Superheroes are something that we have been interested in writing about for quite a long time. And especially now that it seems that cinemas have really nothing much else to offer. We have already pointed out (in our Wonder Woman vs Spiderman review) that whenever we see anything superhero, we compare them to this somewhat obscure 90's anime Trigun. Because they share surprising similarities both structurally and thematically. The protagonist possesses superhuman abilities resulting from a genetic mutation, rigorous training, technological advances or simply not being human. They have outfits that signify something important and they stand behind some kind of ideology. They all attempt to depict the consequences when the protagonists use their powers to protect others/save humanity. In our heads, Trigun is what all of the superhero genre aspire to be, even though we're sure most of the creators of superheroes have never even heard of it. Now, to be clear, we do not think superhero movies are the worst thing in entertainment and they're fun to go watch. But when they are nearly the only product on offer in cinema and they do not deliver the way they could, we do tend to get a little frustrated. We believe there is value in analyzing pop culture and we don't really get the argument that we shouldn't hold popular movies to a high standard (and this includes B-movies as well). Most people reading this are familiar with the superhero genre and have seen at least some of the recent movies/tv-shows. But we'd estimate that not that many know Trigun. It is our favourite show not including miniseries (otherwise it'd be a tie). In order for us to contrast properly, we will have to spoil quite a bit of the show, so we would urge you to watch it (and please, for the love of god, watch the Japanese dub). If you haven't seen it and don't want spoilers, go watch it now (it's only 26 episodes, each lasting less than 30 minutes) or skip the next segment. We
might cut corners when summarizing and you may not even agree with
our assessment of the series, since in first viewing it feels like it
takes 12 episodes for the idea to even start. In other words, this show
requires patience and capacity for subtlety. The beginning especially
can be quite off-putting if you're not used to anime humour and the show purposely makes you think that the main character is nothing but a goofy idiot and an outrageous pervert.
Brief summary of Trigun - Basically it is about two humanoid brothers with opposing ideologies. The main character, Vash, is a pacifist who has vowed never to kill anyone under any circumstances and avoids violent confrontation by any means. His brother, Knives, is continually trying to break Vash's conviction since Knives thinks humans are nothing but parasites and wants them all dead. There's also a priest, Wolfwood, who becomes Vash's best friend but also believes that killing is necessary to protect others. The show is kind of this constant struggle between the two ideologies - whether killing can ever be justified or not. Amazingly both of the female characters are adults and never sexualized (if you've seen anime at all, that is indeed a fucking miracle) and the women (Meryl and Milly) are also part of the dilemma of the show's ideologies and have to come to terms with and determine what they actually believe. Meryl especially has a great character arc. The "past woman" refreshingly isn't a dead lover but a mother figure (Rem) for both brothers and she taught them everything Vash believes in. The last really important character is Legato, Knives' nihilistic #1 henchman and the series culmination is Legato forcing Vash to kill him. The show's last episodes are Vash's struggle to face the ramifications of him betraying his values and realizing that he wants to save his brother instead of having to kill him. The show ends with Vash throwing away his gun and abandoning violence altogether.
As we wrote earlier, Western superhero entertainment shares similarities and differences with Trigun, so we have divided this entry in two: structure and themes. We won't compare the source materials (manga and comics) since we aren't really interested in them and we wanted to stick with moving pictures. So, let's start with structure. Characters are an important part of a story's structure, especially for us who are very character focused. Female characters and villains have in recent years gotten the short end of the stick in many superhero films. That really should be a cause for concern, since women should be actual characters and afforded complexity just as much as male characters. Women in superhero movies mostly still serve as the love interest without a motivation of their own or if they happen to be main characters they are randomly overpowered (like Captain Marvel, who is basically the female equivalent of Superman), die (like Gamora or Black Widow) and have no character arc of their own (like Wonder Woman). And don't get us started on the sexy miniskirts/bloomers and leather outfits that women wear in these movies. You do not really ever get to see things from these female characters' perspective. That is another weird thing about Trigun - though the series is male centric, it devotes quite a lot of time to the female characters' inner thoughts and feelings. And the women, again, surprisingly, get character arcs in this male centric show. The Marvel TV-shows, to their credit, have managed to handle some of their female characters better than their movies.
