User Profile

CHARACTER INFO
CHARACTER NAME: Vash the Stampede
SERIES: Trigun (anime)
RESERVED: Y
WISHLIST: N

PERSONALITY: On the surface, Vash very much appears to be an easy-going and goofy sort of person, with a particular fondness for donuts, alcohol and pretty women. He's friendly to pretty much everyone, even sometimes to those who have guns pointed at his head, and he has a tendency to pretty much just blunder his way into people's lives whether they want him there or not. He's exceedingly cheerful and optimistic, traits that can appeal to some people while getting on the nerves of others. In the face of danger he often acts cowardly and foolish, screaming and running away, but this is only when the danger is aimed at him and potentially minimal. In the face of true danger--in the face of genuine death and destruction, especially that which would harm other people around him--an entirely different Vash emerges. This Vash is much more serious, a man determined to do whatever it takes to preserve lives. He's a dedicated pacifist, so killing the man aiming a gun at someone else is unacceptable: BOTH lives must be preserved, or in his mind he's failed. He doesn't make distinctions between the guilty and the innocent, the deserving and the undeserving; the right to decide who lives and who dies is neither his nor anyone's. In other words, he will always, ALWAYS use non-lethal methods to solve a conflict, even if it causes terrible damage to him. Being forced to kill someone, or being inadvertantly responsible for others' deaths or suffering, is intolerable to Vash and will cause him to fall deeply into despair. No matter what, he insists that killing is not the answer, that there is always another way.

TIMELINE: I'm taking Vash just from leaving Meryl and Milly to go confront his brother Knives.

BACKGROUND: The circumstances of Vash's birth are mysterious, but his earliest memories are of living on an interstellar transport ship with its skeleton crew, his twin brother Knives, and hundreds of thousands of people frozen in a cryogenic sleep. Vash and Knives were discovered by crew member Rem Saverem at the heart of one of their Plants, power sources that provided power, water and other resources for the people of the ship. (It's made evident several times throughout the series that Plants are sentient beings, though by all appearances only Vash and Knvies have taken on human shapes.) The ship was part of Project SEEDS, an effort to preserve humanity after the Earth was destroyed and find a new habitable planet. Vash and Knives grew up primarily under the care of crew member Rem Saverem, a dedicated pacifist and optimist who believed passionately in the rights of every living creature to a happy and fulfilling life, a philosophy she tried to pass on to her young charges. That Vash and Knives were Plants and not humans despite their shapes was immediately apparent, since in two years they progressed from infancy to young adolescence.

Vash loved Rem and took her teaching very much to heart, something that he and Knives came to blows over once when Knives killed a spider to save a butterfly caught in its web. Vash believed that there had to be some way to save both of them; this was the first discovery of the pain that another being's suffering could personally cause him. But by then Knives was already convinced that as Plants, he and Vash were superior to human beings, and he orchestrated the destruction of the Project SEEDS fleet and most of the people it was carrying. Unaware that Knives was behind it, Vash fled the failing ship to an escape shuttle with Knives and Rem, but at the last moment Rem elected to remain behind and try to reverse the destruction. She gave to Vash a final set of instructions: "Vash, take care of Knives."

As the shuttle fell to the desert planet below them, Knives revealed that he had orchestrated the fleet's destruction, but to his fury the power in some of the ships were restored and they were able to make it to the planet unharmed. The ship that the brothers had left behind exploded in atmosphere, taking Rem with it.

Despite Vash's grief over Rem's death and the deaths of so many other people at his brother's hand, he didn't want to be alone on their new planet and thus had little other choice but to follow Knives. For ten years they wandered over the desert planet while the surviving humans from Project SEEDS established colonies and eventually cities, growing into the appearance of twenty-something year old men, at which point their physical aging apparently stopped. Knives crafted a pair of handguns for the two of them that are capable of triggering their Angel Arms, latent weapons in their limbs capable of immense destruction. Knives planned to use his to destroy the humans who had settled on the planet, but at his first attempt Vash shot him in the leg. Both of them were utterly horrified by the act, and Vash immediately fled, breaking off relations with his brother once and for all.

For more than a century he wandered on his own, using his gun to defend himself where necessary but stalwartly refusing to kill, believing that Rem would truly leave him forever if he were to take a life. This way of living had its toll on him: encounters with less than well-meaning individuals left him with horrible, grotesque scars all over his body, and his efforts to escape conflict without taking lives often resulted in destruction of property. A bounty landed on his head and quickly continued to rise, only causing more conflict for him as bounty hunters began to come after him; he earned nicknames such as "Vash the Stampede" and "The Humanoid Typhoon".

