Vash The Stampede: the Existential Character Analysis

I revisited "Trigun" last month, and re-watching the series as an adult, a series I only remembered for its amazing cinematography, I can finally appreciate the depth of Vash's character and the internal conflicts that he *attempts* to deal with throughout the series. Vash The Stampede is a character with as many flaws as hair follicles. Initially drawn in by his goofiness and good-nature, by the end of his adventure you recognize Vash for being a flawed indecisive hero that does not even believe in himself nor his own principles. Vash The Stampede is not an enigma, he is a transparent protagonist who wears his heart on his sleeve, a man whom everyone can read like a book, a good-willed person who's sole purpose is to cause the least amount of harm to people around him, but constantly fails to do so. In this character analysis, I hope to demonstrate that Vash's character development puts into evidence the ephemeral quality of human nature.

Spoiler alert: I'll try to give the least amount of specific details as possible, but there are certain plot twists that must be mentioned in order to fully analyze his character.

As mentioned above, (and a thousand times before), I started watching and reading anime/manga towards the mid-late 2000s. It was the height of The Big 3, (One Piece, Naruto, Bleach), and the wave of young teens like me surfing (creating) anime forums began overwhelming the other well-established fandoms of the 1990s. You have to understand that before 2006-2008, One Piece, Naruto and Bleach were considered of a lesser tier than the wave of iconic shonens of the 1990s. Post-1990s, the anime blogs and anime forums loosely crowned 3-4 shonens as the best/most iconic animes of their era, and those were: Yuyu Hakusho, Evangelion, and Cowboy Bebop. (You can definitely add Sailor Moon to the list but it's a shojo) Out of the 3, Cowboy Bebop is perhaps the anime with the most unanimity in the community, it is very hard to find a list that does not have Cowboy Bebop in its top 5, or even less its top 3, while Evangelion and Yu Yu Hakusho often get boxed out (because their fandom is toxic, there I said it). Cowboy Bebop added a fresh Western twist to the sci-fi craze the anime world went through during the 1990s. However, Cowboy Bebop's reign over the community's consciousness would have repercussions for the other great Cowboy-esque sci-fi anime of the time: Trigun.

The digression was not for naught, I promise. You see, the rise of the Big Three is important, because the anime blogs and forums continuously tried to discredit the new shonens' popularity, and the way they did so was by celebrating the great shows of the 1990s, and I mean the nostalgia was everywhere on these platforms. And so, in the late 2000s, you could not surf the anime side of the web without seeing several posts about Trigun and the other "less" popular 1990s manga/anime. Easily one of the most beautiful anime I've ever seen, as well as having some of the best character design, Trigun seems like a perfect recommendation for any young kid freshly entering the anime world. So forth, like most anime enthusiast at the time, after being peer-pressured from the online anime community, I watched it and it was great; but that's basically all there was to it. The visuals captivated me, and Vash's goofiness appealed to me at my young age. However, that's as far as my interest went, and I never thought much else of the show, (albeit I always celebrated its visuals). As time went on, Cowboy Bebop's reign over the community's psyche faded out Trigun and now it is merely one of those anime people say, "I watched that a while ago, it was great!" Nevertheless, after re-watching it as an adult, I'm here to say Trigun's genius lies in its philosophical bearings, it presents an ethical analysis on the utility of murder, the constraints of destiny and questions human nature.

The show spends half of the series establishing that murder under all circumstances is wrong. However, the 17th episode, where we get to see Vash's origin story, posits the show's two-fold argument: first, the choice between life and death, even in the instance of saving one's life, ought not to be an easy decision. Vash's maternal figure Rem teaches Vash and his brother Knives this very lesson; the cycle of life ought to be agonized and deplored. Knives, the story's antagonist, fails to appreciate the importance of agonizing over the difficulty of taking someone's life. Knives is a villain in the sense he feels no remorse in taking people's lives, but he is not presented as a villain who murders without a purpose. The reason he cannot grasp Rem's message is because, as he says, it's impossible to want to salvage both sides in matters of life and death, it is simply better to follow through and protect the person you want to protect using whatever method possible. And so forth, from episode 17 and on, you are not presented with an irrational villain, instead you come to realize that Knives' feelings are validated and seemingly carried out by every other person in the series. In summary, the first thesis Trigun presents us is that the cycle of life is a vicious one, and that you ought to despair from the harsh choices it presents us all. Indenting on this thought, it reaffirms through Knives that we are participants in this cycle, and that we can look at the cycle of life from the outside, but it reminds us that as active agents in this cycle, we must follow through and protect those we want to protect when the time calls for it. It is this hidden amendment that makes Vash the most heart-breaking character I've ever seen, but also the most humane and relatable character ever.

