Hi! Maybe I'm missing something, but it feels like Hino has been forcing Yuuki's character to become more palatable since VKM 14. Yuuki was selfish and closed off to Zero and Ai in VKM 7-10 and barely acted like she actually loved Zero. In VKM 12 & 13 it gets slightly better, but she still seems closed off a bit. (1/2)
Then we have VKM 14 & 15, where she’s openly telling characters how much Zero means to her, declaring that she will not tolerate the harming of children, getting jealous of Maria, and pretty much confessing her desire to have a child with Zero. This all seems very unnatural to me, honestly. What are your thoughts on this? (2/2)
I think that Hino is probably doing this intentionally and I don’t think it’s necessarily to make Yuuki more palatable because, as you pointed out, it comes across as a little fake coming from Yuuki right now. The Yuuki from the original series would absolutely have done and said these things, but Yuuki from VKM is a woman with different experiences and baggage that has ultimately affected her characterization, at least for the time being.
Yuuki in the earlier chapters (pre-benching) was much more openly affectionate with Zero, then gradually became closed off post-benching. She does become a bit more open in VKM13, but that’s also a red flag chapter, where Zero finally highlights that something is “off” between them and questions Yuuki on it. He’s angry when he comes out of the shower, and that’s not the kind of behaviour anyone would have unless something had been off for a long time and the person in question had been stewing over it, building it up to be worse than it may actually be in their head.
And while Yuuki admits that she’s afraid of losing Zero to death, I think her fear goes beyond that and that she is just as afraid of him deciding to abandon her. (Let’s not forget that she did run away from him initially upon learning she was pregnant, and that Yori thought Zero’s kindness was confusing to Yuuki, likely because of how easily he seemed to accept the child of his enemy and looking after Yuuki in light of all that Kaname and Yuuki both did to Zero in the original series. While Yuuki’s transgressions may not have seemed as severe, it’s important to remember that she thought neither she nor Kaname had the right to be in front of Zero after she erased his memories. I know people joked about it being because Yuuki and Kaname had just had sex, but Zero literally didn’t give two fucks because he had no memory of who Yuuki had been to him, not to mention that would be Yuuki’s transgression, not Kaname’s.)
Anyway, I think Yuuki has gradually been realizing that Zero is now the one closing himself off to her, and I think she’s been getting afraid that he would abandon her. We see it a bit when she decides to feed him her blood while he’s sleeping, something that seemed to be a show of insecurity on her part because he was perhaps not drinking her blood. And then as @getoffthesoapbox pointed out in her VKM 14 Meta, it seems as though Yuuki is also going out of her way to do things she doesn’t usually do, which could be in response to her (speculated) fear that Zero will leave. (And more than likely she’s projecting her feelings on to Zero and the real issue is that she knows she’s done things to give him reason to want to leave, and rather than addressing or acknowledging that she’s trying to counter it with these other things.)
I also don’t interpret her blurting out the children line to Zero as her confessing her desire to have children with Zero, though I’m not denying that she wants that either. I don’t think she really thought about what she was saying and was just thinking about Zero’s desire to protect children and how it got him in this dangerous situation, so the logical conclusion was for him to stop risking himself for random children and to just have a child of his own to protect. But then the full weight of her words sank in and she realized what she was implying, thus the embarrassed reaction, because this is something they haven’t really discussed since Ai was in Cross Academy, and it’s also something awkward to be bringing up given the current tension in their relationship. Like, yeah, they’re sleeping in the same bed together, but they’re not really at that intimacy level yet because of the hangups they both seem to have. There’s an elephant in the room not being addressed.
Anyway, aside from the child line, I also thought her declaration that she wouldn’t tolerate the harming of children seemed particularly ironic considering… well… Zero was a child who was harmed by Kaname, and she’s not exactly vilifying him for it even if she was horrified by his actions. But while Yuuki said this in VKM14, in VKM15 her actions (and words, for that matter) contradict this again. Her priority is Zero, not the child, and so I think it’s possible that in VKM14 she’s going through the motions and saying the things she knows that she should be saying and that she would have said before, but she seems almost… lost, I guess, like she doesn’t know who she is anymore. And I don’t think she has for a long time, and maybe that’s the source of her real fear of Zero leaving. That she’s not the person he fell in love with anymore. That he’d be disappointed if he got to know who she is now, or who she thinks she is now, which ties back into her fear that if she were really like Kaname or Rido, Zero wouldn’t like her anymore.
The problem is, this is just speculation based off what we’ve been shown and the contradictions that have been popping up, but until we actually see into Yuuki’s head to know what she’s thinking, we’re going to have to read between the lines and reading between the lines can be dangerous because it relies solely on our own interpretations which is how you get so many different opinions. Eventually Hino’s going to have to clarify the subtext, but for now we’re left connecting the dots ourselves and hoping we haven’t missed or misinterpreted any. :P
