#stampede knives is simply too Chad. he’s too sigma male.

[shastafirecracker]

I have a minor grievance with Stampede to air out, brought on by listening to Adventures in Solitude by The New Pornographers which is of course the ultimate volume 14 of trimax song. In the last ep of Stampede, Vash and Knives both sprout one wing and fly completely normally. (It takes Vash a minute to get his balance but then he can fly fine.) And this seems to posit that like, they inherently only have one wing each, and that that’s normal and not a hindrance. Obviously the visual -wiggles hand- whatever is that if you put them side by side they make one whole entity with two wings.

However this is in reference to the final volume of the manga, in which they fly off into the sunset holding each other, each with one wing out for balance. But. But. Here’s my beef. Vash is the one who grabs Knives and takes off with him to save him from the Earth fleet/Chronica’s rage. Vash manifests a full ass set of angel wings. Except, in doing so, he’s burning through way too much of his power, and also he just got impaled in the gut by one of Knives blades, so he falters and starts to pass out. One of his wings falls apart. Knives then manifests a single wing to balance Vash’s remaining wing, and he does it with a look of terror and desperation- obviously he’s never done that before, and it’s easy to read into the moment that Knives is not used to trying to manifest something -useful- or -creative- with his blades. He just makes weapons. So his wing is strange, a weapon repurposed to a practical task, unwieldy. The thing is, Knives -can also generate feathers- like Vash but for all his bluster about how Vash never learned how to use his powers and Knives is so all-powerful with them, in the end, he has actually poured so much of his focus into becoming death incarnate - becoming Millions Knives - that he can’t even manifest the one thing it makes sense for feathers (his basic nature) to be: a wing.

And then the two of them fly away struggling with it, barely holding their forms and barely balancing each other, but finally crossing a bridge to work together to achieve something. Anything. Even if all they achieve is to escape (and do exactly what Vash always said: run away and wait for things to calm down, and then try to come back in peace).

So yeah my beef with Stampede is borrowing the visual of the one-winged angels and losing the meaning. I mean, I think Stampede creates some new and interesting meanings of its own - it’s leaning far more into the idea that the twins aren’t really whole on their own, that they need each other to be complete in a more ontological sense. But. As a filthy manga stan. I will always adore what Nightow did with these boys and their troubles, and how few words were needed to explore their feelings. So much of manga Knives is in his facial expressions. His anguish of loss and grief in the last volume is so damn palpable. Stampede’s only brushed over the surface possibilities of Knives as a character.