The Case Study of Vanitas: Things to Remember

Memoire 54.5

An amazing chapter! I'm so excited to get into it, so I'm not going to stall, let's just go!

Misha has completely lost control of the Book. Noé states that it's like the Book is eating away at him, very similar to the wording Luna uses to describe their mark on Vanitas, which were, as shown in memoire 42: "The mark I've engraved on your arm will eat away at you."

But this is different to Vanitas's mark spreading across him, the rapidity of it and the effects are completely different. It's hard to say, because the manga is in black and white, but I think whatever is coming out of the book is meant to be the colour black and thus the marks on Misha's body, and that seems to have completely dyed Misha's book hand, is black and not blue. It's kind of like ink! The reason I say this is the way it's shaded, it's completely dark, whereas when we've previously seen Vanitas's mark it's often more grey. Also, the illustration at the beginning of memoire 46 depicts a black mark atop Misha. Even if Vanitas has been rewritten to some extent by using his powers it's not been depicted as something coming from the Book, his mark is simply spreading, so this is something new we've not seen before. Vanitas explains it as the Book's powers going out of control due to interfering too much with the astermite in the park, although the last action he performed before losing control had nothing to do with the astermite and was about controlling a bunch of vampires under his control. Still, interesting that there's apparently an upper limit to how much you can use the Book.