Firstly, thank you so much for taking the time to write this. I'm sorry you're unwell, I hope you feel better soon.
I think I understand your thoughts far better now, regarding both demons and the nature of the soul, and how that applies to Sebastian and Ciel specifically.
The canon detailing of the difference between the heart/mind (I suppose positioning it as the heart gives it a specific vitality, I'm not familiar enough with Japanese culture to know if the heart has a particular significance in a way that differs from how it does in Western culture, you seem far more knowledgeable there than I - is that so?), intrigues me - I've recently come to adopt the maxim, the folly of humanity was never so great as when they mistook the mind for the soul. We still don't know what a soul is, precisely, in fact I'd say this differentiation makes it still more incomprehensible. Clearly the soul is influenced by the life it's lived, but memory and experience and passion - the heart, or the mind, is distinct. It's perhaps more bodily, or at least more reconcilable than the body. A body can live without it's soul so long as it has a heart/mind (and apparently, an amalgamous demon has a soul and can exist without the heart/mind, since that is tied to the experience of a life, and a demon constructs and shapes their life to serve a master, who has chosen the trajectory of their own in selling their soul, thus in consuming their soul, they receive (perhaps a photo negative image of (not literally, given cinematic records, but in terms of how it fulfills then)) that heart/mind - I've always thought this, and definitely agree with you there.) - so that discursion aside, I would call the soul some spark of existence, some quintessential part of it that invigorates the heart/mind as it itself is enriched by them (the bizarre dolls yearn ravenously for what they do not have, I see the similarity to Sebastian there, only they are trying to gain back what they have lost but us necessary for him, from his stand point is trying to gain something that he hasn't necessarily lost, but that will fill an absence within him that will change him and change how he views and experiences himself irrevocably) - I think the demon's power and possession over the soul it takes in contract is in it's prospective destruction - when the soul is given over to that inevitability, the life it lives becomes inherently and continuously shaped by the demon, it is loosened from the natural order of eschatology and on it's interim the shaping of and sharing in the mind/heart becomes theirs.
I worry that to a degree, removing their hunger as the core of the nature deprives the demons of their otherworldliness and plainly different attitudes and motivations - or demon really, since we only have Sebastian to go upon, and indeed, he is immensely odd by his standard from the perspective of the reapers - he's tired of filling himself meaninglessly, he wants an experience that will shape him - you've got a good post on his cognitive dissonance regarding how he's changing and his dis/similarity to humans - you know, approaching it like this, I can really see where you're coming from, his fulfilment is clearly different and he's clearly relishing the experience of starving for his meal - perhaps the language of devouring he's using is his way of interpreting to himself what exactly he is getting out of this. Perhaps it even transposes that hunger into ability for something more, the something out of nothing, the collapsar carrying rather than consuming the light, a sort of entrapment of one part of his nature by another; but you seem to put it as the hunger being mistaken in the first place, the method rather than the instinct, and fulfilling the central instinct poorly, with the revelation being Ciel as an almost continuous source of heart/mind for Ciel.
There's something of Eros and Psyche to it, not in the romantic/erotic sense (necessarily), but in terms of them being viewed as sublime existential union of the self, a transcendent equation. I wonder how you think Sebastian will deal with Ciel's mortality, even if he doesn't consume him at the end of the contract? (Consume his soul on his natural deathbed perhaps? Let him pass on to whatever lies beyond? (Now I'm thinking of The Garden of Proserpina*)
I think that the season II, 'demons can turn humans into demons', invention is such a cop out, but I wouldn't mind hearing your thoughts on it. Though as I've pontificated on about below, how Ciel would react to all of this requires its own consideration.) Either we have Sebastian's nature itself changed by the experience of Ciel, and his understanding of his nature being totally redefined to the extent that it changes his experience of himself - either of which would be very fitting for Kuro's story.
A brief segue into Lizzie: parallels with her are perennial for Sebastian, trying to know Ciel whilst he shows the only a facade to connect with - Lizzie (though I think he does have genuine affection for her), as part of the identity of Earl Phantomhive, and as someone I think he both subconsciously resents for loving and seeing his brother and not him, but cannot allow himself to love because it would feel like a betrayal of his brother, beyond also eschewing attachment both as an immediate weakness and more because he views his life as one intended for obliteration (the way he comports himself as the living dead is something I could go on about forever) and so he must not let himself get caught on things which prevent being able to follow through with what he thinks he wants and what is inevitability (from his point of view) anyway - he uses the ways Sebastian has threatened to consume him should he renege to thrust himself fully into the transformation of self that is assured by the contract (and what he would be reneging upon would be that very expectation in the first place) - a sort of two way covenant assuring the development of the heart/mind upon those lines, and each of them holding the other to it by the imposition of their conditions, and their very presence in one anothers' existences constantly reminding and enabling this. Ciel uses Sebastian in this way, and whilst Sebastian sees and is able to know far more of Ciel than Lizzie is, since is afterall, necessary in the continued existence and upholding of Earl Ciel Phantomhive as an identity - that is precisely because he is directing it (or seen to direct it) to it's end, and Ciel thus protects himself from conscious emotional reliance upon, and vulnerability with, Sebastian, because of the discomfort and distrust towards even an nominally embraced destruction, because it would feel like justifing the loss of his family and ruination of his past, and perhaps because he doesn't want to consider any of the implications of Sebastian enjoying their game, enjoying him.
