Looking back through the first couple volumes of VnC, it's wild how much of what Vanitas does in early chapters is nothing but a series of transparent attempts to put himself in control when he feels uncomfortable. You don't notice the first time you read it, or at least I didn't, but he's really quite obvious once you have the knowledge of what subjects he's sensitive about.
I've touched on this before, but I think Vanitas's biggest defense mechanism is theater, specifically playing up his own power/unpredictability in order to make everyone around him uncomfortable. "Vanitas" is a character that he plays, and he weaponizes that character against others when the man behind the act feels threatened.
(Now that we're under the readmore, here's your warning for a VnC-standard amount of discussion of sexual assault).
Even starting in his very first scene in chapter 1, when we've yet to see Vanitas get anywhere close to vulnerable or upset, we get a hint of how he operates. His first attempt to get Noé away from Amelia isn't to physically fight him—it's to play sinister and deliver a vague threat.
He could have gone straight for the knives, or he could have told Noé the truth that Amelia herself was dangerous and urged him to get away. But that's not the person Vanitas is. He doesn't talk things out with honesty, and he doesn't resort straight to violence unless he's really over the edge. He threatens and plays up his dangerous persona to get what he wants.
He even uses the very same line with the security guards later in the chapter, playing sinister again to escape arrest because he might be screwed otherwise.
He's pretty much never authentic pre-catacombs, but moments like this where he dials up the act to achieve something show how in control he is of his own inauthenticity. And he never takes advantage of that control more than when he feels threatened, be that threat physical (like the security guards) or emotional.
When Noé asks him about how he inherited the book of Vanitas in chapter 2, something we now know is a sensitive secret, Vanitas immediately changes the subject. He gets in Noé's space, acting borderline flirtatious (and he often does get flirty as part of his persona), then returns to the topic of Noé being his shield (which is an act in itself, given how he really reacts to being protected).
It takes one poke to the chest and a couple of sentences to switch the conversation from "Noé insists on knowing Vanitas's sensitive past" to "Noé has to deal with the mysterious, overbearing Vanitas's whims," which is just how Vanitas wants it. Playing up his demanding, in your face side buries the threat of an uncomfortable topic.
Then, when Dominique suggests that he worships the blue moon during the bal masqué, we get a much more extreme incarnation of this same behavior. Domi's words threaten to undermine a huge part of the narrative he's built for himself as Vanitas, and they do so by dredging up a truth that he wants desperately to keep buried. He might not worship the blue moon, but he really did love Luna, and being reminded of that throws a big wrench in the narrative of his revenge against them.
He cannot handle having his narrative undermined at this point, and especially not by a reminder of Luna, who is arguably the most sensitive part of his whole tragic backstory. So he freaks out, and freaking out for Vanitas means throwing himself into his false persona as hard as he possibly can. He grows sinister, speaking darkly before breaking into maniacal laughter that startles Dominique and her attendants. Then he hurls his constructed narrative into public view, revealing himself and ensuring that every vampire knows his claim of "wanting revenge."
Nobody's going to forget the human that leapt onto a chandelier in the middle of a ball, revealed himself to be the kin of the blue moon, then swore his vengeance against that very kin, and that means nobody else is going to misunderstand him like Domi and dredge up the truth: that he never really hated Luna.
Going manic and theatrical like this is a defense mechanism, and it's one that ensures not only that Domi stops hassling him, but that, hopefully, he'll never even have to consider worshiping the blue moon ever again. It's a total rejection of an idea that made him uncomfortable, achieved through theater. It also takes a situation that was quite out of his control, his being chained up by Domi, and turns it into a scenario that he engineered, where he is in absolute control of the crowd for at least a few moments.
The best example of all this though, the time when Vanitas combines every form of weaponized persona I've talked about into one awful act, is the scene in which he forces a kiss on Jeanne.
As I mentioned before, Vanitas often plays up his flirtatiousness as part of his persona. He does it with Jeanne quite often, and he does a (usually) subtler version of it with Noé a few times as well. It's a great way to change the subject and make throw people off their game without resorting to threats, and his treatment of Jeanne in chapter 4 is an extreme, but not too surprising incarnation of this same flirty habit.
He might be attracted to Jeanne, but attraction alone is not a reason to force a kiss on an unwilling stranger while ending a fight. Vanitas kissing her was, as much as any other moment I've referenced here, an instinct to protect himself and gain control of a situation that otherwise threatened him.
Winning the fight or not, Vanitas is in a tenuous position in terms of control when dealing with Jeanne. Jeanne is an incredibly strong opponent, and she managed to withstand both a bite from a curse-bearer and a direct stunning hit from the Book. Vanitas has played all of his cards, and his only insurance that she won't murder him immediately is Noé, a man he barely knows, successfully keeping Luca hostage without realizing that's what he's doing. These are not great odds. He's also extremely attracted to Jeanne, and though his initial attraction to her isn't nearly as distressing as his full-on infatuation in mal d'amour, being weak to the sight of her represents yet another loss of control.
