“Even if you make a mistake, if you realize it was a mistake, you can always fix it.”
Vash the Stampede Quotes
3 quotes from Trigun, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Carries a sixty-billion-double-dollar bounty and an absolute rule against killing, and the series spends its first half disguising the second as a clown act.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I failed. I failed to save someone again.”
Nine words, and the series needed twenty-three episodes of clowning to earn them. Trigun spends its first half insisting its protagonist is a buffoon with a doughnut habit, which is the setup rather than the tone: every pratfall establishes a man who will do anything, including humiliate himself, to avoid the outcome he is admitting to here. The comedy was load-bearing all along.
“Hey, whatever happened to thou shalt not kill?!”
Aimed at a priest who has just shot somebody, which is the argument the back half of this series is built out of. Wolfwood carries a cross-shaped machine gun and a theology that permits triage; Vash carries an absolute rule and the body count that comes from other people enforcing it around him. Neither position survives the series intact, and the show refuses to award the point.
Read Vash the Stampede's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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Put the objection plainly: the series has just spent two episodes demonstrating the opposite, in a town where the mistake was a person and the person is dead. Vash says it anyway, near the end, having failed more times than anyone watching can count. That is the point of putting it there: it is not a claim about how the world works but a description of the only position from which he can keep going.