#and seeing a reference to Mischa Lecter in that pile

[neversetyoufree]

Christ okay, so for AGES now, ever since I first got into trying to track all the references in VnC, Mikhail's name has been haunting me.

Just about every major VnC character name is a reference to something from literature and/or history, and most of those references are pretty obvious. It's not just some of them; it's pretty much a universal thing for any character of note.

However, for a while now, Misha has seemed frustratingly like an exception. There is a serious dearth of characters named Misha or Mikhail in the historical eras and literary canons that Mochijun tends to pull from. I've been failing to find anything for a while, and I haven't seen any other fans picking out things he could be in reference to either. He's just this apparent weird exception, despite the fact that he's an important and extremely thematically relevant character.

But today I finally realized something. The spelling is different, but there is one decently famous literary character named Misha that works as a decent parallel to VnC's Mikhail—Mischa Lecter from the Hannibal series.

For those unfamiliar, in the book version of Hannibal, Mischa Lecter's entire narrative purpose is to be the younger sibling whose horrific death motivates Hannibal Lecter's violent revenge quest. The rest of the Lecter family is killed before the children, leaving Hannibal and Mischa alone in the world together with nobody else to rely on. Then Mischa is killed and cannibalized, and thus begins her brother's career as a killer cannibal.

It's not exactly a one to one parallel, but "desperate young siblings are trapped together in a horrible situation, and then the younger sibling Mischa dies, leaving the older brother alone and vengeful" does sound rather familiar, doesn't it? As remember, according to Vanitas, our Mikhail is supposed to be dead.

It's a weird and obscure enough comparison that I'm not about to declare I've solved the mystery for certain, but personally I've yet to find a better explanation for our Misha's name. After all, the French version of Michael is usually Michel, so Mochijun choosing specifically the Russian version of the name, then having Mikhail insist on going by "Misha" is a rather conspicuous choice. There has to be a reason for what's going on there.

#I realize I'm the girl that has made multiple posts comparing vnc to nbc hannibal for funzies #but I promise that isn't what prompted this #this is genuinely the result of me digging through a bunch of misc search results for any well-known characters named mikhail/misha/mischa #and seeing a reference to Mischa Lecter in that pile #and my brain exploding a little bit when I realized the reference fit #so anyway weigh in. y'all think this holds water? #vnc #vanitas no carte #the case study of vanitas #vnc mikhail #misha my beloved #english major hours #comparison