Oh god, my sincerest apologies ^^;;;
Trigun is a space Western and a thinly veiled allegory. It’s about a pair of twins, Knives Georg and Belts Georg, who are ideological opposites (except when they aren’t; they’re both extremists). This would be fine, except they are also insanely powerful interdimensional biological generators/space angels, making their conflict one between essentially minor gods. So they make their trauma Everybody’s Problem. One of them (Knives Georg) has set himself up as a cult leader with the intent of obliterating the human race because humans keep other, less independent, interdimensional biological generators/space angels captive as tools somewhere between Star Trek replicators and batteries. He gives this several goes, first by sabotaging humanity’s fleet of spaceships and crashing everyone onto a barren planet without resources in a painfully obvious reference to the expulsion from Eden/fall from Heaven, then by making his brother blow up a city, and lastly by stealing as many of the dependent generator angels as he can and trying to kill humanity via depravation and war crimes. His brother (Belts Georg) is a pacifist gunman who has internalized his trauma differently and does not want to obliterate humanity. In fact, he wants to stop his brother doing that, so he makes multiple badly-planned attempts to end the conflict until one of them sticks. He also lives on the run as a reviled, hated outlaw and a legend after Knives Georg made him blow up a city. The story is one long, intense interrogation of pacifism as an ideal, the consequences of taking or sparing lives, and answers the age-old questions: if nuclear bombs were sentient and afraid of exploding, could/would they love us? And: what would a traumatized angel do with a gun?
Come for the aesthetic, stay for the blatant biblical references and the gut-wrenching tragedy.
And yes, there are, in fact, three guns. One’s a species of Colt (.45 Long Colt?? I do not remember off the top of my head) or the bastard offspring of a Colt and a cinder block, the other is a prosthetic arm, and the last one is a flesh arm that’s actually a biblically inaccurate angelic energy-missile launcher. (OR they are two matching Colts and a spiritual bazooka with a bonus prosthetic arm gun. Depends on the version. As of now, Stampede (2023) only has two guns. The third is much anticipated.)
There are three versions of the story, too. The manga (personally my canon of choice, explains nothing and yeets events at you, incomprehensible fight scenes, emotionally devastating in ways the other two cannot even begin to touch), the 1998 anime (very good, made while the manga was still being written, has its own thing going on, suffers terribly from 1990s anime-itis aka bizarre sexism), and the 2023 anime (very good, mix-and-match canon that turns the timeline into pretzels, suffers from 12-episodes-long-itis with too much happening and not enough time to explore things).
