#Nightow Wrote them so well

[revenantghost]

While it would be nice to think of Knives giving Legato his name as a moment of kindness, you know what else people name? Dogs they intend to use and abuse.

Knives and Legato's relationship is, well. Fucked up to put it mildly, there's a good reason so much of the fandom is drawn in by it. But at the end of the day, Knives actively refuses to see any person, even ones that he "loves" (*waves pointedly at Vash*), as an individual, and since the day he was born, Legato has only served a purpose and served others. He has no sense of self or self-worth, only blind devotion and extremely self-destructive behaviors.

In the end, this name is just a different mark of ownership from another abuser. The antagonists of this story excellently portray the cycle of abuse continuing instead of managing to break, and god is it so painful.

[aspensews]

I just wanted to talk somewhere about how much the relationships in Trigun and specifically Vashwood mean to me as an aromantic person.

I want to start out by saying that I have seen that for some aromantic people the term « queer platonic relationship » still doesn’t perfectly define what our close relationships are like, and I also feel this way, but I will be using that term in this for now since it’s the closest we have for the moment.

I say this because to me the relationship between Vash, Wolfwood, Meryl and Millie feels like what I would want in a qpr. They all obviously love and care about each other deeply in a way that can be interpreted as more than friends but isn’t exactly romantic either. And I love that Nightow never explicitly confirms any of the possible romantic relationships in the story to be such, because that means it is totally possible that these characters love each other this deeply without any romantic attraction.

Vashwood specifically is so incredibly important to me in this way. I was discovering I was aromantic at the exact same time as I was reading Trigun Maximum, and Vash and Wolfwood’s relationship honestly helped me realize I was aro because I realized it was possible to love in the same way as these two do without it being romantic. Nightow wrote them in such a way that the reader can choose to interpret whether they are platonic or romantic but that either way they love each other deeply, to the point that I have seen many describe them as soulmates. I personally describe their relationship as something deeper than friends but not necessarily romantic.

Reading about their relationship reminded me of exactly how I experience love for the people in my life and helped me a lot in not feeling sad when I finally realized I don’t experience romantic attraction. Because I already experience a lot of love that falls into this category and I don’t need romance to be happy.

On the more headcanon side, since the relationship is open to interpretation, I have kind of taken to imagining Vashwood/just the whole team as my ideal qpr where they are all platonic but sometimes have sex about it. I don’t often feel like the shipping communities in fandom are friendly enough for me to talk about a headcanon like this, but with Trigun I have found so many of the shippers to be so friendly and accepting of specifically the multishipping and the trans headcanons for the characters that I hope that maybe my qpr headcanon would be accepted as well.

So if you’ve made it to the end of this post, thanks for reading and if you’re queer haven’t watched and read Trigun I highly suggest it. It has such amazing writing, themes and a canon trans woman! (Elendira ❤️)

[lost-technology]

Explaining Vash Outside the Fandom!

So, today on another forum I mentioned Vash the Stampede. I mentioned him by way of "I don't ask myself WWJD? so much anymore as WWVtSD?" and explained "Vash the Stampede." I said "If anyone is unfamiliar with this name, go ahead and ask and I can fangirl all over you, but be warned, you will be reading all day." I got a taker. And then another taker who is a person on the forum who is straight up not having a good time right now and needs some distraction I feel - to read someone's dumb fangirling over a fandom they aren't in yet. So... I wrote up an essay explaining Vash the Stampede in Word and pasted it in shifts on the blog: (uck, looks like I'm gonna have to post this in shifts, too. Dumb tumblr!

*Flashes my fangirl license*  You asked about Vash the Stampede?  *Raises eyebrows.*  Big mistake.  You shall be here all day!  Vash is the protagonist of Trigun, an anime / manga by Yashiro Nightow.  Well, the manga is by him and there are two different animes to date, one originally airing in 1998 before the completion of the manga (and it gained the idea enough popularity that Nightow was able to continue the manga and purposefully took a different track to keep the story fresh.  Because he had to switch publishers the continuing story was titled Trigun Maximum).  As of 2023 there has been a reboot of the anime, Trigun Stampede, done in a cell-shaded CGI style that takes more cues from the manga.  It has done its own story elements, too, most notably having the City of July as a part of the story, making it almost a prequel, since the City of July is past tense in the other media.  A second set / continuation / completion of it is set for a future release date and as of yesterday, the “final phase” of the new anime will be titled Trigun Stargaze. Additionally, there was a feature-movie made in 2011 based solely upon the first anime titled Badlands Rumble, which is kind of the black sheep of the fandom (personally I enjoy it, find it very funny).  So, anyway, Vash is a tall blonde man with a Bart Simpson hairdo and a long red coat who lives on a desert planet with 10X the guns of ‘Murica.  There are two suns and five moons.  It’s a scavenger world where people barely eek out a living using a form of lost technology known as “Plants” – which are these energy and materials production entities housed in giant lightbulbs (or something more like tanks in Stampede).  No one knows how to create Plants anymore and few know how to maintain them, so everything is slowly dying (except, of course, the native sandworms.  Yep, there’s something Dune-like going on).  People live a half sci-fi half Old West existence and things are, again, very violent.  It’s a world where you have higher chances of making it out better as a bandit than a farmer.    Vash is a pacifist.  He is also an outlaw with Sixty-Billion-Double Dollars ($$) on his head because he has been shown to be capable of incredible destructive power.  Now, most of this comes accidentally from trying to weasel out of tough situations and people after him getting themselves hurt, but somehow towns fall apart.  Except for the City of July (or Jul-Ai in Stampede), which he did wipe out.  Under circumstances not of his own making or will, but the normal citizens of the planet don’t know that.  That was around 24 years ago in the first anime and in the manga.  July exists as of the beginning of Stampede.    Early on in the manga’s story, an insurance company that gets a lot of damage claims regarding damage he supposedly caused declares him a “Human Act of God” so as to avoid payouts.  He is assigned a pair of insurance agents, Milly Thompson and Meryl Stryfe, to follow him around to attempt to mitigate the damage he might cause.  In the anime, it is the same, except that his bounty is not removed for some reason.  (In the manga, the government removes his bounty per his “Act of God” status).  He is also known as the Humanoid Typhon, putting him in the same category as a destructive storm.  Vash-damage is thereafter treated in the same like as hurricane damage!  Honestly, this is one of the most creative things I have seen of any media – having the local superhero / super-cryptid followed by INSURANCE AGENTS. (I am fond of characterizing Trigun as “If Mayhem from the Allstate commercials was followed around by Flo from the Progressive commercials”).  (To Be Continued in Reblog-posts)

