We Don't Need To Talk About Lacrimosa (But We're Going To Anyway)

Yesterday's post was supposed to be about something entirely different but it got away from me in the first paragraph and I never even tried to wrangle it back to where it was meant to be going. Sometimes it's best just to give these things their head, although if you were wondering why it felt so under-researched and lacking in focus, now you know.

The upside was that I got an extra post out of it. The downside was that all day I couldn't stop thinking about the one I'd meant to write. It was going to be a really short one, too. Well, it might have been. I always say that even if it rarely turns out to be true.

Here's the short part, coming up now. So short I could use it for the title and pretty much leave it at that. 

Lacrimosa is a vampire.

There we are. That's it. That's what the post was going to be about. I'm not claiming it's a great revelation or that I've had some kind of amazing insight. It's bloody obvious. It's clearly not meant to be a secret.

The odd thing, though, is that if you google "Is Lacrimosa a vampire?" you get... well I'll get to that in a moment. If you google "Is Lacrimosa in Neverness to Everness a vampire?", though, you get a bland handful of links confirming she's "officially a sleepy vampire" and pretty much nothing else at all. 

I thought it would be more of a discussion topic but it seems not. Either people genuinely don't care or they haven't even noticed. 

It has to be the former. You can't possibly not notice. Here are the giveaways:

• She sleeps in a coffin
• She can turn into a bat.
• She lives on tomato jelly.

Wait? What? What was that last one?

Lacrimosa is obsessed with tomatoes in general. As you can see in one of the screenshots above, she has tomato plushies all over her apartment. She also grows tomatoes in the yard outside. What she really craves, though, is tomato jelly, which for some reason can very easily be had from vending machines in streets all over Hethereau. 

But hang on a minute... vampires don't drink tomato juice. Or jelly. They drink blood. Famous for it, in fact. And I guess that's why Lacrimosa can't be a proper vampire. Well, that and how she seems fine with being out in the sunshine and all.

But tomato jelly looks an awful lot like blood. Not just in the game but in real life. Oh yes, didn't you know? Tomato jelly is a real thing. I'd never heard of it but google it and you'll find dozens of recipes and countless photographs and in some of them it looks really quite bloody.

Although not nearly so much in the jars it's generally stored in as it does in Lacrimosa's preferred container, which is via something that looks extraordinarily like those plastic bags full of blood you see hooked up to an IV in hospital dramas. And which I have seen, on numerous occasions, in TV shows and movies about vampires who're trying to go straight and who only drink human blood from blood banks and the like.

So, Lacrimosa is a sleepy vegetarian vampire, maybe? She likes the look and feel of drinking blood but not the actual blood itself. A bit like vegans who still like to pretend they're eating bacon by mocking it up from mushrooms or whatever the hell they make the revolting stuff from. I wonder how she'd eat an actual tomato? Would she sink her fangs into it and suck the juice?

And that about wraps it up for Lacrimosa in NTE. Except remember how I said earlier I'd get to the "Is Lacrimosa a vampire?" google search results later? Well, this is later.

On my first attempt to find out if, indeed, Lacrimosa is a vampire and if so what people were saying about it, I omitted to include the name of the game. That's how I was reminded of something I theoretically ought to have remembered, having read the book, namely that Lacrimosa has a namesake, who I strongly suspect she was named after. It'd be a bit of a co-incidence otherwise, wouldn't it?

Lacrimosa de Magpyr is a teenage vampire in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel, Carpe Jugulum. The Discworld Wiki describes her as "excessively cruel". The LSpace Wiki goes into more detail, calling her "spiteful, sadistic and malevolent" and noting she "acts as an obvious teenager with traits such as surliness, rebelliousness and being argumentative."

I haven't seen our Lacrimosa doing anything like that but it's interesting that the Tomato Jelly Rampage quest ends with Skia (Who is himself, at least by appearance, some kind of werewolf.) reminding  Lacrimosa about certain basic aspects of civilized human behavior, which he has apparently had cause to tell her about before but which she clearly keeps forgetting.

As with Tako yesterday, I'm beginning to think there may be more going on here than we're being told. On the other hand, Lacrimosa is set to become a playable character so I can't think she's going to turn out to be a villain like Tako almost certainly will.

The whole concept of people behaving like vampires without necessarily being vampires is of some personal interest to me, as it happens, so maybe I'm more alert to it than average. One of the two quasi-novels I wrote in the '90s, the one for which I actually finished the first draft, has at its center a group of suspiciously long-lived, slow-aging, vaguely unsettling characters who may or may not have something to hide.

Since I've spent much of the last twelve months turning that novel into songs, it's at the forefront of  my mind and I'm easily triggered by anything even remotely similar. It's entirely possible I may be reading more into this than there is but it has me wondering...

I really like a lot of the characters in Neverness To Everness. There's some very strong writing here, supported by equally strong voice acting. I'd be happy to spend time with most of the characters I've met so far. Lacrimosa, though, is... problematic.

I'm not concerned about her being a vampire. if indeed she is one, although the tomato fetish is a little disconcerting. It's really the sleepy part I'm having trouble with, though. Her pauses are positively Pinteresque. I keep wanting to finish her sentences for her. And her voice makes her sound like a six year old doing an impression of Vivien Leigh in Streetcar. 

Which is good, in a way. I don't not like it. But it can be a bit much.

Then again, Neverness To Everness is all a bit much at the moment, not that I'm complaining. I just hope it doesn't end up going the same way as Wuthering Waves and end up being so much I can't play it any more because that degree of commitment just isn't what I'm after when I settle down to play a video game these days.