Vash the Stampede (Trigun)
Author: Tiggy Malvern
Spoilers: The whole of Vash's back-story in detail. Otherwise I've tried to keep it to a general outline of the anime and talked around the real biggies.
Personal Website: http://freedom.aeglos.org/tiggy/index.php (NB slash/yaoi)
There are quite a few images associated with this essay. I've put them in as clickable links so people on low bandwidth don't have to bother if they don't want to. Anything with an underline takes you to hopefully interesting places.
So this is our good-looking blond hero, right? *yawn*
Wrong.
Kind of.
The man who incinerated two of the seven cities, designated as mankind's first localized Act of God. Some even say he put that hole in the moon, but you'd have to be crazy to believe that.
Ep 18 Goodbye for Now
Confessions first - I came to Trigun because of Wolfwood. I knew the plot in advance, and conflicted anti-heroes have been a thing with me since I was six. So I sat down to watch, all prepared to fall for Wolfwood, and I did (patterns like that can't be escaped, honestly). What surprised me by the end of the anime, though, was how much I felt for Vash, because pretty-boy heroes full of good intentions have never really grabbed me. Once I started delving into the manga, I adored Vash just as much as I adored Wolfwood. And the reason is that Trigun takes the conventions of the hero and twists them rather further than most media does.
It's hard to know where to begin with Vash. He has more layers and personas than an octopus has colours, and setting this out into some sort of logical order is a serious challenge! And that's without the added complication that Vash in the anime and Vash in the manga have major differences. I've concentrated more on the anime since that's what most people are likely to be familiar with, or to become familiar with if I manage to convince a few poor suckers people to give Trigun a go. Manga details largely at the end, if anyone wants to skip the anime stuff they know.
It's basically impossible to discuss Vash and who he is without talking about the events and the people that made him that way, so I guess background first.
Just what's with this weirdo universe anyway?
The big one, for starters - Vash isn't human. It's left deliberately (and probably wisely) uncertain exactly what he is, except he's the same as the creatures that humans use in their power plants to leech energy from. Whether that makes him an alien or some kind of modified human is open to interpretation. But whatever he is, he's considerably faster and more athletic than humans, and has enough innate power to destroy entire cities if he lets it loose. He's also 130 years old.
Vash has a twin brother called Knives. (There's been a fair bit of speculation over who would ever have named a kid Knives or why, with no real conclusions reached....) They were born on board one of a large fleet of colony ships fleeing the polluted Earth, and raised by the crew, primarily Rem. Rem was a woman of high ideals, a pacifist who believed that all life has value and that the colony ships could found a better society, ideals she tried to pass on to the kids.
Rem: And on our new home...
Knives: ...there will be nothing but peaceful days...
Vash: ...with no wars
Knives: Nor stealing!
Vash: An Eden where people can live as people, right?
Ep 17 Rem Saverem
There was some nastiness and internal dispute on board the ship, the details of which vary between anime and manga. The end result was that Knives decided that humans are an unpleasant, inferior species, and he would be doing the universe a favour by assigning himself the job of pest controller. He altered the ships' course so they would crash into a nearby planet and be destroyed. Rem managed to correct the trajectory enough that some of the ships survived the fall. Most of the people died, Rem included, but some survived.
Vash: Rem... the crew... you killed them all!!
Knives: Yes, and it's very colorful. It's superb... except for the fraction who will be saved because of Rem's meddling.
Vash: Knives... you... you aren't human!!
Knives: (kicking Vash) Damned right I'm not! Don't compare me to those imperfect things! Don't compare me to them! Don't compare me to them!!
Ep 20 Flying Ship
A century later, the setting for Trigun is a steampunk society, with a weird mix of futuristic technology salvaged from the crashed ships, which very few people actually understand, and reinvented nineteenth and twentieth century devices. It's a fairly barren planet, never intended to support people. The struggling civilisation attempts to maintain some kind of law, but much of the time the people who end up on top are the ones with the biggest guns who are prepared to use them. Not exactly Rem's Eden....
So what's Vash's deal now then?
When we first meet Vash, he's the most wanted man on the planet - Vash the Stampede, the Humanoid Typhoon, worth sixty billion double dollars. He's also a clumsy idiot with the kind of permanent grin suggestive of an IQ around 80, and behaviour to match.
Man: That's absurd! He was weeping and eating donuts at the same time! Like this!! (shows picture)
Meryl: Donuts are his favorite food.
Man: Are you serious? This is the legendary gunman?
Ep 19 Hang Fire
It's not until episode five that we start to see glimpses of what's going on underneath that idiot persona. Later we find out how he came to be Most Wanted - twenty years ago, he destroyed the city of July. Mysteriously, he managed not to kill the people who were in it at the time, but many of them died of starvation and disease in the ruins. Vash doesn't even remember doing it. But for the last two decades, he's been permanently running, and permanently a target for anyone with a gun who needs money. There are a lot of those on this planet.
