#i did not feel up to rereading vol 10 so i could get details correct

[mydetheturk]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Trigun Stampede (Anime 2023), Trigun (Anime & Manga 1995-2008) Rating: Mature Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Meryl Stryfe/Vash the Stampede/Nicholas D. Wolfwood, Vash the Stampede & Nicholas D. Wolfwood Characters: Nicholas D. Wolfwood, Vash the Stampede (Trigun), Chapel the Evergreen (Trigun), Livio the Double Fang (Trigun), Razlo the Tri-Punisher of Death (Trigun) Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Near Death Experiences, Suicidal Ideation, Trigun Maximum Volume 10: Wolfwood, Trigun Maximum Spoilers, Dissociation, Blood and Violence, Canonical Character Death, Not Really Character Death, No Beta We Die Like Rem Series: Part 3 of Come Morning Light, You and I'll Be Safe and Sound Summary:

Oh god I feel so alive

You crack all the ampules of serum you have on you at the same time. You're not making this out alive. (You make it out alive?)

~~

You crack all the ampules you have, glass shattering in your mouth, down your throat, carving up your esophagus even as the serum in the broken ampules heals. There is one ampule left, deeper blue than the others. An antidote, supposedly. You won’t drink it. Not without being forced to.

You have higher priorities than your own life right now – Vash, Meryl, your kids.

Priority Target One is the man that made you the monster you are today, damaged goods, only good for murder. Priority Target Two is only in the way.

[nezumiismissing]

Pacing: What the Fuck Happened Here?

So I’ve finished rereading all of the novels, which means I can finally make a long post! There isn’t much to this one, but as I’ve said before, this is based on a small project that I started months before the blog, and I didn’t want to  start over on something completely different just to have to come back to this later. It also ended up being quite a bit longer that I anticipated, so sorry in advance.

Anyways! If you couldn’t tell from the title, this post will discuss the pacing of No.6, and what the differences between the pacing of the novels and the anime actually look like. I’m not going to talk about the manga here, mostly because I didn’t think of it until it was way too late to do it, but also because it follows the novels fairly closely, although in the future I may update this post to include it. I’m also not going to talk about the differences in events between the novels and the anime, because I would be writing this post for the rest of my life if I did that. I’ll have plenty of posts in the future discussing many of the events that were not included in both versions of the story, but for now we’re strictly going to talk about comparisons in pacing.

(There won’t be specific spoilers for anything, but if you haven’t read the novels and for whatever reason don’t want to know what is different, go read the novels. You will not regret it.)

For anyone already familiar with the anime reading the novels for the first time, there are a few things in terms of differences in pacing that are fairly clear, no matter how little you were paying attention to it during the anime. Among those I include:

The timescale of Episode 1 vs Volume 1

The placement of the cave/Nezumi’s backstory scene

The timescale of the climactic arc of the story (entrance —> exit of the correctional facility)

There may be others that people noticed on their first reading, but those three especially stood out to me, and the last two especially felt like major changes that really shifted the flow of the story. I’ll summarize every episode and volume later on, but how do these three events match up between the anime and novels? How different are they really?

Although though Volume 1 does not contain certain events that take place in Episode 1, it still only takes 14 pages to get through the entirety of Nezumi and Shion’s introduction, up until the point where Nezumi leaves Chronos. While overall this is a fairly minor thing, it is kind of strange the first time you read it to see the events, made up of practically the entire introduction to the story, take place over only 14 pages rather than an entire 20 minute episode. This also makes it one of the few points which is really noticeably shorter in the novels than the anime.

The scene in the cave, in which we discover Nezumi’s backstory, as well as more information about No.6, seems to be about the same length between the novels and the anime, and remains mostly the same between the two versions; however, where it differs is in where it is placed within the story. In the novels this scene takes place after Shion and Nezumi have entered the basement of the correctional facility, while in the anime it takes place quite a long time before this (episode 8 for the cave, episode 10 for the basement). As will be a running theme in this post, I have no idea why they changed this. Do I think the placement of this scene has an especially profound effect on how the story works? Maybe. Does it make more sense to have it where it is in the novels, and was I completely confused when I read it for the first time? Yes. I feel that the purpose of this scene is to give us one last moment of relative peace after the events of the basement and before we have to confront the rest of the facility, so moving it seems pointless and somewhat detrimental to the flow of the story.

The correctional facility. Clearly the most important and action-packed arc of the entire series. In the anime, it takes up two episodes, which I would say is a fair, but maybe slightly short amount of time to get through everything. In the novels, we have the other extreme, with the entrance to the basement of the correctional facility taking place across the end of Volume 4/beginning of Volume 5. Even if we remove the cave scene, that still leaves this arc of the story taking place over 3 entire volumes, plus the multitude of events that take place in Volume 9 which are entirely cut from the anime. In total, for the entirety of the events from the last two episodes to be shown, the last five volumes of the novels must be read. Again, I’m not going to go into all the things that are left out of the anime that do explain much of this disparity in pacing, but even without those events, we are left with an arc that is significantly longer and more developed than the anime showed.

