Noel

Noel
Japanese name:	ノエル
Also known as:	Noel Aizome
Portrayals
Japanese VA:	Ai Kayano
Appearances
Primary franchise:	Tsukihime Remake series
Appears in:	Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- Melty Blood: Type Lumina
Characteristics
Species:	Human, Magus Dead Apostle (Ciel Route)
Gender:	Female
Height:	169cm (Human) 143cm (Dead Apostle)
Weight:	59kg (Human) 35kg (Dead Apostle)
Blood Type:	B (Human) Unknown (Dead Apostle)
Birthday:	December 25
Age:	27
Personal information
Alignment:	Chaotic Neutral (Human) Chaotic Evil (Dead Apostle)
Likes:	Gifting herself, social media, antiques, younger lovers (Human) Her puny, audacious, and pathetic enemies; her best self (Dead Apostle)
Dislikes:	Unwieldy weapons, dentists, younger bosses (Human) Ciel (Dead Apostle)
Natural Enemy:	Ciel
Magecraft
Magecraft:	Church Sacraments
Affiliations
Organization:	Holy Church

Noel (ノエル, Noeru^?) is an Executor of the Holy Church posing as a teacher at Metropolitan Souya High School in the Tsukihime Remake series.

Profile

Background

Noel appears one day as Shiki Tohno's homeroom teacher and both the English and PE teacher after his previous one died suddenly, going by the name Noel Aizome (愛染ノエル, Aizome Noeru^?). She is the pupil of Ciel, who had taken her in as a student five years earlier after she had run afoul of a bishop.

Thirteen years before the events of Ciel's route, Roa (then using Ciel's body) and a group of his Dead Apostle Ancestor allies attacked her hometown, leaving her the sole survivor. This left her with a deep hatred of both Roa and Ciel, who she blamed as much as Roa himself for the massacre she survived. It is due to this that she became an Executor.

Appearance

Noel is a woman with brunette hair, brown eyes, and a mature look about her. She keeps her hair in a side ponytail with a pink elastic tie. When undercover as a teacher, she wears a blue blazer and pencil skirt over a white dress shirt, black tights, and high heels. When working as an Executor, she wears a button-up nun’s habit with a cutout that exposes her legs and knee-high combat boots. Occasionally, she also wears the traditional coif and veil of a nun with this outfit.

As a result of her vampirization, Noel physically regresses to her fourteen-year-old self because that was when she was happiest and at her strongest, her once brown hair becomes a magenta hue, while her eyes are turned crimson from their original brown. She trades out her church uniform for a purple sleeveless butterfly-esque coat held together by a large bow around her collar. Underneath her coat, Noel wear what appears to be a matching corset and thigh-high stockings. She has a pair of floral wrist cups and a pair of similar looking heels that each possess a single thorn protruding from their ends. Rather than exactly resembling her appearance when she was younger, Noel’s face is changed by her vampirization.

Noel wearing her nun's coif and veil.

Noel in Melty Blood: Type Lumina

Personality

Noel gives off a friendly impression from her cheerful expressions and is quite flirtatious, especially with Shiki and others who are younger than she is. However, this belies her cowardice and twisted pleasure in inflicting pain on anyone she considers to be weaker than herself, both humans and vampires. Noel displays some frightening sadistic tendencies directed towards vampires, ranging from providing them with hope for a cure for their vampirism before slaughtering them in droves, to simple cold-blooded torture. When she herself becomes a Dead Apostle, these tendencies become directed towards Ciel and Shiki, and she proceeds to attempt to the Mystic Eyes of Roses on the both of them. She is driven by a strong inferiority complex due to her sub-par skills as an Executor, and it is due to this that she eventually becomes a Dead Apostle in Ciel’s route.

At school, she exists exploits her appeal as an older woman to gain popularity with the boys. The girls, however, don’t seem to like her. Judging the way she idolizes love and marriage, it’s safe to say she doesn’t have much luck with either.

It's heavily implied that Shiki reminds Noel of an exchange student she had a crush on when she was 14. The same exchange student who tried to use Noel as a decoy when they were surrounded by the Dead, when everything went to hell in Noel's town.

Role

Tsukihime

Noel is introduced early on in the common route, taking the place of Shiki's class' previous teacher who has disappeared under unclear circumstances. The boys of the classroom are instantly smitten with the young teacher, while the girls feel ill-will towards the amount of attention she is getting. After school, Shiki is approached by Noel, who claims she has something she wants to tell him. However, it appears to be a sexual advance, which transfixes Shiki, especially on her neck. When she asks for him to remove his glasses, the spell breaks, and he rebukes her. She claims it was a simple joke. She warns Shiki to not pry too much during the night, unless he wants to become like his former teacher.