When it's an option, he'll evade the people who come after him. When it isn't, he'll shoot to wound. He avoids killing at all costs, in line with Rem's beliefs ('I made a promise. If I put out even one flame of life, it would make her sad.' Ep 8 And Between the Wasteland and Sky) and preaches 'love and peace' to the thugs he defeats.
In episode twelve, we finally get to see something of what Vash can be, why he has the reputation he does, and just how much of an act the careless idiot is. The classic quote of "Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry." applies itself very well to Vash....
Meryl: Is that the real Vash the Stampede? The evil sixty billion double dollar outlaw with Hell's fire burning in his eyes? (flashback) Which is the real man? I don't understand!
Ep 13 Vash the Stampede
Vash is a mass of contradictions. He's a pacifist who uses violence with exceptional skill to defend himself and others. And like anyone who's good at something, he enjoys exercising those abilities. There are times when he could deal with the bad guys quickly and easily, and knowing that, he plays with them instead. Like writing 'Kiss My Ass!!' on an enemy's weapon (in the manga, anyway - the anime toned it down to 'Beat Me!! Just Do It!').
He's a man who just wants the world to leave him in peace ('I only wanted to live quietly with a different name, and a different way of life.' Ep 18 Goodbye for Now), but he's incapable of standing aside while nastiness happens elsewhere, and will always put himself in the middle of a problem:
Max: Are you going in?
Vash: I guess this is just my nature.
Ep 19 Hang Fire
He does it even though he knows it isn't really solving anything. ( 'Whenever I step in, Destiny homes in on the smell of blood and gun smoke. It only creates mountains of debris.' Ep 18 Goodbye for Now)
He's a man who wants the best for everyone, and yet trails disaster and misery in his wake.
Man: One night and look at this. I didn't believe the rumors, but he really is a typhoon. Over half the town is rubble!
Ep 1 The $$60,000,000,000 Man)
And how do all these other people fit with Vash?
Rem: She may be dead, but she's still very much an influence over Vash. She's both his moral conscience and the person he looks to for guidance. When he doesn't know what to do, his first question is 'What would Rem do?'
Knives: Knives is still genocidally inclined towards humans, and Vash is still determined to stop him. Vash's relationship with his brother is, unsurprisingly, conflicted. Even after Knives crashed the ships and Vash knew exactly what he had done, Vash stayed with him for some considerable time. He was too young and insecure to want to be on his own when he'd just lost everything he knew. They are twins, they were incredibly close as children, and even a century later, after multiple bloody confrontations between them, Vash remains reluctant to take direct action against his brother. But, reluctant or not, it's still his responsibility to deal with him.
Wolfwood: But there's somewhere you have to go. You can't stop. Right?
Vash: Yes. That's right. I have to face him.
Ep 22 Alternative
The Insurance Girls: Meryl Stryfe and Milly Thompson work for an insurance company, and are given the task of following Vash around to report on the property damage that occurs in his vicinity and, if possible, to stop the destruction from happening.
Initially the girls have trouble getting to grips with Vash's various personas, particularly Meryl, who spends a while denying that this annoying moron could be the Vash of legend (and so proving the usefulness of his act).
Meryl: Does that man look like the legendary gunman, Vash the Stampede?! That droopy-eyed, weak-looking, bristle-headed, promiscuous-looking donut freak of a man?!
Milly: (to Vash) She bought the donuts.
Ep 2 Truth of Mistake
Vash goes through alternating phases of travelling with them and trying to shake them off. At first he wants rid of them, but they're competent and determined, and he comes to see them as friends and appreciate their company. But as his life becomes ever more difficult, he wants them out of the way for their own sake. Both girls are heavily armed and no slouches, but that's not enough to cope with the level of violence that Vash both attracts and enacts.
Vash: STAY BACK! Stay away from me.
Meryl: That's not him... That's not the man I know... We can't let him go. If we do, he'll never come back!
Milly: I don't think we can stop him. I don't think anyone can stop him right now.
Ep 12 Diablo
And now I have to be fairly careful or I'll be accused of 'ship bashing, coming as I do from the yaoi side of things. Meryl in the anime develops romantic feelings towards Vash, as she gradually sees past the persona of the goofy idiot. Whether or not Vash reciprocates in any way is down to individual interpretation. I don't see that Vash generally treats Meryl any differently than he treats Milly. The only clear distinction is that at one point Meryl's actions and words remind him of Rem, and he hugs her. From there, it's up to the viewer to decide if a resemblance to the woman who was effectively his mother is likely to be a pro or a con for a sexual relationship *grin*. However you see it, it's clear that nothing happens within the series, though it's left open for afterwards.
In the manga, there are no expressed romantic feelings between any of the major characters, and the creator has stated his intention of keeping it that way. Everything there beyond friendship is entirely in how you want to see it.
