It’s been a few weeks, but I finally returned to The House in Fata Morgana. Are we following the story of Mell? Will we be getting answers for questions I had in the first chapter?

Nope. In fact, I absolutely couldn’t have predicted anything with the second chapter at all. Bravo for unpredictability. So, what will You bear witness to behind the house’s second door?

The year in 1707, a century after the first chapter. The manor has been left destitute for decades… except for the Maid, who is the exact fucking same. I swear, if she’s not a witch, she’s gotta be a spirit of the house herself. For you see, despite her nature, she’s committed to serving whoever becomes the master of the house.

One day, she finds the presence of a man in the manor. Somebody that perceives himself as a monster and initially can’t speak the same language, and thus, You also see him as a monster for a long time. Dubbing himself as the Bestia, he’s committed to the image – though, he wants a sense of peace. For a short time the Maid manages to make him act like a normal guy, but the Bestia goes full Joker and starts regularly killing travelers, who all view him as the beast he thinks himself to be.

Until he meets a White-Haired Girl.

The White-Haired Girl resembles the one from the 1600s and the Maid recognizes her, but this is a different woman that doesn’t have the same immortality(?) that the Maid has. Besides having a completely different past, this White-Haired Girl is blind. My current belief is that this version of the White-Haired Girl is a reincarnation, and for whatever reason, the mansion has a fascination with her that’ll keep drawing different versions of her to it.

Because of her blindness, this White-Haired Girl cannot judge the Bestia’s appearance, and because of her own appearance that leads to people judging her to be a witch, she finds kindred spirits in the Bestia. Even with the Bestia directly telling her what he’s done, she tries to find an understanding with him. As it happens, the Bestia is an amnesiac man who was treated as a monster by those that saw him – and it got to the point that he decided to live up to the image people gave him.

However, in finding a normal human being that somewhat relates to him and wants to understand him, the Bestia decides to embrace the idea of being human. There’s a sort of platonic love between him and the girl, with them even sharing a bed but not taking things further. If there’s anything I got right from the first chapter, love is a big part of the House in Fata Morgana. For the Bestia, love is a grounding force, and I think that’s very true. Let me tell you, having other people around for me is certainly making having multiple sclerosis feel better.

But enough about him for now, we got another character dealing with love.

A woman named Pauline arrived at the village, searching for a sign of her lover that’s presumed dead after a shipwreck. The village however offers little answers, having become hostile to outsiders within the wake of the Bestia’s murderous rampage. The only one that talks to her is a boy named Javi, who’s initially as hostile as everybody else.

In constantly trying to talk to him though, Pauline forges a connection with Javi that opens him up, paralleling the antics between the Bestia and the White-Haired Girl. Javi’s parents were murdered by the Bestia and Javi managed to track down his abode but chose not to act on it, leading to him being ostracized by the village. Pauline offers him a chance to go home with her to find the love that the village no longer has for him if he gives her the opportunity to check the Bestia’s house for her lover, and he hesitatingly agrees.

Who is this love, though? Well, I honestly don’t know the nationalities of all the other characters, but Pauline’s lover is an explicitly Japanese man. In spite of her own husband being partially Japanese himself, Pauline’s mother is initially hesitant about the merchant lover, warning her not to get romantically involved with foreigners. Racism is important in a bit.

On the Bestia’s side, he one day has a visitor at the house: another bestia. The bestia chases him, and our Bestia winds up killing the stranger bestia.

On Pauline’s side, she approaches the house and finds her lover, Yukimasa. She chases him through the house, not comprehending why he’s afraid of her. But believing that he’s being chased by a monster – and slipping back into the Bestia identity he’s been coming to reject – he kills her.

The way I see it, the reason why Yukimasa was viewed as a monster is because of racism and classism. He was treated as a monster by the village because he was a foreign ship worker that washed up on their shore, who initially couldn’t speak their language presumably because of his amnesia. When he is playing the part of a house noble, when he can speak their language perfectly fine, he is treated more respectfully. Yukimasa likely came to associate his race with being a monster, which is why he perceived Pauline to be a monster.

But well, does that excuse all of Yukimasa’s murders?

Well, as it turns out, Yukimasa already killed before he came to the village.

On an old boat trip, he found some Spanish currency and kept it for himself. His boat was put under investigation for stealing goods, so he redirected all blame on a different crewmate. For the honor of the ship, the accused thief is asked to commit the normal act of seppuku. He doesn’t go through with it, and Yukimasa winds up killing him himself.

And Yukimasa really loved it. He winds up torturing another man and killing him under a false accusation of further thievery even though the investigation closed, because man, he fucking loves murder, actually.

Yukimasa is awakening to these memories in light of killing Pauline. He wants to stick to the Bestia identity despite the White-Haired Girl’s objections, because doing otherwise would mean acknowledging that he was always a fucked up guy, and that his experiences at the village doesn’t exonerate him.

I think this sort of conflict with Yukimasa is one that can be true to life. Terrible things can happen to anyone. Terrible things can also happen to horrible people, and even if you can find sympathy with those experiences, that doesn’t necessarily justify the things they do or make them better people.

Furthering this, Yukamasa comes to a realization: he has no real love for the White-Haired Girl. Rather, he valued the stability associated with love more than love itself. He’s just kind of a terrible person.

But before that realization, he leaves the house to get medicine for the White-Haired Girl, wearing the mask of the foreign noble that’s more respectable to people. But on that trip, he hears terrible news: Javi had mustered up the courage to rally men in the village to attack the manor to avenge Pauline’s death. He hurries home, and the mob already made their way through. They obviously didn’t find him – but they did find a woman that looks like a witch, and well, they gotta kill someone.

And so, facing down the angry mob, Yukimasa remembers the biggest truth about himself:

He fucking loves to kill people.

And so as he rampages, the tale of the manor’s second door ends.

The second chapter of The House in Fata Morgana sure took me directions I didn’t expect at all.

Now, let’s talk about one important person: the Maid. Despite her presence at the start of the chapter, she largely disappears after the White-Haired Girl appears. Yukimasa wonders where she went, but she never makes another appearance. A physical one, that is. She still talks to him as an unseen force, judging him and taunting him and just kinda making him worse – or more honest with himself. If the Maid is the spirit of the manor, she seems like a sort of moderating force for whoever’s the master of the house. She’ll serve, but it seems like she’ll take a backseat when action is unfolding.

But the main question is, what is to be gained in her showing You all these past exploits of the manor? We’ll know eventually…

Anyway, I have no predictions for the next chapter except for the Maid and the White-Haired Girl being there. See you guys later.