My name is Earl Ciel Phantomhive. I am the heir of the Funtom Company. If you have any enquiries, do try to make them quick; I am a very busy young man, after all.
𝔬𝔪𝔦𝔫𝔞𝔰𝔞𝔭𝔭𝔥𝔦𝔯𝔲𝔰 ; a mostly canon portrayal of the distinguished Aristocrat of Evil: Ciel Phantomhive.
𝖊𝖝𝖕𝖊𝖈𝖙𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓𝖘; this blog will feature dark and mature content, in line with the themes that Kuroshitsuji presents. This blog will heavily lean on the canonical manga version of the Earl Phantomhive. Do not expect anything else of this character's personality. I portray both twins, but lean more to the one we know well. Therefore, if you do something to provoke him, please expect the appropriate consequences.
𝖇𝖑𝖔𝖌; this blog is private and mutuals only. It is highly selective with crossovers and hesitant on original characters. They are welcomed here, but do not expect this blog to interact if there is no interest. This blog will tag content warnings, but please request if you wish specific triggers to be tagged. Do not follow if you are below the age of 21, please. The admin of this blog is of legal age.
“This month’s Black Butler is the story of duru duru becoming solid.” - Yana Toboso’s Twitter
I’m putting this here for now in case anybody wants to talk to me about it, so that I can try to get this worked out before the next chapter drops. I think the crops are going to die or they’re otherwise not going to be harvested, they might just end up tasting bad because Sebastian didn’t genuinely try to “shape” himself to the needs of his (soul) (their heart). That is, he wanted instant gratification rather than going to the effort of cultivating a fulfilling life and relationship with care.
I have 3 or so posts I’m desperately trying to figure out how to put together linearly. I fill my posts to the brim with links like this because I think it’s all so interwoven that it’s difficult for me to keep everything on track… I have to first define the components of the soul in order to explain what Sebastian is lacking, what he is trying to do and figure out, and what he ultimately wants.
“Each chapter is expressed with decorative lanterns. No matter the ending, I believe that light has guided our two protagonists.”
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Sebastian doesn’t have a human palate, so his “tastes” in people and what he finds attractive is different. Ciel, too, is more concerned with the same ‘inner beauty’ (which seems to be humility and potential) so to speak, and Sebastian has seen that as Ciel making people beautiful. So, now he almost entirely concedes to Ciel’s better judgement. Tries to be palatable. Or, delicious, I suppose.
I love the way the birthday chapter ends on that just before introducing soma and agni, foreshadowing his efforts to achieve something like Agni’s “Devine Curry”.
No matter how perfectly he replicated the ingredients and procedure, it was always missing something he added in something that he makes special for ciel, and put it in a bun so that it had a manageable container. (Bottom of this post lol)
They both have ~ peculiar tastes ~ that go beyond physical attributes and prestige, and behave accordingly.
That was noted by Dedrich and Undertaker, too.
@abybweisse here’s what will interest you, under the cut.
One reason I don’t want this rebloggable is because I’m not confident on which component I should attribute the Soul, Spirit, and/or Life to.
So! @abybweisse, I think this is where I’m at right now:
The silhouettes on the paper of the revolving lanterns are what the light hits to cast the shadows of images, creating the motion picture. The fire itself is the propeller, what starts it. The body is ‘rotation’—that is, the pull of momentum— and we as humans are stuck perpetually spinning within lanterns until our soul/spirits can break free from the rotation and reach nirvana.
It’s not a totally uncommon metaphor. But off the top of my head, the only example I can think of is Jevil from deltarune(?) a game I haven’t even played lol. But that is what the wheel of fortune references, too. “Spring” is the same word as “source” in Japanese, so the Spring of Wheels = the source of rotation, perhaps? What keeps us trapped. The guests don’t want to go home, either.
What Undertaker said was that he couldn’t create (the motor, i.e. the candle). What he did was make the bodies see the shadows on their panels on their lanterns moving as if they had a burning candle within them, and so they animate in turn. He created rotation.
Undertaker also knows that this isn’t a life continuing on, we would only be duped into thinking so by the fact that we see their body moving, too.
(I need to retranslate these pages too..)
But the Stars can all move on their own. They are not merely simulated animation, so they must have a flame, because that is a lantern’s propellant. R!ciel can think on his own, so he must have that light inside to cast onto the paper (and for the silhouetted figures to cast a shadow, in return).
So I believe the stars have a spirit but they have no “lifetime” left. The orphanage has been trying to cultivate children resembling the stars because they want to make up for the lost components, as the stars are currently full of cracks just duct taped together.
