#mochijun please mayhaps a little canon queer
I think the thing that gets me about VaNoé and their relationship in canon is that, at least from what I can remember, nobody ever really says the words friend or friendship about them
VnC is so very much about their relationship and about watching them grow closer over the course of the story, and if Mochijun wanted to, it would be really easy to turn into a power of friendship type story. All she’d have to do is draw more emphasis to the fact that Noé doesn’t have many friends and Vanitas has never had a best friend before, and with just a couple of very small tweaks, she could put a lot more emphasis on the platonic. And it could be really good that way too! It could be really sweet to see Noé thinking about how he “hasn’t had a real best friend since Louis” or something along those lines, and it would still totally work for the eventual tragedy too. Friends being forced to turn against friends for a tragic death is some prime sad shonen content. Plus then we’d get the angle that Vanitas having a real friend is making him into a better person, which is also classic good shonen. There’s no big reason for Mochijun to not go down this path, but she doesn’t.
Noé talks about how Domi is his “precious friend,” and he and Roland talk about their “friendship” with each other, but with Noé and Vanitas, the language is always more vague. People like Roland say Vani and Noé “get along well,” but the kind of good relationship they have is rarely (if ever) specified. Even in the most recent arc, when Noé is yelling at Vanitas for disregarding their relationship, he never drops the “friend” word.
And it’s not that this necessarily means anything, but in a story that could otherwise push the platonic, importance of friendship angle, the absence of all that is rather conspicuous. The ambiguous, unspecified nature of their love and closeness is a big part of what makes them feel so queercoded.
