Does Undertaker refer to taking the ring from Real Ciel in Vol 2?
In the Ripper arc when Undertaker demonstrates where organs were harvested from the victims, he uses Our Ciel as a prop to show where the girls’ abdomens were mutilated.
I wonder if he did that on purpose knowing that Our Ciel would have a good reason to be uncomfortable with the idea of a kid like him being gutted like that.
If the Ciel who showed up at the manor is a “Real” Ciel, one of the unanswered mysteries of the series is how his body could have been preserved when the cultists’ building burned down.
It’s possible Undertaker was hiding there to collect the body. If he was, he would know how Our Ciel and Sebastian collected the ring.
(Volume 2 pg 59)
Even “steal the little precious” sounds like he’s alluding to the ring.
A very odd thought occurred to me last night just before I fell asleep. It had mostly to do with Undertaker saying he didn’t want to lose another Phantomhive.
I was thinking about how technically, both boys are lost. Real!Ciel lost his soul, and our!Ciel is bound in a demonic contract. While I suppose Undertaker could be planning to kill Sebastian to real our!Ciel, that doesn’t help real!Ciel. He still doesn’t have a soul, and Undertaker has made it very clear that a body cannot accept a soul that not its own. That’s when, just before I fell asleep, a peculiar question came to my mind.
What if the way to save both the boys is to make them one?
It’s odd, but hear me out on this. First, the twins have been described as both mirror images and two halves of a whole. Personality wise, they have differing traits which could compliment each other.
When Undertaker first appears on the scene, what’s the very first thing we see?
Of course, this is an anatomical figure that would have been used in fields such as medicine at the time, but look past its purpose. It also shows a bisected man – a man that looks like part one thing (his insides) and part another.
Imagine if there was a way that Undertaker things he could do this. Our!Ciel posses a soul. His brother possess a body without a demon seal. If somehow you could put those two together – maybe in a Dr. Frankenstein sort of way. It could possibly be a way to save both.
It sounds twisted, but Undertaker has done some twisted things in pursuit of his research – such as causing all those deaths on Campania with his bizarre dolls. He’s very focused on his end game here, and his goal has always been to save at least one of the boys…maybe both.
Thoughts?
This is an interesting theory. It reminds me of the first anime season but there have been other parallels before so maybe it’s the same with this.
Maybe that’s even the whole point in UT’s resurrection attempts (which probably have started after real Ciel had died and our Ciel had made the contract). What if Undertaker is aware that it’s not really possible to bring back the dead? And when he said that he couldn’t lose another Phantomhive maybe he wasn’t referring to real Ciel but to our Ciel.
UT may realize that real Ciel can’t ever be truly come back to life, without a soul and all. He may already count him among those he has lost. But if there’s still a chance to save our Ciel from Sebastian maybe that’s how he’s trying to do it.
I’ve got quite a lot to say about this chapter, some things I ranted about yesterday already, but for now let me just say that this cliffhanger is something I’ve been waiting for a long time, but I hope we get explanations about the current arc before UT starts spilling the beans about why he’s so attached to this family (though most of us already have a few ideas in mind).
I also want to say that this won’t end well, again with no surprise. I’m positive that UT is extremely interested in saving Ciel from Seb…
(he’s probably the one who told Bravat to say that)
…and there is a big chance he thinks that, because the twins were so close, real!Ciel being back might help with separating
his brother
from Seb.
However, the most crucial point is that UT is also doing all of this for himself (”I simply could not bear to lose another Phantomhive”), which is clearly biasing him about how clinging onto your dead loved ones isn’t a good method of coping and won’t be one for our!Ciel either.
Honestly, it’s probably going to be the arc UT fails/fucks up for the first time in the story: he’s so focused on the idea that he can’t bear to lose more of the Phantomhive family that it’s blinding him to why bringing back the twin wasn’t a good idea. It shows through:
Lizzie being depressed for several months
Ciel feeling horrible right now
real!Ciel most likely not being 100% okay in the head
the attack against Soma and Agni (I mean, true, UT probaly doesn’t care about them, but it heavily factors into awful how Ciel must feel right now).
I’m just saying, wanting to save our!Ciel from Seb is one thing, but it should have included not attacking our!Ciel’s very few friends. Maybe that means UT doesn’t have a lot of control over the twin (who probably attacked Soma and Agni out of jealousy?), which is the same as having already fucked up anyway.
Finally, yet another argument about UT being biased, but if the RCMT is true, then it means UT ignored the possibility that real!Ciel was partially responsible for Vincent’s death (if he saw his cinematic record?) and brought him back anyway and that is… messed up.
TL;DR if the current arc is all about UT not moving on, then it’s going to slap him back in the face and frankly? He’d deserve it, and I say that as a big fan of his.
I can’t believe Sebby is so dumb that he forgot all about the Campania and Weston arcs.
So I’m not totally familiar with the supernatural aspect of Black Butler (I’m like this with every show, I care so little about Nen it’s funny). However, I will attempt to answer your question from a character development standpoint. So, assuming that R!Ciel who I will just call RC cola from now on is actually 100% genuinely revived from the dead through whatever magic they did to do that, here is my best guess from a character perspective on why we see him distorted.
