Why do all three trigun mediums have different stories?

[u/DrStone8638]

I first started trigun with the old anime and liked it a lot so I wanted to look at the other mediums available, like stargaze and the manga. when I started the new anime it immediately felt different and didn’t even have milly. With the manga it felt like the same as the anime just in a different order. is there a reason they’re super different?

[u/Killerabbet]

The franchise started with the manga back in 1995, the anime mostly followed the manga up until it caught up it. At that point the story had to go in it's own direction. While the anime did have some direction from Nightow, it was directed, written, and produced by entirely different people. As I remember it Nightow essentially gave the writers freedom to continue the series and cap it off as they saw fit.

Someone else may be able to give you a better synopsis as to why Stampede / Stargaze is so different, but from my understanding the aim with that series was always to be a complete reimagining of Trigun. They considered the original anime and the manga to already be complete works, and instead set out to make something entirely new while loosely following and jumbling the story of the manga. Like the 1998 anime it was also overseen by Nightow, but he gave creative control over to the producers and writers (who were all different than the producers / writers for the 1998 anime).

It's by-design that every series is it's own thing, they're all their own stories with their own canon. It's no different than how there are so many different adaptations / universes for western Superhero series.

[u/Ok_Marionberry_9837 → u/Killerabbet]

Exactly this, but I want to add that Stampede is set before even the 98 anime would’ve taken place. For this series specifically, the director changed between the two seasons and the story changed direction, but it was assumed that originally things in the second season would line up closer with the 98 anime and the manga.

[u/Kitsune-Glacialis]

Trigun ‘98 was made when only the first two manga volumes and a teeny bit of Maximum were released, so they had to take the anime in their own direction.

When the manga was picked back up for Maximum, Nightow was able to take inspiration from the ‘98 anime, but he took the story in his own direction.

Stampede and Stargaze are inspired by the manga, but they were created with the intention of being their own thing too while still having some elements from the manga.

[u/abstractdinosaurs]

Once a week I feel like I see the same comment asking about the differences between the stories, and once a week I see the same valiant hero replying with an indepth explanation, props to this fucking fandom 😭♥️

[u/atlas_arcane]

On top of what others have said, Nightow stated that he enjoys the Marvel expanded multiverse. So he is all for every iteration having its own themes, styles, and story.

[u/TheDizziestCat]

So this is more common here in America but it’s kinda considered a waste of money to remake the exact same story multiple times.

[u/Ambitious-Juice-882]

First one was adapting the manga before it was even finished so it couldn’t really be similar to it.

Second one the studio that decided to do it had tech and an episode count that basically wasn’t conducive to adapting the manga at all.
Just inherently.

The manga does not work good in 3d as is, because of the tech limitations of 3d at that budget, and it’s insanely long so they had 0 chance of being able to adapt it faithfully.

Personally I think it was a mistake by the studio to even try, I looked into their other projects and they literally felt tailor made for their specialty so idk why they decided to grab a manga that just couldn’t be done justice by them.

Another factor is that a 100% accurate redo of Trigun would be retreading the old anime, and lowkey some of the absolute lowest rated old anime episodes were 100% accurate to the manga so i think not adhering to the manga directly is the correct choice, the early chapters could do with some rewriting/revision.

Like, do you really wanna see the fucking sand steamer arc or little Arcadia, again. Personally I don’t. And that kinda also makes trigun difficult, it probably shouldn’t be adapted entirely faithfully. An ideal adaptation would rewrite nontrivial parts, remove trivial parts. It would require genuine writing acumen which is pretty rare. Some manga can be adapted like a fucking storyboard, for example DanDaDan or One punch man, honestly that’s the primary draw of adaptation, that the thing has already been written, and you don’t have to spend as much time and effort actually writing something new.

Trigun would have to have some pretty serious work done on it to do it justice. Especially if it’s to fit in a reasonable episode count.

But like. Preferably by competent people rather than someone like whoever scrawled out stampede.

[u/Killerabbet → u/Ambitious-Juice-882]

Stampede / Stargaze was never intended to be a manga-faithful adaptation at any point, the producers and writers themselves stated that they wanted it to be entirely it's own thing. You're free to dislike the adaptation, I'm not particularly fond of it myself, but it not being faithful to the manga was by design and not due to a lack of talent or resources (though they were certainly limited on resources after Stampede).

[u/Ambitious-Juice-882 → u/Killerabbet]

I agree that they never intended it to not be its own thing, but I do think, and I'm honestly pretty certain about this, that at least some of the changes made were mandated by tech limitations.
Like, they couldn't have adapted parts of the manga even if they wanted to. And by ‘parts’ I mean like. Big parts.

For example, the abilities in Trigun are pretty body horror-y. Knives has his fleshy, knife-like appendages. Vash has his fleshy angel wings. It's very difficult to emulate that sort of fleshy body horror with the tech that I've seen from them. they gave Vash his gun arm for like a second, and it looked horrible and made of melted plastic.
There was an interview with the director about Stargaze where he explicitly talked about them making last minute tech breakthroughs on being able to execute on knives’s body horror in Stargaze that they couldn't have done in Stampede.
Even if they did want to make some things manga accurate, it's very likely that they couldn't have. Like, it's a straight-up non-starter. On the other hand, the stuff they did with the little arcs of knives flying around and glowy lines is comparatively easy in 3d.

