Anime / Trigun Stampede

Whose side are you on?^note From top to bottom: Roberto de Niro, Meryl Stryfe, Nicholas D. Wolfwood, Vash the Stampede

Trigun Stampede is an All-CGI Cartoon re-imagining of the original manga by Yasuhiro Nightow. The show was produced by Orange. It premiered on January 7, 2023.

Much like the original it follows the adventures of Vash the Stampede, "the Humanoid Typhoon" across the desolate planet of No Man's Land. He's joined by a young Intrepid Reporter named Meryl Stryfe, her supervisor Roberto de Niro, and a self-proclaimed undertaker named Nicholas D. Wolfwood. Together they face off against the machinations of Millions Knives, Vash's twin brother and Misanthrope Supreme.

Due to the source material being almost 30 years old, some information may be treated as a Late-Arrival Spoiler. As such, please proceed with caution.

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Trigun Stampede provides examples of:

• A-Team Firing: The townsfolk of Jeneora Rock have abysmal accuracy, although this could be excused by their guns being unprofessionally made out of local scrap and their lack of combat experience. The same can't be said for the soldiers on the Sand Steamer.
• Actionized Adaptation: Unlike the first manga or anime, Vash fires his gun near the very start of the story, and the Gung-Ho Guns close in on him almost immediately so that the high-powered shootouts can start in earnest.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Vash has one more failure to add to his list in Stampede, being that he actually knew this iteration's version of Monev the Gale, a boy named Rollo. He failed to keep his promise to find a cure for Rollo's illness and unknowingly handed him over to be experimented on. Needless to say, Vash's encounter with Rollo years later is much more emotionally charged, as he desperately begs Rollo to come back to his senses, and makes his outrage towards Wolfwood's willingness to Mercy Kill him more personal.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • Vash's skillset is much broader than his previous incarnations. In the manga and 1998 anime his main skills were focused almost entirely on his speed, gunmanship, and eventually his Plant abilities. He often kept his distance to deliver trick shots to his opponents over dealing in direct confrontation. In Stampede however, while he's still a runner and a ludicrously good marksman, he's also very skilled in defensive martial arts, uses his gun as a makeshift tonfa more than a gun, and is quick to try to physically disarm or incapacitate his enemies upfront. Additionally, he's far more knowledgeable about Plants and lost technology than his previous counterparts, who floundered around with extremely incomplete knowledge of what they were and what they were capable of for most of the series.
  • E.G. Mine, whose gimmick in the manga was a lame "mine-shaped" spike-shooting shell, is now a more name-appropriate Mad Bomber armed with landmines, suicide drones, and a bomb-laying armored vehicle, whose control unit resembles the spiked shell his original incarnation used.
  • Millions Knives was already a Person of Mass Destruction in the original, but he is far more proactive in putting it to use Stampede, appearing in the third episode to personally take Jeneora Rock's Plant and effortlessly carving up his opposition. Contrast that with how he was an Orcus on His Throne in the anime and for part of the manga. This display of power does match up with his manga incarnation once he finally takes action, however.
  • Gets applied to Nicholas D. Wolfwood's Punisher. In the original, the heaviest weapon installed in it was a rocket launcher. In Stampede, it gains a Wave-Motion Gun that's strong enough to cut a whale-sized worm in half.
  • Zig-Zagged with Stampede's version of Monev the Gale. In this take, rather than just being a really buff guy armed with Gatling guns, he's really buff from an experimental Psycho Serum that also grants him regeneration, while his Gatling guns also have attachments that blast gusts of air. On the other hand, he's also become an Adaptational Dumbass, with the experimentation turning him into a frothing berserker barely able to contain any thoughts beyond "attack Vash the Stampede" and "scream 'Vash the Stampede'".
  • Legato Bluesummers in the 1998 anime and manga had powerful telekinetic abilities, but they only extended to controlling people. In Stampede, he can use his telekinesis to take control of a large ship.
• Adaptational Context Change: Several key moments remain consistent across different versions of Trigun, but Stampede makes many of them happen differently than its predecessors, including but not limited to:
  • Knives always is responsible for Vash losing his left arm. In the 1998 anime he shot it off, in the manga he sliced it off, both times as a form of punishment. In Stampede he slices it off to save Vash from the black hole that suddenly uncontrollably manifested on Vash's left arm, uniquely making the context more heroic, although Knives is still the one who provokes the incident.
  • At some point, Vash points a gun in Knives's direction, which causes Knives to become enraged at Vash's seeming betrayal of their brotherhood. In the 1998 anime, Knives specially made the gun that Vash carries around and gave it to him as "a weapon to dispose of humanity", which Vash immediately rejected and impulsively turned the gun on Knives in response. In the manga, Vash happened to have a gun when Knives killed a village of people who'd chained Vash up, and Vash held him at gunpoint to stop him. In Stampede, the context is similar to the 1998 anime except Knives takes the gun off a dead Plant technician he himself killed. Vash points the gun at Knives when Knives threatens Luida, who has been caring for Vash. This more explicitly frames the situation as one where Vash chooses a human over Knives. Incidentally, like in the 1998 anime, Vash continues to carry the gun Knives "gifted" him, while refusing to use it to kill.
  • In every version of Trigun, the city of July is obliterated in a confrontation between Vash and Knives. In both the 1998 anime and the manga, Knives forces Vash's right arm to form into the Angel Arm and fires it as a display of control and power. In Stampede Knives forces open Vash's "gate" to access the Core, the source of Plant powers, and what is essentially a dimension of infinite energy. Vash willingly forms the Angel Arm as a means to discharge the energy safely, but (thanks to Knives) destroys July anyway. Unlike the previous versions of the incident, it happens onscreen at a point when Meryl and Wolfwood have already entered Vash's life, rather than in a flashback from the past.
  • Vash says a line in Stampede about how he'll simply run away if humans come after him, and then choose to settle by their side once more when things calm down. He also said this line in the manga, but in a different context and emotional state. In the manga he said it while trying to, as calmly as possible, stand his ground. In Stampede Vash is crying it out with all his heart, and then tacks on at the end that it's "because I'm Vash the Stampede", turning the moment into more of a declaration of I Am What I Am and embracing of his identity.
• Adaptation Distillation: Stampede's re-telling of the Trigun story re-orders and combines plot points while also going indepth on lore and escalating in seriousness much earlier than either the manga or 1998 anime. Most notably it turns out to be a Stealth Prequel that depicts slightly younger versions of the protagonists as they get swept up into the events that culminate in the destruction of the city of July, which in the earlier iterations of Trigun was an event that happened decades prior to Vash meeting Meryl and Wolfwood. Stampede's version of Lost July also replaces the Fifth Moon incident in the manga and 1998 anime as being the confrontation that results in Vash going missing, and then resurfacing as an amnesiac going by the moniker Eriks.
• Adaptational Early Appearance:
  • A shot of Millions Knives is seen in the first episode, and he terrorises Jenora Rock's inhabitants in person by the third, compared to his much later debut in the manga and anime. Much of Vash's backstory is also made known to the audience from the beginning.
