Hey guys, so my Vanijeanne opinions are bad and wrong and likely contentiousness so apologies. I am however very willing to have conversations with both those who love it and those who hate it as long as we can remain civil. With that out of the way I want to talk frankly about the ship including my personal opinions on the ship itself and what I think mochijun is trying to do with this relationship.

Because shipping is quite fraught in fandom spaces I feel it's often hard to have meaningful conversations about these types of relationships, especially when (like in Vanijeanne's case) the opinions are quite split. But inherently the ships are an important part of some narratives and that's most definitely the case with vnc. Not just because the series literally asks "What on Earth is love?" only 12 chapters in but because romantic/sexual feelings are inextricably linked to the main characters and their development. As one would expect with a vampire series. So it's worth having these conversations.

The reason I want to talk about Vanijeanne in particular is because it's the explicitly romantic relationship that has seen the most on screen change, and because it works so well for some people and is utterly despised by others. For me personally I think that in certain small aspects of their relationship the writing falls short, not enough to ruin it entirely yet enough to make it unpalatable to some.

We'll start with the most hated scene in all of vnc: the chapter 4 kiss. I've been through my opinions on it in my chapter on the prevalence of assault in vnc. To summarise, my interpretation is that we are supposed to recognise it as bad and as assault but the framing of the scene is jarring and muddies the message we are supposed to take away from it.

Pulling back from vnc a bit I think the scene is viewed unfavourably or with suspicion to a degree because it takes place in a shounen manga/anime. I think most anime fans have seen female characters put into specifically sexual situations they are textually uncomfortable with for the sake of fanservice/comic relief. Women getting spied on in the bath/locker room is a disturbingly frequent occurrence in my experience.

(On a completely unrelated tangent read witch hat atelier if you want to see a criticism of how nonconsensual voyeurism is harmful and disrespectful. It's addressed in one chapter but god it was validating).

So I can't blame people for viewing a scene like that and their knee-jerk reaction being that it was a particularly sleazy attempt at fanservice and getting a female character to be 'cute' or flustered. I have literally seen multiple people say that the anime made it clear Jeanne liked the kiss because she was blushing and I... The damage done to people's reading comprehension by using a blush to communicate a character is tsundere/flustered. On that note Jeanne is not a tsundere and I swear to God people better stop describing her as such. If a blush means someone 'liked it' you better fucking ship Ruthven/Chloé and Naenia/Chloé too (though they didn't have Chloé blush during the anime kiss for some reason and yes I am bothered by that choice).

I had a picture here of the Jeanne and Chloé blushing during the aforementioned encounters to illustrate my point but wattpad nuked it for violating community guidelines so please just imagine those scene instead.

Ah romance

Part of what makes the vanijeanne kiss scene more than simply gross fanservice (aside from an argument that it isn't really framed as fanservice) is that as the series progresses we find out that assault is a thing vnc is interested in depicting to varying degrees and that vanijeanne's relationship is intentionally messy. Of course, you won't know that after only seeing the kiss in isolation. But even the kiss scene isn't presented in a juvenile way like a lot of scenes that are just cheap fanservice. It's raw and sexual in a way that's blatant. It isn't pretending to be innocent by no touching happening. It's not even just a nonconsensual peck on the lips, Vanitas definitely shoved his tongue in her mouth. Uncomfortable as it is I appreciate that vnc at least commits to it. Problematic doesn't automatically mean poorly written.

The other thing that I think makes the initial kiss so thorny is how it can be interpreted as lowering Jeanne's character to something that contradicts her initial introduction. The problem is notably worse in the anime because significant portions of the fight with Vanitas and Noé were cut, making her position as a feared warrior a little less supported. In the anime we are told more than shown how fearsome she is, though in the manga I think appropriate time was dedicated to her nearly murdering our main boys.

It's not so much about people being unable to deal with female characters that have both strength and weakness so much as an understandable negative response to one of the most powerful characters in the series being literally brought to her knees by an average man. Regardless of it making sense in context and Jeanne being able to flex her superior combat prowess throughout the series this scene took what was so far one of the only prominent women in the series and not just defeated but humiliated her. It's hard not to have some reservations about it, especially when one of our main characters was the perpetrator.

That's where I think another, perhaps the biggest, issue comes from. A lot of people don't understand Vanitas. Anyone who takes everything he says as true is immediately misinterpreting him. He is, through and through, a liar and a showman. I truly do not think I can help anyone who thinks his first love confession to Jeanne was honest. A lot of people will also believe that because he is the protagonist he is meant to be correct and any unlikeable actions he takes are a mistake on the author's part. That's simply not true, especially not with Mochijun. If any character is vnc's moral core that would be Noé and even in that case we are supposed to examine his actions and whether his righteousness is always good.

