Rants about Pandora Hearts and Vincent

So...

 LET'S TALK ABOUT PANDORA HEARTS!!

8D

Hmm... I'm not sure I'd enjoy Pandora Hearts so much if it was all cuteness and fluff and funny things. I need the drama, blood and pain to really like a story. Pandora Hearts is so great because it has the cuteness but doesn't get too corny and also has a healthy amount of darkness. Compared to my other big manga obsession, Fullmetal Alchemist, PH is a lot less predictable and also darker, I think. I never spent as much time analyzing FMA as I do analyzing PH.

Random thoughts about Pandora Hearts (mostly Vincent) I wrote down but never posted anywhere

I just reread a few notes I made a long time ago while reading Pandora Hearts. Some of them were just about analyzing characters and their relationships, but there were many things I had predicted but kinda forgot about them. O___o Click "Read more" to view my ramblings. Warning: Mild spoilers!!

Vincent.

I decided to collect some of my rants about him here because I got questioned a lot for liking him in the past. So here are my reasons why I like him. This is a compilation of notes I wrote between the spring/summer of 2011 and February, 2012:

Vincent is so imperfect it's perfect. So bad it's good. So wrong it's right. I love even his creepy incest vibes.

I've always been oddly fascinated with Vincent, but I started really liking him only when I began reading the manga (which was about a week after I watched the anime, so not that much time, lol). In the past 2-3 years, I developed a liking towards sick twisted characters and Vincent fits into this image so well. I love everything about him and enjoy every moment he appears in the manga.

Vincent was a sweet innocent little child, yet everyone labelled him a child of misfortune simply because he had a red eye. And then at some point, he snapped. He's trying to make his brother's life happier while constantly dirtying himself, he murders, tortures, uses poisons, blackmails, breaks promises, seduces women, uses everyone around him to achieve his goal and it doesn't matter since he loathes himself. I think the irony in this is that he sort of really did become that horrible person feared by everyone, even if he's fooling most people into believing that he's a very nice, polite and cheerful person.

Vincent is a psycho. But he isn't your average psycho character who seems to be all nice and friendly in the beginning and then suddenly snaps. Oh no. He's usually wearing that deceiving smile of his, but he's secretly thinking dark thoughts all the time. So far, there was only one time he lost his head and went on an angry rampage and by the looks of it, he sometimes beats his servant up, but otherwise, he remains calm. In other words, he's one of the most cold-blooded psychos I've seen so far. He deceives and uses everyone and tries not to get emotionally attached to anyone other than his brother. And he kinda sorta manages to deceive you, the reader as well, not only the other characters. I've been randomly sympathizing with him for a long time, his creepiness and mysteriousness always attracted me. And I didn't believe he'd be able to provide a good excuse for all he did and does, but then he still did. So I forgave him for everything, lol. He's probably the most unpopular anime/manga character I like this much, but the fact that most people hate him makes me like him even more~ Perhaps I love him for the same reasons other people hate him, ha!

I think that if there is even just one single thing about Vincent that is honest, pure and innocent, then it's his love for his brother.

Moar reasons why I love Vincent:

• He's sort of a "catalyst" in the story. If something bad happens, Vincent usually has something to do with it. Seriously, he's a Pandora member while he's also with the Baskervilles, he was there in Sablier, he plays a big part in the 2nd coming of age ceremony incident, etc.
•  He's messed up in the head and he's sort of a "morally bankrupt" character, which allows him to do anything for one stupid goal and no matter how bad things he does, I won't start hating him for it.
•  He is sneaky and quite intelligent, he likes to manipulate things from the background. He often uses his servant, Echo to do different tasks or "spy" for him. And he can also manipulate people.
• He's a good actor, he rarely loses his calm demeanor and maintains an image that makes him seem perfectly normal to everyone who doesn't know him well enough. He is also capable of acting totally emotionless and cold-blooded even if he actually cares somewhere deep down.
• I find his obsession with his brother creepy, yet touching and intriguing at the same time.
•  His immense self-loathing is awesome.
•  He enjoys causing pain to others. I don't like how some people began making a saint out of Vincent after a certain part. No matter what his goal is, it isn't an excuse for him to be a prick and do wrong things just because he feels like it. (Don't ask why this is a reason for me to like him. XD)
•  He isn't this cool anti-hero who you should feel sorry for and sympathize with, yet he isn't an all-around evil prick either. He's something in between, something... more complex?
• I also like how he believes that he really is the cause of misfortune, the creator of darkness and acts like it while he fails to realize that if he didn't do all the nasty things, maybe he could change his own fate instead of fulfilling his role as the "misfortune child". 

