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Original Tumblr Post: Vash’s use of pronouns
Vash’s use of pronouns
In reply to a post by cerealandchoccymilk:
The whole pronoun business was a super interesting thing to learn when I got into Japanese and wanting to get familiar with it. It has always been something I found fascinating, but also difficult to learn and getting a feel for the intended meaning and purpose.
I noticed Vash’s shift in regular pronoun choice from Trigun to TriMax, but it always made a lot of sense to me. Exactly as you said, Vash was polite towards strangers before, but in TriMax he puts on this meek, polite and sometimes goofy exterior as a mask for his deepening depression.
Just as Vash’s personality shifts from Trigun to TriMax, so does the pronouns. In Trigun he’s had years to recover from the July incident, you can say that he’s a little more mentally sound at the time, or at least vengeance and anger gives him some sort of purpose. Vash is disagreeable at times, he gets annoyed with people, he socializes with big groups of people, all around he’s more assertive, direct and goal driven.
After the arrival of Legato, the Gung Ho Guns and other things, Vash takes a big hit to his ego and well being. The wound that had mended is being chipped at, uncertainty and anxiety begins taking root. After that Vash is never truly the same, he is reactionary, he exists in a wobbly state of barely keeping it together.
It really goes hand in hand with what he signals through the change of pronouns as well, and that is a bit of storytelling that is unfortunately lost in English. We do make our attempts in the Overhaul team to change the wording of Vash’s lines in Trigun to TriMax to give it that tonal shift, since that aspect is otherwise lost. It doesn’t change any of the story meanings or information given, but simply a bit of character writing present in Japanese then localized over to English, something we take pretty seriously on the team.
I look forward to seeing everyone else following in the Trigun Bookclub react to future volumes, it’s gonna be a great ride.