The next two vanijeanne encounters are still uncomfortable to a degree though I think you would be hard pressed to complain about them. They continue the dynamic from the kiss scene pretty consistently with Jeanne (understandably) hating Vanitas and Vanitas goading her and blackmailing her into doing what he wants. It's not a romantic relationship but a sexual one and it certainly isn't healthy. Honestly, that's fine. This flavour of vanijeanne was pretty compelling, if not as something you shipped then as a relationship dynamic that is interesting to watch, which was personally how I felt about it as those chapters were coming out. The actions of both parties were in line with their previous behaviour and Vanitas is still being framed as a manipulator and conniving regardless of him being a sympathetic character and a protagonist.

The relationship is meant to make you feel conflicted. Vanitas pours saccharine sweet words out to Jeanne all while ignoring her boundaries and trying to take arbitrary pleasure from her. At the same time he offers her something she needs: blood. And despite his insincerity it's hard not to believe that he cares to some degree, if only because she's a vampire who might be sick. It's also clear that although Jeanne honestly, truly, hates him the blood she gets is a point of genuine attraction. It's fucked up! That's kind of fun to read to me, I don't know about you. Every time they're together you clench up because you don't know what kind of freak bullshit Vanitas is going to pull next.

Then comes the date and here is a part of the story I feel Very torn about. On one hand it has one of my favourite scenes and on the other it has one of my least. We'll start with the least. To help you understand I need you to be aware I was reading this monthly as it was coming out so any cliffhanger ending I was left to sit on it for a month or more. And one of the cliffhangers made me have a pretty visceral negative reaction.

The cliffhanger I'm talking about is the current ending to memoire 20 in which the final line is Jeanne thinking in her head, "Did I... maybe... manage to react as if I was in love... just now?" It made me want to tear my hair out. Now, you may be confused. After all, just a couple paragraphs ago I was espousing my enjoyment of the bizarre dynamic between Vanitas and Jeanne in their prior meetings. The reason this cliffhanger bothered me was because I couldn't (and still can't, let's be clear) see why Jeanne would think this at this point in their relationship. I was cool with it being weird but the minute I was being forced to engage with it as legitimately romantic that annoyed me.

Jeanne being flustered made sense with her character. Her considering she might feel love when the only nice thing he has done up to that point is call her pretty disappointed me. I felt that I'd been viewing their dynamic through the wrong lens the entire time and that I was supposed to have been uncritically viewing all of their prior interactions as romantic. The cutesy thoughts Jeanne was having made the whole relationship seem less complex to me. It seemed as though their relationship was an inevitability that I should have seen coming. To me the prior and current toxicity felt less like it was intentional and meant to say something and more like a poorly developed excuse to have edgy/sexy scenes just because of this line. I still hate this line. I genuinely believe vnc would be better without it.

The anime is even more egregious because it cuts Domi's line during the date where she determines that Jeanne is a pushover because she literally never gets affection. Without that bit of clarification her reactions towards Vanitas are so unconvincing and plain weird.

From my post about Vani's developing feelings you'll know that I enjoy that progression. With Jeanne's I think it's a lot less clear and it's ineffective because a line like this implies she loved or at least was starting to love him in this moment. I would find her feelings more believable if this line didn't exist and I could assume her feelings started in Gévaudan or in the scene I alluded to earlier which is one of my favourites.

That scene being the one in the atelier where he promises to kill her. It is perhaps my favourite vanijeanne moment because it highlights the issues these two have that drive them to find such a promise comforting and it highlights the darkness within their relationship that is inherently so appealing. It's just plain compelling, binding them together with something almost no one else in the cast would or even could understand. I get why this would give Jeanne reason to begin getting attached to Vanitas. It's a dependency thing, and murder as an act of love is exactly the kind of twisted that makes a dynamic like this work. Only something that big could make them start to cling to whatever scraps of genuine emotion are present in their bond.

After that is Gévaudan and honestly I don't have much to say in regards to it that I haven't already said in Vanitas's feelings for Jeanne post. He starts to despite himself show real care for Jeanne and ends up saving Chloé and sort of by proxy Jeanne. In that arc he makes things possible for her that wouldn't have been otherwise and allows her to reclaim a part of herself she lost as a bourreau by giving her the strength to choose to save someone. It's pretty sweet all things considered and I get why Jeanne would fall for that. I do. I just wish the date had been handled better.

