Review of Trigun

I fell in love with Trigun. Vash the Stampede has all the elements of an anime badass, and every one of those elements is turned on its head promptly. Trigun is an anime that practices what it preaches, in not just its messaging, but its character design. When Vash says he believes in peace, this isn't a thin veil to be pierced by the plot so that he can actually become a shonen protagonist. This is exactly what he means. The anime itself is overt about his pacifism, and just like pacifism itself, you are welcomed to question if it's possible. It doesn't shy awayfrom these questions, and it doesn't give simple answers, in the end. Trigun revels in love and care between its cast and its world. It celebrates community and solidarity in the face of adversity and immeasurable pain. It tackles subjects like alcoholism, capitalism, generational responsibility, environmentalism, and violence against indigenous peoples with the kind of bravery and spiritual integrity that I haven't really seen very often. In a small way, it even addresses police abolition! In a much bigger way, though, Trigun's greatest triumph is an exploration of the gun as a symbol of power.

Trigun does not fall into the anime trap of sidelining its characters or distilling its female characters into mere sexual objects without personality or objectivity. None of its cast are made lesser arbitrarily, and all of them are so easy to fall in love with.

Trigun is brilliant and beautiful. My heart bursts with admiration for it.

Until the ending.

Trigun is a tragedy of an anime. For all my heaps of praise, the tail end of this anime does not build to a conclusion that matches its heights or even builds off of them. It is a lovely, meditative journey that walks off a cliff unexpectedly. It isn't upsetting or insulting, but more deeply perplexing and horribly disappointing.

That's not to say there aren't some other flaws, but they're minor--I think the opening's theme and the opening itself is a bit bland and dissonant, and the score overall is a little flat. But these are relatively small issues.

I think Trigun could have been my favorite anime of all time if it had just kept up what it had going for it. But it didn't. And that's a tragedy.