Meryl the Witness, or I Miss Milly
There’s this Archetype in fiction all over the world called “the Witness”. This is a character that exists to observe the events and eventually relay the story to others.
In Trigun Stampede, this is Meryl’s main purpose. She is explicitly shown to be a naive cub reporter, which is why her assigned mentor Roberto keeps calling her “newbie”. But despite his best efforts to rein her in, she continually gets too close to dangerous situations. She becomes emotionally invested in helping Vash, and Roberto is unable to get her to stop risking her life.
The Witness is an audience surrogate. We’re supposed to look to Meryl to learn how the world of Stampede works and how we’re supposed to feel about what is happening. So when Meryl gets more invested, we feel more invested.
Meryl has multiple roles in ‘98, but she’s still partly the Witness. She’s also Milly’s mentor, the Voice of Reason, and I’m sure I’m missing other things. But one of the reasons I wish Milly was around is because of her ability to Witness the Witness, gently but firmly telling Meryl that she has biases in her story, and blindspots regarding her own motives.
Also, Milly is a little ray of sunshine and a queen.
* Edited because I spelled Milly wrong the whole time.