#like they haven't ignored 99 % of the human experience even in just one situation

[creed-of-cats]

diversity is obviously great for many reasons, but among them being that any character who is normal ass white man is made WAY more interesting in any context if that is deviated from. I will watch so many films/series, ones pre 2000 especially, and wonder how much more interesting and investing it would be if the character just...wasn't the most basic societal "norm" for what's acceptable as a protagonist. Like holy shit, does it not get boring making this stuff with the same dude over and over?

[wander-wren]

it's my time to shineeeeeee except this is like, all headcanon. but it is based on me logicking things out!! stay with me here!!

1- my best explanation is that eyewitness testimony is really unreliable, especially when said eyewitnesses are focused more on the knives than whose wielding them. i also don't think we know where the whole legend started in stampede, like what nai's First Crime is, so we don't know if it was maybe just a case of "wrong place, wrong time" for vash as so often happens

(i know we know it was the Big Fall and/or the time vash lost his arm, but people clearly don't remember/know the circumstances of the Big Fall now, if they ever did, and nai killed everyone in the second instance except vash and luida. plus, i feel like the humanoid typhoon thing has to be more recent if he's on wanted posters instead of talked about like a myth, because no one would believe in a 150yo outlaw)

(does that imply that nai's operations were more subtle and spread out for the first, say, 120 years? what was he doing all that time? now i'm more confused) (random timeline notes: legato was already there with his weird telekinesis situation when wolfwood was taken, however i don't think we have a confirmed age for wolfwood? at most it's ~20 years, a little less. similarly, they had the tech for rollo's transformation, but he was not the first experiment.)

(aaaaaand for what it's worth, in the og/1990s anime, which is a lot more episodic at least to start, we don't even meet nai for ages and ages. vash gets caught up in tons of fights and problems that are never his fault, but he always gets blamed when someone recognizes him as the humanoid typhoon. so that might be part of the issue as well, though of course stampede and '98 are very different canons, so that's just speculation until we get more backstory info)

2- my personal headcanon is that it's made out of some kind of material that would probably fit anyone. rem has one too in the flashbacks! i see it as standard space age clothing, probably either super stretchy or super baggy with tech to make it form-fitting, and probably more tech to make it good for all kinds of environments, bc you never know what you find in space.

THAT begs the question, why does nai still wear it? nostalgia? hatred for anything else humans have made? is it plant made and thus the only think he will allow himself to wear? wait, doesn't he make that weird cloak with his knives? did nai make the bodysuits???

3- i can't say what happened to all of her but i will point out that in that flashback in....e11 or e12, when conrad is talking to meryl and you see the day he met nai? nai points his knives at conrad, and there is a Fucking. Eyeball. in his hand/the knife hilt. i'm 99% sure it moves. tesla's eye? if it's moving, does that imply she's still alive? her whole thing seems really delicate, i'm not totally sure i believe it could have survived a crash like that, but who knows how well nai prepped for it.

(if there's a better explanation for the eye and i missed it, pls ignore this, but i haven't seen ANYONE talk about it, so) (tbf i think i only noticed it the third watch through)

4- i believe nai heavily implies when they meet in e3 that they haven't seen each other, ever, since....potentially the time vash lost his arm. which goes back to: what has nai been doing? has vash been avoiding him, or has he simply not been looking? i feel like it sort of makes sense for him to wait until the point he did, when he had the means to actually enact his plan. it wouldn't help to take vash immediately if nai had no plants to, um, impregnate, and it seems like the whole e12 thing also needed a lot of tech and power that probably would have taken time to set up.

also, nai would have had a vested interest in keeping his allies secret from vash, both to take him by surprise when he finally used them and because vash wouldn't go near nai on his own, but if he knew nai was kidnapping and experimenting on children? mmmm, would he have been able to stay away?

5- oh yeah, ohhhhhhhh yeah. are you ready to receive information that could potentially hurt you?

....yeah?

honestly a lot of the people *i* see discussing it are vash/nai shippers (yes, everyone knows they're twins, yes, that's incest, etc etc--it's not the point here. let's just accept that the shippers exist, there are Undertones in the source material, and anyway, BACK TO THE POINT). but yeah, it totally is invasive, and this post is long winded enough without getting into all of it, but quickly

nai very obviously doesn't view the plants really as people, or beings with like, rights. he doesn't view anyone that way, i don't think. he displays fucking plant corpses in his creepy piano room, you know everything in his secret base thing is plant-powered, and he's not looking into other, more sustainable sources of energy because he doesn't care about humans! obviously! he also never outlines any idea of what to do with the dependent plants. it's said that they can't exist without humans, which is probably propaganda, but it's also not clear how capable they are of surviving on their own. can they even, like, breathe outside the tanks?

anyway, this extends to vash, who has ALWAYS been a tool for nai's own ends, from the very beginning with the Big Fall. nai literally wants vash to be this perfect, untouchable, docile and agreeable version of himself that is everything nai wants, and if he isn't that, nai would actually rather him become a corpse-trophy like the other plants in his room.

i might be being harsh on nai here. i do think he's nuanced and complicated, but this is not the post for all thatttttt. also, um, i can't resist, because speaking of the plantcest/shippy undertones....nai is literally penetrating his brother (debatable if the tentacle knives count as part of his body, but regardless) in order to impregnate their "sisters" which is. it's a lot. that's not even subtext. it IS creepy and gross, tho. i have a lot of thoughts on e12.

6- this one i have no idea about. zip, zilch, nada. the gate thing in e3 still doesnt make sense to me and i've seen it six times. it's like, the one flaw in the show for me because i Don't Get It. maybe someone else knows, tho

Burning questions that have haunted me since watching Trigun Stampede:

-Does no one notice the difference between the pale stabby squid man and the fluorescent red golden retriever man?

-Is….. is the body suit attached? Is it not?

-what happened to Tesla after the crash?

-why does vash not know nai’s murderous employees by the time he’s like 150

-is no one going to acknowledge the incredibly invasive nature of what occurred in the last episode????

-what did nai do to vash’s gate at jeneora rock and why did he need diff tech in the last episode?

If anyone with more context or luck with research knows, or wants to theorize, feel free lol