#in regards to tristamp weird plotlines

[menstits]

asking this as someone who never watched trigun, could u tell me why tristamp sucked? i normally see people praising it so I would love to know your take on it!

I'm gonna be honest with you anon it's probably going to be a long as hell response and i will probably put it under a read more. BUT. Since you asked politely I'm going to try to answer in good faith.

The short answer is that the designs are heinous, the pacing is dogshit and in the span of a season which was supposed to set up the story as a sort of prequel to the events of trigun maximum, which will allegedly be explored in the next season, tristamp already managed to not only completely mangle pretty much every single character's personality and motives but also miss the key point of trimax the literal climax of the story at the end by completely ruining knives as a character and as a villain right from the get-go.

I'm also going to go over tristamp's crimes in great depth because I'm a huge hater.

MAJOR TRIGUN SPOILERS under the cut 👍 if anyone wanted to read trimax

FIRST OF ALL the designs are literally so bad. They got rid of everything that was charming about trimax's character designs such as making vash look like some kind of pathetic softboy, getting rid of his spiky hair and tiny glasses and sexy long red coat in favor of making him look like the average undercut twink you can find anywhere in our day and age. AND they made every single woman in the show ugly as hell like they made meryl look straight they got rid of Milly altogether in the first season they turned rem ugly as sin and just flattened every adult woman's personality into being some brand of motherly figure. The biggest tristamp misogyny sufferer is ELENDIRA who is a villain and one of knives' evil henchmen or whatever who's cool as hell and pretty and probably the funniest character in the manga who is canonically a regular adult trans woman, they turned her into some kind of human/plant creature hybrid and turned her into a child for literally no reason other than being gross and transmisogynistic. Here's the comparison just so you have visuals for how heinous it is (left is trimax, right is tristamp)

Plot wise KNIVES is the biggest overall sufferer of tristamp dogshit writing because they literally just went and entirely flattened his personality into being oughh some kind of evil senseless villain when that's literally just not who he is. Knives and vash were both extremely compassionate and sensitive children who genuinely wanted to be able to get along with humans despite being independent plants. Finding out about how humanity exploits plants is what pushes them in opposite directions: after a suicide attempt stopped by his adoptive mother rem, vash stays true to the principles she taught them especially after her sacrifice that ensures their survival and becomes completely unwilling to take someone else's life even in self defense, which plays into his extremely self destructive behavior and suicidal urges

While knives completely rejects humanity and decides to free plants from humanity's exploitation, enacting his vengeance upon humans in the process.

Knives goes about this by "stealing" dependent plants from human settlements, often killing everyone in the process, and making them join his plant hivemind. In trimax it's revealed towards the end that dependent plants have a will of their own and already communicate with one another in the form of some sort of shared consciousness, and they all only joined knives' hivemind willingly because they were convinced by his arguments and willing to support his cause.

The way knives is defeated is through vash projecting towards the dependent plants all his positive feelings about humanity and all the ways in which humans can actually be kind and compassionate and capable of learning and becoming better people, which *convinces* the plants to willingly try to find a way to live alongside humans in harmony. Despite this, it's still made explicit that the plants don't hate knives for his initial plan, they were simply moved by the knowledge that humans are willing to try to live alongside them with mutual respect.

At the very end, knives and an unconscious vash, both exhausted and broken by their fight, escape authorities are taken in by a random human man and his son and are cared for until vash wakes up. As thanks for saving his brother, knives exhausts the last of his energy to generate an apple tree (or turn himself into an apple tree which is functionally the same thing) that can sustain the man and the child which represents him overcoming his distrust for humans in the face of such kindness given freely to two inhuman creatures wanted by the law and shit. This is the extremely dumbed down summary of what happens but this is just to convey how knives genuinely cares for dependent plants and thinks of them as his own family and they care for him in return and are part of his cause willingly.

In comparison, right in the first season of tristamp there's a weird as hell completely unprompted like forced pregnancy subplot where like . Knives tries to take control of vash to make him like . Use his plant powers to impregnate the dependent plants? So that they can give birth to more independent plants ? Because they just decided to make knives some kind of plant eugenicist for literally no reason who exploits dependent plants exactly as much as humans do for the sake of some perplexing incest adjacent plot point that literally doesn't exist in trimax because knives doesn't give a flying fuck about making more independents he literally just wants to take his whole plant family and leave that piece of shit desert planet so that humans can die with no resources. LIKE. I'm sorry but like knives is a terrorist yes that's well established but he's literally not impregnating anyone and the whole POINT. OF TRIMAX. Is that plants in general including knives are ultimately moved by humanity's capacity for selflessness despite being intimately aware of humanity's capacity for cruelty. The point of trimax is forgiveness and coexistence. And also. That a pair of twins that were kind children and raised with love to grow into compassionate people can react in extremely different ways to trauma and betrayal. Knives was NOT "evil from birth". If anything it could be argued that knives was MORE eager than vash to make friends with humanity and that that's why he reacted so badly to finding out that humans previously killed an independent plant girl like them by running so many tests on her that she got sick and died in the span of a few months . Also vash is not some stupid softboy bitch loser he's SUICIDAL and his pacifist message is effective on people like wolfwood because he actually saves people for real unlike loser idiot tristamp vash who whines and cries all the time without concluding anything.

Also the pacing is literally dogshit snd it's not even true that tristamp is an effective "prequel" of trimax because they were too eager to stick random elements from the end of the manga into it for literally no fucking reason. Something something why is Livio the bus driver etc.