  • Livio the Double Fang and Elendira the Crimsonnail, two characters who didn't even exist in the manga yet at the time the 1998 Trigun anime was made, show up before we even meet the Bad Lads Gang.
  • Episode 12 establishes that lore-wise, Meryl and Wolfwood have entered Vash's life much earlier than they did in previous iterations of the story, being witness to the infamous July incident that gave Vash his $$60 billion bounty. Likewise, many other familiar plot points have been transplanted into happening just prior to and in the aftermath of July, including Vash taking on the pseudonym Eriks and staying with a girl named Lina.
  • The voice of Chronica, a character who in the manga doesn't show up until the final story arc, is heard as a mysterious transmission in space two years after the July incident.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • Stampede has made an effort to extensively flesh out and make sense of the world of Trigun in ways that weren't seen in its previous incarnations. For example, it has created a more defined picture of what Plants are and what happened to the colony ships in the immediate aftermath of the crash. Characters have also been expanded on: Vash has been given a skillset that makes more sense for his pacifistic convictions, and Meryl has been given background details and motivations. Supplementary materials have also provided brief histories for many of the major cities.
  • It transpires that the first 12 episodes are are a longer and more elaborate re-imagining of the "Lost July" incident, which in previous versions of Trigun haunted Vash's past for defining his reputation as an outlaw and humanoid natural disaster.
• Adaptational Job Change:
  • Meryl Stryfe is a reporter for the Bernardelli News Agency rather than a claim investigator for the Bernardelli Insurance Society.
  • Nicholas D. Wolfwood is an undertaker rather than a priest. In reality, he's an assassin, while his original counterpart had that aspect as only his backstory. It's eventually shown that he is under contract as a priest, but he doesn't consider himself to be one.
• Adaptational Name Change:
  • Million Knives in this continuity is a name he picked for himself. When he was being raised by Rem, he was named "Nai".
  • Stampede's incarnation of Monev the Gale is never named during his episode, instead humanizing his tragic origins as a boy named Rollo. However Conrad does refer to him as Monev the Gale in episode 10.
• Adaptational Origin Connection: This version's Monev, Livio, and Wolfwood were all William Conrad's lab experiments, while they were only broadly members and former members of the Gung-Ho Guns in the 1998 anime and manga, with Monev just being a brute trained in isolation and Wolfwood's superhuman abilities being the result of Chapel's treatments.
• Adaptational Personality Change:
  • In the manga, the twins' personalities as children were almost the opposite of their adult selves, with Knives being hopeful that he and Vash could get along with humans, and Vash being much less trusting. After discovering Tesla, Vash even attempts suicide, only after accidentally nearly killing Rem and hearing her "blank ticket" dream does he start to change. In Stampede the twins are closer to the 1998 counterparts, with Vash being the cheerful and outgoing one who never loses hope even after seeing Tesla, with Knives being much less trusting.
  • Wolfwood's personality is much more abrasive and cutthroat than his previous counterparts, who were fairly laid back and jovial in demeanor. Even his attempts at joking around are more like childish taunting rather than good-natured silliness. He's also much more emotionally intense; it's easier to make him angry, but also equally easier to render him sentimental.
• Adaptational Relationship Overhaul:
  • In the manga and 1998 anime, Legato Bluesummers was only focused on Vash at the behest of Knives. In Stampede, he has a connection to Nicholas D. Wolfwood, torturing him after he attempted to escape William Conrad's lab and informing him of his role as an assassin for Knives.
  • Meryl and Wolfwood, in part due to the absence of Milly Thompson for the first 12 episodes, develop a camaraderie they haven't had before in other incarnations of the story. The two of them bicker and banter like little kids and seem to grow to care for each other.
  • In the original manga, Brad was a child born into one of the remaining functioning SEEDS spaceship colonies who eventually grew up to assist with making Vash's equipment, and Luida was a major leadership figure on that colony, but didn't seem to have a particularly close relationship with Vash. In Stampede Brad and Luida are two SEEDS crew members who rescued young Vash after the Great Fall and, after a rocky start, became something like surrogate parents to him, continuing to look after him even now.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: Millions Knives in the 1998 anime, serving as Vash's Evil Counterpart, fought with firearms just like his brother. The manga has him use Blades Below The Shoulder. In Stampede, he instead manifests long chains of blades from his cloak, incidentally making his moniker "Millions Knives" much more appropriate.
• Adaptational Sympathy: This incarnation Monev the Gale is treated like a Tragic Monster rather than the violent berserker he was in the 1998 anime and manga. Instead of just being a larger brute trained solely to kill Vash, he was a young, frightened boy named Rollo who was subjected to horrific experiments that turned him into a monster and robbed him of his mind. The fact that he doesn't threaten any civilians like his previous counterparts only makes him easier to pity — though he did wipe out his hometown, he wasn't in control of himself when he did.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • Meryl is completely unarmed and has no combat experience in this series, while she carried around many derringers and was proficient in the quick draw in the 1998 anime and manga. She also serves as The Driver of the group for most of her screentime in the first half. It's later shown that this is because Stampede is depicting a younger and inexperienced version of Meryl, who has not yet developed the skills or confidence her other counterparts have. It's implied that she is on the path of eventually doing so, since as of episode 10 she comes in possession of a derringer.
  • Zig-Zagged with Vash. While Vash has always been a conflict-avoidant crybaby, Stampede's Vash is noticeably even more passive and meek than his previous counterparts, and seems to lack their underlying temper. However, once put into dangerous situations, he's just as, if not more, capable than his predecessors in handling a fight, especially when taking his much larger skillset into account.
• Adapted Out: Roberto de Niro, a completely new and original character to the Trigun universe, is Meryl's work partner instead of Milly Thompson. Kite and Jasmine are also absent, and Brilliant Dynamites Neon is only shown on wanted posters. If a tweet from Nightow is to be believed, Leonof the Puppetmaster won't be showing up in this reboot. In the season finale, Milly is confirmed to exist in this version of Trigun, as Meryl gets a call from her superiors that a 'Milly Thompson' will be assigned to work under her as a new trainee.
• Age Lift:
  • Vash superficially looks and behaves younger than his previous counterparts despite being roughly the same age as them. He comes off more like a young adult still trying to find his place in the world rather than the self-assured and at times world-weary man that his previous counterparts were.
  • Meryl is a minor example, as she is shown to be 23 years old at the beginning of Stampede, while in the manga she was 21 at the beginning and eventually became 23. Ironically, her personality and stage in life in Stampede is deliberately portrayed as more youthful and naïve.
  • Wolfwood is a more ambiguous but drastic example. In the 1998 anime, he was merely a man somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties with a ridiculous weapon. In the manga, he was a man in his early twenties who looked like he was in his thirties because his abilities accelerated his aging. This iteration of Wolfwood however, is not only designed to look younger than his previous counterparts and in turn also be younger in age, he is implied to be significantly younger than his physical appearance, after the experimentation he underwent to gain his powers caused his body to develop from that of a prepubescent child to a fully grown adult in the span of six months, although his actual age is unknown.
