Vash and Femininity: Trigun Stampede and its Themes of Bodily Autonomy, Exploitation, and Vague Gender Fuckery
alright sit the fuck down. we're gonna talk about THEMES
I was on Twitter- terrible idea usually, but a couple people I follow made some tweets that got me thinking about Trigun's overall themes, and here we are. So let's talk about some themes in Tristamp! And I'll take a couple looks at Trimax as well, just for fun :3
Let's look at how the showrunners utilize gender roles and exploitation of feminine characters to show how unhealthy Knives' obsession with his ideal of Vash is, and how horrific his exploitation of Vash and the Plants is.
Vash, from the beginning of Tristamp, is someone who cares about people's choices. When people kill others in front of him, he reiterates that whether someone lives or dies is not another person's choice to make. This is something he learned from Rem (a prominent female figure in his life). He refuses to kill people because that is not his choice to make. To kill someone is the ultimate removal of their bodily autonomy. They can no longer make any choices at all; they're dead.
Vash is also someone who has almost no choice in what path his life takes. He's constantly dragged around by outside forces, namely situations that are caused by Knives (which we'll get into later). Vash doesn't make things happen, things happen to Vash. The majority of events that occur are not his fault. He's pushed and pulled in a thousand different directions. His entire life is completely out of his control.
This can be seen as early on in his life as the Fall, something he had no control over and had no idea he even had a part in. Even later, in the ship with Luida and Brad, after he's been rescued from the desert, he's kept in handcuffs right up until he's shown to be of use to them and the Plant on their ship. After that, he could theoretically say "no, I don't want to go to other ships and heal their plants," but he doesn't. He's Vash. He's helpful and nurturing at his core, and these people have done so much for him just by letting him stay, so he'll do whatever they ask, no question.
This carries over into his adulthood. At Jeneora Rock, he goes to look at their Plant at one simple request, doesn't protest when he's dragged into a duel-- he doesn't take initiative unless someone's life is immediately at stake. He lets people tell him what to do and lets himself get dragged around by the wrist. He doesn't even pretend to have control over his life like Trimax Vash does, which I mean. Fair. Why pretend to have a grip on your existence when it's impossible to do anything without a gun pointed at your head?
Vash is a very passive character. He's nurturing, kind, gentle- he's a guy that fits a lot of very typical feminine character stereotypes. If you wrote this same story but made him a woman, I wouldn't bat an eye (but I would definitely be looking at it a lot more critically, what with the amount of stereotypically nurturing/motherly female characters in media already.)
This contrasts directly with Knives. He makes a decision and carries through no matter what stands in his way. He takes initiative. If Vash is a passive character, Knives is an active character. Wherever he goes, he leaves a lasting imprint. He makes shit happen! If outside forces make things happen to him, he'll go out of his way to make sure that particular force doesn't affect him again.
These two tweets I saw are what got me thinking about this originally. I just feel like here's a good place to put them as a segue into talking about episode 11.
Episode 11 is where a lot of this feminine imagery really just. Explodes in your face. IT'S RIGHT THERE. You can't dance around it if you try. And it kind of reaches a peak when the connection reaches 100%, the gate opens, and. well. THIS happens to the Plants.
Plants, in both Trimax and Tristamp, are almost always typically feminine-looking. Knives and Vash are the only two who are male or even masculine at all. Knives, as the most masculine out of all of them, is the one trying to take charge, and mould the world as he sees fit, to a degree that is detrimental to both him and everyone else. And Vash-- passive, feminine, kind and nurturing, whose Angel Arm in the manga always sprouts decidedly feminine-looking Plant parts-- is the one being exploited for Knives' plans. It's no mistake that they made the giant plant formation at the end of ep 11 look like a giant woman that almost resembles Rem.
Vash wants people to make their own choices and keep their autonomy when it comes to their bodies and lives. Knives is the exact opposite. He wants all Plants to become independent and he uses Vash to achieve that goal, without asking what Vash wants or even knowing what the Plants themselves would prefer. He exploits Vash for the soul purpose of trying to make these Plants have Independent Plant babies. He's completely incapable of seeing that his choices are not for the greater good! He thinks he's saving them, but none of his actions are for the good of anyone but himself. He’s just violating them for his own gain.
