#tristamp brad

[chotachica]

Currently on ep 9 of Stampede and ooooooh they are so SO sick for making Tristamp Brad a father figure to Vash like oh okay yall really want me to kill myself later on huh

[revenantghost]

Someone on Twitter mentioned that this was the only time that Vash was able to wear his coat with both of his flesh and blood arms

And while that's sad enough... it probably doesn't bother Vash, he probably even thinks he deserves it if it occurs to him. But you know who it probably kills? The man who realized he fucked up and was an idiot and ruined this boy's life, punching the doorframe in grief as Luida ran after Vash, and then designing an intricate lost tech arm for the poor kid to try and make up for it. (At least Brad realized he fucked up, no?)

[c-hrona]

Tomorrows

"And after all was said and done, I wanted to share my tomorrows with him, don't you agree, Wolfwood?".

A what-if of what those tomorrows could have been.

(ID in Alt!)

A super self indulgent thing that, I had in mind after this tweet:

This is another little Zine that you can find on my Ko-Fi for free!

I also made a lil surprise thingie that you can find on this link and I will post it next week :D

A little wip of it:

[to-eat-laugh-love-in-peace]

Shout out to how Brad being initially hostile and wary towards Vash upon learning that he could speak and understand human speech in Tristamp, with him raising his wrench in a defensive position, something that Luida rightfully admonishes him for,

only to come to put in the effort and the time to acknowledge when he’s treated him unfairly, even cruelly at times,

to reflect on the choices he’s made and the actions he’s taken and how it led to things going down the way they did,

to apologize for what he’s said and done, and to continue to support and be there for Vash however way he can

such as through providing him with the best prosthetic he could give him after he came back to Ship 3 with Luida missing an arm and continuing to repair it every time he comes back home with it damaged,

heading out to the outskirts of Hopeland where the sandsteamer was after Vash damaged his prosthetic arm from lifting the ion cannon and passed out from exhaustion from working together with the ship’s Plant to slow the ship down and keep it from crashing into Hopeland,

defending him when Wolfwood doubted Vash for his goal to save everyone, telling him he’s strong enough to find a way to make his dream happen when he himself would have doubted his words too long ago,

and helping him achieve his dream by assisting Luida with her terraforming project using flora in place of Plants nicely contrasts how the people on Ship 5 who were experimenting on Tesla in Trimax reacted with joy and excitement upon learning that she could speak and understand human speech and what this could mean for the development between mankind and the Plants

only for them to pointedly ignore what she actually says, refuse to see her as an actual living being who they’re committing a number of ethics violations on, and regard her with a very detached, very clinical assessment of her physical, emotional, and psychological state, all the way up until her body fell apart. @tristampparty

[alcordraws]

I love the idea of math being extremely easy (and fun!) for vash because he finds it funny to use it to mess with people. Specifically when he and Nai were kids and he'd be forced to play cowboys and robbers and he just wants the game to end already so they can do what he wants so he keeps aiming perfect shots and fucking up Nai's heroic cowboy moments.

On ship 3, Brad uses him as a calculator so he can keep his hands free while he's working on stuff

[nihil-ghost]

@tristampparty Anniversary Day 9: Brad & Luida

[ryanthel0ser]

[hotpooki]

THE FOUND FAMILY IN TRISTAMP REALLY GOT TO ME i love them so so much

[ebthanyyart]

Young Brad 🔧

[yuhi-san]

I sat my ass down and put some meta thoughts into word that have been swirling in my head for ages for @tristampparty day 9 Brad and luida

Because i wont be finishing the planned story on time, soo

Brad, Luida and ship three went in completely blind when it came to how to handle vash being an independent pant. They had nothing to go off on and as far as they knew, independents were a theoretical possibility but vash was the first one they encountered (not even luida had the clearance to see anything that could contain mentions of tesla). Vash isn’t really human but he isn’t like a dependent plant either.

I made a post about how that regarding how vash initially seemed to go through a human lifecycle a lot faster, until they realized he just stopped aging at a certain point.

The other thing I wonder is, do brad, luida and at least some of the others know about tesla?

The answer is, im sure it will never come up in canon. And I guess people are inclined to say, no way would vash ever open up to anyone about it.

But I think brad and luida know. Not much. Maybe just that there was an independent before them and she had died from the experiments done on her. Just these two things is all vash ever said.

Because see, in stampede vash came to ship three when he was still very small. It became his home, he actually bonded with all these people, they are like family. And he was still very young when the traumatic loss of his arm happened.

It changes the dynamic between him and these people a lot compared to trimax and 98.

Vash doesn’t have a regular prosthesis but a cybernetic one (or three if you like me follow the hc that his legs are prosthesis as well). also there is metal and hardware (?) on his chest and stuff. But even

My point is, those aren’t things he got from patching himself up or went through shabby surgery in a back alley or something of no man’s land.

 Initial surgery when luida brought him back aside, that must have been ‘experimented’ with vash to some degree because they knew nothing. Can he get sick? How does he response to medicine, to painkillers? To anesthetics? Vash bleeds but does he have bloodtypes like a human? What are they supposed to do when he lost his arm? Give him a bloodtransfusion like they would with a human and hope his body wont reject it? Throw him in a plant tank and hope that the plants can do for him what he does for them?

And even if they were kind and patient and understanding and reassuring about it, there must have been so many moments where it was literally just trial and error because they simply had nothing to go on. It must have been so scary for vash.