Then Vash discovered that a distant relative of Rem's was alive somewhere on the planet. He tracked him down, only to discover that Knives had found him first and murdered him. They met face-to-face over his dead body in the city of July, and Knives severed Vash's left arm and activated the Angel Arm in his right. Vash turned the gun on his brother, and the resulting explosion reduced July to rubble and left Knives critically injured, but incredibly no one was killed. The bounty on Vash's head went to 60 billion double-dollars and a pair of young women from the Bernardelli Insurance Society, Meryl Stryfe and Milly Thompson, were dispatched to track him down and prevent him from causing any more destruction. Vash left the scene knowing that he was responsible for the destruction but having no memory of how it happened. In the interim between destroying July and meeting Meryl and Milly, he acquired a prosthetic left arm capable of transforming into a machine gun.

Sometime thereafter, Milly and Meryl caught up with him, and though Meryl initially didn't believe he was Vash, a series of subsequent gunfights and conflicts soon convinced her. Vash resisted their attempts to control his actions and often ran away from them, neither wanting them to slow him down or to be hurt by being near him, but eventually he resigned himself to them as traveling companions, at least for the moment. His own goal was to hunt down Knives and somehow stop him from causing any more death and destruction, though what he was to do when he found his brother was very much a dilemma he had yet to solve. As they moved from town to town and city to city, the three soon met a traveling priest, Nicholas D. Wolfwood, who joined them temporarily. Vash initially argued with Wolfwood a lot, not liking the way he kept alluding to turning Vash in for his bounty or how fast he pulled his own guns--he sure carried a lot of them for a man of God--to solve problems, but the two nonetheless quickly formed a close bond.

Later Vash had an encounter with a deadly assassin named Diablo, the member of an elite group of assassins calle the Gung Ho Guns, that killed several people and nearly resulted in Vash killing Diablo. He resisted and fled, but several other Gung Ho Guns came after him, including their leader, Legato Bluesummers, a man sent from Knives to make Vash suffer. One encounter with a Gung Ho Gun resulted in the second activitation of his Angel Arm, the destruction of the city of August, and a hole blown into the Fifth Moon. Again no one was killed, but Vash ran away from his life for several months, living under an assumed name in a quiet village until Wolfwood found him and convinced him to stop hiding and resume his mission to find and defeat Knives.

They met up with Meryl and Milly, and the four traveled together again despite Vash's misgivings about potentially getting his companions hurt. Several other Gung Ho Guns appeared to try their luck, and Wolfwood's murder of one of them brought his and Vash's conflict over their opposing moral ideas to light; Wolfwood insisted that Vash was a hypocrite for refusing to kill and getting angry with him for making the choices Vash wouldn't, while Vash insisted that there was always an alternative to killing. The two nearly came to a gunfight of their own over it, though Wolfwood walked away from their confrontation. Shortly thereafter, Wolfwood was mortally wounded by Legato, who was controlling the body of Wolfwood's mentor Chapel, a Gung Ho Gun. Wolfwood made his way back to Vash and revealed his knowledge of Knives' location before his death.

Vash, Meryl and Milly went on despite their grief over Wolfwood's death, settling into a small village while Vash tried to figure out what to do about Knives. Legato kidnapped Milly and Meryl and used the threat of killing them to force Vash to kill him--his first conscious and willful murder. Vash was devastated by the act, but accepted Meryl's comfort and her suggestion to stay in one place while he figured out what to do next. The townspeople, however, discovering that Vash was in their midst, attacked him and tried to kill him out of fear. Meryl stepped in to stop them from shooting Vash, literally putting herself in between him and the gun. The townspeople back down, and Vash is inspired by the courageous act. Seeing Rem in Meryl, he realizes what Rem meant by her final words of guidance to him ("Vash, take care of Knives")--not to kill him, but to save him. To turn Knives away from killing. Knowing what he has to do now, he leaves Milly and Meryl for the confrontation; Milly gives him Wolfwood's giant metal cross (his primary weapon) to take with him into battle, and Meryl tells him to come back.

ABILITIES: Vash is an expert marksman with both pistols and automatics. Having trained diligently with his handgun for nearly a century and a half to ensure that he never accidentally makes a lethal shot, he's both extremely fast and extremely accurate, and knows exactly where to hit to immobilize someone without killing them.

His right arm can transform into a massively powerful cannon-like weapon called the Angel Arm, which fires a beam of energy that will destroy all inorganic material for miles around. It's been known to level entire cities and put a crater in a moon. It seems to activate in moments of extreme (VERY extreme) durress for Vash; his brother Knives seems also to be able to trigger its activation. Vash's own control over the Angel Arm is tenuous. In the anime, he only voluntarily activates it once, to cancel out Knives' Angel Arm during their fight at the end of the series. The previous two times were caused by Knives, and Vash cannot clearly recall the events of either incidents. Unlike his brother's, Vash's Angel Arm does not destroy organic material (i.e. living beings).

Also worth noting is that Vash's left arm is a metal prosthetic which can reshape itself instantly into a machine gun. Vash seems to be capable of instantly triggering this when he has need of it. The prosthetic is also fully functional as an ordinary arm.

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