Character · Trigun
Millions Knives
The twin brother looked at exactly the same evidence and concluded that the human race was a mistake worth correcting.
In Otakana the clue reads: Twin brother who wants humanity gone
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Trigun
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Millions Knives shares a face, a birth and a species with Vash, and reached the opposite conclusion about everyone else. Where Vash refuses to kill anyone at all, Knives regards humans as parasites on a dying desert planet and works, patiently and across decades, at removing them. He is not raving while he does it. He argues, and some of his evidence is uncomfortably good.
That is what lifts Trigun above a gunfight. The brothers are two answers to the same childhood, and the story keeps putting Vash in situations where his brother's reasoning would have produced a cleaner outcome and fewer bodies. Knives works mostly through other people, arranging catastrophes at a distance and letting Vash arrive slightly too late to stop them.
Yasuhiro Nightow began Trigun in 1995 and moved it to Young King OURs in 1997 after its first magazine folded. The 1998 Madhouse anime keeps Knives mostly off screen, which suits him: he is a pressure behind the plot for twenty episodes before he is a person in it. Studio Orange remade the series in CG in 2023.
Spelling KNIVES
KNIVES is six letters and the silent K catches almost everyone. It is an English word, the plural of knife, so the F becomes a V and an E arrives before the S. The Japanese ナイブズ, naibuzu, offers no K at all. Start from the English word rather than from the sound and KNIVES drops straight into the row.