Wolfwood: mistressrenet gave you the Wolfwood worship yesterday, so that luckily saves me from trying to do a potted rehash!
Vash's relationship with Wolfwood is rather different from his interactions with Meryl and Milly, and I can see two major reasons for that. One is that Vash doesn't feel the same need to protect Wolfwood, because Wolfwood is pretty capable of looking after himself, even in Vash's violent world. In contrast to Vash's repeated attempts to lose the insurance girls, he only attempts to ditch Wolfwood once in the anime, and that's purely to protect someone else's secret.
The second reason for the difference is that Wolfwood sees through Vash's harmless idiot front within hours of meeting him.
Wolfwood: You're always smiling, real friendly like, but your smile is so empty it hurts to watch you. It's like you're hurting like crazy, and grinning to hide it. That's how it looked to me.
Ep 9 Murder Machine
There's little point in Vash always keeping up the happy front around Wolfwood, because lying to Wolfwood just doesn't work. Wolfwood and Vash understand each other because they both live with and by violence. So Wolfwood becomes the one person that Vash can genuinely be himself around, the person he can have a serious discussion with about the more unpleasant aspects of his life that he doesn't want Meryl and Milly to know about, often over a bottle of booze.
Wolfwood: We did everything we could. If you have to call it something, call it fate.
Vash: Don't label it with such a simple word. So many died. They won't come back. It's more than I can bear.
Ep 22 Alternative
Wolfwood is drinking buddy, physical back-up, moral support and occasional confidant, and the closest friend Vash is likely to have had in the twenty years since he acquired his Most Wanted status, if not longer.
Okay, background done (finally!). Where's Vash going from here?
Vash is very inclined towards guilt for the destruction and misery he drags behind him. He has this conversation with a woman who survived the July incident after she tries to blow him up:
Vash: I'm sorry I didn't die. I didn't want the city to go with me.
Elizabeth: How dare you... How dare you say that!
Vash: If you destroyed the plant, you'd be the same as me.
Ep 6 Lost July
To some extent, the guilt is unfounded. The destruction of July was only indirectly his fault, and more Knives' doing than his own. But lack of fault doesn't stop Vash feeling guilty over the consequences of his ongoing battle with his brother.
The big arc plot of the anime involves Knives sending members of a group of assassins after Vash. He doesn't intend them to kill Vash - he knows they almost certainly can't - but to keep pushing Vash, and cause him 'eternal suffering' as Knives' sidekick Legato puts it. Repeatedly.
They use his tendency towards guilt to do it. Instead of always attacking Vash directly, they attack other people - innocent bystanders in some cases, his friends in others. Despite his advantages of speed and ability, Vash hasn't always been able to get away intact over his years as a target. He is badly scarred and held together by more metal than Evel Knievel. He lost his left arm in a fight with his brother and now has a prosthetic with a built in automatic. He can't protect everybody when he can only just protect himself.
Luida: His friends die, his acquaintances are murdered, and some friends even point a gun in his direction.... He continues to wander through his own hell.
Trigun Maximum 3
As the pressure on him increases, Vash finds it ever harder to keep up the grinning persona, and we see more of the man who's spent decades alone and hunted. The happy act he puts on isn't just to throw off his pursuers, isn't just to convince Meryl and Milly that things aren't so bad - it's an attempt to convince himself too, as we discover when we see it crack. After the death of yet another friend, he breaks down in tears in the town square, where seconds before he was apparently gloating delightedly over a bag of fresh donuts.
Vash and Wolfwood do a lot of drinking in Trigun, and in both anime and manga canon, Vash will drink when things get nasty, using alcohol to take the edge off.
Wolfwood: Don't force it down. You have no tolerance. It's not fair to the booze to drink it like that.
Ep 22 Alternative
As the assassins keep coming and people keep dying, Vash is ultimately pushed into a corner where he's forced to re-examine Rem's tenets about the world and find a way to apply them to the practicalities of his current existence. He has to reinvent a moral code he can live by that also covers the big question of exactly what he's going to do about his genocidal brother....
And yeah, I'm deliberately sketching around the details of a lot of this end stuff, because I don't want to spoil everything for people who may not have seen it yet. But are, of course, about to rush out and watch! *grin*
And then there's the guy in the manga.
Manga Vash has all the same ingredients as Vash in the anime, just in different proportions. The really big difference, the one from which most of the others spring, is that you can throw out of the window all that stuff in the anime about how Vash has never killed anyone. Manga Vash has killed people. Never intentionally, they're always collateral damage, but they're dead all the same. When he destroyed July he killed the people in it, including his own friends that he'd been living and working there with.
That changes his attitude somewhat. That whole character arc in the anime where he reassesses his ideals has largely already happened to this Vash. He's aware that neither he nor anyone else can live up to Rem's dreams of Eden, though he continues to try. He's rather less preachy and more willing to make allowances for other people, which has major effects on his relationship with Wolfwood.
