Tsukihime remake short thoughts

2 main reasons why Ciel’s route is so good for me:

The first reason is Noel. Noel is simply put, fucking hot the premise for Ciel’s character arc in the remake which can be summed up as ‘what if Ciel had to confront one of her victims from her time as Roa?’. Noel is great because she single-handedly invalidates everyone’s justification for their actions including herself by sheer virtue of how awful of a human being she is. You cannot at all argue that she’s in the right because she is such a piece of shit (I am literally convinced this is the highest praise I can give to a person).

The scenes where she mercilessly slaughters and tortures a bunch of undead victims invalidates the premise that church executors are acting for a good cause by pointing out how even these undead were victims of circumstance and that eliminating them all is, while unavoidable to keep human society going, not really just in any way. For Noel it comes down to serving as a form of stress relief and it doesn’t bother her at all because she’s convinced she’s in the right and because she has the church on her side.

This implicates her fellow 代行者 partner Ciel who’s killed a lot of (undead) people to get to where she is now, but their dynamic goes much further. As the previous Roa incarnation, Ciel ruined Noel’s life by slaughtering her entire village. Although the majority of readers will not put the blame on Ciel for falling to Roa’s possession, it doesn’t help to justify Ciel opposing Noel later on when the latter transforms into a vampire loli and becomes an obstacle for Ciel to overcome. Noel has every right to want justice for her hometown and for Roa to be eliminated, but her driving motivation and the actions she takes to get there are so base, so shortsighted and selfish that there is no justifying her. Ciel has every right to eliminate Noel as a threat to humanity, but as all of this was a result of Ciel herself (her time as Roa, and then her subsequent awkward treatment of Noel as a co-worker) that Ciel has no grounds to justify herself either.

A very important part to their relationship is that, although it’s somewhat driven by her need to leech onto Ciel’s standing to make up for her own mediocrity, Noel admires Ciel’s talent and was able to ignore Ciel’s involvement in her past because Ciel’s killed her emotions and acted as a machine. What breaks this balance is Ciel finding a heroine(Shiki) who lets her emotionally develop as a person, as well as Noel’s own mediocrity finally catching up to her. There was no way for Noel to receive any closure and die happily in Ciel’s story, and nothing Ciel could do to make it up to Noel either. This is the one point in tsukire that made me tear up.

An interesting scene for me in hindsight is early in the Ciel route when Shiki meets Noel in Vlov’s underground lair and she’s having a mental breakdown over everything. A little later she reveals herself as a church executioner and saves Shiki with a flair so impressive it was as if the breakdown earlier was just an act to convince you otherwise. With proper hindsight, I now see that it was a genuine moment of weakness. It was one of the few times you get to see how truly frail she is on the inside.

Noel has far surpassed my expectations as a character and I’m very happy with how she was written. Noel is so flawed as a person, so incredibly human in the worst ways. I like Noel for all the same reasons I like Shinji from F/SN, which means I love her a lot.

Roa is the other reason. Roa was an even bigger surprise than Noel because what makes him good this time round was always there in the original game. Roa’s pursuit of eternity (reincarnation) rather than perfection (immortality) as a means towards achieving the impossible (knowing all there is to know in the universe) is not new to the basic premise of vampires or for his character, but the flashback scenes that go over his motivations were so beautifuly written and so compelling to read compared to the original (this could just be due to the bad TL of the old game though). They touch upon all the themes that Near Side has always tried to explore, and you can tell this is the case because it doesn’t feel out of place with the original game. Roa’s philosophy is the thematic core of Tsukihime, it might’ve always been, but this remake establishes this so much better.

I think what’s really cool is that after Noel makes everyone irredeemable, the story is able to provide resolution to Roa’s thousand(?) year old seethe and cope. Yeah, he’s done a lot of bad shit, he’s the mastermind behind almost everything in the near side routes, but now that no one is in the right the story is able to engage with him in a more genuine manner. In the true end, he becomes a helpful third party to Shiki since their goals no longer conflict, and after being offered the chance to get Arcueid to notice him, he’s able to give up his longing for eternity to contribute to the final blow that defeats Arcueid and fades away with no lingering regrets. It’s not incredibly complicated, but having a character like Roa choose to end things of his own volition is an incredible payoff to an otherwise forgettable villain from the original game.

His character aside, his presence itself also plays an important role in the story as he’s an ever looming threat within Shiki’s mind that threatens to turn him into an irredeemable monster like Ciel had once been. Because there aren’t that many relevant characters and two of them are Roa’s possession targets, it feels like this threat of Roa’s possession is more universal than just a story beat. It’s like it’s a force of nature or an inescapable part of human nature that anyone is at risk of falling into, rather than just some loser cope that’s held on for a millenia. It makes the story’s treatment of the concepts of sin, evil and redemption so much more nuanced and interesting because Roa isn’t treated as the ultimate evil who you can pin all the blame on.

The final piece to this I guess discussion on Tsukihime’s take on the lack of absolute morality comes from Arcueid, a pure being overwhelmed by the feelings she’s experiencing for the first time. Arcueid’s route is included to demonstrate the best case scenario where nothing really goes wrong with this so that you can then see what happens when things do go wrong. It’s perhaps a necessary inclusion to the remake, even though it’s a little regrettable because Arcueid’s route’s plotting is so much weaker in comparison. What’s not regrettable is that Arcueid is a much more complete character when she’s the losing heroine.

Where does Arcueid lie on the absurd morality scale of Noel to Roa? To Roa, Arcueid is the perfect being that invalidates his philosophy, leaving him in a state of eternal seethe and cope as he reincarnates and tries to get her to notice him, hence the core conflict of near side. To Shiki, Arcueid was his victim who has every right to take revenge on him because at the end of the day, Shiki’s actions that sets off near side is actually kind of fucked up. In a way Arcueid might be the most ‘righteous’ character in the narrative, especially as the personification of nature retaliating against mankind’s encroachment and exhaustion of the planet’s resources. But like Noel, her ultimate downfall comes from how it’s purely her emotions and personal desires that drive her to want to kill Ciel and Shiki to the point where even Roa was disappointed by what she had become. The most important thing is that what drives Arcueid is love. But she was also driven by her love for Shiki in her own route, yet her actions diverge so drastically simply because reality is a lot more complicated in Ciel’s route so she doesn’t get what she wants. Because she’s given the chance to feel the more negative emotions that come with love, Arcueid is just kind of a bad person this time round. As someone who really liked her in the original, it’s actually a little stressful to watch.

When everything’s resolved and Shiki and Arcueid are able to argue with each other like before one last time, it feels like this remake of Tsukihime Near Side has truly come to a close. Noel made this route a true remake of Ciel’s story. Arcueid’s development made this route a proper telling of her own story. and Roa completes this as the core of Near Side. I’m left wanting for nothing more from Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-.

Wouldn’t complain if Noel gets a happier ending though. I love her so much.