Same goes for the villains in these films - they are completely disposable and interchangeable nor do they really challenge the heroes in any meaningful way. The villains are there to be disposed of without any time devoted to them or making them interesting or intimidating. The villains are there purely as a physical deterrence. Now, some might say that Nolan's Batman trilogy does not do this and that his villains have some ideological purpose - that may be true, but Batman, the character Nolan has created, is not very consistent and that reflects poorly on his villains. This makes the villains ultimately just physical opposition and not moral challengers. Then again, we have never thought of Nolan to be particularly good at depicting any kind of internal moral struggles. This is why, to this day, our favourite superhero movie is Batman Returns (which we realize is no one's favourite). The anti-hero actually challenges the main character and he has to question his own identity and conviction, though even in Batman Returns, he wants to save the anti-hero because he loves her. In Trigun, Legato's will is to die by Vash's hand and it is his only goal. And Legato is an enemy that Vash feels nothing but hatred and resentment for, yet he still does not want to kill him. Knives' endgame is to get Vash on his side or make Vash lose his conviction and suffer for all time. These villains have an actual moral purpose in the story instead of just serving as fodder to the hero. Again, some of the Marvel shows have done a better job with their villains (especially Kilgrave, who is by far the most interesting character to come out of anything Marvel and Daredevil's second season with the Punisher actually challenging the main character's beliefs). High stakes are something we have come to detest in a lot of superhero films - either a whole country, the world, or hell, the fucking universe is in danger of imminent destruction. That, for us, often takes the focus away from characters and shifts it to the plot. Trigun, although it has all that threat of extinction looming in the horizon, wisely focuses on the intimate struggle of the characters and so the concept and characters always stay in sync.
One thing that is for us discernibly better in Trigun than in most superhero movies is how they have succeeded in keeping their story and characters cohesive. Marvel in particular have prided themselves with "universe building" but when these movies are taken apart and analyzed more closely, we often notice that there isn't much internal logic even when they're telling the story of the same character. There are three things that we see especially Marvel falling short of (but other superhero movies to a lesser extent, too). First is recycling character arcs and often for the same character (we're looking at you, Iron Man 2). Second, characters changing drastically without explanation between one movie and the next (see Spiderman especially in Avengers: Endgame - suddenly he has no qualms about killing and it's treated as a joke). Third, character arcs are not often fully realized or left to halfway (far too many examples but first in mind for us would be the Black Panther with both the villain and the hero). But we guess that is the price you pay, when you have different directors and writers for most movies in your franchise and whether the movie will have a sequel depends on how much money it makes. Since Trigun was planned to only have 26 episodes, everything in it builds up to the last few episodes and pretty much all four characters have some kind of development. The characters stay consistent throughout the series and changes in them happen gradually and through a natural process of something drastic happening that greatly affects their lives, leaves a lasting effect and makes them re-evaluate their beliefs.
In superhero films, no matter what you pick, they will never stray too far away from accepted masculine behaviour in their superheroing. They will win by using violence and maybe refrain from violence ONLY if the villain is their family member or a close friend. Even Daredevil, who is the most consistent with the not-killing, is a very violent character and violence is part of his life, which the show, to its credit, acknowledges. So, looking at Trigun, we're frankly amazed that a male character like Vash ever saw the light of day really anywhere. There will never come a day that you would see a Western superhero act the same way Vash does to avoid killing or even using violence. Vash will utterly humiliate himself to save anybody's life (and yes, that includes his enemies), even to the point of stripping naked and groveling on the ground. He will beg for the life of a fucking rapist and a murderer and in the process lets the victim's father beat the shit out of him. And he knows neither of these men. Now, if he wanted, he could pretty much decimate all of the people in his way. But he doesn't. Instead, he relies much more into actually being a ridiculous idiot so that people will leave him alone and thus won't get hurt, instead of the usual one-liners that superheroes mete out while kicking ass. It takes at least five episodes before we even see him use a gun for the first time. There is no way that Western superheroes would ever stoop so low and engage in similar degrading behaviour that Vash does because let's face it, it would utterly destroy any masculine image they have cultivated. Your hero groveling on the ground naked to save other people probably wouldn't sell all that well, now would it? But we absolutely love it, because it diverges so greatly from the ultra-masculine superhero behaviour and becomes more of a universal humanist principle that every life, good or bad, has value.