[kindaoptimisticsquirrel]

Trigun Bookclub Vol1 Ch4-5

Thoughts on ch4-5 below!

Previous review

This is just a panel that I liked, because of the idea of using props as graphic image elements (there must be a specific english term for what I’m trying to say). Like the pipe here! I just think it’s purely to make the image more interesting, maybe give some depth, since it creates a distinction between fore- and background. Nice!

In the span of two pages, Vash as seen to the left was really quick to eat...4, 5 sandwiches?? This boy is still growing it seems.

There’s noting super special to mention about this page apart from me again admiring Nightow’s paneling style. It is a pretty simple page layout, but that’s what I love about it! It’s simple, it’s easy to read, and most importantly, it’s not crammed with stuff that’s unnecessary and would just make it more complicated. Like, I also love other series that use detailed backgrounds and I’m a big fan of Inio Asano’s work “Dead Dead Demon’s Dedede Destruction” (google it, it’s the complete opposite) BUT there’s a certain skill to being able to simplify. To simplify, but make it interesting nonetheless! And we’ll see that Nightow is a master at that, because just have a look at his silhouettes and shapes!! Oh man I will be unstoppably in my adoration once we get to Trimax Wolfwood, he’s got the best shapes.

Hehe and I also love the backgrounds in this series. Look at these two house shapes! He could’ve just drawn them like two parallel blocks, but no there’s some diagonal lines, and even some whitespace beneath where the houses nearly connect at the top! And that I say nearly connect is also important, because often in drawings you don’t want lines to accidentally touch each other or the frame, as this is just giving that part of the image more focus that you might not want there. So either leave enough white space between it or just go completely through with it. (example maybe to show what I mean: on the left, Kaite’s hair doesn’t tough the frame border on the right. It is close, but still far enough away that you can connect the dark background as one element. His hair above on the other hand does cross the border of the panel...well not by much, but it works. I should probably give better examples but I hope you get what I mean?)

As the red text says: Look at that freaking beautiful panel to the right. DAMN that’s art. (ok well I wrote one image above smth about elements touching the frame and here the sandsteamer is really close to the frame on the left so I DO wonder if it would look even better if you moved it slightly to the right?

Does it make a difference? I’m really not sure. Anyway, moving on)

I love how Milly is unintentionally really deceptive!

This is just too cute! Look how happy Vash looks now that the child is eating! Letting out a little sigh of relief <:)

Kudos to that first panel for accentuating perfectly what is being said. Yes, it is very dark out there. Neither the characters nor the reader has any idea what might be hiding in the dark because it’s just A WHOLE PANEL MADE OF DARKNESS. And it needs that much black space! Again, wouldn’t have nearly as much impact if id would have just shown one of their faces looking outside while saying this.

Love this page for the flow, the dynamic. Also look how neatly foreground (BL gang) and background (sandsteamer) are distinguished from each other because of their differenct brightness! (all in all we have 3 neatly seperated layers: foreground with the cars, the middle which moves further away for the reader because it’s darker with the sandsteamer and then the background, which is just pitch black, so it’s aaaall the way in the back)

Loving their comic relief energy in the first volume :D

Spoilers so skip if you don’t want to read this:

Rem! Sniff! It is so dear to me that Vash misses his mother so much, and in his mind and dreams sometimes wanders back to her. He’s old, but in his heart, still a hurt and lost boy who’s all alone, missing the comfort of another person he could open up to. I like the fact that they are both laying in a grass field, something Vash probably never even experienced? I wonder if Rem told him about picnics. Maybe they made plans to have picnics, all three of them together, once they arrived on this new world...SOBS