But especially with his arm (and possibly his legs). It’s an cybernetic arm. There are cables and shit directly connected to his body. It’s not a regular stump he has, it’s a port, its hardware embedded in his flesh.

And surgeries are scary, especially for kids. Its normal to be afraid of them. But vash must have been beyond terrified by the mention of it. Far, far more so than could be reasonably explained as a normal reaction. So I think vash told them because he was too terrified, too afraid, didn’t know what else to do or say. A hysteric outburst more likely than calm communication.

(“There was an independent before us. They experimented on her. She’s dead.”)

It was terribly for everyone involved.

But, like even if vash didn’t tell them.

At some point, he made the conscious and active decision to trust this people so unconditionally. Despite his rocky start with them and what had transpired with the blackbox, they could reassure vash that he was save and no one would do him any harm.

Vsh trusted them enough to let them put him under, take a scalpel to him, change his body irrecoverably but he would come out of it alright, wouldn’t endure any unnecessary pain by their hand.

Like, if you think about it like that, after the horror of what happened to tesla that shaped him and nai so much, vash found it in himself to trust these people with what then and possibly still might be his biggest trauma. And like rem had promised, he didn’t end like his sister

[tatzelwyrm]

I can't believe there's people saying Tristamp!Brad and Trimax!Brad have nothing in common when they are both so terrible at social interactions and expressing their emotions and have chronic foot-in-mouth disease.

[redinthesea]

emotionally constipated guilt-ridden man helps adoptive teenage son shortly after traumatic reunion with murderous brother the only way he knows how (with favors & acts of service)

[revenantghost]

This scene is so funny at a glance, but it's also so fucking sad that a kid that obviously loved thoma chicks as an adult hasn't had much experience riding thoma as an adult

[rattoes420]

Episodes 7-12 too :3

[to-eat-laugh-love-in-peace]

You know what drives me absolutely insane about Tristamp, something that is specifically emphasized in ep 8, it’s the existence of different accounts about someone or something surviving even in the wake of the most devastating of disasters, this being the Big Fall, as seen with Brad having brought back to Ship 3 the black box, and Rem’s belongings, which include a few photos of her, Vash, and Nai, and A JOURNAL, something I desperately wish that we get to see the contents of in S2, maybe in a flashback by Luida and/or Brad, or maybe in present day by Meryl, like I wonder if she wrote in code or in a different language to make it a little harder to decipher if anyone else got their hands on it, if the accounts in her journal start before she joined the SEEDS Projects and boarded Ship 5, like when her boyfriend Alex was still alive, or if they start after she boarded Ship 5 to chronicle her journey alongside what remains of humanity across the stars in search of a new planet to inhabit, or maybe if they even started when she discovered Tesla and Conrad and the rest of his group of Plant specialists began to tear her body apart in the name of science not long after that, since she was one of, or maybe the only one in Tristamp, the few who protested against the group’s treatment of Tesla only for her to be ignored, so it could have been a way for her to express and process her thoughts, feelings, and experiences throughout the whole ordeal.

(I STILL like to think that this recording pad she used to film Vash and Nai's first birthday somehow survived the Big Fall even if it wasn't shown along with the rest of her belongings that Brad recovered from Ship 5, if only because there's quite a bit of emphasis put into it with the framing of the scene and all, though who knows maybe it was just a way for Studio Orange to make a smooth and believable transition between a flashback and present day but I still have hope.) And then there’s Vash who’s also shown writing on a journal of his own, another thing that I also desperately wish to see the contents of in S2, in his room prior to Luida coming in to give him his red coat. With Luida going off to bring Vash back to Ship 3, leaving Brad to do some much needed self-reflection on the choices he’s made and the actions he’s taken, I wonder if, since he was looking through his things in hopes of finding some sort of clue he left behind about the other Independent, he actually took a look at it, and on the off chance that Vash hadn’t written his accounts in code or in another language, maybe he would have been able to read Vash’s own thoughts, feelings, and experiences throughout his time on Ship 3, the Big Fall, his time with Rem and Nai on Ship 5, maybe even his discovery of Tesla, and everything that had gone down with Rem right after that.

Back on the topic Ship 5’s black box Brad had recovered from the ruins, and repaired 5 years after the Big Fall, I noticed that when he and Luida were listening to the audio recording, HE MUTES THE RECORDING RIGHT AFTER NAI SAYS THAT VASH WAS HIS ACCOMPLICE SINCE HE WAS THE ONE WHO GAVE HIM THE ACCESS CODES. With how people have pointed out how Studio Orange likes to play with unreliable narrators like Vash omitting the fact that he was the one who gave Nai the access code which made Nai’s claim that he was his accomplice in the Big Fall in episode 1 more plausible for example, this has to imply that there was more to be said in that audio recording and if Brad hadn’t muted it to fixate on the fact that Vash lied to them about the other Independent being alive and come to the conclusion that he had been lying to them this entire time, that he was never on the side of humanity to begin with, then things might have gone as badly as they did, maybe Vash wouldn’t have ran away from Ship 3 to find Nai on his own, maybe he wouldn’t have had to lose his arm to keep him and the everyone else in the scene from being swallowed by his gate. @tristampparty

[alcordraws]

Personally I'm a big fan of Brad going from horrible little bastard man who's 90% sure he's in Alien (1979) and Vash is the titular alien, to President of the Vash Protection Squad/Father Figure. At some point he just accepted that he's coparenting an angel with his best friend. Even revolutionized modern prosthetics for him. What a guy.