Then Jeanne tries to sacrifice herself. She tells Vanitas he can do anything to her he pleases, so long she can protect the child she's devoted herself to watching over, and there is no way on Earth that this moment isn't a trigger for Vanitas, because he once did the exact same thing. He's already in an unsteady situation, and then she reminds him of Misha and his own darkest moments, which means that conversation has to end immediately.
"Please don't hurt him," is the last thing Jeanne says before Vanitas flips suddenly from threats to advances, and his face when he gets close to her is manic.
So when Vanitas gets uncomfortable, what does he do? He changes the subject wildly, suddenly making the whole situation about him and his fickle, unpredictable moods and unreasonable demands. He cranks up the character of the wild, demanding, show-stealing Vanitas to eleven. He kisses Jeanne. And even though it's a cliche line, the fact remains that sexual assault is never really about the sex. It's about power and control. Vanitas does wild things and plays up his persona as a clutch for control when he's uncomfortable, and this is that to an extreme degree. This kiss gives him the power in their interaction.
Plus, the specific bad memories that Jeanne unintentionally triggers for Vanitas are all about bodily autonomy. His own "do what you want to me, just don't hurt the kid" moment was protecting Misha in Moreau's lab, which led to physical violation after violation. It was a complete loss of his agency and autonomy. And his memory of Misha is also deeply tied to whatever happened with Luna's death, and given the possibility of his being made their kin without consent, that memory may also be one of the loss of autonomy.
This scene is Vanitas not just getting triggered, but being reminded of his loss of control and ownership of his body. It makes a twisted kind of sense that the resultant clutch for power and control comes via him forcing his body onto somebody else. He manufactures a situation that is all about bodily autonomy, but he has all of it and the source of danger has none. And he does it all while stealing the show and rerouting the topic as he always does.
Just like so many other actions he takes early in the series, his most reprehensible moment is just another desperate grasp at control. He has to be threatening and showy and unreasonable. He has to be the kind of man that announces himself as savior to a room full of powerful enemies. The kind of man can force himself on a powerful woman like Jeanne. Because if he doesn't drive home the act well enough, somebody might gain access to the horribly vulnerable person underneath.
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Okay! Trying this again now that it's not midnight, because I'm still on my bullshit but have more words now. What I do not have is my copies of the first two novel volumes, since I am traveling, so I can't do direct quotes.
We know that, at some point, JGY and XY became cultivators. IIRC, it is stated in Volume 1 that becoming a cultivator without a golden core is possible but it's unorthodox and unlikely--even moreso given that a golden core in MDZS/CQL is akin to an organ that can be permanently destroyed/remove rather than an energy reserve from your qi being super swole. Demonic cultivation is appealing in part because it operates under a different set of parameters, and (though the world at large doesn't know this) WWX invents it in large part to compensate for the loss of his core.
We can also safely assume that the means to do this aren't accessible to everyone. We see peddlers hawking dubious cultivation materials. JGY tells his sworn brothers about the fraudulent pamphlets his mother purchased for him as a child and laments that she and people like her have no way of knowing that they're useless. (Since this statement goes unchallenged by LXC, NMJ, or WWX's narration, I think we can take this particular JGY assertion at face value.) In Yi City, WWX explains the "folk wisdom" practiced by regular people, ranging from the effective (the rice congee to absorb poison, the mortuary's high threshold to keep corpses from hopping away) to the superstitious (the paper effigies and joss money), and WWX reminds the juniors that these people don't have cultivation knowledge of their own. All of this suggests that there is no freely-accessible bank of cultivation knowledge, demonic or otherwise. There are no old-timey YouTube tutorials, and there is no indication that a person can roll up to a sect like it's nbd in this particular universe for formal education.
WHICH BRINGS ME BACK TO MY ORIGINAL POINT, which is: how did JGY and XY become cultivators in the first place?
JGY has acquired some level of cultivation by the time he's working with the Nie, albeit with a shaky foundation that both he and Narrator WWX identify as a deficit he'll need to compensate for with breadth over depth. How did he develop his power without formal training or reliable study materials? Teenage XY has somehow become capable enough for the Jin clan to see him as an asset, despite the fact that he is a feral street urchin who can't even read as a child, and demonic cultivation is a brand-new technology, as it were. Where, when, and how did he teach himself? What skills did he demonstrate that caught JGY's interest?
Since this story is not about JGY and XY's professional journeys, the text doesn't have an explanation. (Or, if it does, this website and also the wiki have been slipping, because "how the hell does JGY even have a core?" has vexed me since 2021.) There isn't a definitive answer here! What I am curious about--because I cannot possibly be the only one who wonders about worldbuilding ramifications and what offscreen events brought these characters to where they are, and I think it is fair to wonder about the mechanics of things that a text itself brings up--is people's personal headcanons.
So! Canon-compliant Xue Yang and/or Jin Guangyao enjoyers! Tell me how you personally explain their whole deal! Bonus points for telling me how it changes for CQL, bc both of them are coming from very different places there, and an MDZS-compliant explanation won't work for CQL and vice versa. Bonus BONUS points if you have fic exploring it that you can link.
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