  • The same as Wolfwood above applies to Livio, as they underwent similar procedures. Livio also has been designed to look more youthful than his manga counterpart, who was already younger than he looks, bringing into question how old he actually is.
  • Elendira the Crimson-Nail is, like Vash, a visual example. In the manga, she appeared to be an adult woman. In Stampede, she looks like a short young girl, so much so that Rollo initially mistook her for being around his age.
  • Brad is older than his manga counterpart. In the manga, Vash and Brad first meet while Brad was still a child. Their dynamic is reversed in Stampede where instead Brad was one of the scientists part of the original SEEDS crew who took in young Vash after their ships crashed into the planet they live on now.
• Alien Blood: The sand worms appear to bleed brown.
• Alien Sky: With five moons, though not all of them are visible at once. Also the occasional cloud of tiny, bioluminescent, jellyfish-esque Worms.
• All-CGI Cartoon: Like Orange's other series.
• All for Nothing: In the season finale, Vash's triumphant breakaway from his brother's control and subsequent desperate attempt to save July city from the Fantastic Nuke he was forced to generate ends with the devastating result of him having to watch Nai get himself Stripped To Bone by the energy blast and obliterating the city along with 90% of its population. If Vash hadn't aimed the energy upward he would have destroyed the planet, but this is still a result no one would wish for.
• Alternate Continuity: While all versions of Trigun, despite sharing many details, are ultimately very different from each other, Stampede has taken this further by completely restructuring major parts of the timeline, most notably creating a version of the story where Meryl and Wolfwood are present to witness the destruction of the city of July, the monumental disaster that gave Vash his infamous $$60 billion bounty. It has also made one major change to Vash's backstory, by having him be rescued and raised by a surviving SEEDS colony after the Great Fall, instead of being forced to fend for himself.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Instead of looking like the alien birds from Dragon's Heaven, Tomas instead look like bright blue emus. Supplementary materials reveal that they're not native to No Man's Land and may, in fact, be bright blue emus, since they're genetically modified lifeforms.
• Apocalypse Cult: The Eye of Michael, this time a cult that worships Plants and Millions Knives as a god. Members are encouraged to embrace death, for "death is not the end." Test subjects for William Conrad's experiments are acquired under the guise of it being a Human Sacrifice.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • E.G. Mine gets his arms swiftly cut off by Knives for his failure to capture Jeneora Rock's Plant. Father Nebraska immediately follows, losing his arm when he tries to kill Knives, and one of the townspeople loses hers so Knives can drag her to her death soon afterwards.
  • Vash likewise gained his prosthetic arm by way of his brother's blades, albeit in his case, it was due to his incomplete and uncontrollable activation of his Gate, manifesting as a black hole-like sphere centered over his left forearm that sucked in everything around it. It's made clear that if Knives hadn't cut if off to allow the arm alone to be destroyed, Vash would have been killed by a power that he didn't understand, a very different context from the same event in the manga.
• Armor-Piercing Response: In episode eleven, Knives finally explains to Vash just why he crashed the ships, and why he's been trying to wipe out humankind ever since. Because he believes Vash needs to be protected from humans, or he'll be dependent on their love and subjected to their exploitation forever. In short, everything Knives has done? Knives blames on Vash. Already suffering under the burden of believing he was Knives's accomplice in the crash, Vash screams in guilt-ridden despair and undergoes a complete mental collapse.
  Vash: It's my fault?
  Knives: I did it all for you.
• Art Shift: For key flashbacks to Wolfwood's past, the style changes from the "CGI cartoon" used up to that point to traditional animation with a washed-out colour palette and simple cross-hatched shading, complete with dialogue inserted as text on a black background as if in a Silent Movie. The style and sound both grow more elaborate (and trippy) as Wolfwood is subjected to experimental drug treatments by Knives's minions. Once the art switches back to the show's primary style, Wolfwood looks as he does in the present day.
• Bait-and-Switch: In the fourth episode, the crew encounters a rough-looking and abrasive man carrying a mysteriously heavy cross who overcharges for his vaguely-defined services and smokes like a chimney, and a young boy who was recently orphaned and seemingly cannot speak from the shock. Not long afterwards the entire group is consumed by a giant worm. Roberto suspiciously mentions an individual capable of controlling worms in the man's presence. Of course, the "young boy" is revealed to be the one responsible instead... except the two are in fact collaborating to gain Vash's trust.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Than the '98 adaptation, since Knives's name reflects his powers quite literally; his full introduction involves dismemberment and copious blood spray. It's yet to reach the manga's extremes of body horror, but doesn't flinch from some disturbing subject matter such as depicting the body of Tesla, a prepubescent child, floating in dismembered pieces and confirming that even in this state, she's still alive.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool:
  • Worms are capable of making their wings and parts of their body glow, which makes them very pretty to look at when large hoards of them gather at night (if you can cope with the fact that it's all just a ton of bugs, which Meryl can't).
  • Plants are biological power sources that glow with light shed by their markings, intricate lines that look a bit like circuit boards. The final shot in episode seven reveals Vash with the same markings on his face and eyes. Knives later shows them as well.
• Bookends: Outside of prologue and epilogue sequences used to set up the story and what will come next, Stampede begins and ends with scenes involving Meryl driving through the desert.
• Cain and Abel: Even in the new continuity, Vash remains the Abel to Knives's Cain, seeking to protect humanity while Knives would have them all die a slow death. However, neither wants to kill his brother, and their conflict comes instead from various ways they try to influence each other.
• Canon Foreigner: Roberto de Niro has no counterpart in the original manga or anime.
• Casting Gag: Various cast members from the 1998 Trigun anime cameo in Stampede as radio DJ's in funny or ironic ways.
  • Vash's original Japanese voice actor, Masaya Onosaka is the voice of the main news DJ, who ironically broadcasts all the announcements to the world about Vash being a dangerous, Wanted fugitive. There's something hilarious about hearing what was for over 20 years the voice of "Vash the Stampede" now sounding out the calls to hunt down "Vash the Stampede".
  • Wolfwood's original Japanese voice actor Show Hayami is that of the religious radio DJ, preaching the word of the Eye of Michael. Given how a preacher was Wolfwood's original occupation makes the sermon even funnier.
  • Knives's original Japanese voice actor Tōru Furusawa cameos as a DJ lamenting humanity's chances of continued survival on a barely liveable planet. Of course, the irony here is that Knives is the one responsible for crashing the ships.
• Color Motifs: The use of colors in both character designs and backgrounds is very carefully considered, and certain recurring ideas appear.
  • Red represents humanity, both as survivors and as killers, and as beings capable of emotional extremes. Red is Vash's favorite color because he associates it with Rem and the geraniums she grew, which he complements with other warm and bright colors as well as black. Red is also the color of sick or dying Plants. Ironically, Vash is a Plant, not a human, but one who regards himself as inferior or broken.