Western superheroes are rarely also made helpless and ultimately they will be victorious. Even if they lose a few people on the way to that victory, those victims will either be used as a plot device for an argument between superheroes and then completely discarded for the rest of the movie (like in Captain America: Civil War) or then, if a hero dies, they're glorified for that one movie that comes after (like in Spiderman: Far from Home). Though Vash is superhuman, he cannot save everyone, and being the kind of character he is, every single death is a devastating loss to him that will haunt him forever. He is not the randomly overpowered Superman who can just save everyone but then in the end his girlfriend is more important to save than anyone else. Vash doesn't think in those terms - if he has failed to save one life, he has failed to save everyone. It is no wonder though, that in Western superhero films ordinary victims are used as faceless props and heroes hailed as individual saviours of society. The US, where all these characters are created, is after all a highly individualized country, with little talk of communal tradition (which they do have), so it's no surprise that their heroes also stand alone, separate and distant from the people they protect and people they care about. This separation and in some cases, concealment of their identity, is by choice - a duty that these heroes have taken upon themselves. Again, Vash could not be more different. The power he has is useless to him and instead of becoming this shining beacon of righteousness or the lone sheriff keeping the town safe, he wants to be part of humanity. He does not want to set himself apart, he is not special or amazing in his own mind, nor is saving people any kind of duty to him. He wants to live as a human being among other humans, in a world where humans can live and work together in peace and where violence is never necessary. Incredibly naive, we know, but we find it a much more compelling vision than the often authoritarian ideas that many Western superhero movies offer. The beauty of the show is as well, though, that it actually challenges this naive belief of the main character and makes the viewer also question their views.
Trigun has this idea of not only just not killing anyone, but also wanting to save everyone so that not a single person will lose their lives. It is about stopping people from dying and getting killed. This is not a theme in superhero movies or even their shows, really. You might have heroes who won't kill, but since the movies don't focus on that aspect, it might as well be an afterthought. In Batman's case, the Burton's Batman movies at least make pretty clear that this guy is a fucked up individual haunted by his parents' death and he's pretty much walking on the edge unlike the Nolan films, where they have clearly tried to build some kind of hero mythos for Batman. He won't kill, sure, but he will totally let people die. Trigun does not only focus on the main character's pledge not to kill, which is a pacifist principle, but the show also goes further by asking is it possible to save others without violence in a violent and dystopian world, even if you do not kill anyone. This is something that many pacifists, including us, have to ask ourselves. And since bad guys are pretty much dehumanized most of the time in superhero films, their deaths are also completely inconsequential. In Trigun, it makes no difference to Vash whether it's an enemy, a friend or a complete stranger, he will want to save their lives. It could be an innocent baby or fucking Hitler, and he would do everything he can to save both their lives. Hell, his opponents do not even have to be human and he would still refuse to harm them. Now, whether he is right or not is beside the point and is up for the viewer to decide. The show makes no judgement on Vash's beliefs but neither does it make a case that he's right. Another novelty is that the show has an open ending, so whether Knives can be turned from his hatred of humans and whether Vash abandoning violence was the right choice, is left for the viewer to interpret. Imagine that, something is actually left for the viewer's imagination instead of Nolanizing it and explaining everything.