He uses them, externally and internally respectively, to fulfill the goal of his own actualising destruction, and they try to know him and fulfil him however they can, accept the roles he extends to them and try to seep through the boundaries to encompass more. I wonder what one can make out of where they do sharply diverge from one another - Lizzie leaves when she realises how she was deceived about Ciel's identity (and it's understandable that she did so, people lambast her for that with such a vehemence that I can only presume it's born out of typical fandom misogyny. Sorry for the non-sequitur, but I'm very protective of Lizzie, hah), and Sebastian who is so obsessed, so sustained by Ciel's identity, and who has helped curate it and upholds him. (and thus the same is done to his own in turn.)
I had no idea about the wolf story - this is one of those moments where I'm so frustrated with how many references and aspects on symbolism I completely miss out on from a lack of familarity. Thank you for enlightening me as to this one. With this lens, I could actually see Sebastian giving up or being unable to follow through due to this change of relation of his nature to what and how it subsists upon - whether it's an entrapping paradox of 'I want you so much that I can't destroy you' (I have always thought that consuming Ciel would destroy Sebastian, in the sense that he'd never be able escape having been changed by him, but what he existed for is now gone, so he's never able to escape that shape, escape the way he is formed to be filled by Ciel Phantomhive, even as the aftertaste fades and he grows hungrier and hungrier, sort of psychologically eating himself. That's how I've tended to view his nature and predation being turned back on him, and has been what I've typically viewed as the resolution of the story), or what he assumed of his own nature changing and no longer being what Ciel determined it must be and predicated their contract upon.
Ciel would be furious and utterly unmoored, because he's also depended on Sebastian's ability and interest in shaping him along the trajectory they've implicitly agreed upon in their contract - one ending with destruction (I wonder, in that moment of making the covenant, if destruction had not been placed as the immediate end of it, what would Ciel have done, how would he have approached things? He draws demolition around himself like a comfort, but that's because it's always seemed inevitable. Would he have sought it out from the start irregardless? I think he might have - 'It would be too difficult to be Ciel forever', with what the cost of it is). He has psychologically constructed himself for demolition, and aside from being a person meant to be inimical to actually living, he also has to reckon with everything on his shoulders; both the evil he's caused and the duty he's incurred, the hard and awful path of living. I think it would be dreadful for him. He can't even kill himself, because he knows he'd become a reaper (the boy who tried to construct the trajectory of his own life, including an agentic and utter annihilation, entrapped in having to live. Now there's some terrible tragic irony). In terms of trauma, it would make for a very fascinating prospective ending.
On Sebastian's end - I suppose he is, in an odd, untidy way (ie. I might be reaching here), sort of grabbing the spider's thread to save himself, preserve what he wants to continue to enjoy, to experience. No wonder he doesn't want to contract to end, because then, if he does not intend to take him then and there, Ciel will have no use for him and likely be incandescent with him anyway, viewing it as the betrayal at what he has constructed to be his agentic (in his mind) end, and Sebastian has constructed as a way to always be with him and metaphorically feed off of him whilst constructing and influencing what he vicariously imbibes - and now would no longer be able to do so. Something I do absolutely concur with you about, is the way they miss one another in terms of understanding and how Sebastian plays the beast because he thinks it's how Ciel will accept him - I could see this as going along a similar vein, Sebastian not trusting that Ciel - although who Ciel is is entirely because of how the contract has shaped him and how he has used it to shape himself - will have use or care for him in a life that extends beyond it, precisely because he used it and Sebastian to ensure there would be no life beyond it. Sebastian is aware of both this, and the fact that Ciel cannot let himself fully embrace him because it then seems as though he makes what he lost (especially real Ciel) worth doing so, and the only reason he can stand that sacrifice as it is, is because he assumes the inevitability of his own demolition.
How, I wonder, would this this psychological baggage play out between them were the contract abandoned - perhaps we might see Sebastian, thinking it is the only way Ciel will accept and embrace him and allow him to feed off of him, play the beast one last time and attempt to embrace him with claws poised now to devour? And whether/how that decision and the assumption behind it would be challenged.
We know Sebastian reaches for Ciel because he's become his identity and what he lives for and off of (metaphorically or not), and Ciel reaches for him because Sebastian is what paradoxically empowers him to continue his life on its trajectory to destruction, and keeps him in that survival headspace - what he has become accustomed to and what he (thinks he) ultimately wants, and the drive and being that Sebastian has become so attached to in the first place (that is often, correctly, identified as the way Sebastian's presence in his life always amounts to predation even as he immediately improves it - this interpretation would almost situate that as something Ciel, in part anyhow at this point (earlier on it was explicitly directed from Sebastian, as you've pointed out), draws down upon himself by demanding Sebastian perform accordingly - and the reason Sebastian may no longer want to is because he has become so enamoured of what has arisen from going this far along that line).
