The Big Guy and I have been watching the Trigun complete DVD boxset that I bought him for his birthday. As an aside, I highly recommend this particular anime if you can afford it. In terms of story, it's one of the better ones out there.
The hero of Trigun is a man they call Vash the Stampede the Humanoid Typhoon. At least until the middle of the DVD where he was renamed Vash the Stampede the First Human to Ever Be Called a Human Disaster. He has a 60 billion double dollar reward on his head at the moment. Where Vash goes, towns tend to be turned into rubble and people die. I rather like Vash, actually. Despite the bajillions of double dollars in damage and the thousands of people who have died, Vash never killed anyone. He has gone out of his way to make sure people wouldn't get killed. He's the fastest gun in the universe, but he never shoots anyone.
Most of the people he meets don't share his views on the sanctity of all life. The bad guys kill, innocent bystanders die, people are murdered. Vash has an enemy whose sole mission in life is to destroy all human life on the planet. He sends out hunters who kill others whil trying to kill Vash.
The Big Guy, about halfway through the DVD set, suddenly says that Vash is just as bad as the bad guys are by refusing to kill the bad guys. In the first episode, Vash met a bounty hunter that killed a bunch of his own men in an effort to catch Vash. The same bounty hunter popped up a few episodes later and killed more people. The Big Guy says that Vash is just as guilty of their murder as the bounty hunter who killed them because, in the beginning, when he first met the guy, Vash had the opportunity to kill him and knowledge that this man was a man who would kill others with no compunction.
The deeper we got into the story, the more frequently that people Vash had spared returned to kill off innocent bystanders or hostages. The Big Guy---with a lot of righteous disgust---says that Vash is just as guilty of those murders because the lives he spared took other lives.
Of course, he sees this only with his own Western eyes with his black and white sense of what's right and wrong coupled with his lack of respect for the sanctity of life coloring the way he sees things. I don't see Vash the cartoon character letting murderers loose to murder again. I see an exploration of something very Buddhist. Things are different from that perspective.
I knew a Buddhist temple once. They were out in the fields near Salinas, California and they were where my Buddhist teachers went to worship. Because they lived in the fields, the temple was overrun with mice. This presented a huge problem: they couldn't kill the mice. One of the monks brought a cat into the temple to deal with the mice and this caused a huge debate. Was the cat's monk responsible for the deaths of the mice? He introduced a cat into the temple where it followed its natural instincts to kill and eat mice. If he had not done this single action---bringing the cat to the temple---these mice would not have been killed. However, a cat is a mouse's natural predator. The cat is not committing evil by doing what it naturally does, that is, kill and eat mice. Sinec it's the natural order of things for a cat to kill mice, then the monk is not responsible for those deaths.
I watch Vash the Stampede do anything and everything in his power---from completely humiliating himself to taking bullets and nearly dying for others---to avoid someone else's murder and I think of these monks. To them, this is very simple. A man should not kill for any reason. They do not eat meat and they do not kill pests. It would be unthinkable for a Buddhist monk to murder a murderer to prevent the possibility of future murders. To this perspective, killing is wrong. A human being does not have the right to choose whose life has more value and a human being does not have the right to take another's life.
The Big Guy does not agree. He thinks that people have the right to decide who gets to live and who gets to die based on their actions. To him, it's not only perfectly reasonable to murder a murderer, it's unthinkable not to because by allowing this murderer to live, one is responsible for any future murders this person might make.
I can see both sides of this issue clearly. It's the basis on which a lot of our decisions regarding criminal activity and criminal intent are created. Is all life sacred? Can someone forfeit their right to live through their own actions, such as murdering others? If a man knowingly lets a murderer live and that murderer goes and kills again, is the man responsible for those deaths?
Anyway. Philosophical discussions aside, Trigun is just plain good anime. And Vash the Stampede is a total hottie for a scrawny guy.
