So ends the first season of Vanitas no Carte, not with one of its most spectacular episodes but one which serves perfectly well as a place-holder.  With the second cour only a season off, the main function here was to loosely summarize the first 12 episodes and set a few fuses alight for the second.  The rise of the split cour has forced anime writers to confront this awkward episode – not a finale, not part of an immediate continuity, but something in-between.  Very rarely are they great – and this was no exception – but by the standards of the construct it was fine.

I thought we might see Luca come under threat today – my first thought when it was mentioned that Jeanne was told to take the day off.  While that didn’t happen I think it was only deferred – the boy is a threat to Ruthven’s plans and will have to be eliminated sooner or later.  This may have been the first time we heard the ominous older brother referred to as Loki – if we have already I forgot – but his name-dropping is one of many seeds planted here.

As for Ruthven himself, rather than killing Noe he plants a seed of his own.  After sucking him he compels Noe (I guess that’s part of a general vampire thing in this mythology, though it could be Ruthven-specific) to swear to follow his command – later, at some unspecified point in time.  That makes Noe a ticking time bomb and the possibilities more or less present themselves, but the most obvious is that it’s connected to the series’ introductory “reveal” that Noe would kill Vanitas (which I still take to be a red herring, but we’ll see).

Dante brings the news that the Beast of Gévaudan has returned – which I take to be the setup for the first arc of the second cour.  This is based on a real historical incident, where some sort of creature killed an unspecified number of people in the French mountain region of Gévaudan in the 1760’s.  In reality wolf attacks were common in those days in Western Europe, and historians mostly agree that an unusually large and aggressive wolf or pack was responsible, but of course supernatural explanations have never been in short supply.  Presumably in Vanitas no Carte this person is directly involved…

There’s another interesting bit inserted here which finds Noe obsessed by the smell of Vanitas’ blood.  Vanitas warns him in no uncertain terms that if he tries to read his memories through sucking, Vanitas will kill him – but Noe can’t be certain whether he’s merely starving, actually wants to see Vanitas’ memories, or is simply attracted to (by) him.  The too gets deferred as the two of them eventually wind up on a train (this person conspicuously pops up in another bit of obvious foreshadowing) to Gévaudan and Vanitas assures Noe that he won’t abandon him, but we certainly haven’t heard the last of it.

That would pretty much be my summation of where things stand – we haven’t heard the last of it.  Lots of open threads and nothing whatsoever resolved, but that’s more or less as you’d expect.  We’re talking about the midway point of an adaptation of an ongoing manga, after all.  The track record with Mochizuki Jun adaptations is not good when it comes to resolution, but I suppose we can worry about that at the end of Winter 2022.

All in all this series worked pretty well, I’d say – Itamura Tomoyuki’s directorial style ventured too far into SHAFT territory at times but he seemed to dial it back some as the series progressed, and the art direction was generally outstanding.  I like Mochizuki’s old-school deliberate exposition – she knows how to build a story brick by brick – and the characters and premise are more than interesting enough to keep me hooked.  I’m not as emotionally vested as I was at this point in Pandora Hearts, but Vanitas no Carte is a very good show.  I’ll be hoping it can level up from here of course, but even if not it’s still solidly entertaining.