As I’ve noted before, Mochizuki Jun (to me anyway) is a bit of a slow-build mangaka.  She always gives you enough to keep you interested, but the layers tend to keep revealing themselves the deeper you go.  It’s kind of an anti-LN writing style, where the authors generally tell you everything you need to know in the title, never mind the first chapter.  Mochizuki tells you enough to pique your curiosity, then leaves a trail of bread crumbs to follow.  Paired with her deftness with an extremely wide tonal range, that keeps her works from seeming repetitive or stale.

That’s certainly the case with Vanitas no Carte, which is heading into its one-cour hiatus on a very positive note.  The pacing feels leisurely but not slow.  There’s plenty happening every episode, but the cumulative effect is that aforementioned slow build, where the mythology deepens and the character arcs grow more interesting.  And it’s funny how a little context – things we know which we didn’t a couple weeks ago – changes the way we view events like the ones in this episode.

Pandora Hearts never got a full adaptation of course, and given that it was more popular as a manga than Vanitas, there’s really no reason to suspect things will be different here.  I suspect this show will be like Noragami, another fairly popular Bones adaptation of a quite popular fantasy manga – the anime will take us a good way into the story (Noragami’s two cours were separated by a considerably longer time gap) and then leave us hanging.  If that’s the case so be it – two cours for anything but a shounen megahit, CGDCT or isekai these days is a fucking miracle.

Jeanne’s date with Vanitas seems like the precursor of a light-hearted ep, and indeed that’s the case for much of it.  But things are rarely that simple with Mochizuki, with whom the light and dark always closely co-exist quite comfortably.  The premise: Jeanne is desperate to find a way to discourage Vanitas’ pesky interest in her and goes to Dominique for advice.  Dominique is unsurprisingly clueless herself, but she pulls Vanitas’ earlier comment out of her ear and offers it as an inspiration for Jeanne – “I would never be interested in anyone who would love me”.

It’s easy to see where this is going, but still fun to watch it get there.  With Dante and Dominique spying Jeanne’s overtures seem to be having the opposite of the intended effect.  What’s worse Vanitas’ chivalrous behavior is actually starting to break her down.  I think it’s pretty clear Vanitas knows what game is being played here (he’s pretty smart and she’s a terrible actor), and probably knows they’re being spied on too.  But this is all good fun for him, so why blow her cover?  Good fun, that is, until a boy scrapes his knee and Jeanne’s baser impulses threaten to disturb the peace in a big way.

The contrast between Jeanne feasting on Vanitas and Ruthven on Noe is pretty stark – the Yin and Yang of vampirism.  Jeanne was quite ready to break her promise to Vanitas there of course, before he stopped her.  But he’s not casting blame here – he genuinely wants to help her, and probably genuinely wants to get physical with her too.  This is erotic, make no mistake – whereas what Ruthven does to Noe is the pure predatory side of vampire nature.  With this act it seems as if Ruthven has tipped his hand, because of course Noe can’t possibly die here – he’s one of the protagonists, after all.

There are some other interesting little seeds planted here – like the “Sun Tower“, which for some reason has been erected instead of the Eiffel Tower for the Paris Exposition in this world, and Ruthven talking about his former students who are all dead.  Also rather striking was Noe’s answer to Ruthven’s literally testing query – “neither”.  Noe is a product of both the human and vampire worlds, in a manner of which Vanitas’ experience is a sort of dark reflection – his way is the way of harmony and openness (Yang-like).  But that path seems the one less taken in this world, which makes Noe’s existence a perilous one indeed.