  • Blue represents the Plants, liquid-dwelling beings that seem out-of-place in the burning desert of No Man's Land. Knives is strongly associated with it, trying to present an air of detached rationality, complemented by white, gray and other washed out colors. Healthy Plants glow blue. Interestingly, normal human Meryl is also associated with blue in her clothes, eyes and immediate love of a field of blue flowers.
  • Red and blue combined, of course, create purple, which is for both humans and Plants unified. Rem, who wanted humans and Plants to understand each other, had unusual purple eyes. A Plant as it's being healed will briefly glow purple. And once finally unlocked, Vash's powers are purple, contrasting Knives's pale blue.
  • Vash is the red to Knives's blue, but he also is the black to Knives's white. Their battle in the season finale exemplifies this, with Knives sprouting a silvery-white wing and Vash sprouting a jet-black one while pale-skinned Knives is in a white body-suit and Vash's clothes have been stained black.
  • The Worms fluoresce a shade of bright acid green distinct from either red or blue as the impartial and truly "alien" native inhabitants of the planet. When disguised, Zazie wears a shirt in that colour as a hint at the truth.
• Coming of Age Story: Stampede's first 12 episodes eventually prove to be one for Vash and Meryl, as its nature as Stealth Prequel is taken advantage of and gives them personalities and traits that are more youthful or immature compared to their previous counterparts. The events of the story culminate in how Vash came to destroy the city of July and earn himself his $$60 billion bounty, as well as how he gains his more steadfast resolve. It also showcases Meryl's days being new on the job before Milly became her partner, and creates an origin story for how she came to wield her derringer.
• Continuity Cameo: Wanted posters for Descartes, Brilliant Dynamites Neon, Rai-Dei the Blade, Marilyn Nebraska, and that bandit who took over Lina's town can be seen in the Jeneora Rock saloon.
• Creator Cameo: Yasuhiro Nightow appears on a wanted poster as "Nightow the Comix Artist" with a bounty of thirty double dollars.
• Crisis Catch And Carry: Meryl ends up a frequent recipient of this, being an unarmed civilian who gets swept up in a conflict involving superhumans. All too often her companions end up having to pull her by the jacket like the scruff of a baby animal or haul her around like a bag of rice to get her out of harm's way.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • This adaptation is much darker than the 1998 anime, with graphic on-screen deaths of sympathetic characters and less of the humor the original had, though there is still a certain amount of goofiness. It's much more in line with Trigun Maximum, however, complete with similarly dark themes.
  • The landscape of Noman's Land feels noticeably bleaker compared to the manga and 1998 anime, where the towns and cities felt reasonably populated and lively despite the endless desert surrounding them. Stampede's version of the world, on the other hand, really gives the feeling that the people are barely scraping by to survive on the planet that they were forced to inhabit. For example, the audience is directly shown effects of life without a Plant or other source of reliable energy, when a town cannot obtain clean drinking water because of it. The opulent Cyberpunk city of July is a stark outlier, but even it has an unsettling edge when it's shown that it was literally built in the ruins of a spaceship that cracked in half, and it happens to be Knives's base of operations and the home of his cult, which controls the place completely.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: There isn't a whole lot of room for interpretation on this one: Knives is close to romantically obsessed with Vash and acts like an emotionally and physically abusive partner towards him. Knives relentlessly gaslights Vash, blaming him for every terrible thing he's done either to Vash or to the people that Vash loves, and the emotional damage it's done is clear. Vash has been told almost constantly that he is weak, useless, fragile, and unable to make decisions by Knives, and had his choices/competance dismissed and overridden. Knives finally tries to strip Vash of his memories and take control of his body in a manner framed to resemble rape. When Vash asserts his autonomy and independence with the help of a woman who instantly knew the assault he was suffering for what it was, it's triumphant — and he's literally demonised for it. It's the same excruciating story that any abuse survivor knows.
• Dissonant Serenity: Knives almost always has a smile on his face and speaks in a calm tone, even as he's carving people up and spreading destruction.
• Dream Tells You to Wake Up: When Knives subjects Vash to what basically amounts to a Mind Rape in an attempt to wipe him of his memory and bodily take control of him, Vash is awakened by the voice of Meryl reaching him within his nightmare-ridden comatose state.
• Earth That Was: Zazie reveals in episode 8 that Earth as we know it is now nothing more than a wasteland due to humanity exhausting it of its resources.
• Eldritch Location: The higher plane, which no human can enter, the place from which Plants draw everything they produce — matter, energy, and gravity. It looks like a featureless space tinted with blue-violet light between two restless oceans (one the ground, one in the sky) ribboned with Plant patterns, stretching to the horizon. There's no solid surface, so anything in there either drifts weightlessly or falls.
• Empathic Environment: The first time the series depicts Knives and Vash meeting again as adults, the sky is suddenly clouded over and the sun begins to set, making the atmosphere appropriately dark and frightening.
• Episode Zero: The Beginning: Episode 12 of Stampede is marked with a #0 and shares its name with the prologue chapter of the manga, officially denoting the story up to that point as being a prologue itself.
• Establishing Character Moment: How to demonstrate who Vash is as a person when he's still a little boy in a featureless tunic? He cheerfully greets ship full of people in cryogenic suspension by name, then initiates a flying cuddle on his foster mother before showing concern for the suspended people. How to demonstrate the same of Knives when he's the same and still named "Nai"? He's absolutely calm, focused, and non-demonstrative as the ship begins to tear itself to pieces... and then after it's crashed, Vash finds him cackling gleefully over the wreckage.
• Even Evil Has Standards: William Conrad performed a lot of horrific experiments on children to help Millions Knives's cause, but either out of pragmatism or a legitimate attachment to his test subject, he tried to stop Legato from torturing Nicholas D. Wolfwood and asked Nicholas for forgiveness before locking him in his cell. It turns out he's trying to create humans that don't need to rely on Plants, as he believes is necessary for anyone to survive on the planet much longer.
• Flower Motifs:
  • Rem is associated with red geraniums, which symbolize protection, love, and other positive emotions.
  • The purple flowers that appear when Knives forces Vash's Gate are purple geraniums, a flower that conveys admiration and adoration towards someone.
• Foregone Conclusion: If you were already familiar with Trigun before watching Stampede and remembered major points of the timeline, the moment you heard Vash was journeying to a city named July probably tipped you off that the city would likely not be standing by the time the season finale's credits rolled. Sure enough, it wasn't.
• Foreshadowing: Quite a lot. The radio broadcasts introduce a number of things that turn up later, for example, but there are many, many others.
  • After the duel in the opening episode, a bird flutters away from the town's entrance as the police leave. It's a species of Worm, controlled by Zazie, and it heads to July to inform Knives that Vash has been located.