All in all, the show is wonderfully humanist in its principles, and through its main character's pacifist beliefs dehumanizes absolutely nobody, no matter how insignificant they are to the story or how grotesquely monstrous they can be. So, when a life is taken in the show, it makes a bigger impact also on the viewer, since the main character cares way too much about everything living. And that is simply something you do not see in the modern offerings of the superhero genre. There is no time when a Western superhero has had to betray the deepest of their moral core and what they thought defined them as a person. The Western Superheroes aren't ever really truly challenged - they are presented with these challenges that they ultimately solve without profound realization or change. And that, for us, we are sorry to say, squander these movies' potential and makes a lot of them quite boring and repetitive. When diversity of ideas is missing from your supposedly "diverse" set of superheroes, it is kinda pointless for us to pretend that your movies are saying anything deep. Trigun, for us, is proof that superhero type - entertainment can be both highly entertaining as well as deeply thought-provoking.
Brief summary of Trigun - Basically it is about two humanoid brothers with opposing ideologies. The main character, Vash, is a pacifist who has vowed never to kill anyone under any circumstances and avoids violent confrontation by any means. His brother, Knives, is continually trying to break Vash's conviction since Knives thinks humans are nothing but parasites and wants them all dead. There's also a priest, Wolfwood, who becomes Vash's best friend but also believes that killing is necessary to protect others. The show is kind of this constant struggle between the two ideologies - whether killing can ever be justified or not. Amazingly both of the female characters are adults and never sexualized (if you've seen anime at all, that is indeed a fucking miracle) and the women (Meryl and Milly) are also part of the dilemma of the show's ideologies and have to come to terms with and determine what they actually believe. Meryl especially has a great character arc. The "past woman" refreshingly isn't a dead lover but a mother figure (Rem) for both brothers and she taught them everything Vash believes in. The last really important character is Legato, Knives' nihilistic #1 henchman and the series culmination is Legato forcing Vash to kill him. The show's last episodes are Vash's struggle to face the ramifications of him betraying his values and realizing that he wants to save his brother instead of having to kill him. The show ends with Vash throwing away his gun and abandoning violence altogether.
As we wrote earlier, Western superhero entertainment shares similarities and differences with Trigun, so we have divided this entry in two: structure and themes. We won't compare the source materials (manga and comics) since we aren't really interested in them and we wanted to stick with moving pictures. So, let's start with structure. Characters are an important part of a story's structure, especially for us who are very character focused. Female characters and villains have in recent years gotten the short end of the stick in many superhero films. That really should be a cause for concern, since women should be actual characters and afforded complexity just as much as male characters. Women in superhero movies mostly still serve as the love interest without a motivation of their own or if they happen to be main characters they are randomly overpowered (like Captain Marvel, who is basically the female equivalent of Superman), die (like Gamora or Black Widow) and have no character arc of their own (like Wonder Woman). And don't get us started on the sexy miniskirts/bloomers and leather outfits that women wear in these movies. You do not really ever get to see things from these female characters' perspective. That is another weird thing about Trigun - though the series is male centric, it devotes quite a lot of time to the female characters' inner thoughts and feelings. And the women, again, surprisingly, get character arcs in this male centric show. The Marvel TV-shows, to their credit, have managed to handle some of their female characters better than their movies.
