Belated Thoughts on the New Trigun Anime
May. 7th, 2023 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiAs a Trigun fan, I feel I ought to say something about the 2023 anime, but I haven’t felt inspired to because it didn’t leave me with a strong feeling. I didn’t hate it, didn’t love it. I thought it was all right. But I’ll do a little “good, bad, other” list, of course, from own POV. Others’ vary. Spoilers for the 2023 Trigun anime and the manga.
The Good
* Making it a prequel. I think this has the potential in S2 to work especially well for Wolfwood because he ages so fast. Some commented that he seemed like an emo teenager in this version, which is kind of what he is, but I could well imagine him aging up a lot toward being Wolfwood we’ve known in other media after the upcoming two-year time skip. If they do this well in S2, it could be a real win.
* Wolfwood’s backstory: effectively grisly, though making Conrad the mad scientist seems to miss the point of Conrad.
* The art. I think it looked really slick, character designs were nice, and there were some jaw-droppingly beautiful moments, like the big planet creature in July.
* More ecology: I appreciated fleshing out some of Trigun’s untapped potential as a very ecological story by creating a more complex and deeply present native ecology for No Man’s Land. Pretty good handling of the native “worms” too.
* Taking out Vash’s sexism. You can do some somersaults and come up with explanations for why saintly Vash sometimes treats women so badly in the ’98 anime and, to a much lesser extent, manga (I’ve done those somersaults). But on balance it’s cleaner and feels better to just take this out. Good update.
* On a really generic level, I think Nightow was correct that this is still basically “Trigun”; it’s still about the morality of killing, etc., no massive thematic restructuring.
* Knives is treated seriously as a person with his own ideas about how the world should be.
* In S2, we get Chronica!
Bad
* I feel they badly misunderstood why Plants are in the story. They tell us that normal, non-independent Plants aren’t conscious (or mininally?). Then, they have Knives’s big plan to be impregnate all the Plants to create independent Plants because he wants to create a race of independent Plants. So here’s the thing: Plants aren’t unconscious. They are an enslaved people—worse, a people who as seen as machines, as mere power plants. To say they’re not conscious is to align one’s view with the dominant human view that Knives (and the original story) is arguing against. They put Knives on the same side as his enemies and largely removed the commentary on abusing other lifeforms. Unless I epically missed something, this is 180 degree turn in one of the most important moral lessons in Trigun.
* It substitutes interesting, if patriarchal, gender commentary with boring misogyny. I’m not going to argue that Trigun has ever been the world’s most feminist text. But it did do something interesting in making Plants almost 100% a female-appearing species (in adult form), and then making Vash and Knives male (but other independents female). That’s good science fiction just as a brain tease about genetics and gender, and it aligns Vash and Knives, as men, in interesting ways with entirely female progenitors (including Rem as adopted mom). The business in the new anime about Knives wanting to impregnate the “not really conscious” female Plants is just icky. It objectifies female bodies as reproductive vessels while eliminating female personhood, and it casts Knives as really sexist/abusive. Now, (manga) Knives is abusive (occasionally to other Plants), and he’s sexist too. I’d say he inherits this from living in a patriarchal human society, even though he’d claim he’s not influenced by humans; he obviously is. But his sexism is pretty subtle, often expressed in his unquestioning assumption that he’s the right person to lead/control the other Plants. This new plot twist just disempowered the female and made gender in the story less interesting and different.
* I think they also misunderstood Tessla, unless they’re going to flesh out the scenario in S2. Their basic attitude toward the Tessla narrative is “This was an icky thing Vash and Knives found out about how humans treat Plants, but that’s just one example. There’s more!” That’s a little bit like saying that Mengele’s experiments were just one example of scientists being cold hearted. I want to reply, “Wait. Do you know what he did?” The murder of Tessla in the manga is the reason the story happens. It’s what divides Vash from Knives. It’s what incites Knives to cause the Big Fall. It’s what drives Knives’ terrified fury against humans for 150 years. It’s what teaches Vash to understand human frailty (via Rem). And this weight makes sense, because what happened to Tessla is hideous. It is one of the most disturbing things I have ever read. How can one not grasp this?
* Too monotonal. I don’t miss a lot of the hyper-silliness (see below), but they needed some of it. Vash, in particular, suffers from being too emotionally transparent and too serious too much of the time. He (too often) feels like a typical teenager, all angst and heart-on-sleeve. One of the most compelling things about Vash is his layers, his masks, the way his silly exterior is not a lie but a grand omission of the things he grapples with underneath. This version largely lost that—and the way he learned it from Rem. Wolfwood suffers a bit from this too, but (see above) that could be an intentional setup for S2.
