Trigun Bookclub: deludedfantasy: On Tesla, Rem, and Agency in Trimax

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On Tesla, Rem, and Agency in Trimax

Volume 7 gave me a lot of Thoughts, especially about Tesla and her place in the narrative. She’s such a tragic character and I’m obsessed with the implications of her existence, and how her death and Rem’s motivate the twins in very different ways. Much more under the cut.

After volume 7, I’ve been thinking a lot about agency in Trimax, who gets it and who doesn’t. On a slightly related note, I’ve also been thinking about female characters and fridging, so let’s talk about two very important figures who motivate a lot of Vash and Knives’s actions: Rem and Tesla.

On my first watch of Tristamp, the moment Rem died saving Vash and Knives, I went, “Oh no, not again.” That is the classic set-up for fridging a female character. You see her briefly, she declares her love for the main characters, and she’s dead within minutes, now providing our main characters with the correct amount of angst to fuel their actions for the rest of the story. That is essentially what happens in Tristamp. We do see more of Rem later and learn a bit more about her, but that vision of the perfect woman, the perfect mother, who was so unjustly murdered by Nai’s actions, remains constant. She doesn’t have a whole lot of agency.

Part of the problem with fridging is it completely removes any individuality or agency from a female character. She’s basically an empty doll for the main character to project their emotions on and give the readers an easy explanation for their actions. A fridged woman doesn’t have any personality except being perfect and dead.

From where we stand in Tristamp season 1, that’s all we have. But Trimax is another story entirely. It shows us Rem as a whole person. She’s very much so still the mother Vash loves and idealizes, but we learn there’s so much more to her. I’d even argue that’s part of whyhe loves her: because he’s seen her fully, warts and all.

Her first scene in volume 6, during the birthday party, already starts shifting the narrative we’ve become used to. There’s something off about her, we can’t see her eyes. We get the feeling she’s hiding something. When she forces Vash and Knives to hide when the crew wakes up, we’re proven right.

Volume 7 is when we really see her for the first time though. She’s not perfect. She let something horrible happen to a little girl. She’s a woman laboring under a lot of guilt and a lot of love. Everything she’s done for Vash and Knives has been because she hasn’t forgiven herself for what happened to Tesla. Her determination to keep Vash alive when all he wants is to die and the story she tells him about the blank ticket is a defining moment for her character and for him. We understand why Vash has based so much of himself around her, why he’s trying so hard to keep her memory alive. But it also makes it hit even harder that she sacrificed herself to save not just the twins, but the whole fleet. Her death suddenly becomes even more meaningful. She isn’t another woman shoved into a refrigerator; she’s brave, smart, idealistic, loving to a fault, full of guilt and shame and depression, but so very determined to do the right thing when she’s failed before.

Now, compare her to Tesla. I talked a bit about this in my book club post, but I want to expand on it. We don’t actually meet her. Her ghost leads Vash and Knives to her body. We see her dissected body and learn about her through the researchers’ reports and Rem’s explanations. But we never hear her voice or her story in her own words. We don’t know what she wants.

But Knives takes up his crusade and his revenge on humanity because of what happened to her. It seems like a pretty straightforward instance of fridging, but I don’t think it’s that, not fully. Because that’s the whole point is that Tesla never had a voice.

Usually, when a woman is fridged, any actions taken in her name are seen as noble or at least understandable. But Knives’s motivations are deeply, deeply flawed (for many reasons). Despite his goals to free Plants from the tyranny of humanity and give them agency, many of his methods involve taking away agency from other Plants, including his own brother. By starting the crusade in Tesla’s name, he makes it hers. But we don’t know if that’s what she would have wanted! She was just a little kid. Maybe she would’ve wanted to visit those same horrors upon humanity that were visited on her. Maybe she would’ve just wanted to kill the scientists who caused her pain. Maybe she would’ve wanted to disappear and just live a normal life. We can’t know! And that’s the tragedy of it.

Like I said in my book club post, she becomes a martyr for a cause she didn’t know existed.

The absence of Tesla’s voice is so loud. She never had a choice, not when she was alive and not even when she was dead. We don’t know why she showed herself to the twins or if that apparition was even a ghost with some form of agency or a simply some sort of Plant impression that didn’t have an intent one way or another. But Knives decides that the legacy she will receive is of death and destruction and revenge. There’s something that feels so wrong to me about that. It feels like a continuation of Knives lashing out in fear and anger, not considering anything or anyone else.

This isn’t to say that the way Vash treats Rem is perfect either. It’s not. His devotion to the idea of her and living up to her sacrifice are pretty flawed too. At the same time as he knows that she wasn’t perfect, she becomes something of an untouchable figure in his head. He’s living his life in penance for her sacrifice and shattering himself in the process. He takes her ideals to the very extreme and doesn’t leave a lot of room for nuance. It’s questionable whether Rem would’ve wanted this to be her legacy. But at least Vash knows what she would’ve wanted for him: for him to never give up hope, to see the world in all its glory and horror, and give himself the freedom to remake his future when all seems bleak.

I really hope season 2 of Tristamp gives us more of Rem and Tesla, especially since there’s some indication that Tesla was still alive in Tristamp. Rem holds such an important place in the story of Trigun and I want to see the wonderful flawed version of her translated to the story Tristamp is trying to tell.

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