To keep riffing on my Riche thoughts for a moment, it seems significant to me that the first time we see her really step into the action in some way other than asking for help, her contribution is via acting. And specifically acting in the arc themed around the idea of "the self" and "personality" (in addition to social structures) as performances.
Furthermore, despite not being the performative/theatrical type in daily life, Riche turns out to be a pretty decent actress! Especially compared to Noé's stilted performance, which Mochijun places her in direct contrast with.
This is a somewhat. conspicuous character trait to establish at this particular point in time.
Shifting over to pure speculation, if I'm right about something Bad happening to Dante during this arc (which I realize is a really big if), I'm fascinated by the prospect of what might happen with Riche afterwards. If things do go that way, there's no way Johann's going to carry on business as usual in the aftermath, which means that poor Riche will suddenly be the only one left from our original dhampir trio.
If something like that does happen, I'd love to see Riche step into a more plot-relevant and leaderly role. The younger dham kids (assuming Mochijun doesn't go on another orphan-killing spree) are going to need her to step up and continue what she, Dante, and Johann have already been doing for them. They'll need a leader and protector and someone to interface with dangerous outsiders like Machina for them. And Vanitas will also need a new primary information broker. Who better to fill those roles?
And going back to the whole "Riche's apparently a decent actor" bit, given how thus far she's one of the only characters that doesn't put on any sort of affectation or cling to any denial to hide her "true self," it makes me wonder what that latent theatrical competence might be put toward in the future. She hasn't been using her ability to act for much up until now, so why draw her into the spotlight and establish that skill? To me, the obvious answer is that it's establishing something that will become key for Riche later.
If she does have to step in and start to fill Dante's bigger shoes, the ability to act and put on the type of protective mask that she's never needed before would do her a lot of good.
Now that we've gotten four of them, I think I have a much better understanding of what Mochijun is cooking with this door series. It's all about emotional honesty—how each character interfaces with their interior self and how they do or do not share that self with the outside world.
Mémoire 64—Dominique
Domi's door is closed, but she's poised to knock as she looks back nervously at the reader.
For a long time, Dominique has been actively repressing most of what you might call her "true self." She's deeply traumatized and struggles with her self worth, and she's coped with those troubles first by trying to become her dead twin brother, then by crafting a theatrical, de Sade-ified version of "herself" to playact as. Her true feelings and vulnerabilities have been buried deep down, enough so that she's never breathed a word about most of them even to Noé, her closest friend.
However! Following her suicide attempt, Noé and Jeanne's subsequent words of affirmation, and her harsh awakening to her own latent anti-dhampir tendencies, we've seen her making an active effort to change all that. She wants to take Noé's words to heart, to find value in herself and to interact with the world as Dominique, rather than just as "a de Sade" or as a subpar substitute for Louis. Domi's "door" has been closed both to the outside world and to herself for a long time, as she's been unable to let herself exist without a mask of performativity, but now she's finally knocking on that door and trying to see who and what she might be should she crack it open.
Even the flower petals drifting in front of the door echo the petals she throws whenever she makes a grand entrance in peak de Sade form. They're the embodiment of the artifice that has thus far been blocking her honest self-expression from both herself and the outside world.
Mémoire 65—Dante
Dante's illustration is much more straightforward than Dominique's. He stands square toward the readers, looking on sternly in front of a sealed door, because he is an utterly closed book. Much of what he projects to the outside world is a construction intended to bolster his customer service and protect him from the public's hatred of dhams. He also refuses to trust or open himself up to vulnerability with anyone who isn't a dhampir, even though his bond with Vanitas runs deep enough to make that stance feel like brazen denial.
And even among the other dhampirs he's close to, he's something of a hero figure and an unofficial leader. He's not one to willingly reveal the softer, less self-assured parts of himself to them. His gruff exterior (which breaks into outright anger and hostility when provoked) is a protective shield that guards the vulnerable parts of himself that he keeps sealed away.
The one caveat I'll give to all that is that this illustration came at the beginning of mémoire 65: before Vanitas convinces him to accept help and before the events of the circus. I think you could argue that Vanitas has gotten him to open the door a bit since then, or at least pushed Dante to realize that Vanitas managed to pick the lock when he wasn't looking.
Mémoire 67—Ogier
Ogier's illustration features him gesturing the viewer toward a wide open door with a smile on his face, welcoming them in. This captures the attitude he projects to the outside world—Ogier of Sphene is a cavalier open book with no internal conflict to hide. However, there is no "true self" behind the open door that Ogier draws attention toward. There is just another door, and another door, and likely another door after that were the illustration to continue. The "honest face" that Ogier presents is substanceless; it's artifice all the way down.
