#sometimes i'm not even joking ill say 'this shit irritates me don't do what they did' and they're like LMFAOOOO🤣🤣🤣

[bugmin]

i wont lie i feel a little cunty when my trainee laughs at all my jokes

[hellsingmongrel]

Hey, no worries! :V Life gets busy, it's cool!

I'm glad you're enjoying it so far! And yeah, the "He's just a little guy!" energy never fully goes away, he's just always perpetually our little feral baby gremlin man, being terrifying one moment, then the tension breaking with a goofy little moment, and ending with him doing or saying something that shows that even though he's having to he a hardass, he's still just a sweet, kindhearted idiot babyboy. ☺️ Nightow is REALLY GOOD at taking the tense moments and breaking your heart into a million pieces, and then giving you something funny and sweet to make you laugh and remind you that it's not all doom and gloom. He can literally bounce your emotions back and forth like a ping pong ball, the emotional whiplash is DELIGHTFUL in how he uses it, honestly!

Honestly, the action in the manga can ABSOLUTELY be hard to follow sometimes! It does get a bit easier, but it's one of those that becomes clearer the more you reread it. I'm still going back and looking at things and having little moments of "Ohhhhh! This thing here is doing that!" And also it's hilarious to see the times there'll be a character doing something in the foreground, but another character is doing something HILARIOUS in the background, and you may not even catch it at first. One of my favorite run on jokes is Vash doing or saying something, or someone doing or saying something at him, and he's just SO IRRITATED, but if you look behind him, Wolfwood is LOSING HIS SHIT! Just cracking right the Hell up! And Vash can TELL he's doing it, he tries to turn and glare at him once like "Are you LAUGHING at me?!?" But when he does, Nick is just stoic and calm and completely nonchalant. 😆 So yeah, don't worry if the action doesn't make too much sense, especially in the beginning. Nightow got better at showing the action as time went on, and on top of that the art from Trigun to Trigun Maximum made a massive jump in quality, too, so you're also gonna have some just BEAUTIFUL pages. Vash's big, fluttery god-damn eyelashes are a TREASURE!

Also, oh man, I would recommend doing the free crunchyroll trial JUST so you could watch the dubs and then cancel it if you couldn't keep paying for it! There is a reason Johnny's voice work for Vash is so quintessential! And CR has both the new series, the original, AND it's got badlands rumble, I think, too! And all of them have Johnny doing Vash's voice in the English stuff, it's the literal best thing ever! Not saying the Japanese subbed version is bad, it's not, it's just that Johnny will always be Vash to so many people, we can't NOT recommend the dubs highly enough! But back to what you were saying, holy shit yeah, having to watch ep 11 because of subs made it SO MUCH WORSE! When I finally watched the dub later, I was able to cover my face for the part that really upset me earlier and could tell when it was safe to come out of my hoodie again because of the sound. HEARING Vash struggling and...the knives, and the sound of his voice hiccuping when he got stabbed, JFKAHFKR It was bad enough, I couldn't deal with seeing it at the same time. It really does make you feel sick, huh? If I'd been in Meryl's place, I very possibly would have been actually physically ill, having to see it! 8'<

I will not confirm nor deny Nai being alive in later parts, though he IS pretty important to the story, so make of that what you will. 😆 But yeah, honestly, in the manga it comes down to Vash just being better at reading when it's worth it to try and talk someone down, or when he knows he has to just put them out of commission to stop the violence. There are times when he still tries to talk people down, even while he's running in guns blazing, but often he doesn't really get much chance to do it. And yeah, in later parts, Vash reaches a point where he almost just seems to stop thinking and let instinct take over. He's almost "lights are on but nobody's home," and he's driven to points a couple of times where he's literally catatonic, but screaming and acting on pure protective instinct. He's such a sweet, kind soul, but there's a part of him that he keeps hidden that's just pure instinct, pure injured-cornered-animal-protecting-its-babies. It's so sad, so terrifying, but Nightow also makes it weirdly beautiful, too?

Though the time it's REALLY scary is when he's in full ass fluffy predator animal mode, but CONSCIOUS. like. It's SO CREEPY, it's still Vash underneath the feathers, but it's just UNHINGED and weirdly calm and menacing and like...you can imagine him being like a massive, twitchy, disjointed, SENTIENT bird of prey that's protecting its mate, bending his body at weird angles to shield someone from bullets while twisting his head around to glare at them attackers over his shoulder. It's actual horror-movie nightmare fuel imagery, and the entire fandom pretty much agrees that it's fucking AMAZING and we're all both terrified AND turned on by it. 😆😆😆 Even those of us who are ACE. So really, SERIOUSLY, episode 12 Vash was intense, but he was nowhere near as Eldritch Horror as he can be, and I am SO GOD-DAMNED EXCITED to see them tackle it in the upcoming seasons!

