#it genuinely makes me so sad because as soon as he pulled out a derringer his fate was fucking sealed

[sword-dad-fukuzawa]

I just think that the metatextual horror of Roberto’s existence as a character is one of the cool spicy things that can only exist bc tristamp is a reboot. lemme explain

he spends the whole anime not wanting to die and yet following his stupid kohai into mess after mess. he’s an investigative reporter who’s lived pretty long, he’s got good danger sense, but Meryl asks--begs, really--and so he goes. and so he dies. sure he's been toting the old mentor standard death flag from the beginning, and sure meryl dragging him into danger zone after danger zone is what killed him, but i can't shake the nagging feeling that there's another force at work here that is almost palpable from ep 1 if you’ve already watched trigun.

Roberto is textbook “doomed by the narrative” because this story has played out before!! and he was never in it!! the universe corrects itself to account for an unknown!! there’s no room in trigun for Roberto and so he’s always been meant to die. there’s no ending where Roberto survives if the story is to stay the course and that makes me feel like eating drywall.

it doesn’t matter how much fault lies with Meryl because Roberto was never going to make it to the finish line!! she is Derringer Meryl, she starts trigun as derringer meryl and so someone had to make her into that. women named derringer meryl do not spring fully formed out of space westerns okay, something had to give. and from ep1 of stampede that role fell to roberto. his role in the narrative is to be the vehicle for meryl's metamorphosis.

this is absolutely incoherent but Roberto being an anomaly in the universe of trigun is so. hnrgh. he’s a glitch. he’s lucky he’s lived as long as he has. And I think part of the reason he’s so “we should run” for the whole anime is because he knows that, on some level, he's living on borrowed time.

meeting vash near jeonora rock started the clock. or even further back--when he was assigned meryl stryfe as his apprentice. that was the point of no return, because meryl has a place in this story, meryl has always had a place, and roberto never did, not for long.