Arwen Spicer's Blog: Diary of a Readerly Writer (and Writerly Reader) - Posts Tagged "trigun"

Trigun is routinely classified as one of the greats of anime/manga. Unquestionably, it is fun, exciting, gripping, and so on. But what makes it a masterpiece is the authenticity of its moral questioning, which rings hard and true. Disclaimer: it’s one of my favorite works, so expect bias!

Published 1996-2008, Yasuhiro Nightow’s signature manga comprises two large volumes* titled Trigun, followed by a 14-volume series, Trigun Maximum, which completes the saga. This tale of “deep space planet future gun action!!” stars Vash the Stampede, a super-powered gunslinger on a desert planet modeled on the American Old West. Vash appears to be a 20-something happy-go-lucky outlaw, but in reality he is older, sadder, and wiser than he pretends and–gunslinger though he is–he refuses to kill. Vash has a problem: his twin brother is out to get him and also to destroy the human race on their planet. While contending with this situation, Vash picks up several friends, notably Meryl and Millie, insurance agents tasked with following Vash (a humanoid disaster), and Nicholas D. Wolfwood, iconic gun-toting priest. Hijinks, fight scenes, and difficult moral questions ensue.

Read the rest at The Geek Girl Project

(Les Misérables through a lens of Trigun)

(big spoilers for both)

In Les Misérables, the musical, the Bishop and Marius, for a time, sing the same melody, the Bishop singing early on about his hopes for Valjean's redemption and Marius, near the play's end, lamenting the deaths of all his friends on the barricade. What's the connection between these songs? Why the thematic echo?

Both songs discuss sacrifice for a noble cause. The Bishop invokes the death of Christ and other martyrs as an illustration of the tenacity of Christian commitment to redemption:

By the witness of the martyrs,
By the passion and the blood,
God has raised you out of darkness.
I have bought your soul for God.

Such great sacrifices in the name of love and kindness must, he suggests, inspire us to like acts of goodness, such as forgiving a thief by giving him the silver he stole, plus candlesticks, and inviting him to use it to start a new chapter in his life.

Seventeen years later, Marius is grieving the loss of his entire community in a failed rebellion. He is (understandably) stuck at:

Oh, my friends, my friends, don't ask me
What your sacrifice was for.

All he can see is:

Here they sang about tomorrow
And tomorrow never came.

But we know, of course, that the ultimate message of Les Misérables is "tomorrow comes," or as Enjolras puts it in the book, "We are entering a grave illuminated by the dawn." The June Rebellion, the story argues, lays groundwork for the more successful revolution sixteen years later. In a broader sense, such commitment to the possibility of social reform becomes part of the arc of humanity toward social reform even when specific endeavors fail. As the Bishop contended, the passion and the blood are not wasted: the effects ripple out in unforeseen ways generations, indeed centuries, later.

Marius in is a stage of grief. He's feeling exactly as any decent person would in the circumstances, but what he's perceiving is not the whole story. There is a profound hope outside the proximate tragedy. This, I think, is the reason for the reuse of the melody.

An intriguing part of this parallel is the idea that the "passion and blood" of the barricade is akin to that of Christian martyrs and even Christ's crucifixion itself. These two types of sacrifice have similarities: they are both great acts of courage and willingness to suffer personal harm, even death, to help humanity. Yet the moral systems out of which these two types arise are also very different. The essence of Jesus's teaching is to love your neighbor and turn the other cheek. He eschews all violence and renders unto Caesar. His concern is with his own and other individuals' conduct, with the state of souls, not of sociopolitical systems.

The post-Rousseauvian age the ABC inhabits, however, is invested in changing sociopolitical systems: the goal is to overthrow Caesar and create a structure in which having a decent standard of living will be more easily attainable. Loving one's neighbor is excellent, but it should not be relied upon as the method for promoting decent treatment of all people in a complex nation state. The state itself should have a social contract that will (to a degree) mandate decent treatment through the enshrinement of rights. And to attain this goal, the ends often justify the means. The men on the barricade do not kill lightly, but they are very willing to kill. In these respects, their moral system is fundamentally unChristlike.

