Trigun Bookclub: pancake-breakfast: Trigun Volume 1: Vash’s Loneliness

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Original Tumblr Post: Vash’s Loneliness

Vash’s Loneliness

As a few others have noted, this scene just hits different in the manga versus in the ’98 anime. But I wanna talk about it, too, so here we go.

In the manga, the pages preceding this scene feel like some well-meaning townsfolk overstepping their bounds a bit, but in ’98, the narrative had already built Vash up as a womanizer by this point, so this scene felt more like the townsfolk playing into that aspect of his reputation than anything else. That reputation does add an element of surprise that he’d bother to reject their advances when he was looking up a young girl’s skirt, peeping in windows at a lady’s bathtub, and completely entranced by a woman’s cleavage in the previous episodes. But it still didn’t exactly endear me to him.

I don’t remember if he said all that stuff in that center panel at all in ’98 (and I’m too tired to look it up right now), but if he did, it ABSOLUTELY didn’t stick, drowned out in the sudden rejection he has for a pair of skirts that seem to enthusiastically want him for his body. Which is a real miss for ’98, because LOOK AT THE LAYOUT OF THIS PAGE.

Part 1 is a continuation of the previous page, with the sudden revelation that Vash isn’t even slightly asleep right now, but instead is listening in on the conversation. All it would take for him to stop them is for him to ask. Instead, he lies there in silence until he’s alone.

Part 2 is him reflecting on them leaving, on their words, on all that he’s leaving behind and all he’s done and things that we just don’t know about yet in the manga. In spite of not getting any internal monologue from him, it’s clear that there, alone in the dark, he’s rejecting the idea that all of this–the women, the party, everything–is something he’s worthy of. Clearly, the townsfolk think he deserves it, and I’d guess that’s the only reason he bothers to tack that “maybe” on there. The pause before his other statements makes them seem too well thought out.

But then you have Parts 3 and 4. And they are… nothing. Nightow doesn’t spread the previous three bits of dialog from Vash over three panels. He doesn’t add inserts pulling us closer to Vash or to items in the room, or longer shots of the setting easing the transition into the morning of the next day. Instead, he gives us pitch blackness followed by deliberate emptiness with the faintest of clouds.

That’s not a transition. That’s a punctuation.

When we leave this scene, the thing we’re supposed to remember from it isn’t that Vash turned down sex. The thing we’re supposed to remember is that Vash felt he didn’t deserve everything the townsfolk did for him in that evening, and that he felt this so strongly that he deliberately (and sneakily) taps out early to hide in the darkness of his room all by himself to wait for morning.

And that makes this scene FAR more lonely than ’98 having the local wandering lecher suddenly turn down an opportunity to get some.

Reply by needle-noggins:

If you don’t mind me adding onto your post, I’d like to say that I think Vash was celebrating with the townsfolk only because they wanted him to. Denying the town the chance to celebrate, to give him thanks, would be rude of him. Vash is such a people-pleaser, absolutely to his own detriment, and he’s willing to fake all the joy and celebration he can to make them feel appreciated. He doesn’t think he deserves any of it, but he plays along to make them happy. The minute it becomes something more private, something where he’s given the opportunity to be purely selfish, the facade drops. He plays dead. This boy can fit so much complex self-loathing into it.

(Quick note for bookclub purposes: spoilers for Trigun Stampede and for Trigun overall below.)

This is a great addition! I think if one is on their first Trigun experience and has only read the manga, it might be a bit difficult to grasp all this, but those of us who have gone through at least one other version of the story (and those rereading the manga) all know Vash has a tendency to mask his depression like crazy, and generally he does this by leaning hard into the “silly, goofy guy” bit. It’s not entirely disingenuous; he just wants people to enjoy themselves regardless of his own thoughts and feelings, and I do think he genuinely enjoys being a part of that experience. But it doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t ever get to linger in that moment for long, and that hurts him. Deeply.

I think this might actually be part of why he seems so much more serious in Stampede versus other versions. With the exception of the first episode, he’s either having to be “on” for combat purposes or he’s in too small of a group to warrant trying to uphold the mask. Anyone who has tried doing something like that 24/7 knows how exhausting it is, and Vash may not be human, but that applies to him, too. And we definitely see him do the “feigning sleep to avoid actual interaction” thing there, too.

I don’t think he resents his inhumanity, per se, but the fact that it creates a bit of a barrier between him and humans makes him sad. And that’s just accounting for his age and not for… *gestures vaguely* all the rest of what comes with it. I imagine knowing you’re capable of serious spontaneous mass destruction and not knowing how to control it or even quite how it happened would mess with anyone, and for someone who loves people as much as Vash does, it’s a bit of a waking nightmare. But that same otherness that he has allows him to look out for people in ways he just couldn’t otherwise, so he can’t fully resent it.

He just keeps trying his best.

Also! I think all this plays wonderfully with Stampede’s decision to go with Journalist Meryl instead of Insurance Agent Meryl. As a journalist, she’s allowed to lean more into her curiosity rather than tailing Vash more or less because it’s her job and letting the curiosity build over time. Instead of being a babysitter for a walking natural disaster, Meryl gets to have a deep-seated desire to understand, and that changes the dynamic between her and Vash to something that’s a lot more humanizing for Vash.

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