Arcueid Route

In Arcueid's route, she quits working at the school due to Vlov being taken care of and no longer needing to monitor for potential Roa hosts.

Ciel Route

Noel as a Dead Apostle.

In Ciel's route, Noel is bitten by Vlov Arkhangel; while the bite was not deep enough to turn her and she lacked the potential to become a true Dead Apostle, her fear slowly drives her insane and she begins torturing other vampires to death in an attempt to find salvation. After being confronted by Ciel and losing the ensuing fight, Dr. Arach uses one of her drugs to convert her into a Dead Apostle and the newly vampiric Noel goes on a rampage with the intent to kill Shiki and torture Ciel as revenge for what she suffered. After being beaten by Shiki and Ciel, she uses Arach's final injection, which proves to be too much for her to handle and causes her body to burst into a mass of thorns. She attempts to make one final attack while screaming at Ciel to "save" her, but is destroyed by the Seventh Holy Scripture.

Abilities

Human

• Noel wielding her polearm weapon.
• Noel's unusually shaped Black Key.
• Noel's anti-vampire Bounded Field.

1/3

Noel is an Executor, but compared to others she is not an exceptionally powerful one, referring to herself as “weak against the strong, but overwhelmingly strong against the weak“. While she can easily wipe out large groups of the Dead and eliminate normal Dead Apostles, stronger vampiric beings such as Dead Apostle Ancestors or True Ancestors are far out of her league. Her primary weapon is a halberd-like polearm, but she also makes use of a variant form of Black Keys as a sidearm. These Black Keys take the form of stake-like swords rather than thin blades with red hilts, and are specialized towards thrusting rather than cutting. Her polearm is extremely heavy so that it is able to inflict much greater damage on foes, weighing around a metric ton. However, she cannot comfortably swing the weapon even with her training as an Executor, so she must use a Sacrament that lowers its weight in order to be an effective fighter.

While she does not appear to be particularly talented with the Church's sacraments, she shows the ability to create holy barriers strong enough to completely contain fourteen fully grown Dead Apostles. Merely touching the barriers causes the vampires' bodies to melt as if they were exposed to sunlight. The boundaries of these barriers are demarcated by her Black Keys, a technique she shares with Ciel. She is also capable of using a spell that forcibly makes a Dead Apostle experience pain like a human being in order to more sadistically torture them. In Melty Blood: Type Lumina, she is shown using the Cremation Rite with her Black Keys.

In Arcueid’s route, she allows Mario to control her limbs, with his assistance allowing her to fight against Arcueid briefly.

Dead Apostle

While normally unqualified to become a Dead Apostle due to lacking the potential, Dr. Arach was able to artificially induce her transformation into a powerful Dead Apostle. As a Dead Apostle, Noel can create large stakes that look more staves that she can throw as projectiles.

Dead Apostle Noel using her Mystic Eyes.

Upon being turned by Dr. Arach through the scientist's experiments, Noel also gained the Dead Apostle Ancestor Rita Rozay-en's Mystic Eyes of Roses (薔薇の魔眼^?). The eyes allows her create a telepathic connection between herself and her target, allowing her to either attack her target by projecting her traumatic memories into their minds or by sealing the victim's mind within her own. It is implied that Dr. Arach's procedure somehow granted Noel some of Rita Rozay-en's other abilities, or those of a vampire from her lineage, as she also gains the power to sprout thorny vines from her person.

Having been mortally wounded by Ciel, Noel injects herself with the shot that Arach warned would kill her, causing her body to erupt into a storm of thorny vines that Noel tries to lunge into Ciel.

Development

Creation and Conception

Noel was developed to fill the previously absent role of a teacher in the school. She was first revealed in TYPE-MOON Ace Volume 10 in 2015. She was designed to have a more “adult” appearance than the main heroines, but as a character turned out to be more like “an adult who sucks at being an adult”. The concepts behind her design as a vampire were a “butterfly fairy, but still visibly Noel” and “Noel’s dark passions hatched”.

Noel was initially created just to replace Ciel early on in the Arcueid route as a small surprise, but Nasu later decided to expand her role into a character that brought Ciel’s sins closer to her. She is similar to Ciel despite being weak and untrustworthy, and is just doing what any other person placed into her situation would have. She is not the kind of character who could be a protagonist, but merely a victim who had to become an Executor as there was no way to return to her old life. Nasu considers her to be a highly difficult character to portray that nobody but Ai Kayano could have properly pulled off. Takeuchi was instructed by Nasu to design Noel’s Dead Apostle form to “look like it’s in the wrong place in the wrong time”. The theme of the design is a “butterfly caught in a spider’s web”, reflecting how Noel views herself as the protagonist of the world and others as merely “guest characters”.