Trigun's second philosophical thesis is about human nature, the large over-arching theme that looms over Vash's character development for reasons I JUST CANNOT SPOIL, I would be robbing you of the biggest plot twist in the story. Nevertheless, Rem's words and Knives' rationale are meant to demonstrate the moments of absurdity that we face in our daily lives. These moments of absurdity happen when a phenomenon or a situation challenges our livelihood and our moral foundations. These are usually the traumatic moments of our lives where we are forced to either bury our head in the sand or face whatever is shaking our foundational beliefs. Rem's lesson and Knives' rationale directly address Vash's personality and his journey in the anime. You see, for the first half of the anime, we are presented with a Vash the Stampede that is feared by all for bringing disaster everywhere he goes, and he's also the man with a 60 Billion dollar bounty, a bounty set by and for the entire world. However, it is clear from the first episode that Vash is the furthest thing from a rampager that destroys everything in his path. From there-on-out, our first mission as the viewers is set and we are pushed to find out why the whole world fears Vash, why do they see him as this stone cold mass murderer? We go through the entire journey disbelieving the rumour, thinking this is the result of fabricated lies by whoever is the antagonist, (we are not aware of Knives until well further down the line). *BIG SPOILER ALERT* However, as the show begins to be more and more tragic, with every friend and foe constantly dying and Vash's backstory coming to light, we come to realize that Vash's moniker is no lie, Vash singlehandedly destroyed an entire city and murdered millions in an instant. Even before it's been explicitly said, you as the viewer come to realize, "oh wait, I think Vash really destroyed the city of July." And before you know it, this anime goes from sad to tragic.

The contradiction that lies within Vash's character development is not the obvious dichotomy between killing or not killing, but rather it is his intentional inability to remember his past. Vash adamantly will not kill anybody, and initially we are lead to believe he won't kill because he thinks it is morally wrong. Although that is part of his reasoning, the viewer begins to understand that Vash does not want to kill anymore, he has killed people before and he does not want to do it anymore. Sharing a similar plot with Himura Kenshin from Rurouni Kenshin, what distinguishes Vash from Kenshin is his lack of redemption. Kenshin's devotes his entire life to redemption, Kenshin knows he has killed thousands of people in his past, so he vows not to kill anymore as a way to atone for his past. However, Vash does the opposite, Vash denies his past and instead of trying to find redemption, he tries to start fresh with a new moral compass; something we all wish we can do sometimes. Nevertheless, Vash eventually has to face the music, you can never runaway from your past, nor erase it, and that's where we find Vash's confrontation with the absurd.

Confronted with reality, Vash is stuck in a psychological and ethical paralysis when Knives deploys every trick in the book to get Vash to kill, and, spoiler alert, in episode 24, we witness the most brutal scene of the show: Vash shoots Legato in the head to save Milly and Meryl; there's no dramatization, Legato gets shot and dies immediately, and it all goes quiet. Standing in the same predicament Vash lectured his brother Knives about, being in between saving a life and killing one, Vash is ultimately forced to make a decision. Going back to the first thesis presented above, let's remember the show posits that we must agonize over the difficult decision of taking a life, but we must also remember that that we are active agents in this cycle of life, thus when it is time to make the decision, we cannot hesitate. The absurd phenomena that Vash goes through before and after killing Legato is the realization that his principles, his fundamental beliefs are as fragile as he is. In traumatic moments, we are forced to make absurd decisions, we are forced to confront an absurd reality, and more often then not we become mentally paralyzed with the options and reality that stands before us. In other words, human nature and everything we take to be foundational truths about this world can be shaken to its core in the blink of an eye. Trigun shows us that life is harsh, it is mean, and that it necessitates an ethical framework for us to cope and proceed with our livelihood. However, when we set these ethical frameworks as truth, they shatter faster than glass falling on the floor. Still, we ought not to recoil, when the world shatters our ethical foundation, it is our duty to face reality and revamp in accordance to the new circumstances that we face.

In conclusion, Vash is a good-willed protagonist who tries his best to save everyone he sees, he tries his best to be good and to live a good life. However, Vash is also someone who cannot face his own short-comings, he is someone afraid of contradiction, and he is someone who would rather runaway instead of facing reality. When faced with the absurdity of life, Vash cannot make a decision, instead he waits for life to make the decision for himself, to the point where Legato had to take Vash's hand and point the gun to his own head, just so that he could properly kill Legato. In the end, Vash's ethical ineptitude resulted in the death of almost everybody around him, like it did in his past, and you don't hate him for it, but you are definitely aware of his shortcomings. So many times throughout the end of the series, you wish Vash would just snap out of it, you wish he would have handled the situation with Wolfwood better, (I intentionally left him out of this because I don't want to spoil the most cathartic moment of the show). Vash is a man afraid of contradictions, but he is the biggest paradox of them all. He constantly questions other people's humanity, and if you watch the show you will understand why that is such a paradox; again, I can't say it because it would spoil the story's main plot twist. I would recommend Trigun to any philosophy student, but I'd also recommend it to any young adult. It is a story filled with life lessons that will help you become a better person. It is a story of existential anguish, a story of desperation, it is a story about the human condition and it was spectacularly executed.