Legato Bluesummers Quotes

Heard as a reveal, this is late and redundant. Episode 17 has already shown Vash as a child aboard a SEEDS ship, one of two alien boys the crew took in, and Legato is not telling him anything he does not know. What Legato supplies is a meaning for the fact, which is an instruction rather than information. Realizing who he is means ceasing to act like one of the people he protects, and the evidence on offer is the angel arm, which Legato spends this episode trying to trigger. Two episodes later Knives makes the same move in blunter words, and Vash's answers there are the rebuttal to this line: "I know that" to the fact, "I disagree" to the claim that he is a superior being. Legato's version only works as a threat if identity is settled by species. The finale settles it by conduct, which is why the series is content to let its villains own the biology.

Self-contempt is the method here, not the mood. The final episode spells out Legato's job: Knives recruited him and the Gung-Ho Guns to make Vash suffer. Read against that brief, asking to be killed is the job done well. He offers his own life as the target, holds the townspeople he controls over Meryl and Milly, and tells Vash he has free will. Vash shoots him, and the man who dies is the one who wins. The cost lands in episode 25, the one in which Vash wakes after ten days unconscious, in a speech addressed to Wolfwood and Rem, both dead: he killed a man with his own hand, he is no different, he is a sinner too. "Incomplete" deserves more credit than it gets, because it is accurate. Legato has no project of his own, only his master's, and dying by Vash's hand is the one act that finishes it.