Ogier believes that there is no such thing as a "true" self. Everyone has a role to play, a mask to wear, and all that matters is how well they play it. As far as he's willing to acknowledge, there is nothing more to him than his mask, his performance, which is why there is nothing but more doors beyond his door.
In truth, though, there is absolutely more to Ogier than the role he plays, the face he puts on to the world. He may not think it matters, he may brush it off and think it might as well not exist, but it's clear from mémoire 67 that he feels some amount of frustration and displeasure with his role. He has to push himself to keep acting, has to reassure himself nothing else matters. There is a human being behind the mask. And I think that's what the curtain is there to remind us of. Even though he may state that there is no man behind the curtain, even though he may attempt to believe it himself, we the audience know that there really is something real and raw and vulnerable hidden past Ogier's artifice after all.
Mémoire 68—Béatrice
Of all the characters featured so far, Riche seems to be the most genuinely open, and we see a real open door in her illustration as a reflection of that fact. There's no reason so far to believe that her "true self" is anything other than the face that she shows the world.
That said, Riche's "true self" is somewhat shy, awkward, and easily frightened, and Dante and Johann go out of their way to keep her from harm's way (which has the side effect of often keeping her out of the plot). That means that, though she's entirely herself, Riche hasn't had much chance thus far to actually act as herself. She's all internal with little impact on the world to show for it, and this current arc marks the first time where we see her coming out of her shell and placing herself on the stage where all the big action is happening. That's why we see her peeking out from behind the closed side of her door—her honest self isn't locked away, but it's also just now starting to step out into the wider world.
It's also worth noting that her bat, a signifier of her status as Machina's dham, is the one thing fully in front of Riche's doors. Riche may not attempt to hide her true and vulnerable self from outsiders, but nonetheless, outsiders will always read her as a dhampir before they recognize her as an individual person.
I made a post after mémoire 67 proposing that one of the central themes for this arc would be the idea of the "self" as performance—an examination of types of affectation. And now that we're another chapter into the arc, I'm even more certain of that. Domi, Dante, Ogier, and Riche all have very different relationships to the ideas of "true selves" and performance, and as the arc goes on, I suspect we'll see even more characters' relationships to these ideas expressed through the imagery of a set of doors.
It also doesn't escape me that all of this riffing on identity and personality as performance vs vulnerable emotional honesty is happening in a series where
The main character has the power to see others' memories, arguably giving him the power to see someone's "true self" more comprehensively than anyone else ever could, should he choose to explore to their depths
The main antagonist has the power to completely rewrite people's selves without their consent
and I'm eager to see if/when we'll be connecting back to either of these larger ideas.
I was reading back through 66 to check something for another post, and I don't think I flagged this when the chapter came out, so let me state for the record that I did not miss this Johann blush 🥰. Dante pours water on himself and makes his big dramatic sexy determination face, and we get matching blush panels from Johann and from miss Canon Dantecrush. I know what you are, Johann.
Also as a career Noéposter I have to point out that it's interesting how we've gotten relatively little from Noé's perspective for the last few chapters. I want to know his thoughts on everything.
What do you think of the Monsieur Spider = Johann theory, based on the broken arm being the same one Noé kicked? If you pay attention, in ep 5 of the anime, you can see Johann's hair color under Spider's hood when Noé sends him flying against the wall. What worries me is that Dante is guaranteed to die if Johann is a villain...
Hello anon! You sent me this ask in 2021 and I left it to languish in my askbox for the next 5 years bc I was somewhat unsure about this theory and never got around to double-checking the practical details I was uncertain about.
Anyway,
Yeah.
Here's my post about how I think Dante might die soon. For unrelated reasons.
So Astolfo's last name is Granatum, which means pomegranate.
It's just occurred to me for the first time that, beyond pomegranates' general VnC-appropriate status as the Death Symbolism Fruit, you can actually map the pomegranate seeds' famous role in the Persephone myth onto Astolfo's story pretty well.
In the story of Hades and Persephone, eating a few pomegranate seeds in the underworld is what traps Persephone in that underworld for half the year. And while Astolfo is not a Persephone-coded character, and his overall narrative doesn't map onto the Hades and Persephone myth, the idea of being trapped in an underworld rings true for him.