But what about the rest of the series? Surely the anime follows the novels decently throughout the rest of the story, right? While in many ways the pacing is not quite so extremely different through the middle section of the story, many things get shuffled around and reordered, creating some interesting-looking lists of comparison. Below are the two lists I made that compare the overall event structure of both the anime and the manga. The first list states at what point in the novels every major event from an episode is shown, while the second states what episodes contain events that are in each volume:

Episode 1- Vol.1 pg 14

Episode 2-Vol.1 pg 49

Episode 3-Vol.2 pg 35

Episode 4- Vol.4 pg 68

Episode 5- Vol.4 pg 51

Episode 6- Vol.4 pg 55 (most of this was completed by Vol.2)

Episode 7- Vol.3 pg 67

Episode 8- Vol.6 pg 69 (most of this was completed by Vol.3) 

Episode 9- Vol.4 pg 74

Episode 10-Vol.7 pg 63

Episode 11- Vol. pg 66

Volume 1- 1, 2, 3, 4

Volume 2- 3, 4, 5, 6

Volume 3- 5, 6, 7, 8

Volume 4- 4, 5, 6, 8, 9

Volume 5- 8, 9, 10

Volume 6- 8, 10

Volume 7- 10

Volume 8- 10, 11

Volume 9-11

Here the result of the correctional facility arc starting so late in the anime becomes fairly clear, since 4 volumes of content now had to be stretched out over 9 episodes (Volume 4 seems to have gotten the worst of it). We can also see where lots of things were shuffled around (episode 7). These may not be exact either, since many of the repeating events had both locations and details shuffled, making it difficult to judge which one I was looking at. This was especially troublesome in terms of the meetings between Yoming and Karan, since details were shuffled to the point of none of the meetings being able to be identified as a specific event. I also struggled to decide where I should mark the end of Getsuyaku’s segment, since he only appears very briefly in the anime, and isn’t even really a character, yet he plays an important role in the novels. Either way, the lists are as accurate as I could make them.

So how does this change the story?

Well, like I said earlier, a lot of the differences in pacing are a result of so much being taken out from the period during and after the correctional facility arc, as well as much of the novels consisting of internal monologues and descriptions, which obviously don’t translate well to audio-visual format. Because of these factors, I think it’s hard to say exactly how pacing specifically affects the story, but the effects are definitely there. Because of how episodes are formatted, most of the scenes in the anime are the same length, causing scenes that explained important information about what was going on to be cut short or written strangely (Safu and the Mother and the cave scenes come to mind), while slower paced scenes were stretched out over longer periods. The timing of the correctional facility arc in the anime also erases a lot of the urgency of the situations the characters find themselves in (difference between the amounts of time from Safu’s disappearance —> entering the correctional facility). I’m surely not the first, nor will I be the last, person to say this, but No.6 would have greatly benefited from having that extra 12th episode.   With another episode, more time could have been spent in the correctional facility (I would have loved to see more of the stuff from the basement scenes), and on telling us what was really going on with No.6.

So why did they shuffle things around so much? Honestly, I have no idea. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time thinking about this, and although I can come up with a million and one ideas about why certain things were cut from the anime or added into the story, I have absolutely no explanation as to why it was necessary to change the order of both major and minor events in the story. Why are all the events in Episode 7 taken from Volume 3, while Episodes 8 and 10 are spread out across four different novels? I don’t know. I can’t even begin to explain it. I’m sure there are reasons for it, but since the ordering of events seems to have almost no impact on how we understand the “second act” of the story, I see no reason for it to have been changed. But I suppose it doesn’t really matter that much anyways, and I’m just overthinking things like always.

In conclusion, the pacing of the No.6 novels vs. the anime is so remarkably convoluted that I’m not even sure I’ve figured it out, and I wouldn’t recommend looking too deeply into it.

If you made it all the way through this post, congratulations! You made it through a short essay about a topic most people don’t care about from a series that ended six years ago! But for real, if you made it this far, thank you for reading! It’s not the best thing I’ve ever written, and it’s certainly not the most exciting topic, but I had a lot of fun with it, and that’s all that really matters, although hopefully I’ll write about more interesting things in the future and we can talk about lots of fun topics like character arcs and specific scenes (If you have ideas for topics let me know!). I’m hoping to get posts like these out about once a month, but I’ll be writing mini posts and random No.6 thoughts I have at random intervals between longer writings, so look out for those!