Vash: Thank you.
Wolfwood: I killed. I murdered. I'm nothing like these sleepy people here. Nevertheless, you can actually be grateful? Bastard...
Vash: I'm saying... thank you. Because you spilled blood, you saved all of these people's lives. I couldn't have done it without you. I've burdened you with my own feelings. I'm sorry.
Trigun Maximum 3
Probably the clearest illustration of this aspect of Vash comes in chapter 67 of Trigun Maximum when, during a very long and bloody fight, Wolfwood is beating a man to death and Vash just stands and watches. Vash is upset by it, but he knows Wolfwood's reasons and he has no intention of interfering.
We see more of how innately dangerous Vash can be. The Vash who loses control and lashes out can be seen in the anime, for instance when he comes so close to killing the down and (by then) defenceless Monev the Gale:
Vash: THEY'RE DEAD! You killed them! You die with them!
Ep 12 Diablo
But Vash's self-control is a little shakier in the manga, and in Trigun Maximum 5 he comes perilously close to destroying a third city without any influence from Knives or Legato at all, just his own fury and his recovered memories of July driving him.
There was also an incident as a child when he stabbed Rem with a knife. He regretted it immediately afterwards, and the provocation was there (the twins had discovered that a Plant child like them had previously been born on the ship, and had been 'investigated' in a laboratory and died), but it's an action that you just can't imagine from anime!Vash.
Manga!Vash is seeking out Knives with every intention of beating the crap out of him when he finds him, and there isn't the angsting over fighting his brother that goes on in the anime. As the manga progresses, Vash gains more control over his own powers too, and really learns how to use them.
Of the two versions, it's manga Vash who really owns my soul, because he's that bit grittier and more practical. Occasionally, I do feel the urge to kick some sense into anime!Vash when he's at his most rigidly idealistic. That doesn't happen with manga!Vash, because life has already done the kicking.
The manga places considerably less emphasis on Vash the Idiot and more on Vash the Dark and Dangerous. So if it was the angst and the violent setting that made you a fan of the anime, rather than the silliness, then seek out the manga and you will be rewarded....
The Obligatory Summary
Or 'Back to Meryl's question - Which is the real man?'
The answer, of course, is that all of them are. Even the goofy, grinning idiot is part of how Vash would be if he were given the opportunity to simply relax - we catch that when we see Vash as a happy drunk, and in snippets of how he was when he spent two years living under another name in a backwater town, a doomed attempt to get away from his life.
The laughing guy, the grieving one, the one overloaded by guilt, the one who releases his anger and terrifies people into frozen silence - they're all just Vash, and that's what makes him fascinating, the way all these different facets of him interact. Vash has depth and layers.
There are some stereotyped hero aspects to Vash, especially in the slightly cleaned up version we get in the anime. Yes, he's the Hero with Angst, yes, he's the Hero with Guilt. Yes, he questions his own self-worth and is always aware that he's different ('To ordinary people, I must seem like a monster.' Ep 20 Flying Ship). But the bottom line is that Vash is as tough and sharp as nails. No matter what happens to him, no matter how horrible his life becomes, no matter that the beliefs he based his life on prove to be fragile, he will bounce back. Every single time. He will find a way to reconstruct his life and live it, he will regain his faith in himself and do whatever has to be done. Even after he's failed so many times, he's able to say to Brad, 'Will you believe me? Please.'
He picked the right symbol in the coat, the geranium. Vash really is all about determination. How could I not love him?
All anime quotes are subtitles from the official DVD releases, complete with US spellings. :-)
Manga dialogue from Trigun Maximum 3 is the Dark Horse Comics translation.
Linked manga translation courteousy of sumire, who has by far the most informative Trigun site out there for both anime and manga.
Fic:
Character fic recs are very hard to find for Trigun. The fandom seems to revolve mainly around the relationships - the het, the yaoi and, sadly, the Mary Sues. This is all I could find that even came close.
A Little Piece of Paradise Quite plotty, don't read if you don't know the end of the series, but it involves who Vash is and his effects on other people.
Spiders and Butterflies Vash and Knives and the never-ending conflict. Again, requires you to know the anime.
Permanent and Forever It is Vash/Wolfwood, but only in a couple of PG mentions. The author's given it an OOC warning, but I think it's well within the possibilities.
Music vids:
There are a lot of decent Vash AMVs out there - I've just picked a few of my favourites that make different points. (Beware, spoilery vids)
Otaku Vengeance have a good vid to 'Revolution Man', but don't allow direct links to the AMV page. You have to click on AMVs and then on Section 1 to get to the download link. Vash in action, but with depth.
Otaku Productions' Eden Vash and Knives. You may have to wait to download if you're not a member of animemusicvideos.org
Fine Again - Josiah X One of the many 'It sucks to be Vash' vids, this one makes a big emotional impact on me, but that's likely to be highly personal. Same download provisos.
