#sidenote Windmill Village is the name of luffy's hometown in op

[hikennosabo]

#tristampparty day 5, episode 5: child of blessing

day 5 of @tristampparty let's gooooo

our radio djs today are... show hayami!!! (aka original wolfwood) and masaya onosaka again! i'm OBSESSED with casting hayami as the religious radio dj, i love these cameos so much and clearly there was a lot of thought put into where the cameos would be. very very cool

one thing i really think is interesting about trigun - every version of trigun - is the fact that god and religion (christianity) have such a presence but there is never confirmation one way or the other about the existence of god.

who is Missionary Michael

"newly"... we know they've been around for a while, though... and roberto's the guy with Information and Knowledge so i don't think he would make a mistake timeline-wise... EoM had an established presence in (or, more like an iron grip on) windmill village, so it's not like they were operating in complete secret until recently or anything like that. soooo, new relative to what?

wind... typhoon... is this anything

wait no i'm cooking. rollo was born on a windless day -> vash met rollo when he was a baby, the photo is taken -> rollo, as we see in the flashback at the beginning of the episode, prays for wind, implying that there hasn't been any wind in a long time -> rollo runs away, meets vash again, vash makes a promise he can't keep -> rollo gets turned into monev the gale... GALE... WIND... -> vash returns, "reunites" with rollo -> monev gets killed -> the wind blows again

TYPHOON, GALE, IS THIS ANYTHING??? I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M COOKING HERE

this is when wolfwood notices that monev is a product of EoM... that's all he needs to know to decide what must be done.

vash has no idea about EoM or the experiments or the village sacrificing children, BUT if he hadn't brought rollo back to the village... maybe none of this would have happened. or it could've ultimately played out the same. maybe rollo would have been found by someone else. or maybe he would have died out there in the desert. but still. another thing for vash to feel guilty about even though it wasn't really his fault.

savior complex bouncing between him and knives like a ping pong ball

i love the phrasing. he's not god. he's a man. as much as he positions himself as a god, he's still... very human. as loathe as he would be to admit that.

*looks at previous screenshot* i'm seeing a pattern here.

as much as i don't like elendira ii, i think we should consider also giving little fangs to elendira i.

SPEAKING OF CHARACTERS I DON'T LIKE. tristamp conrad is so unbelievably cruel, what the hell. don't get me wrong he's still not GOOD in the manga and he DOES bear responsibility for, y'know, resurrecting knives and all... and generally being too little too late in taking action against knives... but THIS conrad is just so. ugh. why did they do him like this...

so the timeline would be...

20 years ago, the village was destroyed. assuming he was in the lab for 5 years (in other words, he was not let out and could have not wrecked the town during that time), would mean 25 years ago, rollo was taken and became monev. we don't know exactly how old he was at the time, let's say he was 10 for the sake of keeping it even. so ~35 years ago the photo with vash was taken, give or take.

we also don't know how many children were taken before rollo, or how often. but it was an established practice in the village which no one questioned. how long has this been going on exactly?

also just wanted to note that roberto notices the EoM banner in the house. i think that's a detail that gets forgotten because meryl finds the photo of vash right after... but remember that roberto is the one who tells us what EoM is (or rather, what their cover story is) in the first place...

... i don't need to say anything.

actually no there is something i want to say. right after this, monev loses one of his gun... arm... gloves...? uncovering his hand underneath. and also his mask turns off. and we see his face. in other words, there's still a human under there.

OKAY HERE'S THE TALLY I REALLY WANTED TO DO!!!!

wolfwood vial count: 1

wolfwood drinking a vial right before shooting monev... revealing/reinforcing his own "inhumanity" (to the audience? to himself?) right before mercy killing a fellow EoM victim...

i wonder what vash would have done had wolfwood not killed rollo. like. what was the plan. was there a plan? (probably not...) like, had rollo lived, he wouldn't have been able to live a normal life no matter how you look at it, right? wolfwood's mercy kill seems to have been not just the right call, but perhaps the only call...?

vash asking him to wake up... foreshadowing perhaps. maybe foreshadowing livio not actually dying from a gunshot wound to the head, unlike monev. or maybe foreshadowing the words vash might say when... no. i shan't.

speaking of livio... this is gonna come back next episode.

yeah, a lot of what wolfwood says about monev can be applied to himself and livio both. really makes you think.

god i love that the village lights up after everything is over. it makes me think... i don't know what to make of this. like. the reason why the village kept sacrificing children to EoM was because they believed sacrifices would bring blessings. and we know the village was struggling due to a lack of wind. so was EoM preventing the wind from blowing somehow?? there's no way, right??? how would they even do that...? and why would they continue to prevent the wind from blowing in a place that got destroyed 20 years ago?? so this brings me back to the beginning of this post... does god actually exist in this universe?? did god make the wind blow??? and why now? i... i don't know!!! i don't know, man!!!

i do like the way orange adapted monev. or... adapted isn't the right word. they reimagined him from the ground up. they made him more intertwined with vash, used him as a vehicle to introduce EoM, tied him into wolfwood and vash's clash of ideals... and the episode itself is tight, self-contained. and very tragic.

we don't actually know that much about the original monev... he was imprisoned, he has a line about "the man i thought was my father"... i don't remember anything else. the main reason why the monev fight in 98/trimax is memorable is because it contains vash's diablo moment, and it's the first time we really see him seriously consider killing someone. but here, this version of monev... well, we get the opposite. vash wants to avoid killing monev - rollo - at all costs. makes me wonder if we'll get a diablo moment from vash in season 2...

there's probably more to say but i'm tired and my brain isn't working at full capacity lol i need to go to bed. see you tomorrow for episode 6!