Trigun might be the dumbest anime that ever got overrated into being considered good.
First, it forces indoctrination onto weak minded anime fans by cheaply manufacturing a false moral dilemma in the form of Vash, the “good guy” who never kills anyone, but then again he never truly has to, everyone who shoots at him misses, even if it’s 50 people with assault rifles all shooting at him and he doesn’t have to even bother dodging, because no one ever hits him, either because they miss or they intentionally miss to “taunt” him somehow (what?). When you’re never in danger, you never have to worry about protecting yourself. Yet at the same time, the whole stupid show wants to pretend it’s an action packed gritty western, but it just uses that as meaningless window dressing, a flashy front with no substance behind it.
So Vash represents nonviolence, he’s raised by some anime cliche woman that it’s wrong to kill anything, literally ANYTHING, under any circumstances, ever.
His evil twin brother, named Knives (seriously), believes it is okay to kill to protect yourself or others. There’s a flashback later in the series where they’re both kids, they see a spider approaching a butterfly, and Knives kills the spider, and Vash is like NO WHAT YOU DID IS EVIL.
Now normally this could be a moral dilemma presented as an interesting argument. That’s not what this show does though. Trigun goes out of its way to try to prove that Vash is always right and Knives is wrong, by making Knives the most over the top evil mass murderer, and Vash just an innocent man who helps people as its own virtue. Knives is always trying to force Vash into “moral dilemmas” where Vash has to kill someone to save his own life, Vash refuses, and then Knives does nothing, negating the entire dilemma. Then Vash cries because everyone is trying to do mean things to him all the time but he refuses to kill anything, even to the point where he’s never shown eating meat. The idea that all the plants that had to die in order to make food for him are not mentioned, I guess those aren’t considered alive enough.
QED these characters being one dimensional insults to the audience, although most anime fans that I’ve ever known in my life have never been aware of when anything was insulting their intelligence, but Trigun is the epitome of that. It equates killing a spider with being a sadistic mass murderer, and only by crying and being a vegetarian can you actually be a good person.
On top of that, the biggest insult to the audience’s intelligence, and if you actually liked Trigun then you’re an idiot, and here’s the proof: Vash always carries a gun that it turns out is some trigger to his evil secret power. Vash is apparently a big sentient plant (then what do those scars on his body even mean?) who was made as an evil weapon of war, and Knives “activates” Vash with his magic psychic powers to turn Vash’s gun into some kind of bizarre Videodrome rape cannon, the scenes where he does this play out as a rape because Vash is always screaming NO DON’T as his arm turns into a magic glowy flesh cannon (weird but ultimately meaningless symbolism) as Knives does the typical anime stereotype EVIL GRIN HEH NOW YOU SEE THAT etc etc, if you’ve seen about any one anime you’ve seen this kind of scene a million times. Anyway, it’s shown many times that this gun, which a device created for killing, is not actually part of his body, and can be disposed of, yet he always carries it around like some sort of rich girl trendy fashion accessory. Yet he keeps it, then Knives uses magic on it and it turns on Vash’s super evil power. Even AFTER Knives does this multiple times, Vash refuses to get rid of this gun, and yet again Knives confronts him, uses magic, the gun opens up to turn Vash’s arm into a freaky flesh cannon (long live the new flesh I guess), and then Vash is like NO NOT AGAIN. And yet the show still tries to portray that none of this is Vash’s fault, people always go up to Vash and say “this isn’t your fault” and these people who are doing the yelling are cartoonish simplistic villains who are entirely evil or misinformed, and end up either accidentally killing themselves through their own supposed shortsightedness, or end up crying because they become ashamed by someone else’s stronger moral lessons. It’s all a simplistic attempt at indoctrination to make people believe a childish animu viewpoint of some imaginary fairy tale moral absolutism. The bad guys are bad for no reason, they’re just evil to be evil, and the good guy is good because he’s the hero and you should agree with everything he says and does or you’re evil too.
Other moronic insults to the audience involve when someone has Vash dead to rights, pointing a gun right at his head, whether it’s a villain or some villager who claims Vash is responsible for all the murders in the world (the typical persecution complex where the author is probably inserting himself in the story as the victim), and so the guy with the gun shoots AT Vash about 50 times, intentionally missing, before saying “now you deserve to die don’t you see!” You know, instead of actually shooting him. This happens MULTIPLE times throughout the show, and if you don’t realize it’s an insult to you, the viewer, then you don’t have an intelligence to insult in the first place.
