant in a way that looks both like a hyper-respectful Japanese bow and Christian prayer.

[ID: Three panels from Trigun Maximum. The first shows the little boy pointing up with a big smile. Behind him, his mother is looking back over her shoulder at her husband, a smiling man in glasses. The little boy is saying, "Mama, look! She smiled!" The second panel shows the little boy still looking up and smiling as, behind him, his parents talk and laugh together. In the third panel, the boy is turning away and looking at his parents, saying, "See?" as the father smiles and waves and the mother looks surprised. After the last panel, there's black space, and a last speech bubble saying, "She smiled..." End ID.]

She smiled. She smiled at a child smiling at her. She smiled at a child who was alive because of her. She smiled at the people who loved her and prayed to her and thanked her. She treasured them enough to remember their smiles even after being fused into the horrendous amalgamation in the Ark.

[ID: Two panels from Trigun Maximum. The first shows Knives looking startled, wide-eyed and sweating, the left side of his face flaking somewhat. The second panel shows him standing on a walkway over a huge mass of fused plants, an uncomfortably fleshy mess of wings, veins, and random limbs. Knives is saying, "Was that..."]

LOOK at that. Knives himself knows he's at risk of losing his sense of self inside that mass, and Chronica later says that plants don't innately have an individual sense of self to begin with. Yet one of those plants remembered some of the humans she once supported fondly enough to cling to that memory, no matter what; or, perhaps, that memory was so beloved by every other plant that saw it that they all kept it, all shared it and held it close to their hearts, all that love battering against Knives' shaky mental walls of rage and hatred and fear.

[ID: A chaotic double-page spread from Trigun Maximum. The first four panels show a quick sequence of Knives falling to his knees and gasping as he clutches at his face, his eyes widening desperately. The next three panels are thin slices, each showing a larger and larger number of random people, like you're pulling out from a crowd that just keeps getting bigger. Despite how many people are crammed into each panel, artistic effort has been put into making each face unique and distinct from each other. The next face shows Knives' face literally cracking and splitting into a number of panels showing the Project Seeds ships, stars in space, the shooting-star image of the ships falling, a sun rising over ruined ships, and the elongated arms of a plant reaching out from among folded wings. A panel at the bottom of the page shows Knives screaming as it looks like the flesh is actually melting off of his face. The last panel shows Elendira running towards him, crying out, "Knives!" End ID.]

I really think, at the end of the day, the plants don't necessarily mind being relied on as producers, because I think they love life and creation. They've held onto all of these faces, all these people who were alive because of them. Short of the horror of the Last Runs, maybe they take pride in what they do. Maybe seeing other lives flourish from theirs makes them happy. We don't know for sure, but for all the body horror in their imagery, they are still, ultimately, evocative of angels. And they're reaching out to Knives with enough love for humanity to fracture the walls in his mind that he's put up against the reality of what the Big Fall was, against remembering that he did once love humans, and then he killed tens of millions of them. Being forced to see humans as Vash and the other plants do--as individuals, as living things, as people--is literally tearing him apart. God this page is a real artistic flex from Nightow, both in terms of panel composition and just thumbing his nose at mangaka that draw the same three faces forever