#vnc dante

So since my very first read of VnC, one thing has been haunting me, and that’s the dhampirs’ names.

Lots of VnC characters’ names are references, and with every character but the dhams, it’s immediately obvious why the references are there. Veronica de Sade is a sadist. Doctor Moreau is a mad scientist. Jean Chastel was a real-world hunter that claimed to shoot the beast of Gévaudan. None of this is exactly subtle.

And then we have the dhams.

The dhampirs’ names are all references to Dante’s divine comedy. Dante is the author and narrator, Riche is short for Beatrice—Dante’s guide through Paradise, and Johann was the name of Dante Alighieri’s first publisher. But what do the dhampirs have to do with the story of a poet being given a tour of heaven and hell?

For ages I’ve been assuming that we’d have to wait for some future event to make the Divine Comedy reference relevant, but today an alternate explanation finally hit me, and now I’m wondering if Mochijun might be playing on the idea of guides. Because Dante is the closest the closest thing Vanitas and Noé have to a guide through this world of curse bearers that they work in.

The Divine Comedy is famous because it’s the poem that brought structure to the afterlife. It’s the origin of the levels of hell that are referenced so often in pop culture. It is, especially in Inferno, a work that brings order to chaos. It’s also a work that centers around the idea of guides, with three different guide figures appearing at different points to guide Dante on his journey through the afterlife.

Dante might not be a literal guide, but he is, in a very real way, shaping the direction of Vanitas’s revenge quest, because he’s his information broker. He’s the one that tells him about the beast of Gévaudan, about where to find the nine-fold murderer, and about the Chasseurs’ connection to the vampire abductions. Curse bearers are an inherently hard to track phenomenon, with Naenia seemingly popping up at random all over both worlds, but Dante’s always there to tell Vanitas where to go.

The dhams, with Dante at the head, are Vanitas and Noé’s very own trio of guides, just like in the poem about a trio of guides that their names come from.