  • Vash's expression as he stares at Jeneora's dying Plant is very worried, and he says "If we don't act soon, things will get worse." Not only does Vash know that Knives takes dying Plants to prevent them being subjected to the Last Run, he's ramping up his thefts and murders while Vash, the only one capable of stopping him, is scared to confront him. Sure enough, Knives arrives in person two episodes later, takes the Plants, and destroys the town while Vash can do almost nothing about it.
  • One of E.G. the Mine's explosive drones is lurking in the opening scene of episode two. They become active in the closing scene.
  • The very first thing Knives says to Vash in the series is, "Have you ever wondered what it's like to speak with a god, Vash?" This apparent non-sequitur is more or less Knives's plan in a nutshell — force open Vash's Gate, personally enter the higher plane, and make contact with the Core, source of all that Plants produce, to draw enough power to wipe out humanity in one sweep.
  • The opening sequence itself is foreshadowing for the final episode, showing Vash running in an attempt to escape from Knives's mental influence. Similarly the collapsing buildings look like Jeneora Rock, which is torn apart in episode three, and the brief flashes of Plant patterns belong to Knives, Vash, Tesla, and the Core of the higher plane.
  • In episode 5, a religious radio program's sermon states "When two angels descend, a bridge of light will cross the sky and we will be led to the land of God". In episode 12, Vash and Knives, who have each sprouted a wing, plummet back down to the planet in their battle. Two years later, Zazie issues Meryl a cryptic warning that a fleet of ships from Earth are now heading in the direction of the planet, because 'thanks to the twins, a bridge was cast across the void'.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • It's difficult to see because the camera pans away so quickly, but Father Nebraska and Gofsef can be seen among the Jeneora Rock survivors at the end of Episode 3. Gofsef's survival is the most surprising, since he was seemingly vaporized by E.G. the Mine's bombs.
  • In Episode 6, pausing to read the magazine Roberto is holding shows that Midvalley the Hornfreak, a Gung-Ho Gun from the manga, is scheduled to perform in September City.
  • As Livio is breaking down and remembering who he is, there's a moment where he recalls looking into a mirror. For an instant his reflection looks a lot like Razlo, his violent Split Personality from the manga, but the scene is so dark you may miss it. No wonder he was horrified.
  • During the establishing shot of July City in Episode 10, Kuroneko-sama can briefly be seen in the lower left corner before the camera fully zooms out. Some cat-shaped blurs can also be seen during the climactic battle of Episode 12.
• Functional Addict: Roberto drinks enough to appear red in the face in many scenes, but it doesn't seem to hinder his movement or sense of judgment. Even while speaking in a slurred and tipsy manner, he's able to pick up just fine that Vash is clearly hiding something behind his goofy behavior.
• Gas Mask Mook: Members of the Eye of Micheal wear old-fashioned gas masks with ventilator tubes. Members of the Bad Lads Gang wear more modern-looking gas masks decorated with glowing blacklight accents.
• Genre Shift: Stampede's world intentionally has a different feel from the previous versions of Trigun, which leaned harder into the 'western' side of 'Space Western', and whose technological aspects were more gritty and retro. Its lore was also quite loose and malleable. Stampede, in contrast, while still keeping Space Western elements, has gone with a cleaner, more modern science fiction feel, with a more strongly defined background.
• A God Am I: Knives openly refers to himself as a god bringing vengeful fury to humanity.
• Heel Realization: Rosa, the local bartender and apparent leader of Jeneora Rock, has an unspoken version of this when Father Nebraska asks why Vash would bother to protect her and the rest of Jeneora Rock's people after they so eagerly turned on him for his bounty.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Meryl is a tiny 145cm tall (4'9"), while basically everyone else in the cast towers over her at at least One Head Taller if not more.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight:
  • Vash attempts this with Monev, trying to bring back the boy he used to know. He seems to be getting through... until Wolfwood decides it's better to put him out of his misery.
  • Ironically, Wolfwood attempts this with Livio after realizing that he can't bring himself to Mercy Kill his surrogate brother. With Vash's help, he actually succeeds in bringing him back... but remembering causes Livio so much pain that he'd rather put a stop to it himself.
• Ill-Timed Sneeze: While sneaking around July in episode 10, Vash gives himself and Wolfwood away to the police with a sneeze, forcing the men to leg it after Wolfwood gives him an angry whack.
• Immortality Begins at Twenty: Vash and Knives, Independent Plants, aged through childhood and adolescence in just a few years. When they physically became adults, however, they remained exactly the same for over a hundred years.
• Improvised Scattershot: In the first episode, Vash destroys all cluster missiles falling towards Jeneora Rock by throwing a rock he pulls from the ground and then firing a single bullet at it to fragment into to multiple pieces to hit and detonate each missile.
• Inconsistent Spelling: In Stampede, the city of July has an alternative spelling as 'JuLai', used in the English subtitles. This has caused confusion and debate among longtime Trigun fans as it previously was always spelled 'July'. Causing even more confusion, the world map that's shown midway through each episode marks the city as 'July', and the title of episode 12 is 'High Noon At July', referring to the city's destruction. The anime's official social media accounts have used both spellings, often in the same post, indicating that both are considered valid. An interview with staff has clarified that the alternative spelling came from the fact they made the city Asian Cyberpunk-themed, and there is corresponding kanji for the name which would be romanized as 'JuLai' (儒來).
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: For all his abrasiveness and cynicism, Roberto clearly cares a lot about Meryl and even saves her a few times (he's even protecting her in the picture for this page). He's strongly hinted to be a moral, caring person who's gone through so many hardships and witnessed so many deaths it's significantly affected his outlook on life.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: In episode eleven, Knives initiates a strange mental interface with Vash as a means to "remake" him. They travel through Knives's memories shared with Vash, Knives reminding Vash of his many failures, making moral arguments, and giving his own context to events, while forcing Vash to forget the things that comfort him. Vash's immediate resistance, attempts to flee, obvious distress and even begging for Knives to stop all demonstrate the violating nature of what Knives is doing.
• Living Battery: The Plants are pieces of organic Lost Technology that produce food, water, energy, gravity — many things humans need to survive on a planet as desolate as No Man's Land or in space. They're engineered beings resembling sea creatures that can't survive outside of their casings, and with capabilities that humans still don't fully understand. The Fall (in part) has forced humanity to over-rely on them to the point of burning them out, since a great deal of knowledge was lost in the crash and No Man's Land is not suited to support human life (or the Plants, for that matter). This motivates Knives, a rare Independent Plant (birthed rather than cloned, closely resembling a human, and capable of living outside a case) in his Start of Darkness and attempts to Kill All Humans. Vash, his twin, has been attempting to help both the Plants and humans acclimate and survive together.
• Lost Technology: Literally referred to as "lost technology", there exist devices and tools that no one knows how to replicate and are more advanced than what currently exists in the world (like the Plants). Whatever lost technology is left was presumably recovered from the myriad spaceship crashes.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Rollo was born on a windless day, a sign of bad luck in his hometown (which depends on wind-generated power to survive rather than a Plant). As he grows older he suffers from a terminal illness and the town's people pray for wind that won't come. Then Rollo is chosen to be a sacrifice to the Eye of Michael and mutated into Monev the Gale. Twenty years later, the town is deserted. Wolfwood Mercy Kills Monev... and the wind begins to blow again. Coincidence? Or was Rollo the necessary sacrifice after all, his spirit freed from suffering by death?
