No, I don’t think he cares for Ciel at all. (I do like him as a character; this might sound like I don’t but I do!) His actions are protective, but I haven’t seen them becoming increasingly emotional or caring–they’re pretty much the same throughout the series. Ciel is a means to an end, but the irony of course is that Sebastian is no more evil than the people who hurt both the twins and than several antagonists in the series, perhaps less so. I think Sebastian is very good at imitating nuance and such, but I don’t see actual care there. I do think Ciel cares though, but Ciel’s ways of caring are pretty stiffened with the fact that he knows his soul will be eaten and he’s faced so much evil in the world that he’s utterly hopeless without his help. Ciel doesn’t really have a sense of self-worth and probably never did in how he kept comparing himself to R!Ciel, so Sebastian’s care for the sake of using him doesn’t feel as frightening to him probably because at the very least Sebastian is upfront about what he wants and doesn’t put on a mask to Ciel.
It was beautiful and painful. Sieglinde is a favorite of mine, and I also thought Wolfram would die because I’m a character survival pessimist, but he did not, thank God. I was so scared for him.
Sieglinde seems to be a foil for Ciel in several ways. She was manipulated by her mother and everyone around her into believing that she had this great power. I’m curious to see if that foiling will be expanded upon in upcoming arcs/reveals. Namely, if it does turn out that the queen is manipulating O!Ciel by perhaps being, you know, the person behind the murder of the Phantomhives and probably a manipulator of R!Ciel as well.
The relationship between Sieglinde and Wolfram also foils the relationship between Ciel (our Ciel, I’m just going to refer to him as Ciel for simplicity’s sake) and Sebastian. Wolfram loves Sieglinde (not in a creepy way) and would do anything for her, and his profound guilt over what he was forced to do to her in deceiving her weighs on him–but she beautifully forgives him. Sebastian is similarly loyal to Ciel, but the stark difference is that there is no affection there: he’s loyal to Ciel because of a contract to eat Ciel’s soul at the end. Sieglinde was deceived into believing she was supernatural when she was not; Sebastian and Ciel’s contract on the other hand is genuinely supernatural. In the end, Wolfram goes against his contract to kill Sieglinde under certain circumstances, because he truly values her. Sebastian does not value Ciel, though he is useful to him.
That idea of use in relationships kind of perfectly sums up Ciel’s issues. He constantly evaluates his relationships based on how useful they are to him and achieving his goals, as Soma observes.
However, he’s got people around him who do seem to like him for him, not because of what he can do for them, and Sieglinde and thereby Wolfram are among them. Soma is another if he can be shown that R!Ciel, and not O!Ciel, killed Agni.
Given the choice between hanging out with Silva and Kikyo or Hisoka, I’d choose Hisoka hands down. 😛 I can just imagine the pranks he’d encourage the kids to play on their parents.
The fact is, there’s no real resolution to the dueling bad takes out there in fandom. Instead, there are a few facts, which seem opposed at first, that have to be held in tension if you want to say something genuinely thoughtful about a story:
“Stories are intentional creations by writers, not pieces of an independent reality, and the writer’s intentions matter” vs. “Writers do not get to control how you interpret their stories” and “Writers themselves are not truly in controlof the stories they write”
“Characters are not real people, they are created by writers” vs. “Fiction works because we react to characters as if they were real people”
“Characters, being unreal, are not moral agents” vs. “The actions of characters have moral meaning in a story”
“Stories have a moral perspective” vs. “That perspective isn’t identical with the author’s intentions,” “That perspective can’t be determined from the morality of acts performed in the story” and “Enjoyment or dislike of a story doesn’t reflect the reader’s moral perspective”
“Your visceral hatred for a particular story is valid” vs. “A story needn’t be universally condemned because it makes a few people feel bad”
“Characters suffering or doing bad things is not an attack on anyone who might identify with those characters” vs. “Some stories are in fact an act of aggression toward certain groups of people” and “How a story treats its characters – its degree of empathy for them, the centrality it grants them, the agency it attributes to them, the kinds of experiences it subjects them to – can cause both real good and real harm in the real world”
hamliet 