Vash the Stampede

About Vash the Stampede

Vash the Stampede is the most wanted man on the planet Gunsmoke, blamed for destroying a city and priced at 60 billion double dollars. He is also a donut loving goofball who has sworn never to take a life. Vash is a Plant, a being born from humanity's lost technology, and his century long argument with his brother Knives about whether humans deserve to live is the heart of Trigun.

Appearance

Vash is tall with spiky blond hair, aqua green eyes and a long red coat that has become one of anime's most recognisable silhouettes. He wears round orange tinted glasses, carries an oversized silver revolver and hides a prosthetic left arm fitted with a concealed gun. Under the coat his body is a map of scars and stitched repairs, the physical record of a century of taking bullets meant for other people. The contrast is the character in one image: a wanted poster face and grin on top, and a body that has paid for his kindness in full.

Personality

Vash performs the fool: loud, lecherous, terrified of spiders and devoted to donuts. It is a mask, and not only for others. Underneath he is a deeply principled pacifist shaped by Rem's teaching that no one has the right to take another's life, and he holds to it with a stubbornness that borders on self destruction. He absorbs violence aimed at everyone around him, apologises for disasters he did not cause and hides a grief over a hundred years deep. His optimism is a choice he remakes daily, which is why it lands so hard when the mask slips.

Background & Story

Vash and his twin Knives were born aboard the colony ship Seeds, discovered as infants growing impossibly fast inside a Plant bulb. Crew member Rem Saverem raised them as her own and taught them to love humanity; Knives learned to hate it after seeing how the crew treated them. When the fleet crashed on the desert planet, the twins parted ways. Vash wandered for over a century, and in the city of July a confrontation with Knives ended with the city destroyed, Vash's left arm lost and his legend born. Since then he has drifted from town to town helping where he can, hunted by bounty hunters and by his brother's assassins, carrying Rem's ideals into a world that keeps testing them to destruction. The 1998 anime parcels this history out slowly, saving the July flashbacks and the truth about the twins for its second half, which is why the series' tone can turn so completely without breaking.

Powers & Abilities

• Superhuman gun skill: Vash's speed, accuracy and reflexes are far beyond human. He dodges bullets, shoots weapons out of hands mid draw and wins gunfights without killing, which is much harder than killing.
• The Angel Arm: His right arm can transform into a weapon of enormous destructive power, a Plant ability he fears and almost never uses. It is the force that destroyed July, and the reason Knives wants him back.
• Plant physiology: As a Plant, Vash ages extremely slowly, heals fast and connects directly with the Plant machines humanity depends on. His body still scars, and he keeps every one of them.

Key Relationships

• Millions Knives: His twin brother and opposite. Knives believes humans are parasites who will kill the Plants; Vash believes in Rem's love for them. Everything in Trigun grows from that argument.
• Rem Saverem: The woman who raised him and whose death saving the fleet defines his life. Her teaching that nobody has the right to take a life is the rule Vash lives and nearly dies by.
• Nicholas D. Wolfwood: The gunman priest who becomes his closest friend, and his mirror: a killer who envies Vash's mercy while calling it naive. Their bond carries the series' second half.
• Meryl Stryfe: The insurance agent sent to monitor him, who goes from dismissing him as a fraud to understanding him better than anyone alive, and defending his legend against the truth.

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