#vash was going into the final fucking battle and i still didn't know what knives WAS let alone what the fuck he WANTED

[blueskittlesart]

Hi! As someone who now kinda wants to check out Trigun because of the hype, do you recommend that I can start with Stampede? Or do I really need to watch the OG anime first to better understand/enjoy it? Thank you! 🙋🏻‍♀️

you can start with stampede! i'd say knowing the context of the original enhances the experience but isn't necessary to enjoy the show. I would consider stampede more viewer-friendly, especially for those of us who are used to modern storytelling conventions (the original suffers the consequences of general writing trends in anime at the time it was produced and of the fact that it was produced long before the manga was finished, so the story is somewhat disjointed and has a lot of filler which makes it REALLY hard to get into.) if you do end up liking stampede, however, I'd suggest trying out watching at least SOME of the original because it adds a lot of cool nuance and context to the story that stampede tells!

#your only REAL handicap is that you're missing out on references that clue you into the context of the story early on #and quite a few references in the finale. but none of those references are hugely necessary to understand the plot so you should be fine! #i didn't DISLIKE the origial and like i said im glad i watched it first but it was. REALLY hard to get into. #even as someone who understands writing trends & enjoys a lot of older anime trigun is. a product of its time. #there's almost no context given for the story you're witnessing until a good 20 episodes in. #the main villain isn't named at all until halfway through the runtime #and even TWO EPISODES BEFORE THE FINALE i still did not have enough information to fully understand what the hell was going on #vash was going into the final fucking battle and i still didn't know what knives WAS let alone what the fuck he WANTED #not to mention nick was FULLY DEAD and i still didnt know what his deal was. like ok go off king have ur moment bleeding out in the church #but can you EXPLAIN WHATS GOING ON BEFORE YOU SUCCUMB TO THE BLOOD LOSS PLEASEEEEEEEE GOD #stampede does that whole thing WAY better imo. it sprinkles the backstory more naturally throughout the show #again. part of this is 90s writing conventions. but there's only so much i can take fr #it was like comparable to evangelion in terms of LACK OF CONTEXT #anyways. this isnt supposed to be me complaining about the original. it had its moments. i watched 24 episodes of it like it was not BAD #but like. i think the story really benefits from the way that stampede chooses to lay everything out. is what im saying. #tldr watch them in whatever order but if you like stampede try the original #you might not like it more than stampede but you WILL feel cool when you realize how it all relates to stampede #asks #vash is also WAAAAAY sexier in stampede. HOWEVER. the women of the show are like 10 times sexier in the original. so. pick your poison ig

[hikennosabo]

trimax vol 10 random thoughts (ch 5-8)

part 1 here.

okay, time for part 2. i don't want to do this, i have a pit in my stomach.

chapter 5:

destroying razlo's punishers... a good strategy!

getting leverage to jump by stepping on his leg, i love it

you could say he. he was. *wheeze*... i guess you could say he was... ...disarmed... [a comically large hook drags me off the stage]

wolfwood and razlo just met today (not technically but y'know), but he can read razlo so well already, taunting him like this.

THIS FIGHT...!!! it's reminding me of vash vs knives in the finale of the 98 anime! one black gun and one white gun, and them being on even ground, making the same moves...

they're an even match when they're just whaling on each other, but wolfwood has tactics that razlo doesn't. also this is an insanely cool move.

chapter 6:

^ how it feels to read trigun maximum (said again)

^ how it feels to read trigun maximum (said for a third time)

he knows wolfwood is dying. we know wolfwood is dying. he can't do anything to stop it. we can't do anything to stop it. (except for refusing to keep turning the pages, i guess)

THEY HAVE NAMES?

vash can't do anything to stop wolfwood from dying, but he can help wolfwood go out on his own terms...

PLEASE, HE'S ALREADY DYING, WE DON'T NEED YET ANOTHER DEATH FAKEOUT FOR THE BOOKS.

livio interfering... i'm not an expert but this is not how DID works. but sure. the drama carries it.

WHY AND HOW IS CHAPEL STILL ALIVE FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU

razlo realizes very fast that chapel never cared. despite his verbal denial, i think he was realizing way before this.