Spoilers: The whole of Vash's back-story in detail. Otherwise I've tried to keep it to a general outline of the anime and talked around the real biggies.
Personal Website: http://freedom.aeglos.org/tiggy/index.php (NB slash/yaoi)
There are quite a few images associated with this essay. I've put them in as clickable links so people on low bandwidth don't have to bother if they don't want to. Anything with an underline takes you to hopefully interesting places.
So this is our good-looking blond hero, right? *yawn*
Wrong.
Kind of.
The man who incinerated two of the seven cities, designated as mankind's first localized Act of God. Some even say he put that hole in the moon, but you'd have to be crazy to believe that.
Ep 18 Goodbye for Now
Confessions first - I came to Trigun because of Wolfwood. I knew the plot in advance, and conflicted anti-heroes have been a thing with me since I was six. So I sat down to watch, all prepared to fall for Wolfwood, and I did (patterns like that can't be escaped, honestly). What surprised me by the end of the anime, though, was how much I felt for Vash, because pretty-boy heroes full of good intentions have never really grabbed me. Once I started delving into the manga, I adored Vash just as much as I adored Wolfwood. And the reason is that Trigun takes the conventions of the hero and twists them rather further than most media does.
It's hard to know where to begin with Vash. He has more layers and personas than an octopus has colours, and setting this out into some sort of logical order is a serious challenge! And that's without the added complication that Vash in the anime and Vash in the manga have major differences. I've concentrated more on the anime since that's what most people are likely to be familiar with, or to become familiar with if I manage to convince a few poor suckers people to give Trigun a go. Manga details largely at the end, if anyone wants to skip the anime stuff they know.
It's basically impossible to discuss Vash and who he is without talking about the events and the people that made him that way, so I guess background first.
Just what's with this weirdo universe anyway?
The big one, for starters - Vash isn't human. It's left deliberately (and probably wisely) uncertain exactly what he is, except he's the same as the creatures that humans use in their power plants to leech energy from. Whether that makes him an alien or some kind of modified human is open to interpretation. But whatever he is, he's considerably faster and more athletic than humans, and has enough innate power to destroy entire cities if he lets it loose. He's also 130 years old.
Vash has a twin brother called Knives. (There's been a fair bit of speculation over who would ever have named a kid Knives or why, with no real conclusions reached....) They were born on board one of a large fleet of colony ships fleeing the polluted Earth, and raised by the crew, primarily Rem. Rem was a woman of high ideals, a pacifist who believed that all life has value and that the colony ships could found a better society, ideals she tried to pass on to the kids.
Rem: And on our new home...
Knives: ...there will be nothing but peaceful days...
Vash: ...with no wars
Knives: Nor stealing!
Vash: An Eden where people can live as people, right?
Ep 17 Rem Saverem
There was some nastiness and internal dispute on board the ship, the details of which vary between anime and manga. The end result was that Knives decided that humans are an unpleasant, inferior species, and he would be doing the universe a favour by assigning himself the job of pest controller. He altered the ships' course so they would crash into a nearby planet and be destroyed. Rem managed to correct the trajectory enough that some of the ships survived the fall. Most of the people died, Rem included, but some survived.
Vash: Rem... the crew... you killed them all!!
Knives: Yes, and it's very colorful. It's superb... except for the fraction who will be saved because of Rem's meddling.
Vash: Knives... you... you aren't human!!
Knives: (kicking Vash) Damned right I'm not! Don't compare me to those imperfect things! Don't compare me to them! Don't compare me to them!!
Ep 20 Flying Ship
A century later, the setting for Trigun is a steampunk society, with a weird mix of futuristic technology salvaged from the crashed ships, which very few people actually understand, and reinvented nineteenth and twentieth century devices. It's a fairly barren planet, never intended to support people. The struggling civilisation attempts to maintain some kind of law, but much of the time the people who end up on top are the ones with the biggest guns who are prepared to use them. Not exactly Rem's Eden....
So what's Vash's deal now then?
When we first meet Vash, he's the most wanted man on the planet - Vash the Stampede, the Humanoid Typhoon, worth sixty billion double dollars. He's also a clumsy idiot with the kind of permanent grin suggestive of an IQ around 80, and behaviour to match.
Man: That's absurd! He was weeping and eating donuts at the same time! Like this!! (shows picture)
Meryl: Donuts are his favorite food.
Man: Are you serious? This is the legendary gunman?
Ep 19 Hang Fire
It's not until episode five that we start to see glimpses of what's going on underneath that idiot persona. Later we find out how he came to be Most Wanted - twenty years ago, he destroyed the city of July. Mysteriously, he managed not to kill the people who were in it at the time, but many of them died of starvation and disease in the ruins. Vash doesn't even remember doing it. But for the last two decades, he's been permanently running, and permanently a target for anyone with a gun who needs money. There are a lot of those on this planet.