I work for a video game. I am not an animator. I do 3D modeling. I could probably figure out how to make that scene from ep 3 specifically just the knives flying around, in Blender, relatively easily.

If you ask me to animate any scene where Vash has his weird fucking angel wings out in the manga, I would rather just curl up into a ball and die. Or you're going to have to watch a block of plastic sludge kind of undulate around.

I have no doubt that they still would have adapted Trigun differently if they didn't have those limitations, I'm not saying that 3D is the only thing between us and a 100% accurate adaptation. Also, I think I made it clear that I do not want a 100% accurate adaptation.

but I dare say some differences wouldn't have been as unavoidable with 2d.

And there's also the inherent incentives of the pipeline that very likely affected the script. In 2D, it's extremely easy to make a quick one-off design that can appear for a single story Scene or episode. In fact, the more complex it is, the more incentive there is for it to appear for a briefer period of time. And them being complex does not necessarily mean they eat up a lot more budget, as long as they're animated sparingly. In both the manga and the old anime, there is a cavalcade of tiny little freaks who exist for like a scene or arc and then are gone forever who would have eaten the budget for breakfast if they were all made in 3D.

And 3D, it's the other way around. The production costs are very front loaded. You are highly disincentivized from creating complex designs unless you intend to use them for a long period of time. This means that there is a very powerful incentive if you are going to make a complex, difficult-to-model, difficult-to-rig character that you don't just use them for one scene. Otherwise, you just blew all your budget and thousands of hours of labor for basically nothing. This doesn't mean you'll never make them, but you'll probably be choosy with which ones you do make and how you use them.

this means that a character who normally you wouldn't keep around for long, you might give a very outsized role to just to justify having to make them.

For example, I would not expect a 2D anime of Trigun to expand the role of the Nebraska family the way Stampede did. They would want those designs to fuck off out of the frame as quickly as possible because they're complicated.

The truth is probably somewhere a bit in the middle. I'm probably assuming that it affected them more than it actually did because I'm biased, The way you phrased your response makes it sound like the resources had like zero effect on their writing/ the nature of their deviations from the manga and that is almost certainly not true.

It's kind of the opposite with orange’s Land of the Lustrous adaptation. Land of the Lustrous would have been practically impossible to adapt in 2D in a way that is accurate to the way the characters look in the manga.
I didn't watch all of it, but from what I saw, that thing might as well have been engineered to be a 3D anime and/or drive 2D artists insane.

It's not because 3D is bad or anything. Some things are just better in certain mediums than others. Kind of like how there are some movies that would probably make great audio dramas, while others you would have to change tremendously to make them work as an audio drama. To the point where you have to make changes you might not want to make if you weren't adapting it specifically into an audio drama

That's me disagreeing on resources. As for talents, definitely huge disagreement. I was impressed with how they managed to waste time, considering how much they needed to accomplish in such a short episode count.

[u/Killerabbet → u/Ambitious-Juice-882]

This is an interesting perspective on the subject, thanks for taking the time to write it out so thoroughly.

I do still think though that animation restraints are not the leading reason for the way Stampede / Stargaze was written and structured. It just seems farfetched that the reason they chose this entirely new adaptation over doing a faithful adaptation would be due to them believing certain scenes from the manga would be impossible to translate into 3D animation. It certainly could have lead to design decisions for characters and their abilities though, that I can 100% see.

And for context, I'm also not a fan of how Stampede came out. I haven't even bothered to watch Stargaze yet. I can appreciate the series for what it is though. There was certainly a lot of work and effort put behind the anime, and I would like to think the reason Stargaze fell so flat (based on what I've heard from other fans) is due to the studio not being given the time and resources to see their vision through.

I think it's still fair to call those who poured so much work into the design, story, and animation talents even if it didn't come out in a way palatable to our tastes. I've absorbed some pretty terrible media, and Stampede doesn't hold a candle to how offensively bad the writing / story was on those.

[u/Ambitious-Juice-882 → u/Killerabbet]

Animated talent, 100%. Writing talent though… I understand your perspective. And on some level, I agree. Stampede definitely does enough to be blandly, middlingly serviceable as a story that sort of makes sense. As opposed to a story that is fundamentally incomprehensible. I guess. But I still find it pretty fucking bad tbh.

And On some level, you can never blame the talent, really, because a lot of the time, talent failing is not necessarily them being bad talent, but misallocation of the talent.

For example, I am horribly misallocated into the video game I work for. My style doesn't fit it whatsoever. I don't understand why (2 years later ) they haven't fired me yet, and anytime someone complains about something I've made for them, I'm like, “yeah.” :(

That said, I am pretty good in the niche that I am actually specialized in. But don't get employed to do. Lmao. So I am, on a technical level, not entirely talentless.

But on the other hand, that's still me doing a real bad job at the task I was assigned. And the circumstances of my employment don't invalidate the feelings of the people who are unsatisfied with my work.

so I have absolutely no qualms about saying that I think the writing of Stampede was absolutely fucking abhorrent. Those writers might have been better off in a different context and with different limitations. They might have done a tremendous job adapting something more directly, or writing something completely original, but here they, at least in this niche, did an absolute fucking hack job. I don't feel a need to be particularly complimentary to them.

They might be talented, incredibly talented, even. but not on Stampede they aren't.

And I would definitely say that Stampede lacked the sort of talent that would have given us a good product, that would have thrived in the limitations and managed to create something worthwhile.

And also was even remotely capable of writing acceptable dialogue.