The Case Study of Vanitas

Episode 6

If there is one thing I'm really adoring about The Case Study of Vanitas, it's the level of research that went into the world building. (And, you know, the story and characters are pretty good, too.) Episode five spent a lot of time working with symbolism surrounding the French Revolution and the Terror, and this week episode six casts its net even wider as it deals with the aftermath of Noé's remembrances of trauma. Sadly, one of these pieces is not the mentioning of the French queen, because unless there's a vampire queen of France – totally possible, I grant you – France didn't have a queen in the late nineteenth century, or even in the mid-nineteenth century. The last woman to bear the title of “queen” in France was Maria Amalia, whose reign ended in 1848, and she was followed by the wife of Napoleon III, Eugénie, who was empress until the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Of course, this could all be moot if Ruthven doesn't mean a French ruler when he calls Veronica the Queen's Fangs; it could also be a leftover title from when France had a queen.

All of that aside, the more important name here is Ruthven. If you're a fan of really old (as in pre-Stoker) vampire fiction, you may recognize it, because Ruthven is the eponymous vampire (or vampyre) from John Polidori's 1819 novella The Vampyre. Honestly, it's not a very good book, although it was originally written during the same house party when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, which is fun. That Vanitas' Ruthven owes his name to Polidori's original is kind of a no-brainer, because not only is he a vampire, he's also a redhead, and the name Ruthven's Scots Gaelic origins incorporate the word for “red.” An 1816 Ruthven in the novel Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb was a direct, and unflattering, portrait of Lord Byron (by his former lover, no less), so our Ruthven's dashing romantic appearance is also very likely a literary reference. The implication, however, seems to be that our Ruthven is perhaps the Ruthven of Polidori's tale, making him an elder vampire and explaining a lot about the influence he seems to wield.

Another important name to pay attention to is Naenia. That's not just because we finally have a name for the weird black phantom representative of Charlatan – in Roman mythology, Naenia, more commonly spelled Nenia, was the goddess of funerals. Her name also became the word for a dirge (funerary song), which is interesting here, because Naenia in the show seems much less interested in the business of honor and remembrance and more in the actual death part of a funeral. But Naenia is also really, really keen on true names, which could be interpreted to be part of “honoring” someone, although the superstition about not letting someone know your true name lest it be used against you is worth thinking about here. Is Naenia, and Charlatan as an organization, truly bad, or are they merely corrupt?

That's one of the questions that Noé is likely to find himself grappling with in episodes to come. He's already struggling with the idea of “salvation” as not being a one-size-fits-all term. In Noé's mind, “saving” someone means allowing them to live, but that's not necessarily what the afflicted want. Catherine, the little girl he met earlier in the evening, is one of the afflicted, and she begs Vanitas to kill her as a means of “saving” her – from herself, since she knows she can't go back, but also as a way of letting her little sister live, because if Catherine is dead, she can't harm her sister. Noé is aghast that Vanitas obliges, because he can't see death as anything but bad, and he's still grappling with Louis' death all those years ago. But Vanitas doesn't view anything in even an approximation of black and white, and to him, “salvation” seems to be what suits the person and the situation. Noé perhaps isn't mature enough yet to see things this way, or he's unable to think beyond his own pain. While he can come across as the more empathetic of our main duo, that may not actually be the case here – he could instead be trying to foist his view of “salvation” on everyone, which makes Vanitas, with his willingness to do what is asked of him, is the more empathetic of the two. That could be behind his attempt to brush Noé aside at the end of this episode. He's trying, in his own way, to save Noé from the pain of seeing the world as it is, rather than how he wants to believe it is.

But maybe that's a lesson Noé needs to learn in order to finally come to terms with Louis' death. Little Red Riding Hood always sets off to Grandma's house, after all, even knowing that there are wolves in the forest.

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The Case Study of Vanitas is currently streaming on Funimation.