When it's an option, he'll evade the people who come after him. When it isn't, he'll shoot to wound. He avoids killing at all costs, in line with Rem's beliefs ('I made a promise. If I put out even one flame of life, it would make her sad.' Ep 8 And Between the Wasteland and Sky) and preaches 'love and peace' to the thugs he defeats.
In episode twelve, we finally get to see something of what Vash can be, why he has the reputation he does, and just how much of an act the careless idiot is. The classic quote of "Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry." applies itself very well to Vash....
Meryl: Is that the real Vash the Stampede? The evil sixty billion double dollar outlaw with Hell's fire burning in his eyes? (flashback) Which is the real man? I don't understand!
Ep 13 Vash the Stampede
Vash is a mass of contradictions. He's a pacifist who uses violence with exceptional skill to defend himself and others. And like anyone who's good at something, he enjoys exercising those abilities. There are times when he could deal with the bad guys quickly and easily, and knowing that, he plays with them instead. Like writing 'Kiss My Ass!!' on an enemy's weapon (in the manga, anyway - the anime toned it down to 'Beat Me!! Just Do It!').
He's a man who just wants the world to leave him in peace ('I only wanted to live quietly with a different name, and a different way of life.' Ep 18 Goodbye for Now), but he's incapable of standing aside while nastiness happens elsewhere, and will always put himself in the middle of a problem:
Max: Are you going in?
Vash: I guess this is just my nature.
Ep 19 Hang Fire
He does it even though he knows it isn't really solving anything. ( 'Whenever I step in, Destiny homes in on the smell of blood and gun smoke. It only creates mountains of debris.' Ep 18 Goodbye for Now)
He's a man who wants the best for everyone, and yet trails disaster and misery in his wake.
Man: One night and look at this. I didn't believe the rumors, but he really is a typhoon. Over half the town is rubble!
Ep 1 The $$60,000,000,000 Man)
And how do all these other people fit with Vash?
Rem: She may be dead, but she's still very much an influence over Vash. She's both his moral conscience and the person he looks to for guidance. When he doesn't know what to do, his first question is 'What would Rem do?'
Knives: Knives is still genocidally inclined towards humans, and Vash is still determined to stop him. Vash's relationship with his brother is, unsurprisingly, conflicted. Even after Knives crashed the ships and Vash knew exactly what he had done, Vash stayed with him for some considerable time. He was too young and insecure to want to be on his own when he'd just lost everything he knew. They are twins, they were incredibly close as children, and even a century later, after multiple bloody confrontations between them, Vash remains reluctant to take direct action against his brother. But, reluctant or not, it's still his responsibility to deal with him.
Wolfwood: But there's somewhere you have to go. You can't stop. Right?
Vash: Yes. That's right. I have to face him.
Ep 22 Alternative
The Insurance Girls: Meryl Stryfe and Milly Thompson work for an insurance company, and are given the task of following Vash around to report on the property damage that occurs in his vicinity and, if possible, to stop the destruction from happening.
Initially the girls have trouble getting to grips with Vash's various personas, particularly Meryl, who spends a while denying that this annoying moron could be the Vash of legend (and so proving the usefulness of his act).
Meryl: Does that man look like the legendary gunman, Vash the Stampede?! That droopy-eyed, weak-looking, bristle-headed, promiscuous-looking donut freak of a man?!
Milly: (to Vash) She bought the donuts.
Ep 2 Truth of Mistake
Vash goes through alternating phases of travelling with them and trying to shake them off. At first he wants rid of them, but they're competent and determined, and he comes to see them as friends and appreciate their company. But as his life becomes ever more difficult, he wants them out of the way for their own sake. Both girls are heavily armed and no slouches, but that's not enough to cope with the level of violence that Vash both attracts and enacts.
Vash: STAY BACK! Stay away from me.
Meryl: That's not him... That's not the man I know... We can't let him go. If we do, he'll never come back!
Milly: I don't think we can stop him. I don't think anyone can stop him right now.
Ep 12 Diablo
And now I have to be fairly careful or I'll be accused of 'ship bashing, coming as I do from the yaoi side of things. Meryl in the anime develops romantic feelings towards Vash, as she gradually sees past the persona of the goofy idiot. Whether or not Vash reciprocates in any way is down to individual interpretation. I don't see that Vash generally treats Meryl any differently than he treats Milly. The only clear distinction is that at one point Meryl's actions and words remind him of Rem, and he hugs her. From there, it's up to the viewer to decide if a resemblance to the woman who was effectively his mother is likely to be a pro or a con for a sexual relationship *grin*. However you see it, it's clear that nothing happens within the series, though it's left open for afterwards.
In the manga, there are no expressed romantic feelings between any of the major characters, and the creator has stated his intention of keeping it that way. Everything there beyond friendship is entirely in how you want to see it.
