Trigun Bookclub: deludedfantasy: Trigun Maximum Volume 7: Chapter 1-3

Back to the Trigun Bookclub Archive

Original Tumblr Post: Trimax Vol 7 Ch 1-3

Trimax Vol 7 Ch 1-3

Sooooo, the first half of this volume might have destroyed me. I spent a lot of time staring into space between panels because the horrors were getting to me. Prepare for lots and lots of yelling. Here goes.

Ch 1

With a story like Trimax, I get incredibly nervous when an entire volume is named Happy Days. I know I am being lied to.
The way the crew comes out of their pods really reads like people clawing their way out of coffins. Very ominous.
Wow, this guy is rude. Rem hasn’t talked to anyone but Plant children in a whole year and the first thing that happens when the crew wakes up is that one of them harrasses her. Ugh. He could’ve stayed asleep for another three years if that’s how he was gonna be.
Argh, there are way too many people in this chapter and I can’t tell who’s talking when the whole crew is together.
I don’t know what to make of it, but Rem’s eyes are completely white when she lies to the crew. I know someone pointed out that Wolfwood’s eyes are white when he’s in an incredibly emotional state so I wonder if this is something similar?
Knives just messing around with the thrusters because he was curious. So not only do Independent plants grow quickly, they’re apparently incredibly smart. But also still kids because he absolutely messed something up.
Ah, young Conrad meeting the twins for the first time. I like that Tristamp made him a more important character because of what happened to Tesla.
Knives is so concerned with what humans think of him! Having him be so drastically different as a child really makes you wonder what happened to make him hate humanity as much as he does.
Oh no, baby Knives is crying! He just wants to be loved and accepted. Both of them love Rem so much too. Oh my god, I just wanna cry. This chapter is the sweetest, nicest one we’ve had in a while.
Pages that make me wanna sob because of dramatic irony. Little Knives is so hopeful…he’s so full of love and understanding and naivety. I don’t wanna watch it break.

Ohhhh. Now that I know what’s going on, this part makes a lot more sense to me. Knives and Vash think they see one of the people in cryo chambers awake, and they follow her. I think this is actually a telepathic Plant thing. Tesla is still alive, so she’s projecting herself into their minds and leading them to her.
She shows up right after Knives’s revelation about working through their differences with humanity. I wonder how much she hears and is aware of, because it seems significant that she shows up then, like a vengeful ghost that wants to show him how wrong he is.
God, I hate reading the report notes. They’re so chilling and dehumanizing. They keep calling her a “subject” but what we see is a little girl. And she looks so small and scared. Man, I really shouldn’t be reading this late at night. I’ll be up all night thinking about this.
“Trouble over a question of ethics.” Well, that’s a fucking understatement! Question of goddamn ethics, you scanned her so often you gave her cancer! Because you were treating a living thing—no, a child—like an inanimate object that could take as much abuse as you threw at it.
110 days is just over 3 months. I’m raging. How many times did they use radioactive scanning equipment on this little girl to give her tumors??? I had to get one CT scan done and they were extremely reluctant to do it because I was young and they weren’t sure it would show what was wrong with me.
My brain is only capable of producing screaming noises right now. These last pages are brutal and gory and…yeah, really messed up.
All the notes have to say is “Project is closed.” PROJECT??? PROJECT????? That was a little girl you experimented on so much that you basically killed her! I’m gonna throw my laptop out the window.
I’ve come back a little calmer and actually, I can’t tell if she’s alive or not. In Tristamp, it seems like she was put into cryo sleep to preserve her while she was technically alive. But here, I can’t tell. Thing is, she wouldn’t be able to do her Plant telepathy otherwise. Hmmm.

Ch 2

Oh no no no no, little Vash’s dead eyed face is too much for me right now. He’s had his doubts about humans, sure, but this is too much for him to handle. This is the revelation of humanity’s evil that he’s far, far too young to be able to handle.
Oh God, and he’s alone in there with Tesla’s dissected body because Knives fainted. He can’t look away, he’s never been able to look away, and all he can see now is how different he is from humanity. Right now, he doesn’t see any way they can reconcile their differences.
This page, where Vash looks like he’s floating curled into a ball while tormented by those staring eyes, is a nice juxtaposition to a similar panel in the last volume. There, he was peacefully floating in zero-g and feeling safe. Here, is the exact opposite. Here, it’s the loss of his innocence.