I do want to briefly touch on the cabin and the kisses that occurred within it. These have been compared to Vanitas kissing Jeanne during their first meeting and I think that is a false equivalence. It's certainly not a clearly moral action on Jeanne's part, though it's not that terrible either. She did it without his consent, that is not debatable. She wasn't doing it just to kiss him though. She was giving him water because he was being a little bitch and refusing, saying she should kill him. Yes, she could have just shoved the bottle in his mouth but it was in the heat of the moment I don't think she was necessarily thinking clearly. Also, there might have been some underlying unconscious attraction to him driving that action, which from a character perspective is quite interesting.

We can also touch on the other nonconsensual thing Jeanne did in Gévaudan, which was to drink Vanitas's blood at the end. That is not great I will admit. I will still defend her to a degree though. First of all she had no bad intentions and she never does. Second, Vanitas said he would give her blood any time, though he explains after the fact that she should think more carefully about time and place. Third, if he had told her to stop do you really think she would have kept going? It's still not a faultless action but they are in a pseudo-sexual relationship (though not a romantic one as of yet) so it's not the same as the original kiss. Jeanne has reason to believe this is within the bounds of what their agreement entails.

Aside from that I think we can agree the post-Gévaudan contrasting vanijeanne reactions were cute and funny. I have no problem with them and I don't think anyone else does unless they already dislike vanijeanne.

Now, the final thing. Vanijeanne is sexy. Straight up, that's it. Both characters are attractive and the way eroticism is portrayed in vnc is so much more compelling than in most anime/manga. A big reason for that is because 1) it doesn't shove tits and arse in your face 2) we get to arguably objectify the male character more than the girl. I'm partially joking about that but the way it's shown tends to focus on the feelings of both characters and that's hot. The action of sucking blood is itself quite appealing as erotic metaphor for the way it blends pain and pleasure and encompasses the act of consumption and being consumed.

Seeing the woman struggling to suppress her animalistic desires is also subversive in its own way, especially when Vanitas is coded as the submissive partner in their trysts. He's always on his back or against a wall and Jeanne is the one *ahem* penetrating him. There's a lot to be said about how their dynamics within their more sexual encounters tended to flip the dynamic outside wherein Vanitas was the one pulling the strings. It's interesting and I think starting a pairing with sexual attraction and the two of them growing into their romantic attraction is a unique way of developing a relationship.

I don't think vanijeanne is perfect, it took me a long time to come around to it, yet I do see value in it. Its inclusion in vnc enhances the story for the most part. Despite its issues I'll still praise it as a far more ambitious and compelling romance than most shounen manga are willing to even attempt. At the very least (because the bar is in hell) I understand why they like each other.

For some people the places where the narrative stumbles trying to develop this pairing are too egregious. And for some that first kiss is what they're always going to associate vanijeanne with. That's fine. We all have our own tastes and our own places where we draw the line on what we're willing to get invested in. Regardless, I think ignoring vanijeanne entirely is a fool's errand if you want to engage with vnc at any deeper level though - being clear - you do not have to like it. Personally, I actually prefer vanoé because there's a lot of fascinating subtext between them and I happen to enjoy their dynamic.

Still, I think often when people criticise vanijeanne they don't make points anyone will listen to. If you simply champion it as problematic I can't say I disagree but I can't say I care for that surface level take either. Shipping isn't about morality, it's about enjoying the interactions between characters.

I made a small jab at Ruthven/Chloé and Naenia/Chloé earlier but I can't say I'd care if anyone shipped those or that I wouldn't be interested in talking to someone who did like one or both of those pairings. Although I wouldn't be comfortable if they found the scenes in which those two assault Chloé romantic. In the same way I don't call the first vanijeanne kiss romantic and outright dislike that interpretation. I also can't stop people having those interpretations though, and I don't really need to. The chapter 4 kiss makes me uncomfortable but if you find it attractive in some way I may fundamentally disagree and have wildly different interpretations of the characters but you're entitled to view it how you like.

There's a similarly pointless argument often cited by vanijeanne shippers against vanoé shippers; that being that vanijeanne is canon (or at least close enough to canon there's no point splitting hairs). While certainly true we all know canonnicity doesn't matter when discussing ships because they're all about personal preference. If being canon mattered a lot of the most popular ships for fanfiction and fanart would not get anywhere near as much attention as they do. So yeah, if you want to defend or criticise a ship you need to be specific about what exactly you dislike about it and whether your problem lies with the writing or if there's a personal element involved. Alternatively, you can just say you don't vibe with something without starting a disagreement.

This post kind of got away from me in the end. Please feel free to share your thoughts where you disagree or agree with me or if you have any questions about things you want me to clarify. Also I do actually love most of the fandom despite how embittered parts of this may sound. I know most people are chill and hey, there's nothing wrong with criticising things even if they are ships.

I'm sure my main ships (vanoé, domijeanne and jjchloé) all have various sticking points for some people.