Wolfwood: mistressrenet gave you the Wolfwood worship yesterday, so that luckily saves me from trying to do a potted rehash!
Vash's relationship with Wolfwood is rather different from his interactions with Meryl and Milly, and I can see two major reasons for that. One is that Vash doesn't feel the same need to protect Wolfwood, because Wolfwood is pretty capable of looking after himself, even in Vash's violent world. In contrast to Vash's repeated attempts to lose the insurance girls, he only attempts to ditch Wolfwood once in the anime, and that's purely to protect someone else's secret.
The second reason for the difference is that Wolfwood sees through Vash's harmless idiot front within hours of meeting him.
Wolfwood: You're always smiling, real friendly like, but your smile is so empty it hurts to watch you. It's like you're hurting like crazy, and grinning to hide it. That's how it looked to me.
Ep 9 Murder Machine
There's little point in Vash always keeping up the happy front around Wolfwood, because lying to Wolfwood just doesn't work. Wolfwood and Vash understand each other because they both live with and by violence. So Wolfwood becomes the one person that Vash can genuinely be himself around, the person he can have a serious discussion with about the more unpleasant aspects of his life that he doesn't want Meryl and Milly to know about, often over a bottle of booze.
Wolfwood: We did everything we could. If you have to call it something, call it fate.
Vash: Don't label it with such a simple word. So many died. They won't come back. It's more than I can bear.
Ep 22 Alternative
Wolfwood is drinking buddy, physical back-up, moral support and occasional confidant, and the closest friend Vash is likely to have had in the twenty years since he acquired his Most Wanted status, if not longer.
Okay, background done (finally!). Where's Vash going from here?
Vash is very inclined towards guilt for the destruction and misery he drags behind him. He has this conversation with a woman who survived the July incident after she tries to blow him up:
Vash: I'm sorry I didn't die. I didn't want the city to go with me.
Elizabeth: How dare you... How dare you say that!
Vash: If you destroyed the plant, you'd be the same as me.
Ep 6 Lost July
To some extent, the guilt is unfounded. The destruction of July was only indirectly his fault, and more Knives' doing than his own. But lack of fault doesn't stop Vash feeling guilty over the consequences of his ongoing battle with his brother.
The big arc plot of the anime involves Knives sending members of a group of assassins after Vash. He doesn't intend them to kill Vash - he knows they almost certainly can't - but to keep pushing Vash, and cause him 'eternal suffering' as Knives' sidekick Legato puts it. Repeatedly.
They use his tendency towards guilt to do it. Instead of always attacking Vash directly, they attack other people - innocent bystanders in some cases, his friends in others. Despite his advantages of speed and ability, Vash hasn't always been able to get away intact over his years as a target. He is badly scarred and held together by more metal than Evel Knievel. He lost his left arm in a fight with his brother and now has a prosthetic with a built in automatic. He can't protect everybody when he can only just protect himself.
Luida: His friends die, his acquaintances are murdered, and some friends even point a gun in his direction.... He continues to wander through his own hell.
Trigun Maximum 3
As the pressure on him increases, Vash finds it ever harder to keep up the grinning persona, and we see more of the man who's spent decades alone and hunted. The happy act he puts on isn't just to throw off his pursuers, isn't just to convince Meryl and Milly that things aren't so bad - it's an attempt to convince himself too, as we discover when we see it crack. After the death of yet another friend, he breaks down in tears in the town square, where seconds before he was apparently gloating delightedly over a bag of fresh donuts.
Vash and Wolfwood do a lot of drinking in Trigun, and in both anime and manga canon, Vash will drink when things get nasty, using alcohol to take the edge off.
Wolfwood: Don't force it down. You have no tolerance. It's not fair to the booze to drink it like that.
Ep 22 Alternative
As the assassins keep coming and people keep dying, Vash is ultimately pushed into a corner where he's forced to re-examine Rem's tenets about the world and find a way to apply them to the practicalities of his current existence. He has to reinvent a moral code he can live by that also covers the big question of exactly what he's going to do about his genocidal brother....
And yeah, I'm deliberately sketching around the details of a lot of this end stuff, because I don't want to spoil everything for people who may not have seen it yet. But are, of course, about to rush out and watch! *grin*
And then there's the guy in the manga.
Manga Vash has all the same ingredients as Vash in the anime, just in different proportions. The really big difference, the one from which most of the others spring, is that you can throw out of the window all that stuff in the anime about how Vash has never killed anyone. Manga Vash has killed people. Never intentionally, they're always collateral damage, but they're dead all the same. When he destroyed July he killed the people in it, including his own friends that he'd been living and working there with.
That changes his attitude somewhat. That whole character arc in the anime where he reassesses his ideals has largely already happened to this Vash. He's aware that neither he nor anyone else can live up to Rem's dreams of Eden, though he continues to try. He's rather less preachy and more willing to make allowances for other people, which has major effects on his relationship with Wolfwood.