• Meaningful Rename: Vash's brother in this continuity was named "Nai" by Rem but now goes by "Millions Knives", since he despises humanity and is determined to shed anything they gave him. It actually suits him, considering his primary ability involves manifesting chains made up of hundreds if not thousands of razor-sharp blades. He chose it to represent becoming a kind of blade taking revenge for the suffering inflicted on "millions" of his sister Plants all over the planet.
  • Noteworthy in that "Nai" also counts as a Meaningful Name, as the refrain for the opening song ("Tombi" by Kvi Baba) highlights: not only is this word one way of forming negative sentences in Japanese, it also rhymes with "ai," which means "love" (and sounds like the English "I" as well).
• Misanthrope Supreme: Just like in the 1998 anime and manga, Millions Knives and Legato Bluesummers despise humanity and want to exterminate them all.
• Monster of the Week: Played With. The show has Vash and the others encountering an opponent in each episode, though they don't necessarily always defeat them by the episode's end, and each encounter plays out as part of a larger story rather than as purely episodic battles.
• Mood Whiplash: Stampede's first two episodes are mostly goofy, comedic romps in a space western setting. Then the show violently swerves into a borderline horror flick in episode three, when the more terrifying major threats of the series descend upon the protagonists.
• Mother Nature, Father Science: Vash and Knives are both male but invoke this trope in their personalities and appearances as Polar Opposite Twins.
  • On the surface, Vash is covered in human-made objects - he wears their clothing and wields their weapons. But he proves to be the 'Mother Nature' twin who is driven by his ideals and emotional connection to others, finds wonder in nature and the world, and wishes to live among the human race as part of their species. He's framed as traditionally effeminate despite being male (gentle, nurturing, a healer, and very protective and sweet towards children). He is also strongly influenced by the women in his life. And in his confrontation with Knives at July, his powers manifest as a mass of roots and flowers and develops a wing that appears to be made of said roots.
  • Knives on the other hand, on the surface seems more organic - he refuses to don human clothing or partake in their culture, and he sprouts weapons from his body that he uses like tentacles or claws much like an animal. But he proves to be the 'Father Science' twin who tries to live his life by cold, unrelenting logic and his plans to eradicate humanity significantly involve experimentation and technology in order to become a reality. Nearly all of Knives's underlings are male, and he resents all the women that have any influence on Vash. And in his confrontation with Vash at July, he manifests a wing that appears to be mechanical and made of metal.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Like the first episode of the 1998 anime adaptation, Vash's first attempt to use his gun onscreen is thwarted due to lacking ammunition.
  • Vulture-bugs resembling the puppets Leonoff the Puppet-Master used to spy on Vash in the same adaptation appear, again being used to spy on Vash, though this time they belong to Zazie the Beast as a species of Worm.
  • Vash's caricature-style bounty poster resembles his original broom-like Anime Hair. Meryl, seeing it for the first time, laughs and says that real people don't look like that. When they come across Vash himself shortly afterwards, due to being hung upside-down, his droopy current hairstyle looks exactly like his original one. And in episode twelve, his hair is blasted back into a style reminiscent of his original signature spiked 'do for the duration of the battle.
  • Episode two is an extended homage to episode five of the original anime and the manga's first few chapters, with townsfolk hunting down Vash to get his bounty to fix their Plant and the Nebraska Family showing up to cause havoc.
  • Meryl working as a reporter is a nod to her taking the job of a TV reporter at the end of the original manga's run. The end of the first season has her superiors threatening that they'll send her to work at the Insurance Society if she keeps going off on her own tangents, which was the place of employment of her previous counterparts.
  • Jeneora Rock was where Knives made his first appearance in the manga. In the anime it was where the Gung-Ho Guns first appeared.
  • Vash's goal to find Knives in the city of July at the end of episode 3 had already happened before the story began in previous continuities. It ended very badly. This time around was no exception.
  • Meryl initially assumes Wolfwood is a priest, his original job in the manga and previous anime.
  • Wolfwood wears a grey button-up shirt instead of a white one like his previous counterparts. However, in the 1998 anime, flashbacks show Wolfwood as a child also wearing a grey button-up. This ends up subtly indicating the fact that Wolfwood as we see him in the first 12 episodes is more immature as a character than his previous counterparts, much like Vash and Meryl also are, given Stampede's Stealth Prequel nature.
  • The people who experimented on Rollo, note that he's filled with the "venom" of hatred, referencing his original name and the fact it's a reference to Marvel Comics' Venom.
  • Wolfwood once again kills an opponent while Vash is trying to talk them down, angering Vash. Rai-Dei the Blade in the manga, Zazie the Beast in the original anime, and Monev here.
  • In the manga and 1998 anime, all Plants were held in containers that looked like giant lightbulbs. In Stampede most of the Plants are contained in more stereotypical looking cylindrical tanks (though they do form bulb shapes), but it's later shown that the Plant containers onboard the space colony ships also look like lightbulbs.
  • Vash's main gun in this continuity looks different from the ones wielded by his predecessors. However, it's later shown that it was modified, and its original appearance was identical to the guns of his previous counterparts.
  • Vash had a folding knife installed in his boot in the anime. Here, Knives's early usage of his powers manifests as blades emerging from his hands... and from his shoes.
  • Up until Stampede, Vash and Knives did not have an official birthdate. In the 1998 anime, there was a scene where Vash wrote down a profile of himself with inaccurate information for things such as his height and age, where he also listed his birthday as July 21st, ergo, the anniversary of the destruction of the city of July. Stampede, in horrific irony, has chosen to make this their birthday for real.
  • The color palette of Vash's Significant Wardrobe Shift during the battle at July where his coat becomes black with purplish-red accents and his glasses are tinted violet is inspired by the alternative color palette(s) Yasuhiro Nightow would occasionally color Vash in and that his figures would sometimes be released in, where his coat was black and his glasses red or blue.
  • The title of the last episode "#0. High Noon at July" is also the title for the prologue of the manga where the audience is told that Vash destroyed July.
  • In the group photo of Vash, Meryl, Wolfwood and Roberto that's shown on display at Roberto's memorial at July, Vash is sporting his signature crossed-fingered Love and Peace symbol that particularly 1998 anime watchers will fondly remember.
• Negated Moment of Awesome: As mentioned above, Vash whips out his Hand Cannon for the first time, complete with a sweeping camera pan, a dramatic sunset and a thrilling soundtrack. He pulls the trigger... and the gun goes click. Any coolness poor Vash might have achieved is lost when he makes a confused noise and then starts to desperately wail that he needs bullets. He gets to show his stuff once Meryl throws him a round, but you only make one first impression.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: One thing that hasn't changed with Vash even in the alternate continuity. He arrived at Jeneora Rock to help them look after their Plants and spends two episodes protecting the town. However, he ends up alerting Knives to his location by doing so. Knives arrives immediately and not only takes the Plants but levels the entire town to the ground, wounding and killing many in the process. Vash's response to getting blamed for the destruction (as Knives only showed up because Vash was there) indicates that this is far from the first time this has happened.
