English Dub Review: The Case Study of Vanitas “Love”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Now that the crazy crashed party is in the past, Vanitas and Noe are living with Luca’s rich uncle and spending time with their friends while they recuperate. Vanitas is totally in love with Jeanne, but denies their romance in public in front of Luca by claiming she was not in her right mind when she sucked his blood. Meanwhile, Noe wrestles with his own feelings as he ponders the concept of love.

Our Take:

The eighth episode of Vanitas opens with a confused Noe asking Vanitas to explain what love is, and that cringy interaction really set the tone for the rest of this week’s proceedings. The imaginatively titled Love is one of the slowest paced episodes I’ve seen of the show to date. There’s really not much that happens apart from everyone having a lot of romantic tension with everyone else. But hey, I guess that’s better than talking through a lot of exposition! (Although there is plenty of that, too.)

After the weird flash forward opening of Noe’s question to Vanitas, the episode starts out with a scene in which Luca, Jeanne, Noe, and Vanitas are eating a meal together in a fancy restaurant. Everything is going about as well as can be expected when Vanitas suddenly gets all weird and reveals that Jeanne has sucked his blood by showing everyone her mark on his shoulder. She gets all flustered and denies it while Luca is just shocked and offended. In the end, Vanitas backs down by saying it wasn’t her choice because she was in a magical kind of daze thanks to the curse bearers, but then Jeanne drags him outside to talk and Vanitas confirms that his story was just a bunch of bunk to save face.

The two of them have one of the most drawn out exchanges of flirting I’ve ever seen — if you can call it flirting. Vanitas just keeps acting creepy and saying dumb things in the most sleazy manner possible while Jeanne is a brick wall. They have negative romantic chemistry and that made it so bad to watch that it was almost good? Later on, Vanitas admits to Noe that he knows Jeanne will never reciprocate his feelings, but that he prefers it that way because he wouldn’t be interested in the type of person who’s interested in him. Yeesh.

Vanitas and Jeanne might not have the greatest it factor in the world, but Noe and Dom get to show off their own talents in this episode too! She starts sucking on his throat and then he ends up drinking the blood from her hand at the same time. I just—this show is something else. At least Dom and Noe seem to fit better together than Vanitas and Jeanne, even if that’s not saying much.

And of course, since this is an episode all about love, the show staff just had to throw in some bait for the Vanitas/Noe shippers out there, giving them a short dancing scene at the end because Vanitas is “too scared” to dance with Jeanne because he’s afraid of stepping on her feet. With so many weird couples and relationships it felt like this episode was just throwing things at the wall in hopes of something sticking. Blood! Unrequited love! Dancing! You’ll like one of these things for sure! Sadly, I didn’t really like anything that this episode gave us. None of these characters have much chemistry and they all act super melodramatic and dumb all the time (especially Noe). I definitely did not love Love.