I love watching the episodes, but I have never gotten the chance to see it all through.
Who are the assasins after him? Where is Vash from? Why is he so kick ass? How does it end?
SPOILERS
Vash and his brother Knives are aliens, or half-aliens, or something like that. Knives is evil and crazy. He implanted an Angel Gun inside Vash’s arm, which is the ‘trigun’ of the title, the third gun besides Vash’s revolvers.
Thanks. So, any idea why the whole damn planet looks like an atomic holocaust. Everyone is so scattered around, there are secluded cities, limited technology available. Thats whats wierd. They know about technology, but few people have it. Any reason?
Vash and his brother are androids. Them and all the humans are all aliens, seeing as they are humans stranded from Earth on this planet.
But the simple answer is, rent it and watch it in order…!
From what I’ve been able to piece together—from the show (which I don’t follow that close), the internet, and good ol’ wikipedia…
[spoiler]A big colony ship fleet has left Earth for some reason. They either take along, find, or create a young Vash and his brother, Knives. Those two are actually like plant…demigod…bioroid…things. Or something. They grow up on the ship, Vash finds an standard anime-type mentor/big sibling/potential love interest with the stink of doom about them character, a girl named Rem. Stuff happens, Vash turns out nice, Knives ends up bitter and psychopathic. Knives ends up sabotaging the colony fleet, sending it off course, into the desert planet of the series. A lotta people die, including Rem, the doomed would-be love interest. The ones that survive manage to restart a human civilization on the planet over the decades. (The series takes place like 100 years after the sabotage/crash landings happen. Vash and his brother are actually really old, but they age well. Like plants.) Around the time of said sabotage, Vash fought with his brother (Vash, being good, didn’t like the whole “kill all huu-mon scum” plan), and when they hit the planet, Vash ran off into hiding/wandering. Knives just…uh…hid out, plotting to destroy the rest of the humans, or something. You really don’t see much of him. But he stays evil.
And I think the assassins are all after Vash either because Knives put them up to it, or because of the bounty on Vash’s head, or both. The bounty on Vash is either because of Knives’ fiendish plotting, or because Vash routinely gets involved in capers and whatnot in an attempt to help out, but just gets blamed for all the trouble afterwards, or maybe both. I’m not too clear on that part.[/spoiler]
That’s what I remember, at least. A few details, here and there, are no doubt a bit off.
I don’t know all the details about who-got-what-gun-when-and-how, so I’ll leave that up for others to explain.
Just to clear a few things up:
I was under the impression that most if not all the devestation was caused by the ship crashing.
Knives sends most of not all the assassins after Vash in the hopes that he’ll destroy another city defending himself.
Vash & Knives are humanoid power plants. Remember the episode where Vash is working on that floating cities plant & some kind of winged angel thing shows up inside it for a second? Vash is one of them.
The Gung-Ho Guns are a group of assassins, hired by Knives (well, Legato) to hunt down Vash. Whether it’s because Legato thinks they have a chance, or because he’s just toying with Vash, is unclear. But, I think he’s just toying with Vash. To keep the character consistent, he would have to hate the Gung-Ho Guns & want them to die.
Legatos is evil, and hates humanity. So he makes a great #2 guy for Knives, who is also evil & hates humanity. Legatos sole purpose as a character is to finally get Vash to give in & kill somebody. Which he does - it’s Legato or Millie & Meryl. So Vash finally plugs some one.
The last episode tells the entire story. There’s no need to watch anything else. Really pissed me off too. Why waste ~23 episodes just to tell the whole damn thing in the final 30 minutes?!
This thread was a good idea. Trigun is probably the anime that I’m most fond of despite most of the time not knowing what’s going on.
The whole plant thing is never really resolved (and is interesting but not really the point of the story, the point is more the moral issues). Are they “power plants” or “growing type plants”? Or some weird combination of both? The power plants (remnants from the ships engines) are powered by beings related to Vash and Knives and who appear to possibly be related to flora. It’s just as ambiguous in the original Japanese where they also use the English word “plant” instead of a less ambiguous Japanese word.
It’s really a great anime with a bunch of great characters and a neat mythology. The anime, needing a moderately resolved ending, is significantly different than the manga (after about volume 3 or so) which is still being written.
Just finnished watching the series on DVD yesterday. This is what I got from it…
A large amount of the plot seems to be based arround the attempt by Knives to get Vash to kill someone. It seems to me as if Knives beleives Vash will become evil like him if he realises that Rem’s belief that there is always a better alternative than killing.
