Character · Trigun
Vash the Stampede
Sixty billion double dollars on his head, a trail of flattened towns behind him, and he has never killed anyone.
In Otakana the clue reads: Gunman with a sixty billion double dollar bounty
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Trigun
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Vash the Stampede is a blond man in a red coat with a bounty large enough to bankrupt a city, a reputation for levelling towns, and a personality assembled almost entirely out of doughnuts and cowardice. The first half of Trigun is a joke at the audience's expense. The legend is real, the man in front of you is an idiot, and both things stay true.
The rule underneath the comedy never bends. He does not kill. He shoots guns out of hands, takes wounds rather than dealing them, and his body is a map of what that policy costs. Nightow puts him in front of people who richly deserve killing, again and again, and refuses him the easy exit, which is why the series lands harder than its early episodes suggest.
The setting does a lot of the work. The planet is a failed colony living off salvaged technology, water is money, and the towns are lawless enough that a pacifist gunman is an absurd thing to be. Yasuhiro Nightow began the manga in 1995, Madhouse animated it in 1998, and it became one of the shows that sold anime to English-speaking television.
Spelling VASH
VASH is four letters ending in the SH pair, and the V is the useful one. Almost nothing else in the game starts with a V, so one confirmed letter does most of the work. Japanese ヴァッシュ needs a special character to write that V at all. No silent letters and nothing doubled in VASH, and the Stampede is a nickname rather than a surname.