I wanted to capture this “mythic” effect of timelessness and inevitability in my novel The Red Word, a modern story about a war between a fraternity house and a group of ardent young feminists on a university campus. When I read Ovid’s myth of Apollo pursuing Daphne, “one made swift by hope and one by fear,” and the nymph metamorphoses into a laurel tree to escape the amorous god forever, it disturbs and thrills me in ways I find hard to explain.* I believe that myths hit us somewhere below the brain, at some irrational, dreamlike level that somehow feels truer than ordinary stories. There are things I’ve always missed in a myth, the previous time around, that strike me as utterly vital to understanding its meaning. Rereading classical mythology is for me an exercise in surprise and recognition mixed together. The localization team went off with that one.There’s something about our oldest stories that never gets old. Imagine asking your twin, your mirror, the only one like you in the world, who they are because you don’t recognize them anymore. “Who are you?” is emblematic of all that hope, all that love, shattering. Vash who believes in Knives’s capacity for change. It’s Vash who’s held on for so long to the fragile hope that he can get through to Knives. Knives knows damn well Vash won’t listen to him, hence the mindbreak in ep11. Knives, at least, holds no illusions about the sort of person his brother is. It’s an interesting parallel to every little betrayal Vash has stacked on Knives’s shoulders over the years. (Maybe his brother doesn’t want to be saved.)
It’s heartbreaking when you consider he once said “I’ll find a way to save everyone…including Nai.” This is when the denial shatters and Vash thinks for the first time that maybe he can’t save his brother. Even as they once defined themselves as a pair, when Vash asks “Who are you?” with such broken, seething horror, it’s like he’s realizing he’ll have to let him go. “I’m Vash the Stampede” and “Nai is dead.” The finale of Trigun s1 is the declaration to end 150 years of stalemate. It’s like Vash is seeing Knives for the first time and realizing his twin has become completely unrecognizable.Įven as the visual cues have actually made their physical similarities even more obvious (Vash’s finale redesign having his hair pushed back, the multiple side by side shots, Knives himself having discarded his amongus hoodie) it’s a moment where their identities diverge. The fact that they have Vash say “Who are you?” in the English dub before telling Knives he doesn’t recognize him anymore. I know everyone and their mother is frothing at the mouth about it but.
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