DESERVED!!! YES.... KILL!!!!!!

of course razlo can only attack. attack, like how he killed livio's parents. not that chapel doesn't deserve it, but this is the only thing razlo knows how to do.

ough. livio apologizing... "i'm okay now"...

so is razlo just gone now? like i said, i'm not a DID expert, i know re-integration(? not sure if that's the correct term sorry) is possible, but i don't know if this is how it works...

honestly, i feel bad for razlo. he only knew a life of violence, he was manipulated and indoctrinated by chapel, all he wanted was to be needed but his last experiences are finding out that chapel didn't care about him and then livio telling him he doesn't need him anymore. poor guy.

chapter 7:

oh, no, i don't want to read this chapter again. don't make me read this chapter again.

the difference between this and tristamp... stamp had the orphanage much more directly tied to EoM, and a bunch of guys in suits came to pick wolfwood up. this scene is a lot more "normal," a lot less obviously suspicious. idk if i'd go so far as to say stamp!melanie was in on the whole thing, but she doesn't look happy about wolfwood leaving... i do wonder how stampede will handle all this... ANYWAY!

"six years"... lmao. now i understand what people meant when they said the timeline is confusing. it's killing me and i hate it, actually?! nightow ALL you had to do was NOT specify a number!!!

the coins... i constantly forget about them and i find it funny whenever they're brought up... they were so clearly meant to set the ghg up as a shonen battle enemy-of-the-month type thing but then that got thrown off the rails when the magazine ceased publication and everything got turned upside down. yet the coins persist. what are they all for in the end.

also i'm sad. this is wolfwood's paltry attempt at pushing vash away. (also he's been carrying rai-dei's coin this whole time?! lol?! that's also sad... just waiting to give it to vash i guess...)

"this is the way you want it? are you sure?" i'm just fucking inconsolable at this point.

of course this attempt at sincere emotion is deflected. you boys are so, so, so, so, so stupid.

i can't do this man. i can't review the couch scene. i'm crying too much.

the prayer. this especially is getting to me. we've seen wolfwood pray a few times, but now it's vash's turn to pray. we've never seen him do that. and while vash was there to answer wolfwood's prayer... there is no one to answer vash.

what if i climbed into the microwave right fucking now.

ourgh. out of all the images in this chapter, this is the one that stuck with me the most. even more than the couch images. ugh, i can't even fucking write.

chapter 8:

i don't know where else to say this...? lol but livio's personality is different, he's cute now. is this because he broke out of the EoM brainwashing or because he integrated with(???) razlo? (once again: IS this how this works???) or is it both? either way he's a lot more expressive than he was before...

other people have already talked about how we didn't see the burial. i'm also thinking about everything else we didn't see. vash buried wolfwood, and he also cleaned up outside, brought livio in and laid him down, gathered ingredients and started cooking...

how long did he sit on that couch for before he moved. how much and how hard did he cry. we didn't see that either. we don't need to.

knives. he's smearing blood on his face again.

his laughter... i don't think he finds this funny like "haha funny" necessarily, i think he's just losing it.

vash defends the orphanage and knives doesn't even push it. he just moves on. hmm, i'm trying to articulate this... vash's display of power used up more of his life, which knives noticed obviously, and vash is willing to go that far to protect the orphanage... knives still doesn't want vash to die, and... he's laughing out of disbelief, or something like that. i don't know.

vash and livio sharing a meal together is... it's nice. but vash is still clearly very angry. with livio, with razlo, with himself too probably.

i don't know. i'm not angry with livio or razlo at all. they were both victims of chapel same as wolfwood. this is all chapel's fault in my mind, lol.

oh.

we're gonna see this in stampede too, aren't we. wolfwood will die for a third time and we're gonna see vash holding the punisher.

the fact that this volume doesn't even have the goofy author extra... we're just forced to sit with this. man. the book club wasn't kidding, it's so much worse the second time around. the first time i cried a little but i was mostly just taking it all in. the second time i was like actually heaving and sobbing. reading this volume twice within a few days was a BAD IDEA.

AND WE STILL HAVE FOUR VOLUMES LEFT. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GO ON AFTER THIS. four entire volumes without wolfwood...

#trigunbookclub #trigun talk #june speaks #sorry if this is incomprehensible i was crying too much while outlining this and i don't want to read the volume AGAIN #i'm surprised at how much i had to say about razlo in this volume... i ended up finding him more interesting than i thought i would...

[blueskittlesart]

In defense of the original, while I do agree the episodic vibes were a bit much at times, and it was something I kinda had to work my way through slowly rather than binging all in one...

