I’m a huge fan of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and it was thanks to them that I discovered my two favourite anime/manga series, Serial Experiments Lain and Pandora Hearts. Both contain examples of the Strange Girl archetype, including the character I’m going to discuss now. Readers first encounter Echo in Retrace IX of Pandora Hearts, though only briefly. She appears infrequently throughout the manga, and it’s only later on in the plot that more is revealed about her.
Echo is definitely my favourite out of all the cast. This is mostly because she’s quiet. I can’t stand loud, obnoxious people, so it’s always the more silent characters in fiction that appeal to me. Echo seems to be quite shy and self-contained, and she reminds me a lot of Lain because of this. It turns out that this type of character is actually quite common in anime and manga, but I wasn’t familiar enough with it to realise this. (I love comics and animation, but so far I’ve only read/watched a small amount of manga/anime.) There’s also this sense of blankness to her at first, as if she doesn’t want to have a personality. This doesn’t stop her from being an excellent fighter, though. (She keeps knives up her sleeves.) Echo is the valet of complete bastard Vincent Nightray, and for the most part obeys and protects him, despite the horrible way he treats her. She’s a lot more complex than just an emotionless bodyguard, though, as later chapters reveal.
(Warning: The next paragraph contains spoilers.)
In Retrace XXXIV, Noise of Echo, it turns out that Echo is actually the split personality of Noise- better known as Zwei Baskerville, who is pretty much her complete opposite. (I’m not sure what gender Noise identifies as- it’s left a little vague -so I’m just going to refer to zir using gender-neutral pronouns.) It seems that Echo and Noise are based on Tweedledee and Tweedledum from Through the Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There, especially since Noise is Duldee’s contractor. Noise has a much more dominant personality than Echo, yet ze is not often allowed control of their body. Noise is also genuinely dedicated to Vincent, and acts almost as crazy as he does.
(Even more spoilers in the next paragraph.)
In the latest chapter, though, it is revealed that Noise wasn’t always this way. When Vincent first met Noise, ze had little self-esteem, and was far more similar to the way Echo is now. (Perhaps Noise’s gender identity has something to do with this. There have been a few hints that Noise is male. If so, then being in a female body wouldn’t have been very good for zir mental health.) Echo herself was originally called Doldee, and was created by Doldum as a way for Noise to control the chain’s power. Back then, Echo was the stronger, more unhinged one, and it hasn’t been made clear yet how their personalities went through such a big switch. I think that Noise must have become more confident thanks to Vincent’s attention, while Echo ended up being treated as the shadow of Noise’s personality she really was. (It says a lot that it was Vincent who named them.) Then again, I’m probably totally wrong about all of this.
This post is for Aly, who is also a big fan of Pandora Hearts.