At the very least, he seems to be aware enough most of the time that the feathers themselves don't cause him any distress,except for the first time they do something he never knew he could do, at which point, he just STARES. WHILE HIS BODY IS DOING THIS THING. Doesn't move, just stares, until the moment passes and he has to act again. But yeah, people react poorly to it, they're scared of him, and it makes what, if he was healthy enough mentally and had a calm enough life that he could have learned to do it naturally, would probably be a really beautiful part of him seem monstrous and terrifying and deadly, and people panic and lash out. Which, obviously, does not make him views on himself any better, by any stretch of the imagination. He deserves people who would pet his feathers and talk softly to him until he's settled and calmed and happy, not what he gets, and it's sad. q_q

Honestly, he DOES go through so much more trauma in the manga, it gets SO PAINFUL, but you'll love him even more when you're done with it. And Stampede honestly matches the tone of the manga so well, I suspect that they're going to carry those severely traumatizing things into the series, so you're just preparing yourself for when we get to see it in action! XD I definitely suspect that next season, Vash is going to be a lot harder, less timid, he's going to have realized he has to stop being so soft.

Hey besties I have a question

Do I read the manga or watch the anime of trigun first? I wanted to read the manga first but the only way I know to access it is through the trigun manga overhaul account here on tumblr but i don’t like downloading stuff from random people on the internet

So if you say manga first, is that tumblr account a good and safe way to access it online or is there a better place?

[oldfritz]

I'm genuinely curious and don't want to start something! Just wanted to ask what you make of the 'Old Fritz might've been asexual' take, I don't know much about him and I feel you're one of the best people to ask esp since you lean towards 'he was probably queer in some way' too

Hey there! So, first off, don’t ever worry about me interpreting you asking me a question as starting something. As much as I love making dumb jokes about the guy, I love nothing more than doing this kind of stuff and defending or explaining my points. There’s two degrees I want to get over the next decade: first my JD and then my MA in Prussian history. I live for this stuff! Always have! Second off, I’m very sorry for not getting to this sooner. Things have been incredibly stressful for me for a variety of different reasons which have made answering your question, until now, rather difficult. Putting this under a cut because, holy shit, it got long!

My personal reasoning for why I think he’s bi (which, correct me if I’m wrong, I’m assuming is what you meant instead of ace and could be a different post entirely since some historians have tried to argue that) stems more to do with some of my lingering questions about the nature of his relationships with certain woman, rather than that of his relationships with men. To me and my modern, queer eye, Fritz’s relationships with men like Hans Hermann von Katte, Francisco Algarotti, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, and (much to my personal vexation) one Monsieur Voltaire are either outright homosexual/homoerotic in nature or very, very easily lend themselves to that interpretation rather than strictly romantic friendships (which Wikipedia does a fairly good overview of and, if you’re coming to me from AmRev perspective, uses Hamilton and Laurens’ relationship as a familiar example). While I’m avoiding those relationships in this ask, I’d be more than happy to elaborate upon one/all of them in a different one. 

Before I go into the big pauses that Fritz’s relationships with Madame von Wreech and Countess Orzelska give me, I want to deny the use of Fritz’s wife as an example of Fritz’s attraction to woman. While this, admittedly, may sound odd, we have ample evidence of how turned off and repulsed Fritz found Elisabeth Christine. Before he had even met her, Fritz was complaining about how she was ‘not very pretty, speaks but little, and acts like a blockhead’ (Asprey, 87) and, later, admitted to Grumbkow his plan to ‘keep my word,...get married, but afterwards it will be a case of that is that, and goodbye, Madame, and fare thee well’ (Jones, 52). For Christ’s sake, the man pitied her knowing how his treatment would leave her as ‘one more unhappy princess in the world’! Which is little consolation when you remember he also referred to her with such romantic terms as ‘this unpleasant creature,’ ‘the abominable object of my desires,’ ‘the person,’ and claimed to have preferred to marry ‘the biggest whore in Berlin’ (Asprey, 87). And while we (fortunately? unfortunately?) know quite a bit about their sex life, Fritz largely regarded it as just another duty - to quote him, ‘I will only have the duty to fuck’ (Ibid, 87). And while Seckendorf heard - first, presumably from Count von der Schulenburg and, later on, Count Friedrich von Wartensleben, a close and intimate friend of the then-crown prince - that Fritz would ‘fuck and refuck’ Elisabeth Christine and that said act occurred in the afternoon, it still was out of a sense of obligation (Bely, 481-2). When reminded that if he wanted more money for frivolities, he’d need to produce an heir, Fritz bemoaned that he ‘cannot sleep with my wife out of desire, and when I do sleep with her, I do it out of duty rather than inclination’ (Clark, 50). All this in accumulation, as well as the myriad of other quotes and incidents I’ve left out, makes one wonder why his relationship with Elisabeth Christine is sometimes used by historians to prove any sort of heterosexual impulse in the man when she’s the woman with the weakest supports for that argument.

