#like for ex. wolfwood is narratively and thematically a child and that's really important to tristamp

[yellowocaballero]

#trigun#man i need to watch tristamp#anyway yeah vash is so extremely ace#like vashwood makes sense as the two dudes getting shipped because people are always shipping the dudes buuuuuuut#and vashmeryl is kinda cute but yeah i agree on the one sided feeling especially in the manga#also idk if youve read the whole manga and idk if this has shown up in tristamp but lets just say#vashwood as presented in canon has some. interesting snags show up in volume 10 or so when wolfwoods backstory is explored lmao#its not in the 98 anime so its not well known#anyway vash is definitely unshippable to me haha via @proserpine-in-phasesphases

If you're referring to Wolfwood's age, then from what I hear it's similar as to in the manga yeah. I don't know his exact chronological age but I do understand it's 18+.

[TRISTAMP SPOILERS] Except Wolfwood was aged up from, like, twelve. The fact that so many people are a) shipping Tristamp Vashwood and b) without insane levels of discourse is nuts to me. It's probably there, somewhere, in some insane Discord server that I am not a member of. Disclaimer that I don't care what you do and don't ship, these are not real people and this is a fantasy problem, don't ask me to die on this hill. [/TRISTAMP SPOILERS]

But you see why Vashwood doesn't help the 'Vash is unshippable' allegations haha. Vash is just so deeply unfuckable to me for mostly botany reasons, but of course so much of that is just the vibe of Trigun itself.

This is more personal, but Trigun stood out against all other 90s anime on the Toonami block because it was a) utterly unapologetically fucking bizarre and confusing, and b) utterly sexless. All anime for women had big romantic plotlines and all anime for men had a lot of fan service. Even Cowboy Bebop, its next-door neighbor, had serious fanservice. Trigun was the only anime for adults I had ever seen that never sexualized its female characters, that had absolutely no romantic plotline, and that pretty much only cared about moral questions and how weird can this new gun get. Vash flirted all over the place, but it was so obviously a bit and just made the unfuckability allegations worse.

You spend the majority of the anime assuming that this is because Vash has a dead girlfriend he is not over, which is why he never once seriously romantically engages with a woman and never once physically engages at all. This feels very blatant. Halfway through you realize that the dead girlfriend is his Mom, which is the final nail in the coffin for me of sucking out anything remotely romantic from the series. Turned Vash downright unfuckable, because there's nothing less sexy than Vash's insane mother complex. It was just the most sexless anime I'd seen in my life.

It was nice. Incredibly rare in those days. It felt pretty comfortably for people like me: who loved action and who loved complex characters, and who enjoyed visiting a world where we're all more focused on Meryl's 50 derringers than her feelings for Vash.

That's not Tristamp, which had an incredibly different vibe in general, which is fine. It a) babygirl'd Vash and made him very attractive, which I'm chill with because it feels 100% congruent with how he hasn't refined his persona yet, and b) places Vash in the feminine narrative role of a love interest and object of desire. But considering who that dynamic is with and the nature of that dynamic, the level of eroticism and fuckability of Tristamp drops down to -1000 for me! So!!

And now the fandom seems to be like 90% Vashwood content! So!!!! TL;DR: I agree VERY MUCH and my experience of Trigun seemed to be extremely different from most people's haha.

Any thoughts on ace Vash? I know it's not a popular headcanon, but ever since that scene of him just faking falling asleep to get out of anything more with those ladies it's been on my mind.

SUPER interesting note about that scene: in the 98 anime, he says "could I be regretting it just a little?". In the manga, this is the scene:

It's very interestingly ambiguous, but the manga scene implies it's more typical Vash self-hatred! Regardless, the utter unfuckability of Vash remains.

I sincerely cannot imagine Vash being sexually interested in humans, and probably romantically too. There's that scene of him escaping sex, every time he flirts with women it's a complete bit, and the thing with Meryl always felt really one sided. Beyond that, we see utterly nothing from him indicating any interest in women or men.

I think Vash is an alien space hydrangea, of a species that's either extradimensional/inorganic/????, and it frankly makes no sense for him to be sexually attracted to people. I don't really even HC him as ace/aro, because that's an orientation and Vash is botany.

Unfortunately we've also seen Knives naked, so we canonically know that they are Ken dolls down there. There's no genitalia. There's no reason for him to be attracted to people or have an innate sense of human gender.

Hey, how the fuck did Rem even know they were boys? They were Ken dolls! She really did just spin a fucking wheel on that one! Even as children they were super androgynous! Literally assigned male by your Mom!!! Randomly!!! FWIW, headcanon: I think Knives doesn't have a human gender and Vash uses he/him pronouns like he wears his red coat: it's always with him and it's integral to his appearance, because somebody he loved gave it to him :). I think to Vash 'boy' isn't something he is, it's how he presents.

This is sticking to the text and completely ignoring the subtext and narrative stuff happening for Vash and Knives with sexuality and gender in Stampede. Cause. Hahahahahaha.

TL;DR: Vash is a space hydrangea and Rem threw darts at a dartboard why is anybody giving him and Knives a sexuality and gender at all.