I do kinda prefer the more gradual approach to laying out the information; getting to know both the setting and who Vash is as a person and the different facets of both, before getting the context that lets it all click into place. Plus the main quartet having ample time to grow together so that later developments have stronger emotional weight.

I will agree that Knives definitely suffered in focus, and I am interested in how Stampede handles him, but admittedly he wasn't really what I watched Trigun for in the first place. ^^;

yeah my gripe is less with the way the setting and characters were handled and more with the way the. actual plot was handled. it honest to god felt to me like they realized about halfway through their run that they didnt have enough episodes left to get the backstory in in a cohesive way so they just shoved it all into one episode and pretended that that explanation didn't create more questions than it answered. you spend 20 episodes teasing your audience like "ooooh what is vash?? clearly hes not human!! clearly there's something going on!!! don't you want to know whats going on?? keep watching and you'll totally understand whats going on!!" and then your big reveal is that. He Is Not Human. which is something that any idiot who has watched the last 20 episodes has already figured out. the question the audience ACTUALLY has at that point in the runtime is what, EXACTLY, is vash, and what the context is behind the conflict he and knives are in. the backstory episode explains that Knives Is Here, and it gives context to the setting and everything, but it pissed me off that it STILL didn't answer the actual mysteries i cared about, i.e. vash's real identity and the thing with the gun and his fucking arm and knives's motivations and everything. maybe that gets answered in the last episode that i neglected to watch but personally I prefer a story where i UNDERSTAND WHAT'S GOING ON by the time the final confrontation hits. with trigun it got to a point where vash was going out for the final battle with knives and i STILL didn't know who vash was, who knives was, where they came from, or what the hell their motivations were. that just made that final confrontation seem so wholly uninteresting to me that i didn't even feel like watching it. it was like "hey look vash is fighting a cardboard cutout that he is Afraid Of. Why? lmao idk man. probably has something to do with that weird spaceship that shows up in one whole episode before this point. not going to tell you how tho." I think some writers have this tendency to think that mystery = good writing and that not revealing anything to your audience will consistently draw them in for more, but that only works for so long. after 20 episodes of virtually net 0 information it got to feel like I was being strung along and like my questions were never going to be answered, so I gave up on the show in the final hour. Again, i'm not saying it was BAD necessarily and i understand the context in terms of writing and production that led to the show being produced that way but i think it really noticeably suffers due to the fact that it refuses to give the audience ANYTHING but crumbs of information for about 80% of it's runtime. that being said. i did genuinely like a lot of it. it has its moments. im not trying to discourage anyone from watching it or anything lol i just think stampede is a little more successful in keeping the viewer engaged in the story throughout by constantly feeding you bits of information and actually answering your questions as they become plot-relevant.

#asks #wow hi. trigun essay intermission sorry everyone #this same thing applies to virtually every villain in the show. nick. zazzie. the guy with the blue hair whose name i dont even remember. #you get like. the barest snippets of information about them. you know theyre working for knives somehow #you know that they've been somehow modified? and that their titles identify them as relating to knives #in nick's case you know that his whole thing has something to do with the orphanage and the priesthood #but beyond that you get... nothing. and you're expected to just speculate?? figure it out somehow??? #nick especially pissed me off bc it got to a point where he was DEAD and i still didn't understand what the fuck his deal was #despite him being a supporting character for almost the entirety of the show. he still got only like half an episode dedicated to explainin #his backstory and motivations and EVERYTHING. and then he DIED #and like. to be fair. i think the lack of explanation worked in some places. it worked decently with vash #but it worked with vash BECAUSE vash is pretty much an open book as a character. you can easily tell what he's thinking and feeling #and it's not hard to extrapolate things about him from what you see. his pacifism. the fact that he's not human. his past trauma etc etc #you can get a good portion of that just by watching him throughout the show #but i think that only works BECAUSE he shows so much of himself. for a character like nick who is deliberately closed off #and NEVER shows his true self expecting the audience to be able to understand & empathize with him based solely on what he projects #just doesn't work. because it's made clear to the audience from the getgo that nick is not the person he claims he is #and that he takes steps to never show too much of himself. so when his backstory shows up randomly in one episode #and then he immediately dies. it leaves you kinda like. okay. what the hell was that. who was that guy anyway #you know??? #ok rant over fr