Case Study of Vanitas Season 2

Episode 15

You can still visit Chloé's castle today. It's in ruins, of course, but Château D'Apcher, ancient seat of the Marquis d'Apchier, exists in northern Gévaudanl; it was abandoned over the course of the seventeenth century, which aligns with when Chloé would have been left there alone after her family died out. As far as I know there are no vampire stories associated with the castle, but when you've already got the Beast of Gévaudan, you don't really need any other horror stories. And Chloé's life is terrible enough as it is without becoming fodder for sensation novels: when the world was rewritten, she suddenly became a vampire, doomed to be hidden from the world while her father, and later her (or rather, his) descendants desperately search for a way to make her human again. After enough centuries of that, is it any wonder that she gave up and allowed Naenia to turn her into a beast?

In some ways, Chloé's story is one of her embracing what she may have always thought about herself. When your father tells you never to go outside and spreads the word that you're dead rather than trying to understand the changes you've undergone, that sends a message. In Chloé's case, that message was that as a vampire she is somehow “wrong;” she's the shameful family secret, and the only way she can live in the light again is if she reverts to being human. That's drastically different from how Noé lives, and even though Vanitas is opposed to curse-bearing vampires, that's only because he wants to cure them so that they can live freely again. (Or that's what he says, at any rate.) Had someone besides Ruthven contacted Chloé, or had he come back sooner, this could have been a very different story. But by the time he did return, it was to scare the already fragile woman, and that's something Naenia took gleeful advantage of, using her powers to give Chloé visions of Jeanne dead at her hands, which only confirmed what Chloé had secretly thought of herself for some time.

Was it coincidence that this happens around 1764, right when the Beast claimed its first victim, a girl named Jeanne? I'm going to guess not; Charlatan's research has to be good if they're going to successfully get vampires to voluntarily give up their true names, and since, as Naenia says, that's the only way to get the names of certain (powerful?) vampires, I wouldn't be surprised if they orchestrated Naenia's meeting with Chloé down to the second. And since Chloé hasn't seen Jeanne in over one hundred years, she has no reason to doubt that she did, in fact, turn into a beast and murder her. In fact, maybe she thinks she's been the beast all along.

There are plenty of ways to become a monster. That's what Naenia and Charlatan seem to be counting on when they steal names and create curse-bearers. And perhaps the vampires whose names they can't steal aren't so much powerful in terms of what they can do to the world, but in their own belief in their convictions. Chloé held out a long time before she fell, and Noé, despite his innocence, is very clear in his thoughts. That he's an Archiviste probably helps, but he's never stopped being sad or angry about Louis, and that may help to make him untouchable, because he's got that one thing that he holds onto so tightly. This conviction and his general goodness may end up being the saving grace for Vanitas and Jeanne, since with Chloé in possession of the book, Vanitas is going to be up against her without his main weapon. But we also don't know precisely why Chloé wants the book. It seems obvious that part of it is the research her family was engaged in: to rewrite the code of the universe, originally to return her to human form. What she wants to do with it now isn't fully clear yet, but she's so old and tired that she's very nearly gone full Miss Havisham – dressed in the style of a century earlier, living a bare (yet oddly sumptuous) existence in a castle with a lone man, clinging, albeit possibly unconsciously, to a past that has long since turned to dust.

Noé and Vanitas may have traveled back through time. Who's to say that Chloé isn't looking to turn back the clock even further in an attempt to unlock her own time?

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The Case Study of Vanitas Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.