i debated whether or not i wanted to reply to this bc in all honesty i'm very fatigued on both sides LOL. i think this is an issue with the internet being as big as it is which is even if it feels like you're writing something on a "personal" blog, as long as it's public it's not private. so people who hate stampgaze get tired of seeing people talk about it, and people who like stampgaze are tired of seeing hate for it. it's like that zoo tycoon image of over 200 orcas in a tank and one of the statuses is "orca #167 is unhappy" "suck it up orca #167" the internet is now a cramped orca tank where it’s much easier to run into what you don’t want to see and harder to curate what you do.
i personally prefer to keep my fandom blogs to things i like, and i prefer to save kvetching to my private accounts/one on one convos with friends.

i will say before i get into my own personal opinion, i’m not surprised that stampgaze is the way it is when nightow said he would never approve of an anime that was 1-1 like his manga. we were never going to get trigun maximum the anime. whereas some creators are only comfortable with their work being adapted if they have something close to full veto control, nightow had the exact opposite where he was watching the episodes knowing as little as anyone else.

anyways all of that being said…maybe i had more fun with stampgaze when i realized “oh, this is fanfic. this is orange’s trigun fanfic.” this is dangling keys in front of a baby’s face. is it enriching? no. am i entertained? yes.

i love to watch movies and for the last 3 years it’s been my goal to watch 365 new movies every year. since 2023 i’ve watched over 1,225 new movies so far. i like art films. i like nuanced movies. i like movies with complex emotions that rip my heart. but i also like corny flicks. sometimes i like nicholas cage’s face/off or the rock. i think it’s important that not everything has to be good or High Art, sometimes it just has to be entertaining and fun.

do i agree with everything that happened in stampgaze? no. do i like everything that happened in stampgaze? no. but did i have fun and was i entertained? yes. and sometimes that’s all i need.

98 and trigun maximum equally for different reasons! i have very fond memories of 98 because it was my first intro to trigun...one of my dear friends got bagels and rosé for us to bingewatch the entire thing. a completely separate event was when my bf and i first started dating for one of our first couple's trips away, when it was too hot for us to explore outside the wilderness we stayed inside and watched trigun 98. it was also the first time i saw them cry, when ww died. rather funny ww ended up being their favorite. so i have sentimental reasons attached to 98 with people i love.

trigun maximum broke me and is still one of the best manga i've ever read. i knew it would hit me but even knowing what was coming didn't prepare me for the first time experience of reading it.

sorry haha, this is a long answer to a short question. maybe it's a cop out to have two top favs but my reasons for liking them are so vastly different it feels fair.

it's hard to say which i prefer because even when making aus like where milly is a werewolf, or where wolfwood is alive, i still try to stay close to what feels like the character's "voice", if that makes sense...i do a lot of daydreaming. most of my ideas come from imagining if i saw this folding out in front of me like i was watching a movie, would this feel true to the character's actions?

i think the nice thing about trigun is in a way, it has many canon alternate universes, so it feels nice to explore my own scenarios. as much as i like canon it can be very sad, and sometimes i don't always want sad. dealing with real life can be stressful enough. sometimes i want to explore scenarios where wolfwood is alive, where things could have gone differently. i think nightow encourages as much considering he said in an interview that if you're sad about wolfwood dying, he's alive in your creations of him. he wants you to make what you want to make!

so i guess the answer is: it depends on the day! i follow where my ideas and daydreaming take me.

not in a way either anticipated...meryl is a very awkward combination of chatty/running her mouth but also very hard to pin down about her actual feelings. and milly is very forthright when she wants to be but also won't push someone-like how when vash puts his facade back up in the jail, she plays clueless. she's very good at acting clueless and making others think she's clueless.

getting together would happen after awhile of traveling and certainly doing things that feel adjacent to things you'd do in a relationship but without that label attached. it's interesting because with a lot of my ships i don't necessarily see them "asking" someone out or getting together in a traditional sense because they are under very unusual circumstances. also, even though meryl and milly get close i do think milly would have a period of time towards the beginning of their travels of not knowing if meryl is into women, or anyone at all for that matter LOL. it would take time for her to realize that meryl wasn't just being weird or flustered around her because she's easily worked up.

milly would think she might need to be the one to take the lead when meryl takes her by surprise again. probably when they have downtime at a hotel at the end of the night, meryl asks milly if she ever thought about traveling with someone else. like a man or someone. milly says not really, does meryl think of that sort of that thing? meryl says not really, but well, despite their life of traveling they're not getting any younger. a lot of people don't stay in this profession because of how there's no time to "settle down". milly comes from a big family she loves, meryl always assumed this was a temporary position for her.
meryl probably realizes due to her nerves giving her an extra edge of painful self awareness that she's prattling on, and that this is all a very long and drawn out way of saying that the thought of milly traveling with someone else feels very painful in a way she can't place but she's steeling herself for that eventual reality.
i think milly realizes this is the closest she's going to get to a confession from meryl LOL. and just says "well i have no intention of that because i like you and want to stay with you" which probably makes meryl short circuit from how instant and forthcoming milly is (not the first time.)

very saccharine yes i know but they really do feel like a romcom couple so something very sweet and cute seems fitting. takes a long time to happen but once it's talked about it's very instantaneous.

the time when wolfwood and vash were traveling together for years in trigun maximum...maybe not the most exciting thing but maybe that's why i like it, the build up of their emotions and time spent growing closer together. there’s a few i think of, such as:

• sharing a bed together. i think wv wouldn’t mind sharing a bed before they develop feelings for pure practicality. they don’t have much money, it’s a rundown in, both of them are used to taking what they can get. conversely, i think maybe it only starts To feel odd when they begin to develop feelings. ww immediately feeling like he’s taking advantage of an innocent situation to look at vash too long, trying not to feel like he’s some secret scumbag for keeping these feelings bottled, as though telling vash would make it any better. i think vash’s shame would be different LOL. he might sneak a longer peek but it’s because oh he’ll never doom a human to falling in love with him/staying with him so this is nothing and 50 years from now he’ll be over it. :)

• showering. just by nature of NML being a wasteland i’d imagine showering is a luxury. also ww thinks vash can get stinky so he’d probably encourage him to shower when it’s available. i’m sure it becomes comforting to both of them, not a daily ritual, but a ritual that’s nice when the time arises.

• vash spooning wolfwood. i do like wolfwood spooning vash, but there’s something so sweet to me to imagine vash cradling wolfwood’s head, or wolfwood falling asleep on vash’s lap. he didn’t really have a childhood, and even if he wouldn’t know how to articulate it, i think wolfwood would like having a small moment where he feels like he can be a kid. he can put his guard down and feel someone else is looking out for him.