#basically the entire basis for vash's adult persona lbr
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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.
#trigun#trigun stampede#trigun maximum#millions knives#vash the stampede#me: i don't have the energy to write an essay#also me:#this is probably incomprehensible and I don't want to be the guy wot rags on stampede bc i genuinely love the show#and find it more watchable than the 90s anime (sorry)#but it's more fun to complain and critically analyze the characterization#and knives is just so important to me and the fact that he hasn't gotten a good adaptation is disappointing#his childhood personality is so core to his character and yet adaptations choose to make him cold rather than bubbly and hopeful#basically the entire basis for vash's adult persona lbr#anyway i had to hold myself back from writing an essay about knives and his expressiveness too#thinking about the way he reacted to the last run and seeing the plants happy memories and how he “greeted” midvalley and#him being calm and collected just feels wrong
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