* Rem has never been so underutilized before. ’98 anime Rem lacks the depth of the manga Rem, but the writers here seemed to utterly miss her relevance. For one thing, they make Luida a carbon copy of her, thereby largely eliminating the massive scar her untimely death leaves on Vash. Likewise (so far), the 2023 anime has skipped the relevance of her role in Tessla’s death, which to skip much of why Rem matters as a character. It also even skipped the brief mention of Alex she got in the ’98 anime, which alludes to her troubled youth, another significant factor in what makes her a stupendously well written female character in the manga (though you have to read between the lines).
* Having Vash beat Knives with his Plant powers: too soon. July-era Vash is getting squished by Knives’s Plant powers for the simple reason that Knives has worked on mastering them while Vash has resisted doing so. This matters to the story because structurally it sets up the plot movement toward Vash eventually leaning in to using his Plant powers to defeat Knives’s plan in the climax of the entire story. This feels like poor plot structuring: all climactic battle/victory with minimal setup.
* I think they missed what makes the destruction of July powerful; admittedly, this is my interpretation, not obvious text. In the manga, Knives forces Vash to destroy July, which is basically a rape. And that’s bad enough, but given Knives’s reasonably clear (if not explicit) commentary elsewhere that letting go with one’s Plant powers is better than orgasm, I’d conjecture that the most devastating part of the destruction of July for Vash is that part of him enjoyed it. That’s all really messed up, of course, and fantastic psychological tension—all lost here, where Vash just wins, and his guilt is based on his victory inadvertently being a factor in the destruction of the city. (Also, if you’re going to hang out in July in a prequel timeline, why or why not show Hoppered? That seems like a natural way to set up his revenge story more powerfully.)
Other
* Less picaresque shounen silliness. This is a doubled-edged sword. I’ve always found the episodic adventures near the start of the story to be really boring. At the same time, they’re important for establishing Vash as a multidimensional character, and they play to different audience demographic than me. This change may lose that demographic. More importantly to me, it loses character-building around Vash’s silliness, as well as some tonal variation. However, I was never bored. My ideal might have been to trim the silliness but not cut it so completely.
* Having Luida and Brad date from the Big Fall: (pro) this is a nice way of explaining how different the Seeds Ship society is from the rest of No Man’s Land; (con) it eliminates a lot of Vash’s (and Knives’s) cultural isolation as the humans around them die and they keep on living, thus, less pathos.
* Calling Knives “Nai” to refer to his pre-super villain self. I get why they did this. “Knives” is a weird thing to name your child, but I prefer my head canon that just explains the name “Millions of Knives” as an oblique Hindu reference.
All in all, this anime had some beautiful art, some good storytelling, and a handful of genuinely nice character moments set against what feels to me like a failure to understand some of the key storylines and tonal choices that make Trigun so multilayered and powerful.
The Good
* Making it a prequel. I think this has the potential in S2 to work especially well for Wolfwood because he ages so fast. Some commented that he seemed like an emo teenager in this version, which is kind of what he is, but I could well imagine him aging up a lot toward being Wolfwood we’ve known in other media after the upcoming two-year time skip. If they do this well in S2, it could be a real win.
* Wolfwood’s backstory: effectively grisly, though making Conrad the mad scientist seems to miss the point of Conrad.
* The art. I think it looked really slick, character designs were nice, and there were some jaw-droppingly beautiful moments, like the big planet creature in July.
* More ecology: I appreciated fleshing out some of Trigun’s untapped potential as a very ecological story by creating a more complex and deeply present native ecology for No Man’s Land. Pretty good handling of the native “worms” too.
* Taking out Vash’s sexism. You can do some somersaults and come up with explanations for why saintly Vash sometimes treats women so badly in the ’98 anime and, to a much lesser extent, manga (I’ve done those somersaults). But on balance it’s cleaner and feels better to just take this out. Good update.
* On a really generic level, I think Nightow was correct that this is still basically “Trigun”; it’s still about the morality of killing, etc., no massive thematic restructuring.
* Knives is treated seriously as a person with his own ideas about how the world should be.
* In S2, we get Chronica!
Bad
* I feel they badly misunderstood why Plants are in the story. They tell us that normal, non-independent Plants aren’t conscious (or mininally?). Then, they have Knives’s big plan to be impregnate all the Plants to create independent Plants because he wants to create a race of independent Plants. So here’s the thing: Plants aren’t unconscious. They are an enslaved people—worse, a people who as seen as machines, as mere power plants. To say they’re not conscious is to align one’s view with the dominant human view that Knives (and the original story) is arguing against. They put Knives on the same side as his enemies and largely removed the commentary on abusing other lifeforms. Unless I epically missed something, this is 180 degree turn in one of the most important moral lessons in Trigun.
