#thats as a former christian turned agnostic w/ a lot of personal connections to disability & mental health Shit

[wander-wren]

let me go through this one line by line rq. i did talk more about wolfwood and rollo in a different branch of this post, but it was less well-written/thought out bc i did it more on the fly so let’s not worry too much about it. also, disclaimer, i love all of these guys, especially vash, and that’s why i’m being a little mean to him right now. dude’s complicated. ALSO this is only based on stampede, i do not know enough about the original story yet to comment.

i will also acknowledge that this steps pretty close to some real-world issues/debates/etc that are very important to me, so i care perhaps more than i should.

anyway! let’s break this down.

“rollo didnt want to die though. yeah i know wolfwood says it was mercy. wolfwood is projecting”

maybe, and also yes. crucially, we don’t KNOW what rollo wants. wolfwood IS projecting onto him, but equally vash is imposing what he wants, not what rollo wants, because rollo literally does not speak except to say vash’s name and once, his own. his younger self seems pretty attached to the idea of living, yes, but it’s been more than a decade since then (i’m not sure how old rollo is meant to be, but i wouldn’t say more than 8).

he has been modified and turned into a monster, he apparently drove out or killed his entire town, and it’s unclear if he’s been isolated in the village for a while or if he only arrived recently—my headcanon is the former, especially since the success of wolfwood, livio, and elendira would’ve rendered him an outdated model, but they could have still used him. regardless, he’s hardly living a normal or happy life. given his limited speech, it’s not even clear if he has the same level of cognitive function he used to—he definitely doesn’t have the education or socialization of you average 20-year-old.

i’m not advocating for killing rollo at all. i’m just saying we don’t KNOW what he wants. in an ideal world he would have been taken somewhere safe, treated like a person, and made as comfortable as possible while they worked out how to communicate with him and figure out what he actually wants. but they do not have the resources or the time for that, wolfwood and vash are both very biased, and rollo is semi-invulnerable and trying really hard to kill them.

i’m not really sure there’s another way for that story to end, honestly. and that’s the tragedy of it.

“i do agree vash does impose his will on other people, to a degree that’s not a million miles off from knives’s bullshit. and yes vash is also a hypocrite - he can forgive anyone but himself.”

cool! 👍 again, i’m not saying vash is bad and evil, or even that he’s not good. he’s just a guy with 150 years of trauma doing his best, but the thing about unresolved trauma is you don’t always make the best decisions.

“but vash does not want to use people. he wants them to have autonomy so they can choose for the better. and death is a denial of autonomy.”

okay, this is the one where i’m a little less nice. i agree that vash doesn’t consciously want to use people, objectify them, put his needs above theirs—that’s his brother’s deal. i do, however, think he’s so desperate to not have anymore blood on his hands that he is willing to “use” people to get to that end, and he isn’t even aware of that. hurt people do this all the time, when their pain and fear and suffering is so great that all they can focus on is trying to mitigate it, and they completely steamroll “the right thing to do.”

we haven’t seen vash do this yet, really, at least in stampede. i’m being purely hypothetical. i’m saying i see this instinct in him, in his actions, and it only hasn’t happened yet because this is a fictional story and he’s the protagonist and there isn’t really time to explore this yet. vash is also very willing to use himself, his health, and his wellbeing in the exact same way, which also separates him from knives.

i agree that vash wants people to have autonomy. sort of. he never says this that i remember, he’s a lot more focused on their right to be alive (also very necessary), but it’s in line with his belief system so yeah, for sure.

here’s the thing, though: so they can choose for the better? where is this coming from? the only thing i can think of is luida and the “flora” project, but it’s meryl and roberto who learn about that. vash presumably knows, but i don’t think he ever mentions it. meryl is the one who argues (with zazie and conrad) that humanity can be better, with time.

vash doesn’t want people to be free and safe so they can choose to be better. he wants people to be free and safe because they are people. and also because he can’t stand the idea of having more blood on his hands. he also does want them to be better, true (see: nebraska, rollo, nai, wolfwood), but that’s not his primary motive.

because really, “better?” who is vash, who are any of us, to decide what’s “better,” or that the only people who deserve to live are those who are working towards it? vash’s whole fuckin’ deal is that he doesn’t kill anyone, no matter how bad they are. he’s not out here weighing their goddamn ability to redeem themselves. ironically, this is a deeply (culturally) christian way of thinking, in a story where vash is allegory jesus, one of the most misinterpreted guys of all time.

finally, death as a denial of autonomy? mm, no. here’s the thing about autonomy: it allows people to do “bad things” to themselves. assisted suicide, regular suicide—that is autonomy at work. keeping someone alive against their will is a denial of autonomy. that’s not to say you shouldn’t try to help a suicidal person, because damn, please do that, but also: people have just as much a right to die as a right to live.

we’re not even talking about vash anymore, i got sidetracked. my point here is that we never actually see vash in this situation, due to the nature of the story. we never see him forcing someone to be alive that no longer wants to, etc (except himself, potentially). what i’m saying is, based on what we are shown, i think there’s a good chance he would in the right circumstances.

vash is a good guy. he’s not out here running around thinking that other people’s wants and needs are less than his own. but he’s got a big gaping hole in him and he’s very good at justifying the ways he tries to fill it. just because it hasn’t gone badly so far doesn’t mean it can’t in the future.

was talking last night about nai’s obsessive tendencies and the way he views everyone, even vash and tesla, as an object. he keeps tesla alive, in pieces, immediately after the fall and presumably for the next 150 years given all the technology he has, despite the fact that killing her would be kinder, just because he wants her. he nearly leaves vash a hollow shell of a creature just because he would rather that than a vash he can’t keep close.

he’s selfish and cruel and so isolated from the world that what he wants is more important than what anyone else wants.

but also…

vash has a little bit of that tendency in him, too. we saw it with rollo especially, and a bit with livio and the sand steamer—though those ones worked out for him in the end. vash is so full of guilt over the idea of killing anyone, even indirectly, that he will keep them alive to spare himself the grief.

and that’s a nobler pursuit, and i think a lot of people also instinctively don’t want to think about death being a mercy sometimes, but it’s still going to get vash in trouble if it hasn’t already in the last century.

i think it’s interesting, too, in light of the fact that vash himself is sort of passively suicidal at times. he’s pretty close to immortal, but he has no sense of care for his own wellbeing. vash doesn’t believe he deserves to live, but i don’t think he believes he deserves to die yet, either. which implies a double standard in his belief system—death is too good for him, but a tragedy for other people.

“an independent must fix what an independent has done. this is my atonement.”