Vash: Thank you.
Wolfwood: I killed. I murdered. I'm nothing like these sleepy people here. Nevertheless, you can actually be grateful? Bastard...
Vash: I'm saying... thank you. Because you spilled blood, you saved all of these people's lives. I couldn't have done it without you. I've burdened you with my own feelings. I'm sorry.
Trigun Maximum 3
Probably the clearest illustration of this aspect of Vash comes in chapter 67 of Trigun Maximum when, during a very long and bloody fight, Wolfwood is beating a man to death and Vash just stands and watches. Vash is upset by it, but he knows Wolfwood's reasons and he has no intention of interfering.
We see more of how innately dangerous Vash can be. The Vash who loses control and lashes out can be seen in the anime, for instance when he comes so close to killing the down and (by then) defenceless Monev the Gale:
Vash: THEY'RE DEAD! You killed them! You die with them!
Ep 12 Diablo
But Vash's self-control is a little shakier in the manga, and in Trigun Maximum 5 he comes perilously close to destroying a third city without any influence from Knives or Legato at all, just his own fury and his recovered memories of July driving him.
There was also an incident as a child when he stabbed Rem with a knife. He regretted it immediately afterwards, and the provocation was there (the twins had discovered that a Plant child like them had previously been born on the ship, and had been 'investigated' in a laboratory and died), but it's an action that you just can't imagine from anime!Vash.
Manga!Vash is seeking out Knives with every intention of beating the crap out of him when he finds him, and there isn't the angsting over fighting his brother that goes on in the anime. As the manga progresses, Vash gains more control over his own powers too, and really learns how to use them.
Of the two versions, it's manga Vash who really owns my soul, because he's that bit grittier and more practical. Occasionally, I do feel the urge to kick some sense into anime!Vash when he's at his most rigidly idealistic. That doesn't happen with manga!Vash, because life has already done the kicking.
The manga places considerably less emphasis on Vash the Idiot and more on Vash the Dark and Dangerous. So if it was the angst and the violent setting that made you a fan of the anime, rather than the silliness, then seek out the manga and you will be rewarded....
The Obligatory Summary
Or 'Back to Meryl's question - Which is the real man?'
The answer, of course, is that all of them are. Even the goofy, grinning idiot is part of how Vash would be if he were given the opportunity to simply relax - we catch that when we see Vash as a happy drunk, and in snippets of how he was when he spent two years living under another name in a backwater town, a doomed attempt to get away from his life.
The laughing guy, the grieving one, the one overloaded by guilt, the one who releases his anger and terrifies people into frozen silence - they're all just Vash, and that's what makes him fascinating, the way all these different facets of him interact. Vash has depth and layers.
There are some stereotyped hero aspects to Vash, especially in the slightly cleaned up version we get in the anime. Yes, he's the Hero with Angst, yes, he's the Hero with Guilt. Yes, he questions his own self-worth and is always aware that he's different ('To ordinary people, I must seem like a monster.' Ep 20 Flying Ship). But the bottom line is that Vash is as tough and sharp as nails. No matter what happens to him, no matter how horrible his life becomes, no matter that the beliefs he based his life on prove to be fragile, he will bounce back. Every single time. He will find a way to reconstruct his life and live it, he will regain his faith in himself and do whatever has to be done. Even after he's failed so many times, he's able to say to Brad, 'Will you believe me? Please.'
He picked the right symbol in the coat, the geranium. Vash really is all about determination. How could I not love him?
All anime quotes are subtitles from the official DVD releases, complete with US spellings. :-)
Manga dialogue from Trigun Maximum 3 is the Dark Horse Comics translation.
Linked manga translation courteousy of sumire, who has by far the most informative Trigun site out there for both anime and manga.
Fic:
Character fic recs are very hard to find for Trigun. The fandom seems to revolve mainly around the relationships - the het, the yaoi and, sadly, the Mary Sues. This is all I could find that even came close.
A Little Piece of Paradise Quite plotty, don't read if you don't know the end of the series, but it involves who Vash is and his effects on other people.
Spiders and Butterflies Vash and Knives and the never-ending conflict. Again, requires you to know the anime.
Permanent and Forever It is Vash/Wolfwood, but only in a couple of PG mentions. The author's given it an OOC warning, but I think it's well within the possibilities.
Music vids:
There are a lot of decent Vash AMVs out there - I've just picked a few of my favourites that make different points. (Beware, spoilery vids)
Otaku Vengeance have a good vid to 'Revolution Man', but don't allow direct links to the AMV page. You have to click on AMVs and then on Section 1 to get to the download link. Vash in action, but with depth.
Otaku Productions' Eden Vash and Knives. You may have to wait to download if you're not a member of animemusicvideos.org
Fine Again - Josiah X One of the many 'It sucks to be Vash' vids, this one makes a big emotional impact on me, but that's likely to be highly personal. Same download provisos.