* It substitutes interesting, if patriarchal, gender commentary with boring misogyny. I’m not going to argue that Trigun has ever been the world’s most feminist text. But it did do something interesting in making Plants almost 100% a female-appearing species (in adult form), and then making Vash and Knives male (but other independents female). That’s good science fiction just as a brain tease about genetics and gender, and it aligns Vash and Knives, as men, in interesting ways with entirely female progenitors (including Rem as adopted mom). The business in the new anime about Knives wanting to impregnate the “not really conscious” female Plants is just icky. It objectifies female bodies as reproductive vessels while eliminating female personhood, and it casts Knives as really sexist/abusive. Now, (manga) Knives is abusive (occasionally to other Plants), and he’s sexist too. I’d say he inherits this from living in a patriarchal human society, even though he’d claim he’s not influenced by humans; he obviously is. But his sexism is pretty subtle, often expressed in his unquestioning assumption that he’s the right person to lead/control the other Plants. This new plot twist just disempowered the female and made gender in the story less interesting and different.
* I think they also misunderstood Tessla, unless they’re going to flesh out the scenario in S2. Their basic attitude toward the Tessla narrative is “This was an icky thing Vash and Knives found out about how humans treat Plants, but that’s just one example. There’s more!” That’s a little bit like saying that Mengele’s experiments were just one example of scientists being cold hearted. I want to reply, “Wait. Do you know what he did?” The murder of Tessla in the manga is the reason the story happens. It’s what divides Vash from Knives. It’s what incites Knives to cause the Big Fall. It’s what drives Knives’ terrified fury against humans for 150 years. It’s what teaches Vash to understand human frailty (via Rem). And this weight makes sense, because what happened to Tessla is hideous. It is one of the most disturbing things I have ever read. How can one not grasp this?
* Too monotonal. I don’t miss a lot of the hyper-silliness (see below), but they needed some of it. Vash, in particular, suffers from being too emotionally transparent and too serious too much of the time. He (too often) feels like a typical teenager, all angst and heart-on-sleeve. One of the most compelling things about Vash is his layers, his masks, the way his silly exterior is not a lie but a grand omission of the things he grapples with underneath. This version largely lost that—and the way he learned it from Rem. Wolfwood suffers a bit from this too, but (see above) that could be an intentional setup for S2.
* Rem has never been so underutilized before. ’98 anime Rem lacks the depth of the manga Rem, but the writers here seemed to utterly miss her relevance. For one thing, they make Luida a carbon copy of her, thereby largely eliminating the massive scar her untimely death leaves on Vash. Likewise (so far), the 2023 anime has skipped the relevance of her role in Tessla’s death, which to skip much of why Rem matters as a character. It also even skipped the brief mention of Alex she got in the ’98 anime, which alludes to her troubled youth, another significant factor in what makes her a stupendously well written female character in the manga (though you have to read between the lines).
* Having Vash beat Knives with his Plant powers: too soon. July-era Vash is getting squished by Knives’s Plant powers for the simple reason that Knives has worked on mastering them while Vash has resisted doing so. This matters to the story because structurally it sets up the plot movement toward Vash eventually leaning in to using his Plant powers to defeat Knives’s plan in the climax of the entire story. This feels like poor plot structuring: all climactic battle/victory with minimal setup.
* I think they missed what makes the destruction of July powerful; admittedly, this is my interpretation, not obvious text. In the manga, Knives forces Vash to destroy July, which is basically a rape. And that’s bad enough, but given Knives’s reasonably clear (if not explicit) commentary elsewhere that letting go with one’s Plant powers is better than orgasm, I’d conjecture that the most devastating part of the destruction of July for Vash is that part of him enjoyed it. That’s all really messed up, of course, and fantastic psychological tension—all lost here, where Vash just wins, and his guilt is based on his victory inadvertently being a factor in the destruction of the city. (Also, if you’re going to hang out in July in a prequel timeline, why or why not show Hoppered? That seems like a natural way to set up his revenge story more powerfully.)
Other
* Less picaresque shounen silliness. This is a doubled-edged sword. I’ve always found the episodic adventures near the start of the story to be really boring. At the same time, they’re important for establishing Vash as a multidimensional character, and they play to different audience demographic than me. This change may lose that demographic. More importantly to me, it loses character-building around Vash’s silliness, as well as some tonal variation. However, I was never bored. My ideal might have been to trim the silliness but not cut it so completely.
* Having Luida and Brad date from the Big Fall: (pro) this is a nice way of explaining how different the Seeds Ship society is from the rest of No Man’s Land; (con) it eliminates a lot of Vash’s (and Knives’s) cultural isolation as the humans around them die and they keep on living, thus, less pathos.
* Calling Knives “Nai” to refer to his pre-super villain self. I get why they did this. “Knives” is a weird thing to name your child, but I prefer my head canon that just explains the name “Millions of Knives” as an oblique Hindu reference.
All in all, this anime had some beautiful art, some good storytelling, and a handful of genuinely nice character moments set against what feels to me like a failure to understand some of the key storylines and tonal choices that make Trigun so multilayered and powerful.
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Date: 2023-05-11 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-11 01:34 am (UTC)