Mochijun loves a VnC character who's alive and walking, yet symbolically already dead. Vanitas is already dead. He's dead in the future as Noé recounts his story, and he's "dead" in the present because he's lived past the point where he wanted to die and is driving himself into his grave with the Book of Vanitas and his vengeance. And he walks around wearing an hourglass in which the sand has already run out. Jeanne is supposed to be dead, or at least all aspects of her individuality, her personhood, were supposed to have died the moment that she became a bourreau. And she carries her gauntlet, the embodiment of her bourreau self, in a coffin.
Given that precedent, I don't think it's a stretch to say that on a symbolic level, Astolfo has been trapped in a kind of hellish afterlife since he survived the attack on his family. He's like a vengeful spirit: existing as a shell of himself cut off from the growth and change that real living should grant. He's been deprived of real life since the moment that Charles manipulated him into weaponizing his hatred against vampires as his sole reason to live.
That manipulation into desperate cruelty, that offer of violence to redirect and distract Astolfo from his deeper self-hatred, is the act of Astolfo being fed his pomegranate seeds. Propaganda and rhetoric fill the role of literal seeds, and Astolfo swallows what he's given because he's desperate for something to hang onto in his misery. It's food as a metaphor for ruinous indoctrination—drinking the Kool-Aid. Thus he eats the (symbolic) pomegranate seeds, and he is trapped indefinitely in the underworld that is chasseur-hood. He even starts to live underground.
In the lineart version of Astolfo's feature cover, we see pomegranate seeds which fall and become spatters of blood, which in turn fall onto a pile of vampires' skulls. The desperate, hateful rhetoric that Astolfo swallows becomes violence, which becomes dead vampires. The internalized ideas which trap him in the "underworld" of emotional undeath also ensure his place in the cycle of vampire-human violence.
The point of Astolfo as a character, in large part, is to serve as a foil for Noé and Vanitas. Noé points this out directly on the Vanitas side—Astolfo is what Vanitas could have become had his path not diverged by the happenstance beat of a butterfly's wings. Small choices, brief moments in time, can send two people down two wildly different roads. And each moment that Astolfo falls for and falls deeper into Charles's manipulation is a moment of him choosing the worse road at a branching path, a moment of him eating yet another pomegranate seed that ensures he stays trapped in his personal brand of symbolic and psychological underworld.
Astolfo might not be "already dead" in the same way that Vanitas and Jeanne are, but he's not among the living either.
VnC's frame narrative structure is good for many reasons, and one of those reasons is that whenever there's a scene whose framing/presentation I have some issue with, I get to wonder whether it's an intentional choice by Mochijun to frame it weirdly bc Noé is Weird About It
Last night it occurred to me that, if the visuals of the VnC manga are meant to represent the way that Noé portrays events in the text of his memoir, then Noé chooses to present his own assault like this.
the contradictory framing fits in with the fact that the memoir is also the story of noé growing up and shedding his naivete. like despite being a vampire, noé often occupies the gothic heroine role that is preyed upon and, in turn, is being given permission to feel pleasure by the villain. esp relevant in the chloé arc where he most obviously becomes the kidnapped and drugged victim in the cursed vampiric manor. so i think it’s playing into the gothic genre’s hallmark of blurring lines between the erotic and sexual assault (and the erotic being erotic because of the non-consent, the pleasure being forced)
It also makes sense in that noé is the most sexually repressed out of the cast and seems to have to break out of that. the only times we do see sexual desire from him are with Louis and Vanitas, with Domi being an outlet when those other two are denied. seeing unwilling enjoyment just underscores the repression
[screenshotting my previous tags for others' benefit bc they're relevant to your response]
@aguacerotropical That's a really interesting point!
I think I've posted before about applying a lot of those same ideas to Jeanne, since so much of her arc revolves around desire, repression, and learning to let herself want things. To borrow your words, she has to be given permission to feel pleasure by an antagonistic force in her life: Vanitas.
That said, I hadn't really thought to apply that same logic to Noé in this scene. But I really like your idea that seeing Noé experience this forced, unwanted physical pleasure underscores the absence of wanted, reciprocal pleasure in his life.
If we say that one of the memoir's main threads is meant to be Noé finding his way to sexual maturity and learning to understand and act on his desires, it adds context to how often he gets assaulted and goes through otherwise unpleasant sexual experiences. Hell! He gets assaulted in-transit the first time he sets out from Averoigne, before he's even reached the destination that's supposed to be the start of his coming of age story. Him getting bit by Amelia is one of the first things that happens in the manga, and it happens because he trusts and wants to protect her, so he disregards Vanitas's warnings. That opening incident sets the stage for everything that comes after, for Noé growing up and learning to navigate both blood/sex and his own naivete.