• Older Than They Look: Elendira is over twenty years old but resembles a young child. Vash and Knives are the same. Both look to be in their twenties, and looked exactly the same twenty years ago. They turn out to be a hundred and fifty years old.
• Orphanage of Fear: Hopeland Orphanage. Although a nice enough place on its own, the Eye of Michael secretly uses it as a storeroom for test subjects.
• Please Wake Up: Vash begs this of Rollo/Monev, in an almost childish state of denial considering the one he's talking to was shot in the head, fell from at least a story up, and remained unmoving long enough for night to fall. This is in part because he has to work up to accepting how profoundly he's failed.
• Production Throwback: On the tin being used as an ash tray in Roberto and Meryl's car, Sonic the Mach Monkey makes a cameo, a character from another Nightow work. Also counts as a retroactive throwback, since Blood Blockade Battlefront (2009) was published after Trigun (1995), while Trigun Stampede (2023) aired after the anime adaptation of BBB (2015).
• Raised by the Community: Vash grew up on Ship Three after the Big Fall and embraces its crew as his family. Luida and Brad in particular are his adoptive parents in all but name.
• Reimagining the Artifact: In the manga and first anime, Wolfwood showing generosity to children lets Vash see he's a good man. This is mimicked by Wolfwood's debut in episode four, but it all turns out to be staged to endear Wolfwood to Vash's group with Zazie the Beast pretending to be a kid.
• The Reveal: At the end of episode seven, Vash turns away from asking for help from the ship's Plant to reveal his face is covered in the same glowing markings the Plant has. As Meryl's reaction confirms, it's because Vash himself is a humanoid Plant.
• Rule of Symbolism: Episodes 8-9 delve into Vash's past in the immediate aftermath of the crash, revealing that several pieces of his Iconic Outfit were gained during his experiences living on the surface. The survivors of Ship three granted him his red jacket upon officially welcoming him as a member after he saved their plant, whereas his gun and prosthetic arm were gained as a result of his second meeting with Nai, now going by 'Millions Knives'. The humans gifted him an item of sentimental and protective value after seeing the goodness in him, whereas his twin brother only maimed him and granted him weapons to hurt others with, despite caring just as fiercely about Vash in his own way.
• Sad Clown: Just like in the manga and first anime, Vash hides his immense pain under a goofy grin. Unlike in the manga and first anime, this is identified right at the start.
• Sand Worm: Giant worms function like this, tunnelling through the sand and ambushing prey from underneath. Despite being called a worm, it's more similar to an arthropodal whale.
• Shout-Out: An image of Sonic the monkey from Nightow's other work can be seen on Roberto's makeshift ashtray.
• Sequel Hook: Episode 12 ends with two scenes foreshadowing major future events that older fans of the series, especially those who have read the manga, will have some familiarity with, indicating Stampede intends on adapting them: First, a shot of Vash's amnesiac identity Eriks with one of his caretakers, Lina. Second, a transmission containing the voice of an individual named Chronica.
• Shoot the Dog: Wolfwood kills Monev despite Vash seemingly managing to get through to Rollo's old self. When Vash confronts him on this, Nicolas points out that Rollo was suffering in his current form and could only be put out of his misery... but he was also working on behalf of William Conrad to dispose of Rollo, who had been deemed a failed experiment.
• Shout-Out: In episode 7, one of the poses Bad Lads Gang does is the Ginyu Force pose.
• Shown Their Work: Characters exercising various skills are animated with reference to how they would do so in reality, with only a moderate amount of exaggeration to demonstrate superhuman competence. Vash, for instance, displays excellent trigger discipline, holds reins correctly when riding, and demonstrates proper form in melee combat.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift
  • After Vash is reawakened from his Mind Rape induced coma, his coat colors invert to black lined with red and his hair stands on end in a style reminiscent of his original trademark spiked design. His attitude also becomes more serious and confident, as he is determined to stop Knives with everything he has.
  • In the two year time skip after the destruction of July city, Meryl has swapped out her white and blue clothing ensemble for a gray shirt and brown slacks, and her gold earrings have been traded for silver ones. Her demeanor, unsurprisingly, has become more jaded.
• Sins of the Father:
  • Vash is banished from Jeneora Rock following Knives's rampage on the basis of Vash being Knives's brother and seemingly the reason why Knives showed up in the first place. Vash's quiet acceptance, to say nothing of the bounty he already has, indicates that he's been dealing with this mindset from people for a while. It's not simply that Knives is his brother, however; Vash also genuinely considers himself an accomplice to what Knives does.
  • Episode 9 reveals that Zazie sees no reason to trust humanity after Knives told them prior generations of humans consumed Earth's resources until the planet became uninhabitable, and then moved onto a new world to repeat the process. Knives calls humans as a species nothing but a parasitic race of Planet Looters, and believes wiping them out will protect No Man's Land and other worlds from their depredations. Meryl's reaction to Zazie revealing Earth's fate implies that most of the current generation born from survivors of the crashed colony ships are completely ignorant of it.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Just like in the manga and the first anime, Vash's idealism is contrasted against the harsh cruelty of the setting, with his attempts to do good undermined either by Million Knives's machinations or the very people he's trying to protect.
• Smarter Than They Look: Roberto De Niro is a drunkard who seems content to laze in the background, but he repeatedly correctly guesses the true character of multiple people, immediately identifying Vash as a Sad Clown who is hiding his true abilities and figuring out that Wolfwood is actually an assassin working directly for Knives to escort Vash safely. And Vash himself later demonstrates Wolfwood never fooled him in the first place.
• Smoking Is Cool: Nicholas D. Wolfwood smokes like a chimney. While idling his time away at one point, he completely litters the floor with cigarette butts.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Millions Knives never raises his voice, even as he uses his bladed chains to carve people up and spread destruction. His and Vash's second meeting after the crash demonstrates him to be a lot more expressive and emotive than the present day, particularly after Vash refuses to join him and after he's forced to cut off his twin's arm to save him, implying he developed this attitude in part to deal with his loneliness about being separated from the only other being he cares about. He loses his calm a few times, however, particularly towards the season's end.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: A flashback comes with sweet, wistful piano and string music, which continues as the flashback ends and plays on through Vash desperately fleeing for his life as Wolfwood begs the assassin pursuing him to stop.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • Episode 9 reveals that Rem's Heroic Sacrifice to eject Vash and Nai's escape pod from the crashing colony ships also enabled the other ships to eject their pods as well, derailing Nai's plan to destroy everybody on the other ships that weren't Plant carriers and allowing humanity to scratch out an existence on the planet's surface, albeit always on the brink of destruction without the aid of Plants. Nai, now calling himself Knives, has come to despise her for this (and for what he perceives as her human influence on his brother) despite trying to convince her to escape with him and Vash.
