Sure I can, @tristis-333.
As some context, they asked me that question after I listed that I believe that making Vil a half fae would benefit his character in this post.
I mentioned why a little bit briefly here. (x) As for some more reasons as to why I feel like this...
For one thing, Vil has no idea who his mother is. Normally in fantasy stories that would either point to said character being long-lost royalty, like what happened with Silver, or that his mother is actually some sort of supernatural creature. In Vil’s case, the latter option option makes more sense.
There’s also that line in the Heartslabyul light novel when Yuuya sees Vil for the first time and thinks, “Their beauty was so astonishing that Yuuya would’ve accepted that they weren’t human, but some type of magical creature instead.” He keeps making similar remarks every single time he sees Vil after that, even in the next one.
If I never played the game and read that for the first time, I would think that the book would be setting up a plot twist that Vil's mother is a fae. But, nope. They lead to nothing, making it a set up without payoff. It’s just...bizarre.
There are plenty of different kinds of fae or beings that Vil's mother could potentially be. Vila, nymphs, nixies, leanan sídhe, baobhan sith and plenty more are all inhumanly beautiful humanoid magical creatures from folklore that would fit that description.
Before anyone says anything, if Vil was a real life person, he would have every right to never want to contact his mother or learn who she is. Plenty of people do for a variety of reasons. He doesn't owe her anything, especially if I'm right about her she giving him a god-awful name just to be spiteful and immediately drop him off with Eric right after he was born like a strongly speculate.
(The reason why I suspect that is due to the possible meanings behind his name. At best, Vil means "want" as in "I want to get a pizza" in Norwegian. At worst, it means "vile" and "despicable" in Spanish, French and Portuguese. It's a baffling name to give a child, even by celebrity standards. Granted, I think Vil's name is just an ill thought-out pun on "Vil as in VILlain" due Yana loving those, but still...)
Here's the thing. Vil isn't real. He's not an autonomous being capable of making his own choices or can be influenced by his past like a real person. He's a fictional character in a video game, who's entire personality, actions and background were decided by a team of writers. Those traits are there to only serve a larger narrative and should lead to something.
If that's the case, it's fair to ask, "What purpose does that aspect of his character serve the overall narrative?" I can't think of anything besides maybe...
Add more diversity to the character backgrounds
To add more dark drama to Vil's past.
To show off how handsome Vil is in the case of Yuuya's comments.
That's pretty much it. Those seem like pretty weak and flimsy reasons to add that to the story, especially since they seem to be leading to something much more important.
(I also feel the same way about the game saying that Vil and Jack are childhood friends, but not doing anything with it aside from mentioning a couple times and Jack popping up in that one flashback. Since that's another topic completely, I'll leave it at that.)
Making him half-fae gives those plot points and hints a proper narrative payoff. It would tie together all the comments about how almost inhumanly beautiful Vil is, give the mystery surrounding his mother an actual purpose and makes all those little hints feel like they were building towards something instead of going nowhere.
Second, in canon Vil has this intimidating allure that pushes people away from him. However, almost every character in the game is inhumanly beautiful, aside from Grim, Henrick, and Ortho, so why is Vil the only one to have this issue to such an extreme degree? Wouldn’t all of the other characters struggle with that if that’s the case? We get that he can be a bit…much, and even people in the fandom commented about that, but that doesn’t seem like it would be a enough reason to cause all that in universe.
If Vil is half-fae, that lands better. You could read it as humans subconsciously recognizing something dangerous in him and wanting to stay away. Kinda like how the vampires are portrayed in Twilight. That adds a clearer reason for why people react to him the way they do.
Another thing as well is that I always found it odd that Sebek is the only half fae in the whole game. I understand that fae in the canon are relatively uncommon in the canon let alone half fae. Even then, I still think there would be a couple more in the cast in general. Without getting too personal, I used to be in a similar situation growing up as Sebek and even then I knew of a few others aside from my family who were like me.
To be fair, I think this is partly thanks to the game being Japanese. Because Japan is such a homogeneous country, Yana and the other staff probably never considered how that might come across to more diverse places like the US and Canada or even how NRC is supposed to be like. Even then, it is something that sticks out to me personally.
