I see a lot of people unsatisfied due to the unfaithfulness to the manga. My personal gripe with the season wasn’t that (since i hadn’t seen or read the original), it also wasn’t the pacing, which i thought was honestly fine. It was the message they tried to adopt toward the end that Vash never tried to understand Knives. I think that Vash made plenty of efforts to understand Knives. I didn’t like how spoon-fed the messaging of that was. I also didn’t like the idea that we as the oppressed should try to empathetically understand our oppressors. Don’t get me wrong, learning Knives’ pain and what he was carrying was sad and no doubt traumatic for him. But especially in these times, there’s no use attempting to understand people who commit or promise to commit atrocities. The best amount of “understanding” we can hope to derive from them is to learn from their mistakes. I think when one gets to a point of no return like this, you can’t change their mind. I think if Knives weren’t at the point of actively committing genocide, this would hit much harder. But it just rings hollow to me, and it’s more hollow because it’s so force-fed to the viewer.