#yall understand why i have over 100 drafts

It’s really interesting to me that every major battle with a curse-bearer has that curse-bearer’s salvation as the big turning point/climax in its given story arc, except for the case of the little girl Catherine at the bal masqué, and that’s also the only case where her very salvation is in doubt.

For Amelia, the boy in Moreau’s lab, and Chloé, their stories can move safely toward resolution once they’ve been saved. Their problem has been inarguably solved, so Noé’s narrative retelling of them can wrap itself up, no questions asked.

For Catherine, though, Noé sees things very differently. He rejects the idea that her death could be a salvation when he sees it happen, and even if his idea of what salvation is has changed by the time he’s writing his mémoire, I doubt that moment will ever be a clean or comfortable memory for him. Catherine is the one curse-bearer that he can’t understand Vanitas as having saved, and as a result, her narrative has to be different than the others’. Her salvation comes at a strange and uncomfortable point in the narrative structure of the bal masque. She’s not the climax at all, but dark piece of rising action, unsteadying Noé and Vani before the real climax (Veronica’s ambush) makes its appearance.

I don’t know if this is intentional on MochiJun’s part or not, but it’s really cool that the one time the formula of salvation=climax breaks down is also the one time that, in Noé’s eyes at least, Vanitas’s salvation itself also fails.