Same goes for the villains in these films - they are completely disposable and interchangeable nor do they really challenge the heroes in any meaningful way. The villains are there to be disposed of without any time devoted to them or making them interesting or intimidating. The villains are there purely as a physical deterrence. Now, some might say that Nolan's Batman trilogy does not do this and that his villains have some ideological purpose - that may be true, but Batman, the character Nolan has created, is not very consistent and that reflects poorly on his villains. This makes the villains ultimately just physical opposition and not moral challengers. Then again, we have never thought of Nolan to be particularly good at depicting any kind of internal moral struggles. This is why, to this day, our favourite superhero movie is Batman Returns (which we realize is no one's favourite). The anti-hero actually challenges the main character and he has to question his own identity and conviction, though even in Batman Returns, he wants to save the anti-hero because he loves her. In Trigun, Legato's will is to die by Vash's hand and it is his only goal. And Legato is an enemy that Vash feels nothing but hatred and resentment for, yet he still does not want to kill him. Knives' endgame is to get Vash on his side or make Vash lose his conviction and suffer for all time. These villains have an actual moral purpose in the story instead of just serving as fodder to the hero. Again, some of the Marvel shows have done a better job with their villains (especially Kilgrave, who is by far the most interesting character to come out of anything Marvel and Daredevil's second season with the Punisher actually challenging the main character's beliefs). High stakes are something we have come to detest in a lot of superhero films - either a whole country, the world, or hell, the fucking universe is in danger of imminent destruction. That, for us, often takes the focus away from characters and shifts it to the plot. Trigun, although it has all that threat of extinction looming in the horizon, wisely focuses on the intimate struggle of the characters and so the concept and characters always stay in sync.
One thing that is for us discernibly better in Trigun than in most superhero movies is how they have succeeded in keeping their story and characters cohesive. Marvel in particular have prided themselves with "universe building" but when these movies are taken apart and analyzed more closely, we often notice that there isn't much internal logic even when they're telling the story of the same character. There are three things that we see especially Marvel falling short of (but other superhero movies to a lesser extent, too). First is recycling character arcs and often for the same character (we're looking at you, Iron Man 2). Second, characters changing drastically without explanation between one movie and the next (see Spiderman especially in Avengers: Endgame - suddenly he has no qualms about killing and it's treated as a joke). Third, character arcs are not often fully realized or left to halfway (far too many examples but first in mind for us would be the Black Panther with both the villain and the hero). But we guess that is the price you pay, when you have different directors and writers for most movies in your franchise and whether the movie will have a sequel depends on how much money it makes. Since Trigun was planned to only have 26 episodes, everything in it builds up to the last few episodes and pretty much all four characters have some kind of development. The characters stay consistent throughout the series and changes in them happen gradually and through a natural process of something drastic happening that greatly affects their lives, leaves a lasting effect and makes them re-evaluate their beliefs.
In superhero films, no matter what you pick, they will never stray too far away from accepted masculine behaviour in their superheroing. They will win by using violence and maybe refrain from violence ONLY if the villain is their family member or a close friend. Even Daredevil, who is the most consistent with the not-killing, is a very violent character and violence is part of his life, which the show, to its credit, acknowledges. So, looking at Trigun, we're frankly amazed that a male character like Vash ever saw the light of day really anywhere. There will never come a day that you would see a Western superhero act the same way Vash does to avoid killing or even using violence. Vash will utterly humiliate himself to save anybody's life (and yes, that includes his enemies), even to the point of stripping naked and groveling on the ground. He will beg for the life of a fucking rapist and a murderer and in the process lets the victim's father beat the shit out of him. And he knows neither of these men. Now, if he wanted, he could pretty much decimate all of the people in his way. But he doesn't. Instead, he relies much more into actually being a ridiculous idiot so that people will leave him alone and thus won't get hurt, instead of the usual one-liners that superheroes mete out while kicking ass. It takes at least five episodes before we even see him use a gun for the first time. There is no way that Western superheroes would ever stoop so low and engage in similar degrading behaviour that Vash does because let's face it, it would utterly destroy any masculine image they have cultivated. Your hero groveling on the ground naked to save other people probably wouldn't sell all that well, now would it? But we absolutely love it, because it diverges so greatly from the ultra-masculine superhero behaviour and becomes more of a universal humanist principle that every life, good or bad, has value.