The one single moral lesson this show tries to push is that “no one has the right to kill anyone or anything ever.” The show forces the point that “if you disagree you’re evil” by having a bunch of stupid cardboard cutout bad guys show up that actually spout retarded dialogue like “it is okay to kill someone to defend yourself or to save a life” and then to follow that up they brutally murder people or use magic powers to make people murder each other, or ripping their arms and legs off.
The show accidentally proves the opposite without wanting to, however, when Vash is presented with multiple opportunities to kill his eeeeeeevil twin brother (HOW ORIGINAL!) and Vash refuses, then Knives goes out and murders tons of people for fun or for no reason. Many many more times, Vash is “forced” to pull the trigger on someone, and they do that stupid old trick where you hear a gunshot, never see anything, and then it flashes forward where Vash says “I shot him… but I don’t remember even doing it!” or some retarded animu bullshit like that, and anyone with even a severely damaged brain can tell that Vash didn’t do it, but then Vash still spends an entire episode crying about it.
The entire show is a string of childish false dilemmas and attempting to force it down your throat that Vash is the good guy for never killing people, but then never really putting him in danger so he never has to make that choice in the first place. If you find anyone who fell for this show’s bullshit, it’s pretty much the ultimate acid test for being a manchild.
Then again, liking anime at all is usually proof of that. 8)
PS: There are actually more reasons than this why this show is stupid, for example the couple of times Vash does shoot someone, it’s “non lethally” in the leg, even though if you know anything about anatomy, blowing a golf ball sized hole in someone’s femoral artery will have them bleed to death in maybe less than a minute, and that’s not even getting into the hydroshock effect, but no this show just wants to be about cool guns and posing in trendy looking trench coats.
You have a lot of good points, and I do agree that a lot of this series was pretty naive and one-dimensional, but I still think it was fairly enjoyable overall.
MY. RAGE. KNOWS. NO. BOUNDS.
First off, sorry to my wtfmanga followers if this doesn’t fit my normal style. But when something rubs my rhubarb THIS MUCH, I just can’t let it go…Okay. Here’s the thing. I can understand when someone likes something I don’t like, everyone has their own tastes and opinions. And it’s one thing to just say “I don’t like that.”
BUT
It’s something else ENTIRELY to go out of your way to write a long winded rant and say that “I HATE THIS AND IF YOU LIKE IT YOU ARE A RETARDED IDIOT MANCHILD BECAUSE I AM RIGHT AND YOU ARE WRONG.”
Look, I’ll admit I’m a fan of Trigun, and I disagree with you on many of your thoughts on the show, but you know what? THAT’S OK.
I think Vash is a more complex character than you give him credit for.
I don’t think the creator is trying to shove some kind of moral of “If you’re not like my main character you’re wrong and evil and blablabla” down our throats. (Especially when his next big series was GUNGRAVE, which if the main character of THAT series is any indication of your idea, then it would kind of negate everything you just said about the creator’s moral imposing agenda!)
I do KNOW that all I got out of your argument is you are a dismissive, egotistical, hypocrite who thinks herself better than everyone who doesn’t think like him.
You say that Trigun is full of a “I’m right, you’re wrong” mentality, when your WHOLE FUCKING RANT is nothing more than just that.
I don’t even know WHY you made this rant to begin with, because it would seem with your hatred of “anime cliche’s” and how “liking anime makes you a manchild” that you don’t even like anime to begin with.
So what is your argument for exactly? Do you think people that agree with you will sing your praises and hold you on high? While those that don’t and like Trigun will see just how wrong they are and say they were sorry for liking something one random person on the internet didn’t?
I could argue more on the matter, but I feel it would fall on deaf ears.
The long story short of it all is just this:
You don’t like Trigun for “insulting your intelligence”? I don’t like you for just plain being insulting.
Canabalt HD:
There’s nothing I don’t like about this game: simple gameplay, beautiful art style, lots of fun.
This game is more addicting than it has any right to be
I have no shame. Yes, I ordered this.
There’s a blue variant but that’s already sold out…in like, the first 24 hours of it being up. Whoa.
I ordered mine! (Well to be more accurate I had a friend order it for me BUT STILL!)
