After wrapping up a few loose threads from volume 4, such as Jeanne and Vanitas’ not (?) date and Noe’s run-in with the politically powerful vampire Ruthven, Noe and Vanitas hear about what sounds like another vampire curse-bearer, but in an oddly different situation than before. Legend has it that a monstrous creature threatened the village of Gévaudan centuries ago and corpses are appearing in the area again, the exact kind of disaster that you would expect from a vampire that has had its true name stolen. But Jeanne has had a run in with this “beast” before it seems and that’s only the start of the deeper mysteries this time around.
These installments of Vanitas start to lean more and more into the lore of this not-quite Earth that is inhabited by humans and vampires. Previously the characters themselves seemed rather unconcerned with the relative recent history where their world was cleaved into one for humans and one for vampires, an earth-shaking event indeed and one that has been causing repercussions ever since.
For instance, Noe meets the vampire Chloé who was born a human to an all-human family centuries ago and suddenly “became” a vampire around age 4 (in the world of Vanitas, you are either born a human, a vampire, or a mixed-race dhamphir, biting humans does not turn them into vampires); this being the sort of thing that just “happened” at that time, when the metaphorical ink used to re-write the world’s formula wasn’t yet dry. Vanitas hasn’t yet shown what the story’s overall goal is going to be, as so far it’s been smaller stories of both Vanitas and Noé becoming more and more entangled in the power struggles of the two worlds, especially on the vampiric side. I suspect this distortion to the fabric of reality is going to be a major part of the conflict going forward. Right now it seems like the two worlds are at peace (although for humans, “peace” means “relative ignorance”) but it seems like the magic that made this happen might not be as sturdy or balanced as people had hoped.
On a seemingly inconsequential note, I was a little disappointed to see that the character on the cover of volume 6 is a side character (from the human, anti-vampire faction Chasseurs) who has barely even appeared in the story yet. I was really hoping that one of the already established characters, like Dominique, would get that prized position instead.
Speaking of Dominique, volume 4 left off on a cliffhanger involving her meeting a character who looked like a young boy but gave off the creepy air of being anything but. Despite this seeming like an important moment, she has yet to reappear again; if anything it’s almost brushed off (with another character who was leaving that scene reappearing in front of Noé and Vanitas and just shrugging his shoulders at where Dominique is), which makes me a little sad at how relatively little screen time Jun Mochizuki’s female characters seem to be getting in this series. It’s true that Pandora Hearts also had more male than female characters (I’d guess a 2/3rds to 1/3rd ratio) and that they both ran in shounen, Square Enix magazines but I am disappointed.
Jeanne has been getting more and more screen time as the story goes on, and without her male charge that she was introduced alongside with, but even there an awful lot of her more internal moments deal with her coming to understand feelings for the first time because Vanitas is “stirring up emotions” in her (i.e, it’s a crush, romance generates nearly all, important moments of self-realization fiction informs me). Jeanne’s backstory is important to understanding the Beast of Gévaudan as well but I wish she was more “important” for her own sake, not just for how her life ties into the lives of other characters.
Despite that complaint — and I do hope that the gender balance is something that shifts later on — I did genuinely enjoy many of the quiet revelations in these two volumes, like seeing Vanitas at his most vulnerable yet and piecing together more of his background. I’m still a bit cautious about how this series will play out; I don’t know if it’s going to be fine or if it’ll suddenly go SPLAT and end in a mess, but frankly by this point in Pandora Hearts I would have thought the same thing so I’ve been here before, I know to just hang on and see where this gorgeous ride takes me.