First it’s important to point out that RC Cola and Ciel are meant to be compared as foils, they are quite literally twins. Not only that but every time they are described it’s describing them as identical but opposites.
This is of course, pretty blatant stuff. Ciel tells us the audience point blank in his narration that we are meant to compare the twins, and see that they are different. However, literary foils mean more than just a comparison. A foil is an illumination to point out something that would otherwise be hidden in the main character.
The narration tells us that RC Cola was the most important twin and the true heir, but really RC Cola’s only purpose in story is to highlight and inform us of things about Ciel. That being said let’s analyze what the flashback tells us about RC cola’s character pre-demon cult.
It’s established right away that RC Cola sees value in his brother, even if Ciel compares the two of them and often puts himself down with that comparison. Also, in his youthful naivete RC Cola assumed that the two of them would always be together and was upset by the idea of Ciel having his own life.
Of course this was just a childish tantrum and his possessiveness over his sibling is definitely something he would have grown out of if given the proper opportunity. His father comforts him by emphasizing the responsibility and position of the earl.
Just as much as Ciel defines himself by being the weaker sibling, RC Cola defines himself as being the stronger and more responsible one. Of course that doesn’t mean he doesn’t value Ciel because the manga clearly establishes that he does, but rather it’s a pretty common sibling dynamic for one to view themselves as “the responsible one”, right? Even with twins who are basically the same age.
RC Cola probably got a lot of reassurance by making himself appear stronger for Ciel, and saying he would protect him. It was a role he gave to himself, the same way Ciel always saw himself as weaker than RC Cola. However, we see that RC Cola because of the cruelness of the situation he’s in fails to both protect Ciel, and to return to the mansion with him, and dies a pretty pointless looking death.
All of his reassurance amounting to nothing apparently. So if RC Cola is somebody who gained his self confidence one through his relationship with his brother, and two specifically through protecting his brother, and embracing his responsibility through his role as earl or his obligation to protect his brother and appear more confident for the sake of the both of them, then having all of that stripped away in his death would definitely do something to mess with his personality.
We see the first thing he does upon revival and anouncing himself is to reclaim his identity as the first heir, and also to reassert that Ciel is the weaker bodied one between the two of them.
So basically, the flaws of RC Cola’s childish personality that probably he would have grown out of if tragedy had not intervened, have come to entirely overtake his personality and change his identity. Which leads us to what exactly this is supposed to indicate about Ciel.
It’s a metaphor for Ciel’s survival guilt, basically. The same way RC Cola’s pointless death is something that caused him to lose the chance to grow up and move past his flaws, surviving the incident is also something that permanently warped Ciel’s personality to the point where he who was gaining confidence in standing on his own two feet and leaving the title of earldom is now pretending to be his brother discarding all of his original wants and dreams for the sake of making up for his own survival in the past.
The reason RC Cola is a metaphor is because in this story which is magical and not reality, Ciel can be confronted with the person who died when he survived, walking around again as if he was alive again. Whereas in real life cases of survivor’s guilt, you’re not going to talk it out with the survivor’s zombies and try to reason with the unfairness that some people live past terrible things and some people do not.
So from a metatextual standpoint the reason RC Cola’s personality is so twisted is because he’s meant to confront Ciel with the fact that Ciel has spent so much time living in the past he’s refused to let himself grow up properly, and is merely putting on an act of what he thinks growing up should be. This is done by showing RC Cola being a warped version of his past self who never got the chance to grow up, and therefore shows all of his childish desires, to be with Ciel forever, to have the responsibility of the Earl, (most likely treating Lizzie as a future bride he’s entitled to as Earl but we haven’t gotten to that part yet), and to be the stronger one while Ciel again is the weaker one pushed to an extremely unhealthy level because of the growth he was never allowed to receive.
Random Musing: Is our!Ciel really the black king in this supposed chess game? After all, his entire point was to put himself into danger so he could find the culprits, but it is against the rules of the game to purposely maneuver the king to a place where it is attacked by enemy piece. Even he is the king, he should know that he cannot directly face his brother since a king cannot put another king in check. Keeping with the chess analogy, both brothers can only rely on their knights and pawns in this game.
This is why I think his chess allusion only goes so far. It sounds better on paper than it actually is in practice. We know now that much of our!Ciel’s big talk was just because he was attempting to copy his older brother. And while I do think that he’s aware of the rules of chess, much of his bravado and over-confidence is probably just a mask that he had to don to make himself ‘believable’ in his eyes, if not in the eyes of others around him.
Hey! ^^ I think real Ciel was talking to Sebastian when he said these words because he was addressing him before in that scene:
But maybe he really didn’t mean that he ate his soul but rather what happened to the ring, especially since there’s a focus on the ring after real Ciel said these words.
We know that the ring seems really important to the twin. It could calm him down when he was a kid after being so desperate about our Ciel’s plans for his future; he held on to the ring during their whole captivity and swallowed it so no one could get it; and the first message he left for our Ciel when he returned was about the ring, as well:
So maybe the fact that Sebastian and our Ciel got the ring out of real Ciel’s body enrages the twin even more than Sebastian eating his soul. Or at least he may not only talk about his soul but also about the ring when he says “How dare you do that to me that day”. So the twin could have probably meant both – our Ciel and Sebastian – but I think he rather meant to address Sebastian in that scene.
midnight-in-town 