Trigun SpOilEr #2 ~plants

OK, here's me being not-very-useful again!

Pre-existing water on Gunsmoke? I think so, otherwise the water veins don't make sense and the Seeds guys shouldn't have even considered landing there in the first place, with they were doing although they ended up deciding against it. Wolfwood (the m2a one, not the character, I don't need medicating) tells me that in the manga the plants produce the water, as well as everything else useful and consumable.

What are the plants. Now here's a thing. They are human creations. They are (mostly) somewhat humanoid and they 'live' in big lightbulby things (where you can't see their somewhat humanoid forms most of the time) and they produce almost everything the humans need to live on Gunsmoke. 'Plant product' comes out of the lightbulby things through chutes and it looks like amorphous blobby stuff. What I want to know is - what did humans create the plants out of? What were their raw materials and did they have the right to 'create' something like that out of them? There's a very nasty feel about creating a 'device' that is sapient, and smarter than you to boot, and then exploiting it unto death. Smacks of the worst kind of slavery.

MAJOR SPOILER FOR THOSE WHO DON'T KNOW THE MANGA AND INTEND TO CATCH UP WITH IT ONE DAY....











Vash and Knives aren't the first plants to have been 'born' fully humanoid. Earlier on a girl plant turns up like they did. The Seeds people experiment on her so relentlessly that she gets sick and dies young and horribly. In the manga Rem is the only one who knows Vash and Knives origins and keeps it a secret so that the same fate doesn't befall them.

How many ships destroyed? Dunno. Only one is left able to fly. Lots?

I think Vash is aspiring to be a geranium.

 

And can they multiply with humans? Who can tell. In the manga, as far as I can tell, Knives is revived after the July incident by being 'reborn', fully adult (!) from another plant. So they have wombish attributes... Since there's only been one girl plant (now dead) and two boy plants so far it's a bit hard to see how the lightbulb-independent plants are going to reproduce if they're not human-compatible. The ones inside the bulbs all seem to be female and to produce little plant-buds on their backs.

Sorry I'm so unclear on what's going on. I don't have all of the manga. Some of it I've seen the pictures and read translation, some I've read the translations and not seen the pictures, some I've looked at the pictures and made attempts at translating myself (limited success) and some I haven't seen either pictures or translations. Besides this problem, it's not like Nightow exactly spells things out for you anyway!

I'm a bit dubious about the plants-and-humans-in-harmony scenario. As Knives points out, if you save all the butterflies the spiders will die of starvation. The humans on Gunsmoke have to exploit the plants to survive. They could be a bit nicer about it though. There's a very nasty scene in the manga where they torture a dying plant to get the last bit of energy out of it. In front of Knives, dakara - no more personnel left at that installation.

 

Update.

If I have this right, according to Trigun Maximum #7 as translated by Sumire-ya, the tally of the Seeds ships is:
802 destroyed.
74 crashed.
124 lost.
I'm not sure what 'lost' means in this case.

 

I was hoping that at the end of Trigun that rain would start pouring down everywhere and oceans be created... but I guess I can't expect it to be like Dune @_@x


And let me get this straight, do all of the bulbs seen in Trigun contain plant creatures which give off energy? I remember in episode 26 Knives started to make one really power up, like he was mind controlling something inside of it...