Trigun #6:
Project Seeds
Pioneer
75 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
01/23/2000
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Trigun #6:
Pioneer
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The worst part of an eight disc series to me, as a reviewer, is the length. Price doesn't particularly bother me, though the difference between a six disc series and an eight disc series is a significant one. Nowadays I usually just wait until Rightstuf has the item I want in one of their Weekly Specials then I get it all for like $10 a DVD. This is not very efficient for your average anime watcher who, you know, wants to actually WATCH the anime as these special deals tend to take about a month or so to get to you (Just got my 2040 art box after four months! And to this day it still says 531 in stock!)...but that's not the point I'm trying to make. See, if I had my way everything would be in the nebulous area of four to six episodes per disc. Three is too little because then I somehow how to squeeze eight content packed reviews out while if I only had to do six or (god willing) four, I can generally get a lot more than that done. Especially in shows like this, where they're so character based that after I say "Vash is karayzee!" and "OMGWTF...Wolfwood is like UBERLEET BISHONEN!" and, of course, "I want to marry Super Hot Merle"** there really isn't too much left to emote. Which leads us to crappy harranges like this that nobody really wants to read, yet still I force them on you. Sorry for that, lovely audience. |
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You're fortunate that, in so far as characters are concerned, we're introduced to one that's only been glazed over in the previous fifteen episodes. That character would be Rem Savrem, whose name seems almost palindromic at first (A man, a plan, Panama!). Upon further inspection it turns out that her name isn't a palindrome, it's only a portent of how incredibly stupid her character is. Her name being Savrem is roughly equivalent to me being named Dave McDave. I spent my first year of Japanese sitting across from a girl named Jill Gilette, and I still haven't been able to recover from that. I just can't jibe with the idea of alliteration. I've always been more of a consonance man, myself. The episode, titled after the self-same stupid character, chronicles the early years of Knives and Vash, found by the interplanetary Project Seeds. Project Seeds is sort of like an anime version of every other Sci-Fi epic ever made (many of them anime themselves!) where we totally fucked up the Earth and now we need to get more planets to live on. Will this happen? Probably yes. Will I still be alive to care about it? Oh HELL no. So I really don't think concerns me, anime or not, as a mater of principle. |
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Yatsuhiro Nightow certainly would like me to think it did though and so would Rem Savrem, whose basic philsophy boils down to "Never kill anything ever, even if it would save the lives of you and a million other people". This is the stupidest mindset I have ever heard, is she a fucking vegan or something? Hey Rem, here's a hint, humankind and their ancestors existed for about ten thousand years before the advent of agriculture. Put that in your tofu pipe and smoke it. And suck me Rem, I freaking hate you and your gigantic breasts. I know you can't tell from the picture up there, but they're huge and annoying in a Soul Calibur II kind of way. You know, the way I'm not down with. What's worse is that the -other- chick in the disc is like, twelve but looks like the standard anime concept of an eighteen year old. We're winners on all fronts! Especially when this thing is the focal badguy of an episode. Awful. Now, Trigun has always been sort of divergent from my ideals on the basic concepts of character design, but that strange baby-thing is a gross violation of all rules I hold sacred and frankly, it's just really not cool. |
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What's also not cool is the weird kind of "synchronicity" pacing of the first episode on the disc. You know what I mean, when things happen just to move the plot along with no rhyme or reason to them. Oh, so the spaceship crew left awake just happened to include a drunk, a pretty girl, and a ridiculously obessed nerdy guy so that Knives, Vash's evil brother, could mind control them (I think! They don't tell you anything!). So now the drunk guy raped the submissive girl and the nerdy guy kills him to make the submissive girl like him but she freaks out so he wastes her and them the captain blows him out an airlock. This all happens in about two minutes, where Rem is trying to convince the guy who just comitted double homicide to put the gun down. Fuck that. I would've said "Suck VACCUM, BITCH!" and pushed the button. I don't need that kind of stress. And I seriously don't get how a fucked up specimen like Knives could even naturally occur. Like, he doesn't seem to have any real motivation, he's just a little sociopath. But he's only one year old! Only...in weird "power plant people years" that means he's like twelve years old. You don't see many twelve year olds with the desire to destroy everyone, at least...not without a reason. Then again, you don't see a lot of twelve year olds made out of power plants. In the end though, for all its foibles, Trigun is still just as cool as ever. I just like the main characters, and its general refusal to pander to the norms of anime. While I could deal without City of the Damned little kids and, even worse, horrifying baby-badguys it's still Trigun and that guarentees a fair modicum of interesting markmanship and plot development. I mean, hell, I could do worse. |
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