These two value systems, to some degree incommensurate, are both praised within Les Misérables, play and novel, so that the tensions between them are not readily apparent. The complexity of this discourse is thrown into sharper relief for me by comparison to the manga, Trigun.

Trigun provides a text in which these two systems are openly at war. The story concerns the antagonism between twin brothers, Vash and Knives, who are vastly powerful beings called Plants, designed to generate energy for humans. On their planet, Plants are exploited by humans in the struggle to survive ecological privation.

Vash's moral system is essentially Christlike: based on kind behavior, "peace and love," for everyone, a refusal to kill anyone, and a general lack of any kind of systemic social planning. Knives, the antagonist, does nothing but systemic social planning: he is an ardent revolutionary willing (indeed eager) to commit genocide against the entire human race on their planet in order to change the system that enslaves his Plant people to human needs.

Now, Knives's plan is obviously not good. And yet, it is a plan for pulling the ecosystem they all exist in out of a death spiral in which too many humans are being materially supported by too few Plants, with the result that both Plants and humans are slowly dying off, the Plants from overextension, the humans from lack of resources. Vash has no plan. Left to his own devices, the Plants and humans on their planet might very well go extinct for all he would actually do to prevent it (though he'd be very nice to them as they dwindle away).

Trigun pits Vash and Knives against each other. But the triumph of Trigun is a direct result of the agency of both. Vash does stop Knives from genocide, essentially by awakening both humans and Plants en masse to empathy for each other. Once they understand each other's suffering, they have a motive to find a peaceful solution. However, Vash would never have done this if Knives had not forced his hand by apocalyptically pushing his social reform agenda. The two value systems have elements that are incommensurate, yet—perhaps for this very reason—both are needed to break the social stalemate and achieve positive change.

So too, perhaps, in Les Misérables: the boys from the ABC were, to a degree, not good Christians—I dare posit a number of them weren't Christians at all. But agency such as theirs is needed, as surely as Valjean's or the Bishop's. A social system without individual human kindnesses will be a Brave New World at best, but humans without a decent social system will continue to suffer and die, Fantine after Fantine. Hope is born of individuals and systems both. The passion and the blood prove the worth of the dream.

In my recent skimmings of Trigun meta, I came across Gar Gar Stegosaurus' "Trigun Re-Watch: Gender Problems" and wanted to dive into the conversation. However, since the post is now closed to comments, I'm going to ruminate here.

The post makes many good points about poor writing of women in the Trigun anime. In particular, I agree that Meryl and Millie, despite being "major" characters, are structurally irrelevant (perhaps even more in the manga). In my own fannish efforts to redact the story into a 2-hour screenplay, I've discovered they don't have a single vital function. [1]

I also agree that Rem, Vash and Knive's adoptive mother, is idealized in the anime. This idealization is slightly troubled by her narrative about her dead friend, Alex, who once helped her learn to make good decisions and whose death devastated her. But in the main, yes, she falls handily into the trope of the smiling anime mum, brimming with sweetness and light and uplifting advice. I don't dispute this, but I want to complicate the criticism by contrasting this presentation with Rem in the manga, who is one of the most important and best-written female characters I have ever read.

Rem with the wee ones

The problem with the idealization of Woman ("God bless her for her sweet compassion," as A Tale of Two Cities puts it) is that it assumes Woman to be a natural embodiment of all that is moral without human realism. Human beings, of all genders, have an instinct to goodness, but we learn to be good by trying and falling—and trying and falling and trying and falling again. The problem with the Ideal Woman trope is not that the woman is very good—even saintly. The problem is that her sainthood is not understood as the result of life experience; it is assumed to be innate: expected but not earned; instinctive, not learned.

Anime Rem may be this sort of shadow puppet of good morals. Manga Rem is not. She is a guilty woman who has crawled up a mountain to reach every scrap of moral wisdom she passes on.

