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**mild** spoilers for 217

i think this exchange will haunt me for the rest of my days. obviously this isn't the first time we've seen nonverbal communication between these two but. BUT. the familiarity. the ease with which ciel ducks behind sebastian, reminiscent of hiding behind his father's legs when he was younger. the little glance and nudge saying "i don't want to/can't deal with this right now, please take over". the way sebastian immediately just gets it and smiles so fucking fondly.

ohhhghgf the DICHOTOMY of the preceding interaction centering ciel's eyepatch, a stranger making light of something he's clearly sensitive about, only for him to instinctively seek safety within the person responsible for the accessory and what lies beneath it. if anyone needs me i'll be writhing on the floor in agony

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Finnian, Mey-rin and Tanaka-san show what they’ve got to save the Young Master, Episode 9 (BAMF Phantomhive servants, Part 2)

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something I've always really appreciated about sebastian and ciel's dynamic is how good sebastian is at calming him down, actually showing a surprising amount of emotional intelligence.

In this scene, he reacts by grabbing Ciel's arm to stop him from hitting Elizabeth. Ciel typically seems to react negatively to being touched when he's emotionally heightened, but Sebastian's touch seems to be grounding:

Sebastian then moves in front of Ciel while he talks to Lizzy, effectively hiding Ciel and giving him space to calm down.

In the Jack the Ripper arc, he covers Ciel's eyes to stop him from seeing the corpse, and again, Ciel doesn't react at all negatively:

Again, he doesn't attempt to talk to Ciel himself to try and calm him down. He just takes over the situation and talks to Grelle, letting Ciel calm down in his own time. When Ciel is ready, he pushes Sebastian's hand away, and Sebastian lets him:

In both examples, Sebastian deals with it by effectively giving Ciel a temporary break from the situation and stepping in until he's ready.

I think it's something that works uniquely well for their dynamic. Sebastian knows that he couldn't comfort Ciel with words. Even when Ciel had a nightmare and didn't want to be touched, he was still comforted by Sebastian's presence. He didn't want him to say anything, just to stand there:

I also find it cute that Sebastian immediately agrees to stay and doesn't question it or make fun of him.

When making the contract, they agreed that Ciel's orders are only binding if he explicitly calls it an 'order' or a 'command':

Sometimes, Sebastian doesn't do what Ciel tells him unless he explicitly gives it as an order. In chapter 1, Ciel asked him to make him a cake and Sebastian refused. In the Circus Arc, Sebastian didn't immediately burn the manor, Ciel had to yell at him and state it was an order, and Sebastian then had no choice.

So in the scene where Ciel has a nightmare, Sebastian wasn't compelled to a) not touch him and b) stay in the room. He could easily have been cruel about it and mocked Ciel, or made him give it as an order first.

Similarly, I always found it interesting that in the Emerald Witch Arc, Sebastian says 'if the young master commands me not to touch him, then I cannot touch him'. Because at no point in this scene did Ciel 'command' Sebastian not to touch him:

But Sebastian treats it as a command anyway, because he can see how distressed Ciel is. Touch is his way of calming Ciel down, and that includes not touching him when he doesn't want it.

I think that's why, in these scenes, Sebastian's words are quite mocking but at the same time, he's caressing Ciel's face and refusing to put him down:

This ended up being way longer than I intended it to be, but basically my point is that it's interesting that while Ciel knows Sebastian can't lie to him, it's physical reassurance rather than words of comfort which play the biggest role in their dynamic. Because Ciel knows Sebastian doesn't really have his best interests at heart so he doesn't trust his words, but Sebastian's touch is safe and grounding to him, at least subconsciously.

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the change in Sebastian's character is actually kind of wild if you think back to early kuro. to that time when he deliberately delayed saving ciel when he was kidnapped, and releasing those snakes on him in the circus arc. I can't imagine him doing any of those things now. The only time Sebastian has 'allowed' him to get hurt since the circus arc is during the cricket tournament, because it was part of ciel's plan, and sebastian didn't seem too happy about it from the way he immediately took him off to the sanitorium.

And with pretty much everything sebastian does, we can't really tell what the motive behind this change is. I think it started during the circus arc (Agni's advice has definitely stuck with him) and was also intensified during the Campania arc (when he almost lost Ciel). So it might be because he's trying to be a better butler. Or because he's realised the threat of losing ciel is very real and he's protecting his prey. Or, the perpetual question, has he started to actually care about Ciel? Or maybe a combination of all 3?

