"I Don't Know What I Expected But This Wasn't It”

⌕ trigun stampede • vash.

bearotonin

in recent events of that zoo losing the clouded leopard, it reminded me of the time i went to a large petting zoo and there was a free roaming little black sheep. cutest little guy i ever saw, soi went to the zookeeper nearby and said ‘i think its really cute how you have a sheep thats allowed to just walk around. ‘ then the zookeepers eyes widened and he grabbed his walky talky and ran 

i will defend to the grave that literary analysis IS enjoyable and a valid hobby but it's amazing how a hyperfixation on The Character will have you writing essays for fun

an essay can be a playlist or a fanfic where they get railed btw. the definition is flexible.

Have you guys seen the golden cow its pretty cool. probably even cooler than God

The duo ever

anakin skywalker's relationship with the jedi order begins and ends with his mother.

the first time he meets a jedi, he's slave, and his first reaction is him saying, “no one can kill a jedi." and that means so much! because he is a slave, and even at age nine, he very explicitly knows that he nor his mother have no control over their own life or their own death. in the next breath, he asks, "have you come to free us [the slaves]?" for nine-year-old anakin, who lives and dies by his master's will and whim (and knows that very, very well), a jedi's power is intrinsically intertwined with a mastery over life and death which he has never had.

and qui-gon says no. and anakin asks him, "why else would you be here?" and that's never, ever answered to anakin's satisfaction. there must be a higher power and a higher goal, here, because up until qui-gon dispels this notion, the jedi have been the highest power anakin can conceive of. ultimately, anakin's freedom does not come from the jedi––he wins his freedom after having it gambled as valuable property—and his entrance into the jedi order comes with leaving his mother behind, his mother behind in slavery, in real and present and explicit danger. but the jedi did have the power to free his mother: anakin knows this, anakin asks this, and anakin is never answered—why didn't the jedi free the slaves?

anakin's most pivotal, most consequential meeting with the jedi order is his first meeting, and he's very much completely rejected by them, for things he can't control: his mother, his age. he is nine years old, has been freed from a lifetime of slavery maybe forty-eight hours before, and taken half-way across the galaxy with people he barely knows to meet an order he thought was myth with powers and rules he does not understand and have not been explained to him. when he is told he is afraid––of course he is.

"afraid to lose her?" yoda asks of shmi, and that line right there echoes off the great chasm that stands between anakin and the jedi order for his entire life. anakin, at such a tender age, is intimately aware that shmi is in clear and present immediate physical danger at all times. yoda is speaking hypothetically, existentially. anakin is not. anakin's fears are grounded deep in reality, of lifelong slavery, and yoda is one of the many standing before him who have the power to help and free his mother. so why not?

anakin's entire career as a jedi is founded on shmi, who told him, "don't look back," who anakin left behind as a slave, so in turn anakin tells his mother, "i'll come back and free you." but ten years later and shmi is still not free—as far as anakin knows.

it hangs over the narrative of aotc until anakin is holding his dead mother's body in his arms. by then, anakin is too late to free his mother, and it morphs: “I will learn to stop people from dying.”

it’s not a rational plan, or a reasonable goal, but it’s an understatement reaction that traces its origin directly back to anakin always having been very acutely aware that he has no control over life or death, especially since he was born as a slave. and no doubt! anakin’s skills drastically increase in the three years between aotc and rots. he goes from unceremoniously having an arm cut off by dooku to being able to relatively easily best him in a duel.

but from shmi’s death onward, every potential death of a loved one is now, in anakin’s mind, the same death played over and over. if he is running through every potential situation as a chance to re-do shmi’s death, he is the only unknown variable. as much as padmé’s death is complicated by their child’s fate hanging in the balance, it is, once again, shmi’s death.

there’s no wonder that anakin turns towards palpatine—who has manipulated and groomed him since age nine, from right when he left his mother—because yoda unknowingly recites the same lines in the script anakin has been feverishly relieving for years. yoda says: the jedi cannot help. his response was the same to padmé that is was to shmi: make peace with this, there is nothing to be done. but why? why not? why didn’t the jedi free the slaves, all those years ago? why can’t they save padmé?

the irony, of course, being that for all of the hellfire and fury anakin brings down on the order, he’s left with exactly the same as where he started. there are slaves. there is death—pointless, pointless death. shmi’s dead, padmé’s dead, his child’s dead. the republic rots away into the empire, because the empire had long before calcified in the bones of what had been a republic.

later, much later, palpatine demands the same thing from vader: i will torture your son, you will watch, and you cannot do anything—make your peace. and finally, finally, anakin shatters the cycle he and the galaxy are trapped in. he saves luke, leia lives, as anakin’s greatest triumphs, because it is the end of the old and beginning of something new. no more slaves. no more death.

Vash the Stampede + Text Posts

[bonus]

(I don’t like putting watermarks so, PLEASE, if you want to post these gifs somewhere GIVE CREDITS! Also, don’t use them in edits/videos. Thanks~)

Some more Trigun (vashwood) stuff …uwu

Ep 12 redraw cause I loved this shot ✨

Vash my beloved (1998 anime version)

He is so expressive.

‼️Tristamp gang‼️

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BBY!!!