Trigun/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alas, Poor Villain: The manga really goes to great lengths if not to humanize the villains, then to make the readers understand their motivations and grief.
  • Anvilicious: See An Aesop on the main page.
  • Non Sequitur Scene: There's a moment in Trigun Maximum where Vash and Livio are counting the coins they got from the Gung-ho guns. They were missing one. Suddenly, a muscular black guy with weird hair and skimpy disco attire comes in and gives them the coin, pulls a bug out of his mouth, then proceeds to ask whether Vash or Livio prefer clams or fish. Granted, there's a reason why this happened (Zazie used her mind control worms), but it's random, it's weird, and after the incident, nobody talks about it again.
  • Complete Monster: Legato in the anime.
  • Contemplate Our Navels: Knives; Legato; Livio to a large extent; most of the Gung-Ho Guns. Vash mostly escapes this trend through frantic goofball action, though he has understandable moments of this too.
  • Creepy Awesome: Legato.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome:
    • In the anime, the battle of Vash and Knives in the final episode.
    • In the manga, Wolfwood vs Livio, Chapel and Razlo. All of it.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: H.T, as well it should be—Tsuneo Imahori (the musician responible for the aforementioned awesomeness ) is also one of the lead guitarists in The Seatbelts.
  • Cry for the Devil: In the manga, some of the "Knives chapters" seem to express almost too much sympathy towards him, it even feels like Nightow identifies the most with his point of view at times. Your Mileage May Vary, of course.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Almost too many to count. Legato makes fangirls pass out all over the place (even though he's gay, and was even a gigolo—only in the manga, though). Knives has a fervent fandom too.
    • especially when it's implied that they're both cannibals.
  • Fan Wank: Not as bad as in other fandoms, but still pretty bad at times.
  • Foe Yay: Particularly egregious when Legato seems to be hitting on Vash.
  • Fridge Horror: When Vash first meets Legato Bluesummers, he gives him a bag that he says "contains a lesson from him." Just then, a woman runs into the town square says that her husband was murdered. In Japanese, her words loosely translate to "He can't talk." However, a more accurate translation would be: "He cannot talk because his head was taken from him." It is never shown in the anime just what Legato's "lesson" was, but the manga was very clear: the bag contained the woman's husband's head. As if that weren't bad enough, Legato is shown eating a hot dog out of the very same bag. Where did he get that I wonder?
  • Fridge Logic: Nightow occasionally forgets that having grown up on a desert-like planet, the characters wouldn't have the same comparisons and metaphors as us. A notable example is when Vash compares the sky to "the deep blue sea": you'd almost forget he grew up on a spaceship then on Gunsmoke and has never seen the sea...
    • He's read books, though. Even seen video, quite likely. (Knives had seen video clips of war and man's inhumanity to man in the manga.) Lots of people on Earth talk about the sea without any practical experience; it still has cultural currency on a desert world. He does do this, though. Especially as he declined to make the setting realistically inhabitable even with the plants, or balance the limited native biosphere into something comprehensible.
      • I.e. it consists of ostrich-horse tomas and giant sand worms. And little birds which must have hitched a ride like feathery rats or something, at least in the anime.
      • There are also littler native bugs. These seem to constitute an entire native ecology and share a hive mind.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: When someone says that the cross Wolfwood carries on his back is heavy he replies "That's because it's full of mercy!" Later on, that line becomes a bit sinister.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Trigun is ridiculously popular in America, but not quite as much in its homeland of Japan. Because of this, the movie premiered at Sakuracon 2010, months before the Japanese premiere.
  • Growing the Beard: The anime.
  • I Am Not Shazam: His name is Vash the Stampede, not "Trigun".
  • Iron Woobie: Vash, apparently. Seriously, nothing is allowed to go right in his life, and he loses everything and takes it very much on his own head whenever anyone gets hurt on a half-civilized planet with almost no natural resources and loads of guns. And it took him over a hundred years to briefly give up.
  • It Was His Sled: Most of the anime's big twists have long since passed into common knowledge in the English-speaking anime community by now, to the extent that when Adult Swim chose one episode to air for their 2012 April Fool's Day Toonami block, it was the one where Wolfwood dies.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Knives in the manga. And Legato.
  • Moe: Let's face it, Vash is a very Moe character. You just have to see the visceral Squees he seems to trigger all over the fandom.
  • Narm Charm: Debatable too—Vash and Knives's whining pathetic ways of arguing about their very extreme ideologies bring out their emotional immaturity, as they can't seem to get more nuanced than "everybody is good vs. everybody is evil."
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • A lot, especially with Legato and the sense of impending apocalypse.
    • Legato mind controls a group of forty or so normal people to crawl into a small trailer via a hole in the top. Seems innocuous at first...until you notice the trailer can't fit forty people. The results are...unpleasant.
    • The anime has him mind controlling one man and forcing him to shove his own hand into his chest cavity.
    • Also in the anime, the infamous hot dog scene.
  • Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: Killing people is wrong, and almost never justifiable.
    • Although, especially in the anime, there are people who come away convinced that somebody as sociopathic as Knives should be put down like any other rabid animal and so see Vash letting him live as Vash's biggest What an Idiot! moment.
  • Stoic Woobie: Wolfwood.
  • Tastes Like Diabetes: Rem
  • Tear Jerker:
    • Wolfwood's death in the anime.
    • After Wolfwood's death, Vash is eating donuts in a lively, ordinary town, remarking at how wonderful being alive is and at all the people. He then suddenly breaks down in tears as he thinks of all the horrible things that have happened to him, as well as the fact that many of his friends are now dead. And then Legato shows up.
  • This Is Your Premise on Drugs: Western In Space on crack! Characters on alcohol, steroids and gunpowder-huffing!
  • True Art Is Angsty: Debatable.
  • Wangst: Debatable.
  • What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?:
    • Some parents consider this to be an anime for teens ages 15–16 when it's more specifically created for kids around their early teens. Some people do consider this anime for kids, but since it's aimed at kids a little younger compared to Cowboy Bebop, it could also be for a preteenage group.
    • The manga, however, should NOT be viewed by anyone that young.
  • The Woobie: Vash, definitely; Wolfwood, to a large extent; young Knives; young Livio; actually, young almost anybody!