#sometimes evil isnt a crazy scientist experimenting on you

[videogamelover99]

Pausing my program of BSD analysis to quickly talk about VNC because

I had started the anime fully thinking that Vanitas was A) a Vampire and B) THE Vampire of the Blue Moon. This is a little bit the anime's fault, as they had introduced the Vanitas story if the opening scene, and it's likely that this was the actual plan for the mangaka in the beginning.

So I spent the first few episodes being like "yes ofc it makes sense that Vanitas is acting all high and mighty. He kind of his. His disguise is kinda shit too, like how does he explain the fangs??" and viewing every interaction hinting at his backstory as "Vanitas doesn't consider himself a good person because he was the one that caused the maladies in the first place. No he's changed and is trying to fix it, but he carries that guilt with him" and it makes perfect sense! Noe calls his deeds noble and Vanitas laughs because Noe doesn't know anything.

But then turns out that yes, Vanitas is in fact just a human boy (well, mostly), and honestly, this was the most brilliant choice the writer could have made. Vanitas's self-hatred doesn't make sense but it's not supposed to make sense. It's the self-hatred of a child that internalized guilt over simply being alive. Survivor's guilt, if you will. And it doesn't matter that his father loved him and supported him because he saw the way the adults missed his mother, and without someone directly counteracting it his first thought was "It's my fault".

He way children and childhood trauma is portrayed in VNC is so good?? It's real, because what caused that trauma wasn't just cruel adults, sometimes terrible things just happen.

...Then again, it doesn't help that there's like ONE main character adult who isn't a terrible person.