  • In episode 12 tiny little Meryl, who might be the character least informed about what the hell is going on, is the one to ruin Knives's plans simply because she wouldn't give up on Vash. Knives never factored her into the proceedings, barely even knowing she existed right up until the moment Vash breaks free. Appropriately, he did so once she invoked his memories of Rem. It was Zazie who brought her to July, which means her involvement could be considered the product of a bug.
• Stealth Prequel: Episode 12 of the first season reveals that everything beforehand has been a prelude to the destruction of the city of July, the incident that would earn Vash his $$60 billion bounty and define his character by the present-day events of the manga and 1998 anime. The key difference is that members of Trigun's main supporting cast, specifically Meryl and Wolfwood, who either were infants or hadn't even been born yet when the event had occurred in the original canon, are present to witness it. As a result, the events portrayed in the first 12 episodes of Stampede act as a combined prequel and re-telling of story beats from the manga and anime. Appropriately, episode 12 has the exact same title of the prologue chapter of the manga: High Noon at July. It also resets the episode counter to 0.
• A Storm Is Coming: The third episode opens with a radio broadcast warning of an oncoming sandstorm and a shot of someone walking through the desert towards Jeneora Rock. The traveller is Millions Knives, Vash's genocidal twin brother, on his way to a family reunion. He makes his entrance bringing a storm with him a little under halfway through the episode.
• Strapped to an Operating Table: Whatever Knives's plans are, he needs people with abilities normal humans don't have, and has his cult abducting and altering children with forced drug regimens and surgery. The families (if they're around) are called on to offer their children as sacrifices.
• Terraform: Luida of Project SEEDS aims to transform the desert world of No Man's Land into a green planet.
• Time Skip: Following the July incident in Episode 12, the series jumps to two years after the incident occurs.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Just like the manga and anime, Vash follows a code not to kill anyone. In this version, he already considers himself personally responsible for every death in the Fall, and is determined to add no more to that tally.
• Ugly Hero, Good-Looking Villain: Downplayed in the sense that Vash is by no stretch of the imagination ugly, but he's an amputee covered in horrific, painful-looking scars beneath his coat. Knives, by contrast, looks the peak of physical wholeness and health, something he's not afraid to show off.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Despite Vash helping Jeneora Rock's inhabitants time and again, including saving their town from a bombardment of rockets, they turn their guns on him after finding out about his bounty. Tragically justified as the town is in a state of decline and needs the money to support their children. Also outright called out by both Meryl and Father Nebraska, with the latter asking Vash why he would even bother protecting them after they turned on him so easily. Rosa unfortunately falls into this again after her son Tonis gets injured in Knives's rampage, angrily telling Vash to leave and never come back due to learning of his relation to Knives despite him helping her get out the town before it collapsed.
• Variable-Length Chain: Knives's bladed chains are shown extending thousands of feet, able to wrap around the entirety of Jeneora Rock several times. Justified as the "links" aren't actually physically connected.
• The Voice: The Stinger of the season finale is hearing a mysterious voice transmission in space. We learn that one of the two people talking is named Chronica, and that she is an Independent Plant.
• Walking Disaster Area: It's not for no reason that Vash is called the Humanoid Typhoon. So far, almost every last one of the settlements he's travelled to for any length of time has been destroyed as a direct result of his presence. The only one that wasn't was already deserted.
• Wham Episode: Two specific episodes in the first season:
  • The first two episodes introduce Vash, the reporters, and some Starter Villains. They have a cartoonish tone where nobody really gets hurt, and Vash is a harmlessly goofy man hiding superhuman competence whose pacifist ideals lead to the situation improving. Then the third episode, "Bright Light, Shine Through the Darkness", introduces Millions Knives. From that point onward the series grows significantly darker, more graphically violent, and more disturbing, as well as more directly challenging Vash's beliefs. It even goes so far as to destroy the town the first two episodes took place in, as if to ensure there can be no safe harbour anymore.
  • Episode 12, High Noon at July, is a major one, as it reveals that all the past episodes beforehand have built up to this continuity's rendition of the monumental July Incident and that Meryl and Wolfwood, two characters who were never involved in it in both the original manga and anime continuities, are there to witness it. To hammer in that the episodes thus far were really made to be a Stealth Prequel, the episode title card is labelled with #0 rather than #12, and shares its name with the prologue chapter of the manga. The conclusion of the incident also results in a two-year Time Skip that greatly sets up major plot elements and characters from both Trigun and Maximum that were previously absent in earlier episodes, including Milly Thompson, Vash's amnesiac identity of Eriks in the care of Lina, and Chronica.
• Wutai: The City of July, thanks to its prosperity, is depicted as a Chinese-themed Cyberpunk-esque metropolis, with neon signs, paper lanterns and skyscrapers everywhere. This has resulted in an alternative phonetic spelling of the city as JuLai, with corresponding Chinese characters.
• You Don't Look Like You: Most of the characters have been redesigned from their original looks. Vash is missing his iconic spikey hair, and his distinct red coat with Too Many Belts has been traded for a long, hooded, red military jacket. Meryl wears a jacket instead of a cape and shorts instead of a skirt. Wolfwood looks the least different, but his features are more youthful and conventionally attractive. While not strictly a prequel, Stampede depicts a version of the events that lead up to Lost July, an incident that occurred in the backstory of both the manga and 1998 anime. Their different appearances therefore, were intentionally designed from the angle of making them seem younger.
• Younger and Hipper: While nearly every character has been redesigned to be sleeker and a little more in-line with current anime aesthetics, the major protagonists Vash, Meryl, and Wolfwood all look and behave distinctly younger than their previous incarnations. This is particularly true of Meryl whose character has been the most altered, being a young, inexperienced reporter, compared to her original characterization as an experienced insurance agent with a cape full of derringers. It becomes evident by episode 12 that this is because Stampede's story is being told as a Stealth Prequel, combining elements from the first part of the Trigun manga and 1998 anime with elements from its initial backstory. Episode 12 ends on the destruction of the city of July, while in the original story it was stated this event happened many decades prior. In other words, this version of Vash is literally being depicted as younger in terms of major events in his life. As for Meryl, it's apparent that the story thus far has served as a journey for the audience to watch as she grows into being more aligned with her previous counterparts.
• Younger Than They Look:
  • Rollo, this anime's version of Monev the Gale, would be in his late twenties at most in the present, given that he was a young child when Vash first encountered him twenty years ago, but his freakish musculature and deformed face make him look significantly older. It's shown in flashbacks that he was horribly mutated into this form by William Conrad's experiments when he was still a child.
  • Nicholas D. Wolfwood already had some of this in the manga, looking about a decade older than he actually was, but it's taken even further here, where the results of William Conrad's experiments transform him from a child into a grown man in less than a year.

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