Monthly anime marathon: Trigun
Feb. 7th, 2013 05:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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.
