“Even if you make a mistake, if you realize it was a mistake, you can always fix it.”
Trigun Quotes
A gunman with a sixty-billion-double-dollar bounty who refuses to kill anyone, and a desert that keeps testing the refusal.
- Anime
- Completed · 1998
- Manga
- Completed · 1995–2007
- Also known as
- トライガン · Toraigan
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.
“You had me kinda worried. I noticed you always smile and seem really friendly, but the way you smiled was so empty it hurt to watch you. You're hurting like crazy on the inside, yet you grin and bear it.”
The first person in the series to read the protagonist correctly is the one who arrives dressed as a joke, dragging a bundle the size of a coffin. Wolfwood was raised in an orphanage funded by the man who will later own him, and he recognises a performance because he is running one. Everything that makes their friendship work, and everything that makes it end badly, is in that recognition.
“Sometimes the answers just crash down from heaven.”
It reads as a priest's throwaway piety and it is closer to a confession of method. Wolfwood's answers do not descend, they are delivered by the cross-shaped weapon he carries everywhere, and the joke he is making at his own expense is that the difference has stopped being clear to him. A man who says this in that costume is telling the truth in the least examinable way available.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“You're not a human being. You're a plant.”
Five words that reorganise the whole series retroactively. The bounty, the destroyed cities, the impossible survival, the absent childhood: all of it has been running on a premise the show declines to state until this point, that its gunman is not a man at all but the same kind of being as the power sources keeping the colonies alive. The reveal costs nothing to say because everything before it was the setup.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“The humans treat you well? Did you have fun, dear brother?”
Usually heard as sarcasm from a genocidal villain, and it is, but the question is also sincere and that is worse. Knives genuinely wants the answer, because his entire case rests on the claim that humanity cannot be lived among, and his brother is the only counter-evidence in existence. The mockery is what a man does when the experiment he ran on someone he loves has returned the wrong result.
“Hey! That happened to be my can of pudding! And you wasted it. You should never get between people and their pudding.”
Milly's comic lines get quoted as the character, and they are the least of her. She is the one member of the cast who never adjusts her behaviour to fit the desert, and the series eventually reveals that as a position rather than an obliviousness. Reduced to pudding jokes she reads as a mascot, which is how she is usually reproduced, and the writing is doing more than that.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Secondhand smoke is bad for the baby, darling.”
Delivered to a chain-smoking priest with no baby in evidence, and it lands as a domestic joke until the arc it belongs to closes. What the line establishes is a claim on him: an insistence that he is a person with a future to be careful for, made by the only character who talks to him that way. The series then takes that future away, and the joke is what is left holding the loss.
Read Trigun
The quotes above are worth more with the story around them. Print editions are the only way to check a line against the official translation, which is how every quote on this site is supposed to be sourced.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Links on this page are affiliate links, which cost you nothing extra. They never influence what appears on this site or what the commentary says about it.
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.