They're really leaning into gender roles for these guys, but in a way that screams "HEY, LOOK AT THIS! ISN'T IT FUCKED UP? LOOK AT HOW FUCKED UP THAT IS. LOOK AT THIS, AND BE UNCOMFORTABLE, AND KNOW THAT IT IS FUCKED UP."
Because it is! It's so extremely fucked up. They're using this imagery and these roles, something that makes most of us intrinsically uncomfortable, to drive home how unhealthy Knives relationship with his ideal of Vash is. That's the point. We're supposed to be uncomfortable with this.
Now of course there's some nuance to it. Like, you could see Knives as somewhat of a feminine and/or queer-coded figure as well, ESPECIALLY if you look at some of his panels in the manga, which could in turn lead to themes about infighting and control within marginalized communities, but that might be something for another post. :3
And there's definitely different ways you could take this! Vash, with all this feminine imagery, could be either transfem or transmasc coded, depending on what way you'd rather see it, which could lead into themes of how people outside the norm constantly face a lack of bodily autonomy and are exploited for purposes outside their boundaries. We could also look at Wolfwood and his lack of choice over joining the Eye of Michael and becoming the Punisher, and how masculine men (particularly men of colour) are often forced into violent roles against their will. If we look at Trimax, the exact same could be said for Livio/Razlo and people with disorders such as DID/OSDD.
There are many different ways you could spin these themes, some of which I don't feel personally qualified to discuss. If anyone who is qualified to talk about Wolfwood or Livio/Razlo or even other characters related to these themes, then god PLEASE add onto this post or make a post and tag me or something. I would love to read it!
Anyway, in conclusion: Vash is a feminine figure constantly taken advantage of and exploited and and he's so incredibly trans/nonbinary-coded that it drives me insane. Thank you
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okay this has been going through my mind for days and I have to get my thoughts out before I explode
Disclaimer, this is not talking about a specific artist/person and would never condone or participate in anon hate or online bullying for any reason but especially this one.
I get why people are mad about Link being portrayed as this buff, hypermasculine, tall guy. I am too (again don’t fucking attack people over it though) and it seems like such an infuriating way to change the character just to fit into some ideal of hypermasculine attractiveness or to make a ship fall into a more hetero lense by making him a decent foot taller than whatever girl he’s being paired with.
The world of video games and action movies and every form of media ever is extremely saturated with male characters that are swole and manly and whatever other descriptors people are trying to push onto Link that don’t fit into his actual character. There are so many characters out there that already fit this male standard and having a clearly androgynous elf guy was like a breath of fresh air.
Link was literally designed to be a character whose lines on gender were blurred, ‘a girl with a masculine touch or a guy with a feminine touch’ so that anyone could project themselves onto him. His physical design in botw/totk was specifically made to be feminine enough to wear a certain outfit to pass as a woman (which includes a nearly mandatory cutscene where he puts on the clothes and blushes after being called pretty, like you have to be blind to think that its an experience that he doesn’t like at all) and in totk there are a bunch of outfits made for Link that are blatantly gnc, ones that are practically dresses, include nail polish and lipstick, you can even dye his hair bright and vivid colors and that’s half way to giving him new pronouns. The whole reason Linkle isn’t included in more mainline loz games was because her existence would force Link into a gender dichotomy, if there's a clearly female version of the main hero, that means the main hero has to be a man, and they would rather abandon a potential reoccurring character than make Link conform to a gender binary.
So pardon me when it feels disingenuous and even malicious for him to be morphed into these clear masculine ideals, where he towers over any female romantic partner (even when in canon he is regularly depicted as noticeably shorter than her) or even in m/m fanworks he’s really beefed up, perhaps to make the scene feel more gay or something.
Perhaps it’s because his more twink-y/ femboy body type is so heavily sexualized (though obviously when people are sculping abs on him it’s totally not because they’re horny about it) and that’s an issue in itself that bothers me. But it’s just so tiring to see one of the very few popular main characters who is short and feminine and androgynous be molded into just another bland muscle-headed action hero over and over and over again.