Yes, Vincent does things only to make others suffer. He should not be the asshole he is. But in a way, he must feel almost OBLIGATED to do these things just to make sure that he is the child of misfortune, the despicable person who is only capable of making others suffer. Because Vincent hates many things, but hates himself the most. He puts on a calm, smiley demeanor, but on the inside, he vents and suffers. He drowns his anger and hatred into cutting dolls and other things.
He is not a completely dark pointlessly villainous character. He does not want to cause havoc just for the sake of causing havoc or for his own benefit. He uses Gil as an excuse for his actions, but he truly believes he could make Gil's life better. He has this somewhat childish belief that he is the cause of everything bad that happened and without him, everything would magically become better. Vincent's character is full of contradictions. He loves his only brother Gilbert to the point of utter obsession and would do anything to protect him from harm and make him happy and yet, the cause of Vincent's unlucky fate, the reason he was despised and labelled a child of misfortune is actually Gilbert himself.

 Somebody said somewhere that Vincent was Grell with a brother complex... FFFUUU. Actually, I liked Grell in Kuroshitsuji to some extent. But he's just a pathetic 2 dimensional comic relief character. Vincent is one of the deepest, most complex characters in Pandora Hearts and one of my favourite anti-heroes.

I don't think Gil is such a despicable brother. Many Vincent fans dislike him, because he "hates Vincent and doesn't care about him". This is not true. Gil does care about him in his own way, it's Vincent who doesn't let Gil closer to him. And you should know how well Vincent was able to confuse and manipulate Gil before Gil grew balls somewhere during the Headhunter arc. And chapter 65 should be proof that Gil cares about Vincent. In a normal case, Gil might have died from that shot he took instead of Vincent.

Vincent is the kind of person who is kind, friendly, loud and outgoing to most of the outside world, but hides an immense amount of darkness and secrets deep inside. He's sort of like Break, actually. 8D Don't kill me Break fans, but I've always thought Break and Vincent had a lot in common. It's just that Break is a more positive character with more virtues than faults, while Vincent is sort of a villain or anti-hero with more faults than virtues.

HAHAHA! I wrote this paragraph long before the past arc in the summer of 2011:

"When I first saw that Glen had purple eyes like Alice, I got this idea that maybe they were related. Because physical resemblance seems to be pretty common within the great duke families of Pandora Hearts and even if the Baskervilles are not blood relatives, it's possible that Glen had a little sister, niece, daughter or something before everything started. I mean this entity known as "Glen Baskerville" seems to be some kind of demon thing, who possesses humans. His reincarnations get reborn and then he slowly takes over their mind and body, so it's possible that the person we know as Glen was originally a normal human too. The fact that the new reincarnation looks so much like Alice proves that there may be a relation between Alice and Glen.
The big question is: how and why did Alyss become the Will of the Abyss?"

XDDD

I wrote this before Retrace 65 (Collapse) came out:

"This is stupid, but I'm also a little scared of the upcoming PH chapter. I've always waited for it with much anticipation, but now I'm not sure. On one hand, I love how the storyline is advancing and the plot thickens, but on the other hand, I hate it. I'm worried about the characters or something, lol. I don't want bad things to happen, but it seems like the worst case scenario is happening right now."

8D

I have a lot more things I wrote down, but it took me long enough to compile all these and this post is also long enough now, haha~~