Adding another half-fae character to the cast would help with that, and Vil feels like the most natural choice. He already has an unknown mother, multiple characters comment on how he looks almost inhuman, and his whole story has several little details that don't really go anywhere as they are now. Making him half-fae would tie all of that together instead of introducing a completely new character or rewriting someone else's backstory from scratch.
As a bonus, it would make Vil and Sebek foils for one another if that was the case. Sebek could represent someone who hates his human half thanks to intergenerational trauma associated with that war. While Vil would represent someone who doesn't mind both sides, he chooses to embrace his human half while hiding his fae half for a multitude of reasons. If that was the case, it would make Vil parallel real life celebrities like Rita Hayworth who went to great efforts to hide part of their heritage to get film roles.
Finally, I think Yana is a pantser. While that isn’t automatically a problem in of itself, plenty of talented writers are, it genuinely feels like she hardly ever drafts things beyond the initial planning stage, leading to a whole host of issues stemming from that. Granted, this is understandable in the case of her manga thanks to manga authors constantly being under extremely tight deadlines by their editors, but that’s still one of her flaws as a writer…among many.
You might be thinking, “That’s…great. What does that have to do with anything?”
Well, and this is getting into speculation territory, I think that Yana set out to make Vil more pompous, vein and image obsessed like James from Team Rocket or Tamaki Suoh from Ouran Highschool Host Club, but then changed her mind around Book 5. Kinda like what happened with Luke in the Percy Jackson books, albeit less extreme.
The way Vil acts and some of the things he says before Book 5 feel extremely out of character compared to how he's written afterwards. Like these…
The same goes for that scene in the anime where he primps himself in front of the Dark Mirror. If Yana changed her mind about the direction she wanted to take his character midway through production, moments like that make a lot more sense.
Obviously, I could be completely wrong. But between how different Vil is before and during Book 5, along with his prototype design in the artbook giving off that impression and Vil turning old in Book 6 having more weight if he was more image obsessed, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that was exactly what happened.
Either way, it creates another problem where Vil's personality doesn't really match the background the story gives him. On paper, he's a privileged nepo baby, whose father is a famous actor and already had connections to the entertainment industry. But from Book 5 onwards, his entire mindset revolves around discipline, constant self-improvement and acting like one mistake could destroy everything he's worked for. While that's not impossible, those traits fit someone who had to fight for every opportunity they got far more rather than someone who had a safety net from birth. As a result, his personality and his backstory don't feel like they belong to the same character.
The easiest way to fix that would be to either give him a more humble background like Epel, making it so he had to break into the industry on his own instead of relying on a famous father, or have him face some kind of discrimination or marginalization. Any of those would make his outlook feel more grounded. It would also make his rivalry with Neige even stronger because it would mean he was projecting his own insecurities onto Neige long before finding out that Neige works just as hard as he does, especially if Neige is the nepo baby and Vil was the one who worked his ass off to get to where he is in this scenario.
Making Vil half-fae is one way to bridge that gap without throwing out his existing backstory or Neige's. He could still have a famous father and grow up with privilege, but being half-fae could leave him feeling like he constantly has to prove that his success comes from his own talent and hard work rather than people being naturally drawn to him thanks to some inherited fae allure. It also gives him a fantasy equivalent of discrimination that fits the setting without changing too much about his design or diving into real world discrimination. That makes his drive to be perfect feel a lot more understandable, and it ties back into several details the story already established instead of introducing an entirely new conflict. If that was the case, he also has plenty of reason to hide that part of his identity thanks to fearing how the public would react to that news or that he would be typecasted even more, especially if fae are already stigmatized.
I know this is a controversial take in this fandom...for some reason, and everyone is free to disagree with me. But that's just my two cents.
To make one thing crystal clear, I don't hate Vil. He's one of my favourite characters in the game, and the one I relate to the most. I just wish that some things about his character and the rest of the game in general were handled better. Criticizing the writing around a character isn't the same thing as hating on them.