Western superheroes are rarely also made helpless and ultimately they will be victorious. Even if they lose a few people on the way to that victory, those victims will either be used as a plot device for an argument between superheroes and then completely discarded for the rest of the movie (like in Captain America: Civil War) or then, if a hero dies, they're glorified for that one movie that comes after (like in Spiderman: Far from Home). Though Vash is superhuman, he cannot save everyone, and being the kind of character he is, every single death is a devastating loss to him that will haunt him forever. He is not the randomly overpowered Superman who can just save everyone but then in the end his girlfriend is more important to save than anyone else. Vash doesn't think in those terms - if he has failed to save one life, he has failed to save everyone. It is no wonder though, that in Western superhero films ordinary victims are used as faceless props and heroes hailed as individual saviours of society. The US, where all these characters are created, is after all a highly individualized country, with little talk of communal tradition (which they do have), so it's no surprise that their heroes also stand alone, separate and distant from the people they protect and people they care about. This separation and in some cases, concealment of their identity, is by choice - a duty that these heroes have taken upon themselves. Again, Vash could not be more different. The power he has is useless to him and instead of becoming this shining beacon of righteousness or the lone sheriff keeping the town safe, he wants to be part of humanity. He does not want to set himself apart, he is not special or amazing in his own mind, nor is saving people any kind of duty to him. He wants to live as a human being among other humans, in a world where humans can live and work together in peace and where violence is never necessary. Incredibly naive, we know, but we find it a much more compelling vision than the often authoritarian ideas that many Western superhero movies offer. The beauty of the show is as well, though, that it actually challenges this naive belief of the main character and makes the viewer also question their views.
Trigun has this idea of not only just not killing anyone, but also wanting to save everyone so that not a single person will lose their lives. It is about stopping people from dying and getting killed. This is not a theme in superhero movies or even their shows, really. You might have heroes who won't kill, but since the movies don't focus on that aspect, it might as well be an afterthought. In Batman's case, the Burton's Batman movies at least make pretty clear that this guy is a fucked up individual haunted by his parents' death and he's pretty much walking on the edge unlike the Nolan films, where they have clearly tried to build some kind of hero mythos for Batman. He won't kill, sure, but he will totally let people die. Trigun does not only focus on the main character's pledge not to kill, which is a pacifist principle, but the show also goes further by asking is it possible to save others without violence in a violent and dystopian world, even if you do not kill anyone. This is something that many pacifists, including us, have to ask ourselves. And since bad guys are pretty much dehumanized most of the time in superhero films, their deaths are also completely inconsequential. In Trigun, it makes no difference to Vash whether it's an enemy, a friend or a complete stranger, he will want to save their lives. It could be an innocent baby or fucking Hitler, and he would do everything he can to save both their lives. Hell, his opponents do not even have to be human and he would still refuse to harm them. Now, whether he is right or not is beside the point and is up for the viewer to decide. The show makes no judgement on Vash's beliefs but neither does it make a case that he's right. Another novelty is that the show has an open ending, so whether Knives can be turned from his hatred of humans and whether Vash abandoning violence was the right choice, is left for the viewer to interpret. Imagine that, something is actually left for the viewer's imagination instead of Nolanizing it and explaining everything.
All in all, the show is wonderfully humanist in its principles, and through its main character's pacifist beliefs dehumanizes absolutely nobody, no matter how insignificant they are to the story or how grotesquely monstrous they can be. So, when a life is taken in the show, it makes a bigger impact also on the viewer, since the main character cares way too much about everything living. And that is simply something you do not see in the modern offerings of the superhero genre. There is no time when a Western superhero has had to betray the deepest of their moral core and what they thought defined them as a person. The Western Superheroes aren't ever really truly challenged - they are presented with these challenges that they ultimately solve without profound realization or change. And that, for us, we are sorry to say, squander these movies' potential and makes a lot of them quite boring and repetitive. When diversity of ideas is missing from your supposedly "diverse" set of superheroes, it is kinda pointless for us to pretend that your movies are saying anything deep. Trigun, for us, is proof that superhero type - entertainment can be both highly entertaining as well as deeply thought-provoking.
