Since we'll hopefully be getting out of the VnC hiatus soon, and this new arc seems to finally be turning the spotlight back to NoƩ and calling out some of his more troubling traits for the first time, I've been thinking a lot about him recently.
I've talked before on this blog about NoƩ's inability to recognize or process bad things when they happen to him alone. He bounces back from and idealizes almost any experience as soon as it's over, even when he absolutely shouldn't. It's one of my favorite traits of his, and it's been lampshaded a couple of times in-manga. Louis calls out how weird his attitude toward his kidnapping is during the mƩmoire 9 flashback, and the "be a little bothered" from Vanitas and co in mƩmoire 57 has the same effect.
We also recently got a whole extended sequence of Vanitas and Domi complaining about how NoƩ also never anticipates harm before it might come to him. He waltzes into dangerous situations like it's nothing, almost as if he thinks he's unkillable. Combined with the above, this is just more of his strange brand of optimistic denial. Everything is fine in NoƩland! It can't possibly not be fine! He always trusts and thinks the best of people and situations by default, never wanting to expect they may do wrong, and so long as a given event doesn't involve harm to external innocents and/or NoƩ's loved ones that he can't rationalize away, he compartmentalizes and denies harm once it's done. Thus he carries on in blissful ignorance, his past suffering having no effect on the blithe trust with which he treats the world.
But in addition to all that, NoƩ is also very notably divorced from the consequences of his own actions. It's not that he's *incapable* of considering his own effect on people, and he certainly tries to be kind and decent, but much of the time, it just doesn't seem to occur to him that people will have reactions to the things he does. He does as he sees fit, and when his deeds impact the people around him, especially if they produce a reaction that could upset him, it bounces off his mind in the same way that potential traumas do.
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On the more lighthearted end of the spectrum, this leads to things like NoĆ© never noticing when people are attracted to him. It may also have something to do with his airheaded messinessāthe way he's always thoughtlessly making a mess of the hotel room and incurring Vanitas's wrath in bonus materials. On the heavier end of the spectrum, this causes a lot of genuine problems for the people around him. He's largely oblivious to the depth of Dominique's mental health problems until she's pushed to her breaking point at the amusement park, despite the fact that he's inextricably entangled in the cause of them. He also completely loses sight of Vanitas's reactions to him when he gets caught up in his protective rage at the start of the vanoĆ© fight, and it takes an outside reminder from Jeanne and a literal mirror to make him realize that his own actions are part of why Vanitas has devolved to such a state.
This lack of self-perception on NoƩ's part feeds back into the other problems I laid out at the top of this post, his obliviousness toward his interactions with the rest of the world helping to facilitate his denial. It's part of the happy little insulating bubble that he interacts with the world through. And as the other side of that coin, his automatic, unthinking denial of things that could hurt him is part of what enables him to ignore his own impacts on the people around him. You can't reckon with or worry about harming other people when you live in NoƩland where everything must be fine. I think the fact that he wants to be a good person that doesn't harm others actually makes it harder for him to confront the truth of how he impacts the world, because him hurting others is a Bad Thing that would cause him mental harm.
We've seen NoƩ mess up, understand his mistake, and apologize for it before. He apologizes to Vanitas for making assumptions about him after the bal masquƩ, he apologizes to Vanitas again at the end of the amusement park fight, and he apologizes to Riche for speaking with ignorance about dhampirs. However, I think the bigger a mistake of his is, the more harm it causes other people (and the more understanding would hurt him as a result), the harder it is for NoƩ to comprehend his wrongs. He's clearly trying to make things right with Domi, and he's told her that he values her, but I don't know if it's yet occurred to him to conceive of their mess as a situation where he's done her active wrong. He also literally passes out on her mid-conversation, leaving Domi and Vanitas to carry him back to bed when he was supposed to be comforting her.
But I think the most fascinating example, the moment where all this comes together into NoƩ's most feeble and blatant act of denial yet, is the first time he sees Misha after clawing up his face. The anime actually changes this detail, which is its own can of worms to get into, but in the manga, when NoƩ sees Misha's injuries in the light of day after attacking him, he immediately fucking turns around.
At the end of his wits at the amusement park, NoƩ claws a child across the face in a fit of anger and protectiveness. I'm not interested in condemning NoƩ for this, especially given that the child in question was actively trying to stab Vanitas at the time, but I will say that his actions are quite extreme. Given Vanitas's response and the way Misha's injuries are portrayed, I think it's clear that the manga wants us to see how NoƩ hurts Mikhail as something troubling and extreme. He gives that kid a pretty horrible injury, and Misha will likely have scars on his face for the rest of his life.