Vash manages to avoid directly killing anyone for most of the series, but does learn that the mayhem that occurs arround him leads people to die (he detroyed a city without harming the inhabitants, but later the inhabitants fight amongst themselves and many die).
Near the end, he is forced to kill a character to save the two remaining friends he has. This almost destroys Vash, but he realises that it is not that he never kills that is important, but that he always strives with all his power to never kill. So he comes to a new understanding of Rem’s teaching. He regains his strength and eventuallyconfronts Knives. In a very even combat Knives is eventually defeated but not killed.
What is it with crying and Japanese Anime/Film.
Vash often cries for noble if sappy causes. Cryingman cries when he kills. Ichi the Killer also cries a fair bit.
I haven’t watched that episode yet, but I don’t find the other episodes a waste of time. They’re worth it just for the two insurance girls, Meryl Stryfe and Milly Thompson, who follow Vash around trying to limit their insurance company’s financial exposure to the inevitable trail of destruction around Vash.
Spoiler tags, just because…
That’s pretty much because these are people, (IIRC WRT Crying Freeman) who are not killers by nature thrust into having to kill by their circumstances, respective antagonists, etc. They don’t like taking lives and express their sadness, frustration, and so on through crying. Seems natural enough. (That and if Freeman didn’t cry, people would be like…so, why’s it called “Crying Freeman”?)
Generally speaking, I’m pretty sure that killers in anime who went into the killing business of their own free will aren’t terribly weepy about it.
(Bolding mine)
Someone needs to get this fella to Gotham City, I think. 
Pretty much what they all said. Also (and this is not a spoiler, it’s established early on) a majority of the people on the planet only have distorted secondhand recollections or hearsay that Vash was somehow involved in the events that have led them to their current state, and thus conclude that he must be somehow responsible for all the ill happenings around, thus he’s an “outlaw” with a $$60 Billion price on his head.
[spoiler]Also, a majority of the people in the “Planet Gunsmoke” outback seem to have adopted a “do what you gotta do to survive” ethics where they assume roles of predators and victims as if that were the normal order of things, while Vash, of course, holds fast to the belief that this is not necessarily so.
The “Plants” seem to be a sort of engineered biological/technological beings that were part of the colony-ships’ life-support systems, and of which Vash and Knives apparently are an unexpected evolution, one that is more apparently “human”. In the back-story episode we learn that the leaders of the colony-ships were all wary and skeptical about these new mutants and only Rem felt they should be brought up as regular children.
Being superhuman, Knives early on concluded that normal humans are vermin only fit to be his prey and despises the idea that Vash developed solidarity with them. He engineers a whole series of confrontations that are designed to back Vash into a corner so he must strike back.[/spoiler]
Meanwhile, Vash just wants to live a normal, easygoing life and maybe have some more of Merryl’s donuts. He affects a clownish public persona as a way of emphasizing to those he meets that he’s not a threat.
Aaaaarrrghhhh:mad: :mad: *&^%$ coding!!! Mods, help!
I find most Shonen Series heroes mildly irritating for their cheerful naivete, but Trigun was one of the few anime where I abso-fricking-lutely hated the protagonist.
Yeesh. At least Kenshin (from Rurouni Kenshin) had a semi-good reason for his non-killing vow. Vash is just a dumbass, period.
Heck, all the characters in Trigun need repeated beatings with the Clue Stick of Doom.
And the finale…what a copout. Although I guess you could interpret it cynically, I suppose.
I dunno. Vash is a lot more superhuman than Kenshin, so he can get away with a lot more ethically. Consider for example the first encounter with the Nebraska brothers, or the bit at the end of the train arc where he just deflects a bunch of point-blank machine-gun fire. Kenshin needed a good reason for his vow because he was, though awesome, still just human and quite capable of getting people killed people with his mistakes. Vash doesn’t, because he isn’t and wasn’t. Even when he blew up a whole city, he managed to leave all the inhabitants alive.
No excuse for the ending, though.
IIRC, the animé series was completed while the manga (comic), whose storylines diverge quite a bit from the animé, was still running – this is not an unusual situation – and they may have been trying to hedge the ending.
That’s something. Is there an English translation of the manga available?
Not sure if there’s a translation. As I recall it, there were actually two different comics, and I think that threw me off when I went to buy them since it wasn’t real clear which was supposed to be before or after.
And then the ending of the anime put me off so I never checked into it.
Reading through Eatman, if it has been translated, I can say is quite worth it. The anime was somehow a bit flat from the comic. (These two are rather linked in my mind.)