#again it's possessiveness born of trauma vs service as a choice

[masterkeynobi]

god i can't stop thinking about padmé & sabé & anakin they've consumed my fucking brain like. (partially under a cut bc this gets Long)

queen's shadow establishes several things: first, that sabé is padmé's hands and that padmé is sabé's heart. every other handmaiden has a life planned out after amidala's reign; sabé doesn't, sabé who was the first to be chosen and who will be the last to leave. sabé's own parents don't call her tsabin anymore. sabé, in short, is sabé before she is anything else.

second: padmé is invested in the freeing of slaves. padmé is a pacifist. padmé broke ties with captain panaka because she only ever advocates for violence in self-defense. padmé naberrie would have gone to tatooine herself — but she is padmé amidala, and she must be senator, and so she sends sabé in her stead.

on tatooine sabé goes by tsabin and it doesn't feel right. she & tonra go about things the wrong way, lose the trust of the locals, cannot find shmi skywalker. twenty-five people isn't nothing, but it's not nearly enough, either. she doesn't find shmi skywalker. she's unhappy; tonra's unhappy; it's a failure. but padmé calls from coruscant — padmé has other priorities — and sabé goes.

senator amidala is not the queen. the voice is different; the clothing is different; it's taking down the walls built up over four years of a reign and rearranging them to form something new. worth noting, too, that amidala's voice as queen was formed from all herself & her girls, was formed from sabé more than anything. senator amidala is imitable, still, but is padmé. padmé can remake herself, did it once at fourteen and lived by it, but — coruscant is hard. her peers discuss politics as though they are philosophies and not people impacted. she thinks: this is not me.

for the first time since all those years ago, giggling children in a shared bedroom, sabé and padmé aren't attached at the hip. sabé is padmé's eyes and ears on coruscant; she isn't there to watch the senator's day-to-day growth, but still. they are familiar. padmé is herself and amidala; sabé is herself and tsabin. they are each other's peace, each other's steadiness, and they navigate the upper and lower levels of coruscant together with each other as their anchors.

time passes. the galaxy goes to war. padmé meets anakin.

here's the thing about anakin skywalker: the way he sees the world is inextricable from the fact that he spent his most formative years couched in horrific exploitation. anakin grows up wanting more than anything to have full control over himself and his surroundings. anakin curls around those he loves like a dragon, possessive, protective. service, to anakin who was born a slave, will never not feel like violence. possession is all he understands. anakin skywalker is in love with padmé.

& sabé, too, is in love with padmé. but sabé's devotion is boundless and without expectation. she says my hands are yours — my life is yours, should you ask for it — and knows down to her bones the implications of her fealty. she would die for padmé and padmé would let her and that's a choice she would make a hundred times over. she doesn't want pity for it. she kisses tonra and loves padmé and has no trouble reconciling these two things.

the galaxy is at war; padmé marries anakin and tells no one.

sabé isn't around for geonosis or its aftermath. sabé is on tatooine, doing things the right way this time around, settling in and gaining the trust of the people who live there. she sets herself and tonra (a couple. partners. equals, truly, in a way she and padmé have never been) up as a pair to be trusted to get slaves offplanet. not because they've been ordered to, this time, or because they're looking for shmi, but because it's simply the right thing to do. their quality of life suffers — they are naboo — but it's so fulfilling for both of them, a task they want to dedicate time and effort to.

padmé calls sabé and sabé knows before she picks up that she'll be asked back to coruscant. her hands have always been padmé's. she goes.

padmé is different now, though. is hiding something. sabé catalogs her fake smiles and doesn't know why she's wearing the mask of amidala, doesn't quite understand her anymore, and though both of them speak of things being just like old times — sabé, playing decoy while padmé gallivants off to be brilliant — it rings false. padmé has changed. sabé doesn't know senator amidala. there's something padmé isn't telling her, padmé who kept no secrets, whom sabé knew better than she knows herself.

sabé hates coruscant, she realizes. hates playing senator and stumbles around the chancellor and desperately doesn't want to lose herself in politics the way padmé almost has. (it is easier now, padmé says, to think of politics as ideas and not people. is that bad?)

your husband says hello, says sabé, brushing through padmé's hair. sabé's love for padmé has never been possessive, has never needed reciprocation, has only ever been loyalty and devotion and time spent so close together they might as well be the same person. but padmé didn't tell her. she only found out because the man himself barged into her bedroom and almost choked her out. the issue isn't that padmé's in love with someone else, it's that she didn't even tell her. the padmé she knew (the padmé who was hers, more or less! shared faces and shared goals for years on end) isn't the padmé of the present. the padmé of the present is anakin skywalker's wife.

still, for sabé, unrequitedness doesn't have to mean heartbreak. she talks to padmé, says anakin — scares her a little, honestly. padmé mentions an incident with the tuskens. sabé goes still, because they're talking about that massacre on the other side of the planet.