The reapers and Sebastian are wandering spirits because of their bad karma. I think the reapers are more aligned with what being ‘stuck’ traditionally means in Buddhism. They still have souls, they still have bodies, so they are still given the chance to atone for something
Sebastian is a wandering spirit who is cast back down into hell every time he fails to fulfill his soul. The sacrifice grants him entry into the realm of the living through their passage (the “ferry” is the water and the bridge is the gate) but he does not get a life or a form or a spirit of his own unless someone grants it to him.
Given form, Sebastian, like all living beings, only knows hunger. That’s interchangeable with “desire”, “craving”, “pull”, and “rotation” and “drive”, for those things have to do with our baser instincts that keep us alive physically. But you are eternally stuck in the life cycle until you is achieve insight and the extinguishing of craving.
On the Wikipedia page, you can probably just read the Top body text and understand the manga and what the supernatural characters are trying to figure out a lot better lol. I don’t think any of them really know what a “soul” is, either. I’m not too sure I expect it to be entirely pinned down for us.
Another bit of evidence I can point towards in favor of r!ciel having a soul is the rest of the Halloween chapter:
Spirits of the departed can return, lizzy and ubdertaker are in their ‘lanterns’ with r!ciel.
I think Layla and Altar are some allusion to Sebastian and Ciel being/becoming Eros and Psyche? I have another draft about the whole cage motif where I noted that the last lines of ENAMEL’s lyrics functionally say the that they will stay side-by-side, even if that means they will be irreversibly stuck together in their cage. This could be why the “Nectar Springs” has its name, it’ll have a double meaning: Nectar is the drink of the gods which granted Psyche her immortality so that she may be with her husband Eros (Cupid).
I think Undertaker has been calling out Sebastian’s hypocrisy/arrogance because he just wants the same thing Sebastian does, but he’s less capable of achieving it. I think the Phantomhives have something unique about them that makes a passage between our dimensions possible. You see Sebastian and Ciel walking forwards in the same direction as the spirits, because the literally gave one another a new life. (This and that).
I told you on one of the discord servers how the theme seems to be the karmic cycle taking place within the same lifetime, the way you can become “born again” in Christianity. You can still atone for your sins. Wolf did die, he was seeing his life flash before his eyes, and his atonement yielded to a second chance: a rebirth.
Not even Sebastian, who does live through multiple “lives”, becomes reincarnated in the Buddhist sense. That’s why I started this post that way, I don’t think Sebastian entered the “human” cycle until now, because this is the first time he has lived as a human. Maybe he’d like to think that the duru duru wasn’t really him, but something else he had just been reduced to, because of his own circumstances… and he just did whatever it would take to get out of hell
ALSOO, the entrance into the cauldron room was by way of running down a spiral staircase
Like the lyrics to ENAMEL!
But it’s not the first time you see a downward spiral motif. There’s one at the beginning of chapter 65, which is what its cover is referencing.
once everything sinks, grelle is the first to pop back up lol
She’s good at those sorts of transitions where you cut to a character/scene immediately as a way of saying something about what you just saw.
+ More cage bars/ revolving lantern imagery in conjunction with sinking/spiraling downward
I really want to stress how cliche it is too, lol. Of course it’s a double edged sword so it’s this at the same time as it is emotional turmoil, but like imagine if I were to say “falling” instead. You would just immediately catch onto the fact it’s conveying characters who are falling in love lol, there’s just no subtlety in my opinion. it’s downright gaudy.
Yana tweet:
I'm currently reviewing the plot for the luxury liner arc that I wrote back then, for the sake of Black Butler. The final line of episode 63 somehow feels deeply moving. [ image reads: Sebastian grasps Ciel’s hand. ]
You know what, I’ll just use Ouran again because I’m sure that’s the shoujo our demographic is going to be familiar with
End of season 1 practically had the same scene.
For 10 months there’s been this post titled “drowning” in my drafts that I can’t finish because tumblr only lets you add 30 images to a post. It’s a mess!!,
If I were the animation director I would be getting real obnoxious about this, I’d totally rip it off tbh, I just wouldn’t be able to keep myself from stealing the way that the background shows them zipping past the light posts along the road for how it could so elegantly resemble a film reel lol. I wish the new directors took liberties or got Yana as involved, because I think the Book of Atlantic movie looked like garbage and missed practically all of these motifs (and all the parallels that I would be derailing this post if I started trying to include…)
And now, here’s your springs:
The official translator clearly caught on to what tropes we are starting to play into ha
🪽 how can I explain my idea that ciel eats gummy bears cruelly ?? I imagine him biting off their arms and legs first to make them « suffer » while he enjoys the snack
