dammit jim

Mochijun has drawn Vanoé back to back and/or with Noé inverted a zillion times, but the strong blue vs red and black vs white color theming in this one really drives home the whole "they're perfect opposites" visual of it all. The contrasting duo of all time.

Vanitas and Noé are chained together, or at least they're both wrapped up in the same chain. And it's the chain from The Book of Vanitas—the initial connection that first binds them together when they meet.

Vanitas and Noé each both have one chess piece behind them that is fully broken rather than just a bit cracked. Vanitas and Noé are also both, as people, deeply haunted by one particular death from their backstory.

Vanitas lost both of his biological parents by his mid teens, and he thought he'd lost Misha as well until recently, but he's always been first and foremost defined by the death of Luna. Luna is his namesake, the source of his powers, and the motivating force behind his self-destructive revenge. There would be no "Vanitas" at all if not for the ways the events around Luna's death broke and defined him. And the shattered chess piece behind Vanitas is a queen piece: a broken matriarch to represent the death of his mother figure.

Noé lost his human grandparents as a small child, and he's been separated from his Archiviste family by death and/or distance, but he is first and foremost defined by the death of Louis. Louis is the one great loss that poured gas on the fire of Noé's savior complex, to the point he even references his failure to save Louis as a reason he has to save Domi in the Amusement Park. Louis is the dead friend he still dreams of years later in Paris. He is the one great specter of grief that even Noé cannot romanticize into something painless. And the shattered chess piece behind Noé is a bishop: the piece best suited to represent a boy who was less noble than a knight but more important than a pawn. (Not to mention, of course, that Louis died in a ruined church).

Vanitas and Noé each have a king piece in the other's color. Noé is biting the blue king piece, and Vanitas is holding the magenta king up to his lips in a way that very much looks kisslike. That would be a loaded piece of imagery in any context, but given that the broken background pieces already establish the use of chess pieces to represent people in this illustration, and given that we know Noé wants to bite Vanitas, it's. Well it's certainly evocative.

This illustration is from right at the very beginning of the series! And it's such a fun teaser of everything we've learned about Vanitas and Noé since. It's got the way they're eternally in contrast yet bound together. It's got subtle references to the deaths that haunt them both. It's got implied sexual tension. It's got foreshadowing.