That being said, now we get to the women with a more muddled places in his romantic escapades, if you will. What exactly happened between Orzelska and Fritz during his trip with his father to Dresden in 1728? The main source for everything that occurred during this trip is Wilhelmina, who didn’t attend and without anything about this specific incident coming from Fritz or Friedrich Wilhelm I, make it rather hard to use as concrete, irrefutable proof. Now, if her recollections were contemporaneous - like coming from a diary or journal she kept at the time - that would be one thing. But it comes from her memoirs which, while a delightful read 10/10 recommend, are written decades after this trip took place and, memory being a finicky thing, can’t be taken to the bank. All those disclaimers, here’s the story as told by her:

‘One evening...,the King of Poland [note: Augustus II] insensibly led the King of Prussia to a very richly decorated room...The King of Prussia, delighted with what he saw, stopped to contemplate all its beauties, when [all of] a sudden a tapestry was rolled up, which procured him a very novel sight. It was a lovely female in a state of nudity [note: Countess Orzelska, the Polish king’s daughter], carelessly reclined on a couch. Her beauty excelled that of the finest pictures of Venus and the Graces; her body seemed of ivory, whiter than snow, and better shaped than that of the Venus de Medicis at Florence.

...Scarcely had the King cast his eyes on the fair one, than he turned about with indignation; and seeing my brother behind him, he rudely pushed him out of the room, and left it immediately after in a violent irritation against the trickery they had attempted to practice on him. ...In spite of the King’s vigilance, [Frederick] had had time to contemplate the Venus of the closet, who did not cause him so much horror as she had done to his father. (Wilhelmina’s Memoirs, vol. 1, 107-6)

Wilhelmina then goes on to claim Fritz had fallen ‘passionately in love’ with Orzelska and that the illness Fritz experienced upon returning home was simply being lovesick. Pinning the accuracy of this story is incredibly difficult because, again, we have only one source relayed decades after the fact and from two volumes of memoirs known to have inaccuracies. While I, personally, would love if he had had a tryst with Orzelska (who is such a badass in her own right and deserves more recognition than as a footnote in this guy’s story), there’s no one way to say with more than 30% confidence. I am inclined to believe something along these lines happened because if someone told me a story like this, lord knows I wouldn’t forget it for the rest of my life. And, with Wilhelmina being so close with her brother, it lends a bit more credence but as to the actual emotional or physical response Fritz had to it, well, without my time machine, I can’t and don’t want to say.

With Madame Eleonore-Louise von Wreech, things are a little more concrete. For starters, Fritz actually talked about her! In written correspondence that survived! We even have seven letters between the two of them that survived, which is a bigger win! As Blanning says, they’re ‘ardent but light in tone, ironic, almost flippant, and highly stylized’ (Blanning, 58). Their relationship was known to those close with Fritz at the time that Schulenberg felt compelled to visit and warn the crown prince against devoting himself to women because ‘the slight pleasures gained cause a million displeasures.’  Fritz’s response? To tell the poor guy that he may have ‘the gift of continence, but I assure you that I do not’ (Asprey, 83-4). Firtz even went so far as to send a letter to her mother, waxing poetic about Louise’s ‘beauty, her majestic air, her bearing, and her entire department.’ It’s worth noting that Louise eventually broke off the affair due to being bored by how he ‘loved [her] too much and often annoyed [her] with his clumsy love’ (Ibid, 84). Contemporaries, including Friedrich Wilhelm, believed Fritz had impregnated her with a daughter who her ‘cuckolded husband would refuse to recognize’ (Blanning, 58). Blanning is the only source I’ve seen dispute this due to this news coming from Seckendorf, who didn’t reveal how he came about this information; that Fritz and Madame von Wreech’s correspondence doesn’t indicate a physical relationship; and on the fact that she was not pregnant. I haven’t been able to find the birth dates or any sort of records for Louise’s two daughters to figure out where their conception could’ve been in the timeline and if it matches with the likely dates for the affair, but I also don’t have the resources Cambridge would afford Blanning. Either way, while the physical nature of the affair is in dispute, the emotional aspect certainly was there. Especially when taking into consideration the fact that she’s the woman Fritz was likely referring to in the 16 August 1737 letter to Voltaire where he claimed she had taught him how to love (and also inspired him to write poetry, which we shouldn’t be thankful for). Specifically, all these years later, he stated how ‘this little miracle of nature possessed every possible charm, together with good taste and delicacy. She sought to transfer these qualities to me. I succeeded well in love but poorly in poetry. Since that time I have very often been in love and have always been a poet’ (Fritz’s Oeuvres, vol. 21, 96).

All this to say, there’s a bit too much evidence of some degree of opposite-gender attraction in Fritz to completely write off the possibility that he could’ve been bisexual. While it’s undeniable he held a preference for men and that’s whose company he typically enjoyed, I still do find it interesting the two exceptions (one potential and the other with a fair degree of certainty) to this. And, while I would never want his attraction to men be minimized in favor of that to women, it still remains important to note to get the most comprehensive picture of the man.