Monthly anime marathon: Trigun

[foxinthestars]

(Something besides my fanfic!)

So I just finished my promised-to-self monthly foray into back-catalog anime, sort of a semi-marathon. This month I actually picked it in advance, once I remembered that I had, so I just got done watching Trigun. My sense is that it's one of the classics, and I recall in particular a friend who was into it years ago when I was into Rurouni Kenshin and how it was often compared to RK (RK being one of my foundation stones as an anime fan). However, all I'd ever seen of it was the first four episodes dubbed on VHS, so yeah, it seemed overdue.

And now that I've seen it... Um... I have to admit I actually didn't care for it all that much. I mean it's not bad or anything, but it isn't a favorite, and certain things bugged me enough to want to rant a little.

It made me feel my age to see just how old-school the thing looks, but that's fine with me (at least short of Bubblegum Crisis flashbacks and it wasn't to that point). My problem was with the story and characterization part; basically it started out as good clean fun but didn't really win my heart before it made its series of turns into thankless grimdark (which I hadn't done the due diligence to see coming), and IMO the writing wasn't tight or graceful enough to pull off its themes very well. I feel less like I just watched an exploration/deconstruction-reconstruction of the Abslolute Pacifist Fighting Ace trope and more like I just watched a chaotic shouting match about it that the writers simply called for the good guys despite a lack of conclusive results.

For one thing, the fights in the second half didn't deliver a well-grounded or coherent escalation of threat, so for example when Wolfwood just shoots Zazie the Beast, it doesn't have the kind of impact it should because the situation doesn't feel abnormally threatening or even specially important until that point. Coherently or not, though, the threat does escalate, and by the end the villains have made themselves so irredeemably loathsome that (although I fear I'm betraying my RK-loving roots a bit here) Vash's meltdown over killing Legato really doesn't make sense outside of Vash's head. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this --- to pick up the RK comparison, refusing to kill, say, Shishio doesn't necessarily make sense outside of Kenshin's head, either, but at that point in RK I understood how and why it was like that in Kenshin's head and could be totally invested on that basis if nothing else. I never got there with Vash; I can see where they were trying, but for me, they didn't pull it off, or maybe Vash's reasons for being so invested in Absolute Pacifism didn't strike me as strong enough to support the weight put on them ("I littered Kyoto with corpses and now I reject that path and forge a new one" vs. "My sorta-Mom told me a thing and I don't want to be like my genocidal twin." Hmm...). At any rate, it wasn't enough to keep the Legato thing from breaking down into "Okay, you got roped into an assisted suicide that probably saved the lives of thousands; if you regret shooting the guy and don't want to do that again, we can talk, but will you stop being a hypocrite to all the screwups you met in the first half and get one iota of perspective, please!?" (I will say, though, that the understated direction on Legato's death was brilliant; just seeing him prosaically fall over made the moment more gut-deep real than any dramatic effects could have.)

So yeah, um... If you haven't seen it yet, be warned it gets darker than you'd expect early on. For me, it's no RK, but now, however belatedly, I know. And I apologize to anyone whose foundation stone I just insulted.

Comments

[branchandroot]

Yeah, in a lot of ways you had to be in the moment to appreciate Trigun at all, because it had a /lot/ of holes. Most of them in Vash's head. *wry* I often felt less like this was about Absolute Pacifism and more like it was about watching Vash grow up enough to have a more nuanced view of the world, or at least of his own reasons. But we only get a /hint/ of that direction in the very last ep.

And by then I was way more invested in Wolfwood, who was already /dead/.

[foxinthestars]

Yeah, that too. (Goodbye Interesting Character...)

In the latter part, I can see that, although I feel like the premise of Vash's character seemed to shift; early on the immaturity was played as a pose and he actually had it together enough to hand out Warrior Therapy all over the place, but later his maturity and skill seemed to just take some hits for the sake of the plot (see the incoherent threat escalation; I half suspect these exact same people could have just been owned if they'd only showed up in the first ten eps.)

[branchandroot]

That does seem quite likely. His meltdown over using the Angel Arm, the /theoretical/ reason for his regressing, never got quite enough weight to really hold that up.

