It's a long story although it's kind of a short one
Cal | he/they | bisexual, enby | multifandom || peaky blinder blog: @red-write-hand || c.ai account: sephiroths_child || carmen berzatto, oliver quick, and roman roy are my roman empire || trigun is my current insane brainrot || requests open!!
to me the difference in how vash was portrayed in trigun maximum vs trigun stampede can be illustrated in the scene in ep. 4 hungry where roberto is like "this is a guy who can kill with a smile on his face" because tristamp vash in all his soft gayness is just like nooo... look at his eyes ^_^ but i know in my heart trimax vash would've gone "you're right. we should leave him once we get out of this worm"
genuinely how do you fumble something like yuri on ice. the show was so popular all over the world. tons of actual ice skaters were talking about it, iirc one professional ice skater even did a routine to a yoi song, it was wild. all they had to do was lean into it, make the movie and then a season 2. and instead they announce the movie, go radio silent for years before limply trotting out a "oh btw the movie's cancelled" today. just pathetic.
One thing that I really love that Trigun does is not making Knives into Vash's literary foil. At first glance it seems like he is and it would be the easy thing to do. I mean, making twins into foils for each other?? It's kind of the obvious way to go.
Nightow didn't do that though, instead he made them opposites. This is reenforced in their appearances, namely their opposing beauty marks. In Stampede it's incredibly obvious in the literal mirror image they have in their sprout days. Where Vash loves humanity and fights to protect them, believes in them, Knives hates them. Wants to exterminate them, thinks they only run on greed, blah blah blah, if you're reading this you know his whole deal already. They are opposites for sure, but that's not what a foil is.
His true foil, as we all know, is Wolfwood. I feel like this is also fairly obvious, but I'll go over it briefly anyway.
Wolfwood and Vash both have something to protect and very different ideas of how to achieve that. They have similar senses of justice, with a grey area around killing bad guys of course. They are foils in the way that they reflect each other, show what each could be like were their circumstances different.
Absolutely none of this is groundbreaking, lol, I am very aware. I'm just pointing it out because I love that Nightow didn't go the obvious route. Instead he made Knives a complete opposite and Wolfwood a proper foil. I think it's a really fun way to eek even more character (read: angst, emotion, inner turmoil) out of Vash. It brings so much more out of him, I think. Being faced with not only a diametrically opposed twin brother, but also someone who makes him reconsider his morals is just so much more interesting than if Knives were the foil! In fact, Wolfwood would likely not exist as a character if Knives were the foil. If that role were filled, his character would have significantly less meaning.
ANYWAY!!! I can't stop thinking about Trigun, I don't even know if this is anything or if I'm just stating the obvious. It's just something I like! 😊