isn't that the funny thing, though? that sabé knows tatooine, now, better than the prodigal son of its suns? padmé sent her there, dear pacifist senator amidala, padmé who wanted post-election to free slaves, but it is sabé in the end who's doing the freeing. sabé has been padmé's hands for years; sabé does her dirty work and finds personal fulfillment in it. sabé frees slaves because she wants to do it. because it's right.

sabé leaves padmé's service that very night — my hands are yours. please don't ask me for them again. — and goes back to tatooine. & when she returns there she finds that the white suns have reached out; she greets tonra and she smiles. there is work to be done and she will do it as herself, casting her own shadow.

padmé amidala is married to anakin skywalker — who, it has to be said, never freed anyone who wasn't himself. anakin who doesn't even really know tatooine at all, anakin whose genius could have dismantled the slave chips the white suns come to tonra about in the blink of an eye, anakin, born in the desert, who lands on tatooine and ignites his lightsaber and leaves with blood on his hands and darkness in his heart. and padmé marries him. and padmé pulls sabé off tatooine and asks her to stay on coruscant and sabé says no.

[chibimyumi]

Hey! Hope everything's fine (: I wanna ask about the following: what do you think will happen to r!Ciel? I just can't see o!Ciel, Sebastian, the Undertaker etc killing r!Ciel... He might decide to leave the scene for his brother's sake. It would be quite ironic if r!Ciel will choose to sacrifice himself after UT's hard work to bring him back to "life", given the fact that he's an ex-human who committed suicide.

Dear Anon,

First of all, thank you very much, I am doing great. I hope you’re doing great as well! Secondly, I am so sorry for the late reply.

What I think will happen to R!Ciel.

I definitely think that Undertaker will do anything in his power to make sure that R!Ciel does not get killed again; we have seen Undertaker’s obsession with the Phantomhive family, after all.

Sebastian is the titular character of this series, and right now he is incredibly scared of the reaper. Functionally, Undertaker is designed as the main villain and foil to Sebastian. Therefore, storytelling-wise, I think the logical proceeding would be for Sebas to thwart Undertaker when it comes to R!Ciel. Both of them would share the same reason to oppose each other, namely that they are each other’s greatest obstacle in achieving their respective goals. For Sebastian, it is to fulfil his contract and devour O!Ciel, which Undertaker is trying to prevent. For Undertaker, it is for Sebas to NOT fulfil his contract, as he wishes to reunite the Phantomhive family as much as possible. As such, though R!Ciel is of course a character of his own, he does also function as a plot-device for Sebas’ character arc to bear fruit.

Unpacking ‘Need vs Want’

Any good character arc should contain a good ‘need vs want’ correlation. The part above ⇈ and the greatest part of the manga so far, addresses only the ‘need’ in the ‘need vs want’ in Sebastian’s character arc. The ‘want’ is mostly left untouched. Sure, we could say that Sebastian ‘wants’ to fulfil his contract in order to have O!Ciel’s soul, but there has never been any explicit explanation as to whether Sebas had a choice in the matter to begin with. He did not seem to have any say in whether he gets summoned or not, as was suggested by him telling O!Ciel to dismiss him if he required no service of him. Here, we learned that Sebas can’t just leave on his own accord; i.e. he is chained. From this, we may conclude that sacrificing R!Ciel was the fee to get Sebastian to travel to the human world. If we do accept that he had no say in whether he wanted to come or not, we could say that by ‘paying’ with R!Ciel, Sebas was put in a magic-parcel and sent to O!Ciel, with the included promise to enter a bond of servitude. In order to dismiss him, the same postage fee would have been required to repack him and send him back.

If we accept Sebas’ condition of entering the contract as being involuntary, all the ‘want’ in him that is left so far is:

wanting his meal to be delicious

to not be a speechless slave.

Out of these two ‘wants’ however, only number 1 counts as the correlation with the ‘need’ which befits a character arc.  Number 2 is more of a coping mechanism, or a means to an end, if anything. Whether or not he acts like a speechless slave will not really change the way he fulfils his contract. For number 1 however, Sebas does need to act differently depending on how he wishes to manipulate the flavour of O!Ciel’s soul. Sure, so far in the manga, Sebastian has done quite a few things already to influence the flavour of his meal, e.g. letting the snakes attack the boy in Snake’s tent in the circus arc, or not allowing him to continue simpering due to trauma in the werewolf arc. (But one could even argue that shocking him out of trauma has more to do with the ‘need’…)

The current development in regards to Undertaker is probably the first time where Sebas’ ‘want’ arc can finally shine. I shall explain below:

R!Ciel and O!Ciel’s bond.