And regardless of how justified he may or may not have been in hurting Misha in defense of Vanitas, it's clear that NoƩ himself is upset by the true extent of what he does to Mikhail's face. When he looks at him in the light of day, when he sees a numb-looking child with his face wrapped in still-bloody bandages, though we only get to see a small segment of his face in that moment, he looks sick. He knows that he's done something troubling, and I'm sure he feels all kinds of heavy and unpleasant emotions.
This is one genuinely bad thing he's done that NoƩ cannot deny. He can't rationalize this one away and make it all copacetic. He can't conveniently forget the emotional reality of suffering and harm, because that reality is standing ten yards away from him. And he can't just apologize for things either, because apologies cannot undo physical harm, and frankly, I'm not sure he'd be able to give an honest apology for his one. Sickness at the results of his actions doesn't mean he fully regrets hurting Misha, at least not at this moment when emotions are still raw.
But NoƩ, confronted with this undeniable source of guilt and pain, is still ultimately unable to look the pain he's caused in the eye. A problem piercing through the happy veil of NoƩland and forcing him to acknowledge it doesn't mean he's capable of reckoning with that problem. Instead he just. turns away from it.
NoƩ, forced to acknowledge a harm he's done and unable to employ all the many layers of automatic insulation that usually protect him, physically turns around because he cannot bear to look at the person, the child, that he's hurt. He employs the very last possible form of avoidance available to him, even though it's useless in the ways that matter. Not looking at Misha doesn't mean he gets to un-know the fact that he maimed him, but he simply cannot bring himself to look.
NoƩ is extremely good at playing "I do not see it" with things that hurt him. He's good enough that I think he has genuinely no idea he's doing it a vast majority of the time. Whatever mental shield he has that's protecting him is automatic enough that the badness that could hurt him doesn't ever even seem to cross his conscious mind. But no matter how automatic and subconscious, this tendency of his is still, and the end of the day, nothing more than an unhealthy coping mechanism, and this moment helps to put that to our attention.
What's the difference, really, between him cheerfully acting like Jean-Jacques and ChloƩ's assaults never upset him and him turning around so he doesn't have to look at the wounds he gave Mikhail? NoƩ can't look at pain, can't acknowledge the things he finds upsetting (at least not things that cause him alone pain, as others' pain often triggers his savior complex and spurs action). This scene with Misha throws that into the light, forcing NoƩ to desperately cling to his avoidance in an obvious and physical way.
Even when there's no way to deny the harsh reality of having done something he finds horrific, NoƩ Archiviste cannot make himself look directly at a painful truth, be it others wronging him or his own wrongdoing. It takes an external hand to step in and force him to turn his head and acknowledge/reckon with a problem. And even then, who knows if intervention can always be successful.
The start of the dham arc so far has drawn a lot of attention to this pattern of behavior, with Vanitas having to sit NoƩ down and explain to him in detail why his words said in well-meaning ignorance make Dante so upset. This is NoƩ being forced to look at a harm he caused because he couldn't or wouldn't look at and comprehend the problem (his fellow vampires' racism) in the situation he was in. But upsetting Dante is ultimately a low stakes problem for NoƩ. He put his foot in his mouth and offended a peer; he didn't shred Vanitas's little brother. He's able to accept his wrongs and feel his discomfort without resorting to physically turning around and avoiding the issue.
I want to know what NoƩ will do if/when this arc forces him to confront a source of pain he can't handle in a context that's more high stakes than a social faux pas. I want to see what he'll do when something really forces him beyond his ability to believe that everything is fine. How badly would he have to be hurt to lose his ability to filter an event/events through rose colored glasses? How badly would he have to hurt someone else? Or is his instinctive shield good enough that he'll never get out of it on his own? And if so, who else might step in to make NoƩ own up to reality?
Teacher and the Archivistes are becoming plot-relevant now, and our attention is being drawn to NoƩ's issues. I think there might be something coming soon that even NoƩ can't turn away from and cheerfully pretend isn't hurting him. Teacher even ends his appearance at the amusement park with a little speech about having to "wake and face reality," which makes me even more certain that a wake-up call for NoƩ is imminent.
Either that, or NoƩ's going to mess up and hurt somebody even worse than he hurt Misha later this arc, and in that case, we might get to see a feat of denial even worse than him literally turning around to avoid looking at the wounds he caused.
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