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does anyone else want to violently throw up every time you think about the phantomhive servants discovering the truth about the contract and realising that the boy they were hired to protect and who they grew to care about so strongly was doomed to die from the start and they're powerless to stop it. and how they'll probably be devastated and have to cope with losing everything again. or is it just me

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it actually makes me a lil insane to think about how loved sebastian is. how agni admired him and saw him as a friend. how madame red said he's basically family to ciel. how Mey rin adores him for being the first person to make her feel valued and appreciated. how finny used to give him hugs so strong they would supposedly damage a normal person's spine. how bard's face lit up when he appeared in the forest in the emerald witch arc. how elizabeth felt so safe and reassured with him there on the Campania. he's become such a valuable part of so many people's lives. and maybe it is all just part of an act, part of his butler aesthetic, but in a way, isn't it kind of beautiful that a demon could be so committed to a contract with a child that he accidently ended up improving the lives of everyone around him in the process?

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Kuroshitsuji S5 | Ep9 | What gives me the most amusement now is my game with you, constrained by your “butler” requirement. Not following my every impulse and acting like a beast. However, if you prefer me “beastly,” I’ll act the part for you. I am merely one hell of a butler, after all.

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Phantomhive Manor Layout

I'm the type of person who loves a good fictional map or floor plan and, unable to find one of the Phantomhive manor house on the internet, I naturally tried to make one myself. I figured that I would be able to to follow the routes the characters take to get to certain rooms and compare the interior and exterior window positions and designs to map the rooms.

I've been trying off and on for around a week now and, besides the entrance hall, I couldn't confidently tell you the location of a single room. Windows seen from the inside don't exist on the outside and windows on the exterior aren't present within the rooms. Certain windows and external doors exist in one chapter and are gone the next. Characters go up 3 full flights of stairs only to end up on the second floor. Entire stories appear where they weren't in previous in arcs.

This is obviously due to human error and things being changed to make them more historically accurate or to serve the story. It also doesn't matter where the rooms are, only the purpose they serve and what happens in them. The location of the dining room isn't important; we just need to know that's where people eat and have birthday parties, and one time Sebastian did a cool flip there.

That being said, I always want a Watsonian explanation even when there's a Doylist one. I could only come up with one in-universe explanation for the logical inconsistencies of the house: when Sebastian restored the manor house, he didn't just fix it. Whatever he did to it, the house is no longer a static, spatially-consistent structure.

If anyone is interested, more details about how confusing this building is are below the cut (with some out of context manga spoilers).

The Manor House

The first image is the front of the house, the side which carriages approach. The second image is the back where the garden is. Both are from Meyrin's backstory.

Here are more aerial views:

Note the appearance of extra windows along the side of the central section in the first one, which is from the same arc as the previous two images. The second is from the Blue Revenge Arc.

Here are details of the back view of the building:

Note the disappearing windows in some.

Ciel's bedroom.

Before the Green Witch Arc, Ciel's bedroom windows look like this on the interior and exterior:

Note that they open outwards (casement). Also note that they interrupt the hip-height decorative design inside. The three exterior shots are from Sebastian's record in the Luxury Liner Arc and don't match any corner on the more zoomed-out views of the building.

At the end of the Green Witch Arc, the windows are now hung (the bottom half slides upward to open) rather than casement style, but are otherwise the same:

In the Blue Revenge Arc (including the servants' flashbacks and r!Ciel's time there after he reclaims his identity from o!Ciel), the windows change:

The curtains are now a solid color and the decorative design is below the windows, rather than being interrupted by them. Those are insignificant details, but the panels showing the exterior directly contradict the interior and information from previous arcs:

The room is now on the middle floor while before it was on the top floor (not including the attic level), in addition to having a different architectural design around it.

The bedchamber together with the front room have 4 windows altogether, but the exterior only shows 3. The dressing room and bathroom each have a bay window, but the area where they would be seems to be up half a level. There's also a window on the exterior on the wall behind Ciel's bed, but no sign of it inside.

Interestingly, the layout of his quarters would be closer to the floor above, which has the four windows on the back and the two bay windows on the side. It's missing the dormer windows above, and the architectural details below, but it makes me think that there was some error in planning/drawing and the bedroom was actually supposed to be on the top floor.

It seems that the whole manor is actually two main floors for the family and guests, with a basement level and an attic level for the servants, and that one additional floor in the corner block got added at some point. In the earlier arcs, the roof of that section was the same height as the section to the left of it. It was only in the Blue Revenge Arc that they became different heights:

I thought things might be cleared up by following the routes of the characters to reach the room, but it's hard to understand where they're going.

In the Murder Arc, they go up one flight of stairs from the dining room (usually on the first floor in these types of houses) to reach Ciel's bedroom, and the second time they go up at least two floors from a bedroom (usually on the second floor) to reach the same room.

In Bard's backstory, Finny tells him Ciel's room is on the second floor, and then Bard goes up three flights of stairs from the first floor to reach it.

Something to note is that the three middle panels of Bard's route are identical to the first route of the Murder Arc, and then he goes up an entire extra staircase to reach what is supposed to be the same room.

