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Does the Original Trigun Hold Up?

Ishida_Akira(fake) wrote:

mgree0032 wrote: Cowboy Bebop and Trigun are the times that the dub is better than the sub version. Tell me you're an American without telling me you're an American. Not dissing you, it's just that Americans are the only ones I've ever talked to who held that opinion.

Not American here, not even close, and I find that statement severely disagreeable. This was one of Johnny Yong Bosch's earliest roles (not his absolute earliest, some of those were terrible), and he did a fantastic job in this -- and one of the reasons I started paying attention to the voice actors in anime.

I have not finished "Trigun" but JYB's first Japanese anime role was Vash.

It was not. He voiced Kaneda from Akira, Artemis from Sailor Moon, and Tohji from Evangelion before Vash.

Kadmos1 wrote:

I have not finished "Trigun" but JYB's first Japanese anime role was Vash.

It was not. He voiced Kaneda from Akira, Artemis from Sailor Moon, and Tohji from Evangelion before Vash.

That said, I was actually thinking of his voice from Reiji from Gate Keepers as his earlier work, which was in fact from the same year.

A major part of Vash's character is that he uses those goofy antics as a disguise. They weren't faked--he's genuinely a lighthearted, fun-loving person--but they were his shield to hide behind when he could, and he only dropped that shield when it was necessary. That's why episode 5, "Hard Puncher," is so impactful. We the viewers spend the first four episodes largely sharing Meryl's opinion of Vash: we see him pull some fun tricks, but there's no way this nut can possibly be the infamous Humanoid Typhoon, right? But then Vash faces his first true threat, and the mask comes off, and the sunglasses go on, and the guitar starts twanging, and you start to realize that yes, this is Vash the Stampede. That's not directorial indecision, that's a deliberate build to a fantastic character moment. Still gives me chills.

I'm sorry but I have to disagree. This type of character shift should've been made heir apparent halfway through the first episode to convey to the audience from the get go that Trigun was meant to be a comedy/drama mix. It's not something that we have to wait 5 episodes into before the gloves come off. You set the impression of the show with the first episode and if audiences watch the show thinking that it's an action comedy, then they expect the rest of the show to match tone. Anything otherwise is patronizing the audience.

Maybe it's that this series was made at a time when creators trusted the audience to not be so ADD as to need the entire tonal conflict of the series laid out halfway through the first episode.

I'm not attacking anyone, I just fail to see how a series having an intentionally misleading introduction followed by a later tonal shift is anything but a time-honored storytelling device. Even limiting the scope to anime, there's a long tradition of 26-episode series that take a few episodes to set an initial mood, and then drop the hammer somewhere a bit in. Hell, Outlaw Star came out in the same year and did pretty much the exact same thing, and Bebop arguably did to a certain extent as well. It's not something we see nearly as much of anymore, because continuous 26-episode anime productions are all but extinct, but it's absolutely a common device that was used in multiple series I can think of. It didn't work for you, and that's fine, but it's hardly some sort of egregious mistake.