Vash is so angry. Rightfully so! What was done to Tesla was horrible and what proof does he have that the same won’t be done to him? Rem has been lying to him his whole life. He’s found out just how cruel the world is. It’s so easy to forget (and honestly not always easy to see) with adult Vash, but at heart, he is driven by anger. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, because in his case, his kindness comes from that deep-seated anger. Remind me to write a longer post about that later.
Still, it’s so interesting to see that anger and realize it’s always been in him, from the very beginning.
But this is also the start of something worse—Vash’s suicidal ideation comes from here. He doesn’t see a point in living if the world would treat beings like him with such cruelty, forever leaving him marked as other and inhuman. He doesn’t want to live in a world of only humans. How does he become the man who will do anything in his power to defend humanity when all he has right now is fear and hatred?
Vash refusing to eat because he just doesn’t see the point and doesn’t want to live—I see where Tristamp got Vash’s feelings about deserving to eat from.
Oh my God??? OH MY GOD???? Vash was gonna stab himself. Like yes, I’ve read this before, and yes, I know he’s actively suicidal here, but just—this is the first time we’re seeing it exposed like this, the very depths of his despair. The past few pages, the way he’s been drawn, with his cheeks hollowed and his eyes without expression or emotion, it’s A Lot and I’m not okay.
And Rem just fucking grabs the blade to stop him. She’s willing to hurt herself to keep him from dying. He learned all of this from her, every part of his ideology, and it wasn’t in abstraction. He saw it and, not only that, it was what Rem did to save him. He really becomes her continuation.
Vash has this moment where he becomes very unhinged and actually sounds a bit like future Knives when he hurts Rem by pulling the blade away from her. He learns how powerful violence is, the relief and catharsis it can bring. But immediately after he has these thoughts, he sees how he hurt Rem and that snaps him back to himself, to the little boy he is who just loves his mother.
He has her blood on his hands and that’s too much for him to take. She might be one of the humans that hurt Tesla, but he still loves her and it scares him to see her like that.
He patches her up and gets something to eat….my heart is breaking. He’s just a little baby, why does this have to happen to him?
The blank ticket story is going to make me cry. There’s so much hope in it, especially when you consider the situation Rem had that dream in. She was depressed as hell, she’d lost someone she loved and probably didn’t see a point in going forward either. And it’s a reminder that there’s more to the world than evil and darkness. There’s kindness and goodness too and that’s what Vash needed to hear.
I also think he needed to see Rem’s tears and remorse to remind him that he knows her. She might have made a mistake with Tesla but she never did anything to them. She’s trying to make up for it, with everything in her being she’s trying.
Also, “If you hadn’t stopped me then, I never would have known that when you cry, Rem, you look like you’re laughing.” WOW, Vash you really picked up all your best and worst qualities from your mom, huh? You learn to do the same thing.
Knives wakes up with a dead-eyed look and then says he doesn’t remember anything. Yeahhhh, no, I don’t think so.

Ch 3

The chapter titles in this volume are going to be the death of me. I don’t know if I can handle reading something called “King of Loneliness” after that last chapter. Send help, I’m doing it anyway.
“She hung her head low.” What happened weighs on Rem so much and you just know she ended up taking care of Knives and Vash as some kind of penance. I don’t think she expected to love them as much as she did by the end. But she also never intended on telling them any of this and just forging ahead with them into the new world, disappearing without ever having to face up to what she did.
I can’t blame her though. Is there a good way to tell a child a truth like that? But it would have been better if she’d told them all of this rather than Vash and Knives finding out on their own. Much like it would’ve been better if Vash was honest about who he was and what his mission was with Meryl, Milly, and Wolfwood from earlier on. Hiding things from the people you love rarely ends well.
“There’s so much we have to do to make sure it never happens again.” Now that’s what I call foreshadowing and dramatic irony. We all know what Knives means by that.
But Vash knows something’s wrong with Knives. And we see it too. This is the first time in these chapters his face is obscured in shadows, just like it was when we were first introduced to this younger version of him volumes ago. This is the first moment where Vash feels like he doesn’t know his brother.
Knives is losing it. He’s painting himself in his own blood as he no doubt plans the Big Fall. His descent into fear and darkness here is masterfully done and so unsettling.
The juxtaposition of these pages too, with his fearful face covered in blood and tears and the triumph as he watches the ships fall from the sky. This was an act of evil, yes, but it was driven by fear and helplessness.
Knives claims all his decision making as rational, but these last few pages have shown that to be untrue. Certainly, there was logic behind it, but most of it was driven by emotion.
Ohhhhh, I finally understand this bit! Knives merges with the Plant! He asks her for help and shows what he’s feeling, his anger at humanity and, ultimately, his plans. Last volume, he realized he doesn’t have the power to achieve his goals alone and this is how he plans to fix that.
At the beginning of this chapter, I thought the King of Loneliness was going to be Vash, but really, it’s Knives. He pushed everyone away and destroyed the colony fleet. He pushes away the Gung Ho Guns and merges with the Plants to achieve his goals. Ultimately, he is still a scared lonely boy who never processed the terrible things he witnessed and learned. His trust was broken so completely, he never recovered.

Back to the Trigun Bookclub Archive