One of the most important things the flashbacks were telling us is that O!Ciel and R!Ciel have an incredibly strong bond, and that O!Ciel used to be hyper dependent on his older sibling. After R!Ciel died, O!Ciel had to rapidly grow up in order to fill the shoes his brother left behind, as well as to establish his own identity, or arguably, his brother’s identity according to the almost idealistic standard to which the younger twin held him.

O!Ciel is no longer dependent on his twin, but if we read this spread page from the werewolf arc as the order of guilt-level O!Ciel feels towards people, we see R!Ciel being in position number 1.

So the arc for O!Ciel here is to decide whether his sentiments play a role in his decision making.

Will he show that he has entirely let go of his sentiments and see R!Ciel for the zombie he is, and continue his revenge arc in a bee-line?

Or will lingering sentiments flow into a mini personal-redemption arc now that the main object of O!Ciel’s guilt is back?

Considering O!Ciel’s personality, I personally am more willing to bank on a route 2, where the sentiments might threaten to influence O!Ciel, but him having to smack these feelings down even more harshly. If anything O!Ciel has learned in the past almost-4 years, is that the dead stay dead. Back in chapter 19, O!Ciel even lectured Soma on the stupidity of wishing things back that are gone at one point.

O!Ciel realises very well that R!Ciel is not his brother anymore. We have seen his shock upon seeing his brother’s corpse talking to him, yes, but afterwards, the first spoken reaction we see of him is utter outrage. That scene was so full of spontaneity and catharsis, it is hard to believe that he used all those long, looong moments of absolute silence to come up with a script to give people a ‘show’ of how he wants his zombie brother deader. If anything, the long period of silence was probably him considering what the return of ‘the real first born’ means to him, and how it will influence his future. And of course O!Ciel is not happy to find out that the one adversary even his demon seems unable to overcome, has become their adversary again in a major problem that O!Ciel cannot afford to hand-wave. During the Campania- and the Boarding School Arc, O!Ciel could say: “Oh, Undertaker is up to no good, he has to be stopped. If not, then it sucks for others.” But now, if Undertaker doesn’t get stopped FOR GOOD, well… it will become: “That sucks a lot for me!”

Returning to Sebastian’s ‘want’

So, what does all this rant about O!Ciel have to do with Sebastian’s ‘want’ arc? If O!Ciel goes for route 1 (bee-line to revenge), then Sebastian and O!Ciel’s ‘want’ arc will overlap, and the two of them can head towards the same goal (albeit with different motivations).Here above however, I said that I am more likely to vouch for route 2.

If O!Ciel opts for route 2, then O!Ciel’s ‘want’ and Sebastian’s  ‘want’ will contradict, as surely Sebastian is not waiting for a soul with ‘too-many-sentiments-to-kill-a-corpse’ flavour. In that case, however reluctant Sebastian might be to fight Undertaker again, he will at least make sure that O!Ciel’s resolve to kill the zombie won’t wither. This task however, will require a much greater effort and determination on Sebastian’s part than anything he has done so far in terms of ‘seasoning his meal’. The snake-stunt in the Circus Arc was adding some salt and pepper perhaps, but this time, playing a hand in whether or not O!Ciel has the guts to kill R!Ciel will be as flavour-changing as choosing between boiling or stir-frying a meal.

Hence, with clashing interests between demon and boy, Sebastian must see to it that his ‘want’ won’t be hindered by O!Ciel’s ‘want’. So,  ladies and gentlemen, and other respectable individuals, here is where we might see Sebastian’s first ‘want’ arc where he acts solely out of personal desire. Regardless of whether O!Ciel would initially choose route 1 or 2, the final result (if Sebas has any say in the matter) will still result in them going after R!Ciel.

R!Ciel Leaving Baby Brother?

As for R!Ciel leaving the scene for his brother’s sake… I personally find it quite hard to believe so. As explained in the Boarding School Arc, Bizarre Dolls – however well they are made – are in essence the embodiment of a person’s strongest emotions and fixations in life. R!Ciel’s fixation is probably his regret that he could not stay by his baby brother’s side to protect him and planning every detail out in their ‘glorious shared future’. Remember how R!Ciel could not handle O!Ciel saying he is going to live his own life and become a toy maker? Yikes.

The possessiveness of R!Ciel that was unfiltered due to his young age became the essence of his current being; a baby-bro-con zombie. Instead of “braaains”, it is “baby-brooooo”. In short, I do not think there is any chance R!Ciel will be able to physically and mentally let go of O!Ciel. As touched upon in this post, I think Undertaker’s and O!Ciel’s shared objective is to force O!Ciel to live a ‘happy life’ together with his twin.

If anything, R!Ciel’s (artificial) intentions fit the theme of Kuroshitsuji perfectly; humans are too greedy to let go and will submit to their greed ever after death.

If we consider this, then the Bizarre Dolls tell us that: “what makes humans human is their greed and fixation. In order to make a corpse human again, the main and only way to make this possible is to restore this greed and fixation.