It’s played for laughs, but I really do love Emily’s character choice to have Vesper be stuck in this weird state of self-grief over her undeath, specifically at the stage of denial. Especially when paired with her ability to sense fetters/the dead.
She is so specifically tuned to find and know and understand death, who the restful dead are and who the restless are, and she wanted to be a zoologist which is just a blanket study of life right beneath the bigger umbrella that is biology. And yet, because she is squarely in the middle of that as an undead being, she can’t apply a goddamn thing from either knowledge set. So instead she quite literally jams them together going, I know death and life and animals. Clearly, I am half-bat.
Except she died and came back. Her heart’s not beating and she cannot accept that, won’t even entertain the idea because if she came back wrong where does that leave her? Especially if she came back feeling the exact same way she always did, loving animals and being biased towards herpetology. Even the name Bat Child is fucked. She’s not a bat or a child. She’s forty years old and stuck in her twenty year old college student body! But she can’t be taken seriously as an adult because she got turned just shy of looking like she has any life experience. So… she gets treated like a child, and she’s less than human, and that makes her Bat Child.
Fucking chef’s kiss, no notes.
Emily Axford has a gift for creating some of theeeeeee most fucked up characters and packaging them in the funniest boxes only for you to open said box and go “I need to lie down for several days.”