In the Blue Memory Arc, Ciel has to come down from a higher floor to reach his parents' room (which became his room).

If the bedroom is on the second floor, he must have come down from the third floor, but I can't find the window in the stairwell anywhere on the outside of the building.

The Dining Room

The dining room is a long room with two entrances on one of the short walls, three large windows on the left, a fireplace on the right, and a huge bow window at the end. I initially thought there could be two of them, because I noticed that the height and design of the bottom of the bow window seemed to change depending on what meal was being eaten. However, I now think it's just inconsistent drawing.

As usual, there's no way to tell where this room is located. There are no bow windows on the outside of the building, or even a corner of the building which would allow for this configuration of windows.

The Drawing Room

This room has two enormous windows and conveniently has a panel of Ciel looking out of one them so we can determine its general location. However, I'm not sure which of the following sets of windows is correct:

The blue and orange are very big, but the yellow has the same window pane pattern as the most recent iteration of the room, which is the most accurate. However, the yellow is a set of three windows while the room has two. One of the windows could be in the next room, but it feels unlikely. The interior distance from the top of the windows to the ceiling is lacking from the the blue on the outside, so if the drawing is accurate, it would probably be the orange. The orange also feels most accurate to the panel of Ciel looking out the window, but the earlier volumes were less consistent in perspectives and proportions, so it's impossible to tell.

Ciel's Office

Ciel's office has a bay window overlooking the drive up to the house. There are two locations that fit this criteria.

In volume one (so take this with a grain of salt), there's a second window consistent with the teal option, but it doesn't seem to show up again. The side where the second window would in the orange option is never shown (to my knowledge).

Whichever option it is, the other side might be the room where Sebastian tutored Ciel.

The wall shown with bookshelves doesn't seem to have a window consistent with the teal side, so assuming the window is on the opposite wall and this room is the orange, Ciel's office would be the teal.

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ciel walking away is sending me

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sebastian in chapter 215

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Waited for years just to make this

(thinking of making more of SnapCube x BB shitposts later)

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I’m slutting them out

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Out of curiosity, I did some reading on mustard gas and learned that you need to wash yourself thoroughly with water and mild soap, preferably in the shower of any running water to wash off the chemicals.

They did the right thing by undressing completely and burning/disposing their clothes, but getting into the cauldron seemed like a bad idea because the chemical would mix with the water and after a while, they were basically submerged in contaminated water.

I have no idea what kind of tonic Sieg made Ciel drink. There's nothing about drinking or rinsing your mouth with anything, although they also should've washed Ciel's eyes with clean water to prevent any vision problem.

Another symptom is Central Nervous System excitation. It basically means that the neurons were firing rapidly, enhancing fear and anxiety, which is in line with Ciel's symptom. It's causing him to suffer from PTSD. It's like when we're nervous or anxious, but a lot worse.

Also, the reason why Sieg's bedroom is at the very top of the tower is to protect her in case the gas spread across the village. MG has a higher density and heavier than air and will settle in low-altitude areas.

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Outdated Sebastian

When I first read chapter 214, I chuckled when Fairchild told Sebastian that the role hospitality staff played was far superior to servants.

Sebastian's face there says it all. I wasn't sure at first if this was on purpose or just a sales pitch that definitely didn't set well with Sebastian.

Then, with the interaction with Rodney Hall. Hall shows off innovations like the elevator, indoor plumbing with hot water, and a phone to ask for service. He even adds that servants will be relieved of their duties.

Interesting choice of words there.

When I first read through, I thought that not only was this little jabs at Sebastian, it was also setting up a scenario where Sebastian's butler aesthetic didn't seem as impressive.

Then, I thought of something else. Undertaker is most likely sending a message. This hotel makes others obsolete and outdated. He could be saying that Sebastian has also become obsolete. Perhaps Undertaker has found either a way for o!Ciel to get revenge or made revenge itself no longer necessary.

There's also the implied threat. Undertaker is planning to 'relieve' Sebastian of his duties.

Thoughts?

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Kuro 214 spoilers

(Read here)

I initially really thought it could be Joker with a proper haircut (mostly because of the little pointed teeth), but :

the cliffhanger makes it seem like they were looking mostly for Seb and not for Ciel & Seb

Also they seem to have a neck tattoo (?) and no earring hole, unlike Joker :

So maybe it's not Joker.

I also checked to see if the church on their hood was the same as the cult that abducted the twins and summoned Seb 4 years ago...

...but it doesn't seem to be the case, so I guess he's not this guy either from ch137 ?

Otherwise, I guess this person could look like the hired killers from ch3 if we're reaching ?

Anyway, the possibility of Joker's rather new look aside (to make him more butler fitted), it'll be cool to see if UT was petty enough to track down someone from Seb's past somehow, unrelated to when he started to work for Ciel, and brought them back as a BD.