In the context of each of Noé's (mostly bad) blood/sexual experiences being one link in a chain that eventually carries him to understanding, I suppose it's significant that the incident with Chloé happens so soon after his rejection by Vanitas. Noé's desire for Vanitas's blood intensifies to the point that he feels compelled to try to act on it, and he's shot down. Then just a few days later in-fiction (and just a few chapters later for readers), we see him experience undeniable physical pleasure in a circumstance that terrifies him. He fails to sweet talk his way into pleasure when he desires it, then he suffers from the horror of forced pleasure without desire. Both of these scenes are cruel echoes of the reciprocal relationship/encounter that he actually wants.
Noé's memoir is about processing his grief, and it's about chronicling Vanitas as a person and unpacking his psychology, and it's also about Noé's sexual/vampiric coming of age story. It's about him fumbling his way into understanding the world, into understanding Vanitas, and into understanding and acting upon his own desires. In that context, especially given how Noé's physical desire for Vanitas is intertwined with his desire to know him and see his memories, the arc of Vanitas and Noé's relationship and the arc of Noé's sexual coming of age are inextricable from each other. He wants him and he wants to know him. And for Noé to grow up, he has to someday understand what that means.
So Astolfo's last name is Granatum, which means pomegranate.
It's just occurred to me for the first time that, beyond pomegranates' general VnC-appropriate status as the Death Symbolism Fruit, you can actually map the pomegranate seeds' famous role in the Persephone myth onto Astolfo's story pretty well.
In the story of Hades and Persephone, eating a few pomegranate seeds in the underworld is what traps Persephone in that underworld for half the year. And while Astolfo is not a Persephone-coded character, and his overall narrative doesn't map onto the Hades and Persephone myth, the idea of being trapped in an underworld rings true for him.
Mochijun loves a VnC character who's alive and walking, yet symbolically already dead. Vanitas is already dead. He's dead in the future as Noé recounts his story, and he's "dead" in the present because he's lived past the point where he wanted to die and is driving himself into his grave with the Book of Vanitas and his vengeance. And he walks around wearing an hourglass in which the sand has already run out. Jeanne is supposed to be dead, or at least all aspects of her individuality, her personhood, were supposed to have died the moment that she became a bourreau. And she carries her gauntlet, the embodiment of her bourreau self, in a coffin.
Given that precedent, I don't think it's a stretch to say that on a symbolic level, Astolfo has been trapped in a kind of hellish afterlife since he survived the attack on his family. He's like a vengeful spirit: existing as a shell of himself cut off from the growth and change that real living should grant. He's been deprived of real life since the moment that Charles manipulated him into weaponizing his hatred against vampires as his sole reason to live.
That manipulation into desperate cruelty, that offer of violence to redirect and distract Astolfo from his deeper self-hatred, is the act of Astolfo being fed his pomegranate seeds. Propaganda and rhetoric fill the role of literal seeds, and Astolfo swallows what he's given because he's desperate for something to hang onto in his misery. It's food as a metaphor for ruinous indoctrination—drinking the Kool-Aid. Thus he eats the (symbolic) pomegranate seeds, and he is trapped indefinitely in the underworld that is chasseur-hood. He even starts to live underground.
In the lineart version of Astolfo's feature cover, we see pomegranate seeds which fall and become spatters of blood, which in turn fall onto a pile of vampires' skulls. The desperate, hateful rhetoric that Astolfo swallows becomes violence, which becomes dead vampires. The internalized ideas which trap him in the "underworld" of emotional undeath also ensure his place in the cycle of vampire-human violence.
The point of Astolfo as a character, in large part, is to serve as a foil for Noé and Vanitas. Noé points this out directly on the Vanitas side—Astolfo is what Vanitas could have become had his path not diverged by the happenstance beat of a butterfly's wings. Small choices, brief moments in time, can send two people down two wildly different roads. And each moment that Astolfo falls for and falls deeper into Charles's manipulation is a moment of him choosing the worse road at a branching path, a moment of him eating yet another pomegranate seed that ensures he stays trapped in his personal brand of symbolic and psychological underworld.
Astolfo might not be "already dead" in the same way that Vanitas and Jeanne are, but he's not among the living either.
I rarely have the time and energy to write long meta these days on account of my offline life getting so busy, but rest assured I am still rotating vnc and its themes and the concept of vampirism and ESPECIALLY my guy Noé Archiviste in my head on the regular
The thing about Mikhail Vanitasnocarte is that he's a really useful and interesting and compelling character and also every time I think about him for too long I feel a little bit nauseous.
