Oh hey also while I’m talking about names in VnC that may or may not be references, here’s some fun facts for you:
The final king of France, famous for his execution via guillotine, was named King Louis XVI! And! The first person executed for royalism at the start of the French Reign of Terror, another quite famous beheading, was a man named Louis Collenot d’Angremont :D.
Y'know, if Noé continues down the path of becoming adversarial to teacher, it’s quite possible that teacher and/or the rest of the de Sades might decide to cut him off. We know he has money in the bank from the de Sades, and some access to vampire high society through Dominique, but I wonder how easy it would be for him to be cut off from all that.
I also wonder, if the de Sades found out that Noé has turned against their father/grandfather, whether they might try to cut him off from Dominique. I can totally see a future where Domi is forced to choose between supporting Noé vs teacher or staying with her family, and though that should be an easy choice, abuse does funny things to people, and I’m curious how hard it might be for her to leave.
Or alternatively, there’s also the incredibly creepy option where none of this happens. If Noé fully turns against teacher, and teacher doesn’t cut him off, how long do you think it’d take Noé to notice that that’s wrong?
It feels totally in-character to me for teacher to continue supporting Noé financially even as he fights to stop him, since he seems to view Noé much more as an amusement than a serious threat, and there’s something rather unnerving about that.
So I was rereading chapter 4, and uh, this little lie of Vanitas’s gets a lotmore uncomfortable given the new info we got in 55.5.
It’s so interesting to me how there’s certain things that Vanitas is quite sensitive about and does not want to discuss, unless he can turn that discussion into theater and weaponize it against those around him.
Like, the most obvious example of this is his speech at the bal masqué, but he’s totally doing the same thing here. He parades his desire for revenge as part of his introduction speech to the vampires, then lies about not really wanting revenge when Noé asks him about it in the morning, because the truth is his vengeance is a sensitive subject.
Here, meanwhile, he’s weaponizing the fact that nobody else knows what it means to be the kin of the blue moon. We know that the loss of his humanity is an incrediblyvulnerable thing for Vanitas, and something that he avoids bringing up to anyone for as long as possible, and yet here he is referencing that very idea. He can’t admit that he really is being made into something inhuman by his use of the book, but he can lie about having a powerful, presumably inhuman “true form” due to his kinship with Luna, because that’s what will win him this fight. He just has to turn up the false theatricality to eleven in order to say it.
What he says here is really quite close to the sensitive truth, but he’s fine, because it’s all part of the act.
I just realized that the melody of If You Want to Save Her (the soundtrack to the big vanoé fight) is actually a remixed version of The Destiny Waltz (the soundtrack to when Vanitas and Noé first meet).
So in other news, I’m suing Yuki Kajiura for emotional damages