I’m not mad at the creators for portraying him differently than how I like him portrayed, I’m mad because we really do get so few characters like him in good popular media, and to be honest, I really like him the way that he is. I love that he’s tiny and has long hair and has the option to dress any way the player likes. It seems a little distasteful to make him taller than a female love interest just because that’s how straight couples have to be, there’s just never been a real straight couple where the guy is shorter than the girl, that’s just Impossible! (/s)
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I've recently been watching these very interesting Star Wars video essays on YouTube (yeah I know, a rare breed) and it brings up these comments Lucas has made about how he views Star Wars as almost like a silent film in terms of how important the visuals are to him in comparison to the dialogue. But this essay also points out how important Lucas finds all of the "rhyming" moments in his trilogies and the way he utilizes them to remind you of something else for emotional or thematic reasons. And there's so many of them, both in visuals and in dialogue, and it's interesting to consider how important this is to him, the repetition for a purpose as well as the storytelling through visuals above everything else and then to look at Star Wars since the Prequels came out and realize how little has really been able to match up to those ideals since then.
The ONLY thing that's come out since the Prequels that I think really hits these two things the same way is, in fact, Andor. One of the things I noticed about the way people discussed Andor as it was airing in a way I haven't really seen for any of the other shows or films was the visual SYMBOLOGY. So many times I saw people noticing the Imperial cog everywhere, from the aerial shot of Narkina 5 as the prisoners escape to the architecture of Mon Mothma's house. There were people picking up on the use of items in Luthen's shop that are familiar from other things to give this idea that Luthen is from another time, he's attempting to preserve this world he lost, that if you're not looking closely enough you won't notice what he's really saying or doing with this shop. The color choices for the different locations and people got analyzed because the people involved spoke about how they intentionally utilized color to SEND A MESSAGE about the characters and the world. We know that the people who made the costumes and sets really worked hard to treat Star Wars almost like a period drama and study the history of the franchise as if it were a real place so that the things they came up with felt like they belonged in this world everyone knows so well even if it's completely new. And of course there were all of the myriad references to things from Rogue One, the constant repetition of "climb", the sunset on the beach, etc.
Nearly EVERY SHOT in this show was created with so much intention behind it in order to say something meaningful about the characters, the world, this specific story they're in, and the overall saga of Star Wars itself. It's insane how much greater impact this show was able to achieve through the incredibly careful usage of visual symbols and thematic repetitions, much like Lucas did before them. It feels like they didn't just study the history of the galaxy far far away, but they studied the history of STAR WARS and what Lucas was trying to do and say with this story. They peeled back his onion a bit more and were able to create something that really has that same visual feel even when it's not created for a child audience. It also is experimenting with its narrative style through its structure and through Cassian's character being allowed to be somewhat more reactive than proactive, and while that didn't work for everyone, it does feel like it's following in Lucas's footsteps of experimentation through Star Wars. Push the boundaries of what Star Wars is and can be and what you can say with it.
But this only works because they peeled the onion back enough to TRULY understand all of the messages Lucas was sending with it. They got the heart of Star Wars and despite its lack of space wizards, despite the lack of most major characters in the Saga, this was a show that honestly got the message more than just about anything else Star Wars has put out since the Prequels. The choices between selflessness and selfishness, the themes about how you always HAVE to make a choice even when it feels like you don't have any (sometimes ESPECIALLY when it feels like you don't have any), and how important it is to make sure to choose the path of compassion above everything else. The themes of connection to others, the symbiotic circle and the impact even the smallest person can have on world around them, it's RIGHT THERE and it's CENTRAL to Andor's storyline.
So yes, it experiments a little with narrative structure, but it's possibly the most Star Wars thing to exist Revenge of the Sith because it honestly truly GETS what Star Wars was about, both in its themes and in its filmmaking. A lot of people said that Andor didn't feel like Star Wars to them, usually because of the lack of space wizards and the fact that it's not a story aimed at children. But to me, Andor is EXACTLY what Star Wars is and has always been. They're stretching the boundaries of what Star Wars can be, but it's saying the exact same things Star Wars has always said, it's just saying it slightly differently. This doesn't feel like fanfiction to me, not really. Unlike things like the Mandoverse or the books, Andor isn't just taking some of the toys out of the sandbox and going to play with them somewhere else. Andor is IN that sandbox. It's building a slightly different sandcastle, but it's still within the sandbox, using the same sand that Lucas did.
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