A marvellous paradox is that your interpretation has him want that to happen beyond the bounds of the contract (or perhaps at this point, he'd phrase it to himself as wanting the contract to continue indefinitely, both out of not giving himself false hope, and moreover not admitting to himself the absolute unpinning of what he understood his nature to be) but it can only exist because of the contract, they cannot exist in one anothers' lives and affect them as they have without it being because of the circumstance that casts their experience of one another as something doomed to converge and end, something that is by nature intended for destruction (obviously, you don't think this of them by this point in the story, but this is the understanding they set out from, regardless of how it may have changed). I wonder if there is any circumstance in which Ciel would let himself reach for Sebastian because he wants to, or if he will always ransom his enjoyment/comfort/attachment/dependance of him upon his own destruction. If he would ever let himself heal, and accept Sebastian as a part of that, when Sebastian has been his insurance that he will not have to heal, and will not have to face going on with his survivor's guilt and trauma.
This section is mostly regarding our initial discussion in that comment thread and some things you mentioned there. a) I think that the way Sebastian dwells on experiences and death of character as what he finds fascination in, and as what we see at multiple points through the story encourages his attachment towards and pride in and respect for Ciel (I think it's a dual edge of - look and how wonderful he is, and how I've helped that along, though the preponderance might actually be on simple reverent interest at some points), and his immersion - perhaps even sustaining of himself through it - in this, is the carnality of consummation. Something abstract and almost transcendent transmitted through a means of metaphor (literal consuming or not) that is symbolically sensual and narratively chaste and cerebral.
b) Why Ciel has jumped to it as a devouring - as we concurred on, an agentic death, a release from the onus of existence and from his trauma and survivor's guilt and the responsibility of the evil he's paved the road to his devastation with. Someone's got a marvellous post above how the tangible attributes we see of Sebastian's 'true form' (I'm not sure he has any singular form - he's a soul without heart/mind, I think he's one without a set body, the way we see him manifest in the making of the contract and in GWA is more how he's rendered in this plane of existence - but that's entirely my own unfounded hypothesis, and again, another silly tangent), includes 'eyes to see you with, hands to touch you with, a mouth to eat you with' - essentially he sees the attributes he can leash to turn on others and will eventually be turned on himself. This is a great part of why I do see the fundamental core of Sebastian's nature being a black hole of hunger (and the event horizon of the butler construction around it becoming more real the more the hunger is eclipsed by what it desires, rather than that hunger being a misinterpretation of his needs in the first place - of course, this is what Ciel's perspective shows, but it is notable that the only tangible part of himself the demon has described is his belly - then again, one supposes that could be taken as his interpretation on what he is. Humans misinterpret themselves, he's not as peerless as he thinks), and I think that is what Ciel thinks of him - and why he distrusts the body of fabrication around it, even when it's come to situate the belly within itself and deny it precedence.
There is something dreadfully nineteenth century, the romantic arrogance before it dropped off into the melancholy humanism of the epochal perspective the story is being written from, of Ciel and his desperation to do the most hunan thing and agentically design his own life - and he has to be aided in this by inhuman hands (you have no idea what that means to me - it's an Anne Rice specific re/misinterpretation of acheiropoieton, but suffice to say it is utterly piercing and desolating in terms of cosmology, how the human life to determine itself completely has to invite the warping and perverting of nature, our immense absurd cosmic tragedy - but I'm meant to be offering up my analysis of Black Butler and not my confessional theology, so I should have some discipline and shut up, lord knows I've rambled on enough throughout all of this) - and precisely because of what the human can envision for itself, it is constructed around the eager inevitability of demolition: todeschrieb.
Sebastian willingly giving up Ciel's soul would be such a huge volte face, (though perhaps in part because of my own build up preconceptions and interpretations), and I will say that I am not at all entirely convinced of this being the case - but I'm also far less sure of my previous longheld interpretation. This is certainly a vivid and illuminating lens to theorise that possibility through, and playing with it has given interesting developments to some of my other thoughts concerning Kuro and its central relationship, as much as it's also served me up a hefty helping of uncertainty!
(Final question, more out of idle fascination than anything else, so please feel no pressure to answer, I'm aware it's a bit overly familiar. Is your disagreement over Kuro being a tragedy born out of how this interpretation has influenced your opinion on that, or vice versa, or do you view tragedy as a gratuitous genre?)
I have a great tendency to ramble, so I hope I got this all across saliently, and again, thank you so much for taking the time to explain your thoughts to me.
Obviously this is your blog and you can do whatever you like, but would you mind terribly not deleting this? I'd love to be able to come back to it and reread it and I think it renders your thoughts so succinctly.
@fervent-fever , I apologise for tagging you so abruptly, but I'd love to know, what are your thoughts on all of this? ( @kuroposting , if you would rather I not tag anyone on a post you intended to delete, please tell me if I've overstepped and I'll take this out at once. If you're alright with it, then I really do implore anyone reading this to share their opinions, it's such a fascinating and vital debate and I'm very keen to know what everyone else thinks.)
* /From too much love of living/ we pray with brief thanksgiving/ to whatever gods may be/ that no life lives forever/ that dead men rise up never/ that even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea/