Richard Ranasinghe de Vulpian’s Backstory is Very Queer: An Essay
(Author’s Note: This post is over 2,300 words long according to Microsoft Word and has images in it. There is no “read more” link. If you do not want to read this many words of me rambling about Richard’s queer backstory, please just hit “J” now. You will be scrolling for a while.
Author’s Note The Second: This was written up for @riku7se‘s birthday today. Happy birthday!)
Talking about Seigi’s queer-coming-of-age is easy and I do it often, because, well, it’s what The Case Files of Richard the Jeweler books focus on the most, since he’s the protagonist, thus the books are his story, and it is the story of The Case Files of Richard the Jeweler. It’s easy to go “Good lord, you are not a straight man,” at Seigi, because what is Seigi even doing? But Richard’s backstory may in fact be one of the queerest things I’ve ever read.
The anime covers almost none of Richard’s young childhood, or his backstory in general, or his personality in…general, but we get more of it in the novels. Richard as a kid was much like he as an adult: shy, quiet, introverted, awkward, intelligent as anything, fascinated by pretty rocks and jewelry, in love with languages, and largely friendless. Even Claremont family servants didn’t like him, because they thought he was strange and unchildlike (and it turns out later, they don’t like him because he’s queer, too, and isn’t going to be reproducing children on a convenient schedule to carry on the family name).
Of the friends he did have, it’s not especially surprising that he doesn’t seem to really have considered them true friends. He expressed affection in odd ways that they didn’t interpret as he meant them. He gave gifts that seemed excessive and performed acts of service that no one else would’ve considered, and this behavior had everyone assuming he was queer well before he seems to have realized that himself.
He was shy, awkward, and loved wrong.
And on top of that, they seemed to be using him as a replacement. Richard was, in many ways, and entirely against his will, treated as a mini-Catherine. He hated growing up looking a mirror and seeing “his mother’s face” looking back at him. It might even be part of the reason his family was somewhat cold to him—Catherine didn’t leave much a positive impression on the Claremont family, for certain. He didn’t (and doesn’t) hate his mother, but he didn’t want to be her, and he is already so much like her that they have difficulties getting along.
Richard is androgynous enough to be mistaken for a woman on occasion. He even dressed as one in London to disguise himself when rescuing Seigi from a museum, and he really put no effort into it other than putting women’s clothing on. Seigi mentions himself that Richard’s beauty is not really masculine or feminine and Richard could easily be mistaken for either except that he wears three-piece suits, keeps his hair fairly short, and is a cis man. His manga design, I think, illustrates his androgyny best:
When you get a shot of his just his face, it is legitimately kind of confusing what gender he is supposed to be.
At boarding school, Richard had male classmates fighting over him as trophy—something he didn’t ask for, didn’t want, and something that was blamed on him. After all, he was Different. He was distractingly gorgeous, even to boys, his expressions of affection too strong, too violative of accepted boundaries, and he loved pretty, girly things like jewelry. He was soft and gentle and kind. He didn’t fit the definition they wanted to impose on a young boy growing into a man, and he didn’t fit into womanhood, either. He’s too pretty, too confusing, looks too much like a woman and acts too much unlike a man. Any indication of queerness on the part of these other young upstanding young men was his fault. because society views queerness as contagious (and isn’t it, in a way? Once a person meets a queer person, they’re much more likely to discover the parts of themselves that are queer). He was obviously strange, and obviously feminine, which made him dangerous to The Order of Things.
When he invited some of these friends to visit him over the summer in France while he stayed at a villa with his mother, once they laid eyes on his mother, all thought of Richard disappeared from their heads. Why would they need his male beauty when a female equivalent existed right there? Much more proper. Much more appropriate for them. Much more…what they wanted.
Richard was only a substitute when they needed one. He was the closest thing to a beautiful woman. When an actual woman was there (especially one that could rival his own odd beauty), it turned out they only really liked him for that, and they dropped him. And Richard was so hurt by discovering he was just a replacement and a convenience for straight people that he stopped inviting people to see his mother. He wouldn’t even invite Deborah, his fiancée, a woman, to meet his mother, because…what if? What if he was just a replacement again?
Richard did not bring anyone back home again to meet Catherine until Seigi. This is fascinating, because Seigi did a lot of substitution when they first met. Every time he would think of his intense, queer feelings for Richard, he immediately, before he even realized what was happening, redirected them at a woman. With Tanimoto, or later even just a theoretical woman.
There’s a great manga cap of Seigi telling his college buddies about his gorgeous foreign boss and they all assume he’s talking about a woman. This is what Seigi’s head was doing in the background all throughout the first act of The Case Files of Richard the Jeweler.
This is also what Richard’s friend did to him.
I could write a whole other essay about Seigi and Richard and Catherine and compulsory heterosexuality, and I honestly really want to, but that’s a long derailment and this about is about Richard. And speaking of Richard and Deborah, wow, Richard. Wow. On the surface, that seems so normal. Lonely man finally finds someone who cares about him, he falls in love, and his family ruins it.
Except I’m not sure that’s actually what happened.
Deborah was someone he loved, someone he wanted to build a life with, maybe, but most importantly, she was a friend he thought understood him, one he might be able to keep after everyone he kept losing.
I don’t know if I can’t explain to alloromantic people what reading about Richard choosing a life partner based not on romantic affection but on a desperate desire to be able to keep a friend and not be alone was like for me as an aromantic person. Amatonormativity spends so much time insisting that you get one life partner, they must be a romantic life partner, and all other relationships are expendable in favor of your romantic spouse.
This insistence hurts everyone, but it especially hurts people who never really wanted to or managed to form a romantic bond with other people that was acceptable and valid enough. And it doubly hurts people like Richard, who already has such strong abandonment issues after his friends and parents mostly dropped him and pushed him off on other people.
And damn if it wasn’t one of my first times reading a fictional character struggling with that.
But Deborah was willing to marry him, even without romance. He finally had someone, and he clung to her. The timeline of The Case Files of Richard the Jeweler is frequently messy and often inconsistent, but it is very likely he proposed to her after he realized that marriage to her might not even be possible due to the legal restrictions of The Will (of course, interracial marriages have their own long history with this that I am far from qualified to speak on, so I won’t).
His family, particularly Jeffrey, was supportive despite that…at first. Richard’s uncle was willing to let Richard marry who he wanted (after all, Richard was the spare, wasn’t he? Godfrey had two real sons). Right up until it became obvious after spending years with lawyers that there was simply no reconciling Richard’s love with the family’s needs, and Richard was expected to set aside his desires in order to conform to the family’s expectations and support the family in the ways they demanded it. Deborah was not an Acceptable partner, and society was going to look at the whole family, Richard. Time to bury yourself and do your duty and marry someone you don’t and maybe even can’t love.
The amount of historical pain queer people have, being forced to do this, is immeasurable.
Richard’s love, as queer as it was, was taken from him. Deborah told him she didn’t even know why he thought it would work out in the first place, which is brutally harsh. It became obvious the biological family he had wouldn’t support it, and he simply couldn’t do it anymore. He had spent years trying and failing to win their approval, but they had finally taken too much from him.
He ran to an entirely different country and refused to respond to the legal name on all his legal paperwork. Richard might not be trans, as much as some of his androgyny sometimes speaks to that experience (see again: hatred of growing up with his mother’s face), and the series provides little if any allowance to interpret him that way, but Good Lord, running away from your family to start fresh with a new identity? There’s a reason that around a quarter of homeless youth in the UK are some variety of queer.
Richard was wealthy enough to run off to another country for his mental health crisis, and he picked not only one where his family, his own namesake, had been safe to love freely before, but a country that was, once, a place with much looser laws around homosexuality than the UK that made it a so safe place for queer British colonialists to settle in safety.
Saul and Seigi both question Richard’s motivations for his actions as a con artist (why is he selling valuable stones for cheap to people he likes, and punishing people he doesn’t?). Here is the thing about that: this was not only something that he inherited from his grandmother whose love was also looked down on by society, but it’s something he didn’t respect, something he loathed. His behavior was meant to punish himself.
It’s important that he was using gemstones for this: something he loved, something that wasn’t accepted as something a man should love, but that he found innately beautiful and compelling anyway. He hurt himself with them and punished himself with them because he hadn’t ever been allowed to love those parts of himself. He didn’t see himself as worthy, or see a way to love these things healthily in a way that both he, and they, deserved. Saul told him in Sri Lanka that he could see the love of gemstones light up his eyes, even though Richard was certainly trying to hide it at that point and wasn’t willing to accept that about himself.
Saul also tells Richard at this time that he has no self-awareness, and no introspection. Sound like someone else we know? Sound anything like queer people who don’t know their way or what they want yet? Richard was still spinning wildly out of control back then, and I’ll argue he still hadn’t quite realized anything about his own queerness.
And the thing that healed him, the thing that scarred over these wounds and allowed him to live, was a found family made of people who loved them the way he loved. People who encouraged him to be himself, even as a weird as that person was. Who encouraged, very specifically, a fairly transgressive love of jewelry and beauty and told him not only was it okay that he loved that, but that he could make that love his life.
Monica, Saul’s adopted daughter, was adopted from one of Saul’s own little found family members: one of his very best friends gave Saul custody of her welfare after his death instead of a biological family member. Monica escaped an abusive marriage to come with Saul and find her own healing. Saul’s sister-in-law came to study gemstones and jewelry with him while they were both mourning the loss of Saul’s wife and Maya’s sister. Richard found Saul there, who Seigi even says is much alike Richard in the way they are stubbornly kind, gentle-hearted men. All of them found familial love with each other when romantic love wasn’t working out for any of them, when their biological families couldn’t support them anymore.
Specifically, when Richard’s biological family decided he was too much and too wrong for them, he made his own little patchwork family to replace them. Found Family is one of the queerest tropes there is, because too often queer people are rejected from the homes they are born in and it is their way of making a new place for themselves with new people. Like I said earlier: queer realizations might be just a little contagious. People who defy society’s expectations are a much more likely place to find your own deviancies than society is.
Some four years after living with this little found family made of people who love the same things he does, the same way he does, all in ways that society doesn’t necessarily respect, Richard has the introspection and self-awareness Saul knew he lacked. By the time we meet him in Japan alongside Seigi, it’s pretty obvious he figured out who he is and how he loves, and that this way is very, very queer. And he seems pretty damn okay with it!
It was with these people that Richard found himself and found some kind of inner peace. He healed. And he didn’t necessarily heal the best he could’ve—I’ve more than once referred to this series as akin to watching a poorly-healed fractured leg being rebroken and set with pins so it heals straight and true, and that is as true of Richard as it is of Seigi and any of their customers.
But it was something he needed then to live.
They allowed and encouraged him to love people in ways society didn’t approve of, love things society didn’t approve of, let him be a strange, wild disaster for a few years, and he came out of it finally knowing who and what he was.