[smurasaki]

I fear I've never seen all of Trigun -or- Rurouni Kenshin. *is probably a bad anime fan*

I have a hard time sticking with - hm, not quite sure what the right term is - stories about super excelent fighters who fight lots of people who've tracked them down because they're super excelent fighters. Kenshin was a reasonably compelling character, but the story just didn't grab me. Trigun seemed to have more of a plot, but one with a bad case of 2001-syndrome ("What? What? Why are we seeing giant space babies (or in Trigun's case, random woman and other flashbacks of huh?)? What does that mean????), and, well, heading off toward grimdark is a very good way to lose me.

...

It suddenly occurs to me that setting the protagonist up as the best is nearly as bad for my investment as declaring them "The One." It's not as obnoxious, but I'd still rather have fiction about people who are muddling through as best they can. (Why Bond, Dirk Pitt, and MacGyver are exceptions to this I'm not sure - the stories lack the competition aspect? I am distracted by the shiny? They're more ludicrously competent than "the best”?)

Then again, my foundation stone anime could be summed up as under-dressed spies in a world of explodium (The Dirty Pair), so I have no business discussing depth of stories. :P

[foxinthestars]

Well, not *all* of RK is worth watching, even in my opinion (when they get home from Kyoto, the anime is over and the rest is just painfully ridiculous filler (no word of a lie the last arc has people killing each other with Feng Shui); I've actually never read too much of what the manga does after that, but what I have seen suggests that it jumps the shark, too). I think it caught me at maybe one of those times in my life and the Absolute Pacifist Fighting Ace thing really got me deep down, the valuation of life and that our hero does get to do the right thing and win that way (particularly a sucker for the win/wins that end with the opponent's psychological healing), and the other characters are a lot of fun; I won't say Kenshin is necessarily the most interesting one. Special place in my heart, but if it's not your taste, hey, that happens.

I don't know that I have a problem with the protagonist being "the best" per se, but I do often see the problem of starting with the bar too high in an absolute sense, with the result that upping the ante swiftly leads over the event horizon of the ridiculous (not just in fighting, I've also noticed it in sports manga), which is a different issue than yours...

[smurasaki]

Oh yes, the escalation into absurdity of most competition based anime/manga. Yeah, that's a problem, too.

My tastes are so incoherent that I frequently can't explain exactly why I like some things and not others. And there are a lot of things, like RK, that I like the idea of, but somehow fail to connect to. Which leaves me back at the great question of what exactly my tastes are.

[quicksilver_ink]

Oh, man, Trigun. This brings back memories.

My college anime club watched Trigun twice. The first time, we only had fansubs for the first 4 or 6 episodes (right when it starts to get more serious), so we watched the rest in unsubtitled Japanese. At every eyecatch and the end of every episode, the members of the club who were fluent in Japanese would explain to us what the heck had just happened -- sometimes along the lines of "...and the Legato and Vash had a philosophical debate, I think they were making references to Buddhist philosophy? I'm not sure."

This meant that I pretty much developed my understanding of the series based on what I saw onscreen and how the cast reacted emotionally -- and emotional response was the only way I had to relate to the characters. This definitely masked the weak writing -- after all, if Legato was monologing and Vash was weeping, I assumed there was some deep epic verbal sparring match going down, instead of the much weaker reality of Legato talking about how boring evil he was. (Maybe it was just that I'd built him up as so sinister in my head, but when we saw the subs the next year I was disappointed in how blah his dialog was.)

So my memories of the series are all emotional content unspoiled by the writing -- Vash weeping after yet another senseless tragedy and asking "why? Why" (the only Japanese word I learned purely from context); Millie's grief at Wolfwood's death, the hulking menace of Legato, Meryl's shock at seeing Vash's scars.

Man, the series in my memories was so much more epic than the reality. =P

[foxinthestars]

Oh, wow. I can see where that would happen. Having constructed my image of it at second hand through people I knew in its day who loved it, maybe I got a little shadow of a similar thing.

My anime club had it together a bit too well for that kind of thing by the time I joined (although I heard war stories of printed-out scripts, and my sister told of her own uni days and getting the Japanese guy who worked at the Imo's Pizza to explain Vampire Hunter D).