#it absolutely sends me that knives ACTUALLY GOT his lame cowboy planet

[nanomooselet]

Episode Zero: High Noon At July

So anyway, Vash is right about everything.

Yes, I'm exaggerating. There are plenty of caveats to Vash's ideals. There are hard ethical questions surrounding humanity's relationship with the Plants, and those will have to be answered or neither species is going to survive much longer. But nothing's going to get better if all they have is Vash, busy getting shot at, and Knives, busy getting his brother shot at. What Vash has been struggling with from the opening minutes of the show is that he's been assuming all the blame for what Knives does, taking punishment and abuse from him and from humans without a word of protest, simply because he believes it's what he deserves.

And it's not. It never has been. He's never been to blame. It is, unequivocally, something Knives did to him.

From those same opening minutes, Knives has been the twin with agency. Never mind that he caused the fleet to crash and instigated the entire plot, or that he was also the one who actively sought to discover Rem's secret; I mentioned before that he offered Rem a choice before escaping in the shuttle. But what I noticed the second time was something equally crucial. Nai is the one piloting the shuttle. Vash is just a passenger, carried along as Nai steered, subjected to his decisions and forced to bear the consequences for his actions. And Nai didn't exactly... ask to be one piloting. He just sits in the chair and takes the stick, not a word said. He assumes agency for himself and for Vash both without room for discussion.

When Nai offered Rem a choice, and she refused, he resolved to give no one else he loved a choice, ever again. But Vash never got a choice, not with Nai. And that became a pattern.

When Nai told Vash: you're my accomplice, you're the one who gave me the program access code (I'm all but one hundred percent certain he means that when Vash accessed Tesla's records, Nai remembered the code he entered), Vash started to run. He fled. He couldn't bear the culpability - it's pretty much the instant he began to engage in suicidal ideation. He ceased to exercise his agency because he believed it lead to this unimaginable horror. The die is already cast: he's Nai's accomplice. It's decided.

Or rather, Nai decided.

Did Vash really keep running for a hundred and fifty years? Well, no, not quite - Knives (naturally) called time-out when Vash pointed a gun at his face. Just wait for a short while...a mere century or so. I promise I'll build a world of Plants. Even he, I think, realised slicing off Vash's arm was a bit of a dick move and had to regroup. But a hundred years later the game was back on and Knives's next move was founding his cult, stealing Plants, committing murders and framing Vash, and Vash was just as bereft of agency as before.

Vash the Stampede is a name that humanity gave him, but they gave it to him because of Knives. Note how it fits the naming scheme of the other members of his cult. Zazie the Beast. Elendira the Crimsonnail. Nicholas the Punisher. Livio the Doublefang. Monev the Gale. E.G. the Mine. A stampede is a herd of running animals too scared to think about the damage they cause as they flee for their lives. And that doesn't really apply to Vash, but it describes the twins as a combined force - Vash flees, Knives follows him bringing destruction. Vash is afraid of facing Knives; Knives is afraid of being without Vash. And between them, complete and utter ruin is left in their wake.

So what changed?

I said before that Meryl is the only other character besides Knives with agency, with a couple of exceptions, and I'll say right now that Vash isn't one of them. In this game, Vash's agency - really Vash himself, his power, his soul - is the prize. People want to have Vash. They desire him. And he doesn't think he has a choice but to fulfil those desires in order to make up for his sins, which is why he went to confront Knives in July - despite knowing, deep down, that his brother will not be convinced and he's walking to a hideous fate, perhaps his death. Vash is an Independent, but he doesn't seem to think he has free will. It's been beaten out of him so viciously he attributes all his hard-earned skills to luck and his compassion to some instinctive bodily urge, as though he's a trained animal. Which Knives takes just the most disgustingly cruel jab at - You need to smile, show your charm, and behave like a harmless pet./They only love your charm, your tricks, and the tightness of your leash. Imagine if Rem had ever heard him talk that way to his brother. (I'm curious how the translation worked there.)

Ah, Rem. We see so little of her. We know almost nothing about her, save that she was an imperfect woman who did her best, who loved both her children as hard as she could. Who chose to love them. Who told them that as long as you can make a choice, you can choose a better future.

I think that was a belief she privately struggled to hold, personally. Knowing that by her inaction an innocent child was subjected to a worse fate than death, it would have been hard to imagine there could still be a future for her. I hope that in the end she came to forgive herself, even if only a little, and not just because of the twins. But we'll never know.

And after Rem, Luida. Who told Vash he was a survivor rather than a coward and he deserved to live, and who survived herself because of Vash - the very last time he stood by, frozen, as Knives tried to take away someone he loved. Who, with Brad, showed that humans can change and learn, and that though they still need to rely on Plants they need not consume them. Who began to take real, practical steps towards that chosen future for both, who gave Vash his coat and built him his hand - a protective memory and the part of the body that reaches out to another that his brother cut from him. Because of them he found contact with his own kind, and began to bridge the gap that had always existed between the two species, and the two sides of his own nature.

And finally tiny Meryl. Inexperienced, sheltered, easy to knock down, easy to pick up, unarmed, all alone, and absolutely filled to the brim with rage. Meryl's way of caring for things is by getting righteously, furiously angry about them. I wonder how long it's been since anyone knew and cared enough about Vash to be in the position to get angry on his behalf, over what's been done to him. Knives didn't take the slightest bit of notice of her (except to dismiss her as "another parasite" because he's a bitch like that) until Vash responded to her. She wasn't even supposed to be there - Zazie just thought it would be funny. Zazie is the best.

(I always wonder if the song Vash sings was him trying to answer Meryl's frantic cries for him to wake up. If he somehow how meant to lift her closer or build the path she climbed to reach him. Conrad said he couldn't speak human language anymore. What if that was the only other way?)

These three women all shared faith in Vash and his ideals, and loved him, rather than what he's "supposed" to be or what he could do for them. All helped form him into the man he is now. Each of them had agency and made choices, even hard ones. And so in the end, Vash's victory over Knives's cruelty also belongs to them. Vash awakens because the connection forged by these women allowed him to pull himself free of the pit of corrosive pain Knives plunged him into - breaking chains of guilt his brother had forged to keep him by his side forever. When the question is asked, "Whose side are you on?" the answer is neither the side of humans nor Plants, despite what Knives thinks. It's the side of Vash choosing his own future, inspired and supported by the women who loved him, rather than being trapped and frozen in the past. Inevitably there will be mistakes, losses - even horrors.

And it'll still beat any future this asshole chooses for him.