(Dark spoilers for the manga follow:)

Absent from the anime but crucial to the manga is Tessla, the first-born independent Plant, before Vash and Knives: led by scientific curiosity, the scientists on the SEEDS ship experiment on her until it kills her. Then, they dissect her. Rem did not participate in this; indeed, she filed an ethical complaint against it. But that's all she did. She herself explicitly owns later that she should have done much more—anything in her power to stop this torture and murder of an innocent child. Rem's guilt over Tessla's life and death is agonizing. She does what she can to atone by raising Vash and Knives as her children and hiding their existence from the crewmembers (who are in suspended animation in the manga). She doesn't tell her sons about Tessla—an understandable choice in parenting young children. But this decision bites her when Vash and Knives find out the truth on their own and are thrown into a shock and horror that Knives never recovers from and that becomes foundational for Vash.

Rem and Vash post-Tessa revelation

In a way, Rem's complicity in Tessla's death and her effective lies to her children about it are responsible for Knives' apocalypse just as much as her heroism is responsible for saving their civilization from Knives' attempt to crash all their ships. As Vash observes late in the manga, things are complicated.

This is one dimension of Rem: the Frankensteinian figure attempting to atone for her abandonment of her people's monster creation.

But prior to this Rem, more hidden in subtext, is a human being already forged by hard experience before Tessla was born. As in the anime, Rem tells her children vaguely about her friend, Alex, who helped her make good decisions and whose death initially left her feeling that she could not go on alone. This is the sort of tame, abstract story you tell a child. What does it really mean? We can't know for certain because (almost) our only access to Rem is through what she tells Vash in child-friendly terms. But the gaps are interesting. Rem was an adult when Alex died. Why should an adult need another person to tell her right from wrong? Grief over a loved-one's death is understandable, but why should she doubt her own basic ability to make life choices without him? Clearly, he came into her life at a time when she was stumbling, unable to reliably make good choices for herself.

Now, this describes all of us sometimes in some ways, and the specifics of Rem's problems could be anything. We don't know. We know she came from an Earth in socio-ecological collapse, and I'm sure that pressure battered everyone's psyche. But another clue comes from a panel in the manga in which Rem, grieving Alex's death, awakens from a dream in a large apartment strewn with trash, including several wine bottles. This seems some hint that she might have been an alcoholic and Alex the futuristic equivalent of her AA mentor. Of course, it's also possible she was just binge drinking atypically out of grief. But the escape into substance abuse seems to fit a person whose standards for herself are so exacting that she wears her happy smile with her children like a mask that never falls (except for that one conversation with Vash about Tessla). Rem places herself under extreme pressure never to slip up, never for an instant to be a bad role model as a parent. If she was anything like that as a youngster too, she might well have sought artificial ways to relax her inhibitions. Indeed, Vash, who explicitly loves his alcohol as method of unwinding, may have obliquely inherited this coping mechanism from her, just as he inherited the smiling mask and dizzying moral expectations.

But maybe she wasn't an alcoholic; it doesn't matter. She was human; she stumbled. Alex helped her find her feet. He died. She stumbled again, had to learn to internalize his teaching. She pulled herself up, started a new life, joined a SEEDS ship, only to have her world shattered by the Tessla horror, which she spends the rest of her life atoning for.

Vash is a saint, and Rem is a saint, and he learned to be a saint from her. Rem is, indeed, almost ideally moral. She lives that way because she's learned again and again the awful consequences of failing to be. She is that way, probably, because she is a naturally highly self-controlled person, perhaps too much, sometimes to her own detriment and the detriment of others. She is right and wrong; she is good and bad. Most of the character complexities that make Vash such a compelling figure exist in Rem too. Most of his personality (Christlike, goofy, evasive, lying) was modeled by her.

Rem is a saint for the same reason most saints are: she learned to be. She is the Jean Valjean of the story: the sinner redeemed who rescues the children left behind in the wake of cruel death she failed to prevent. In fact, the pattern of her name, Rem Saverem, echoes his so much that I wonder if this parallel is intentional. She is one of the very rare female characters whose moral stature and moral struggles are rendered in terms as compelling and monumental as the most impressive male characters.

Note:
[1] I do disagree with Gar Gar Stegosaurus' characterization of Millie's childlike incapacity. Millie is undoubtedly naïve, innocent, and often clueless, but she is also tough as steel, a trained fighter, and a very morally centered and assured person. Like Vash, with whom she has much in common, she certainly is a goofball but a goofball with a weighty core.