Parallels between Doll and Our!Ciel
So this just came to my mind how similar and antagonistic Doll and Our!Ciel can be. I’m going to try and break it down into the different similarities and contrasts I’ve spotted and then tying it all in into how this forms and molds their relationship.
First off, one discernible fact that somehow was imperceptible to me at the start is that they both covered their eye.
We soon find out the reason behind Doll’s concealment of her left eye which was left marred and disfigured due to her parents’ neglect and abuse.
And in Our!Ciel’s case, well, there isn’t really much to elaborate here as we all know he needs to hide the contract seal.
But this brings me to my next point. The concealment of their eye could be considered a metaphor and also a symbolism for a masquerade of something bigger. Like what, you might ask? Well, for one, it could be a camouflage of their true identities.
In Doll’s case, she put on a costume (literally and metaphorically) that allowed her to switch between being a first-tier circus member and a second-tier member. She disguised herself by using the alias Freckles (I will go into more detail regarding this later) and would wear baggy clothing and ankle boots which in this sense can be considered her ‘costume’. And when she’s playing her role as “Doll” she will don her white wig and ballet shoes. Honestly it can be argued either way which one would be her ‘costume’ because both “Freckles” and “Doll” managed to fool Our!Ciel.
But what’s also interesting is how Doll allows Our!Ciel to think of her as, as he put it, a 'bloke’, and never once has she tried to put herself under the impression that she was a girl and not a boy. This may be because she doesn’t want Our!Ciel to feel uncomfortable or otherwise awkward since they share and sleep in the same room after all. All the same, she keeps her real identity to herself until she eventually reveals it when she rescued Our!Ciel from Snake’s snakes.
Bur Our!Ciel’s case goes much deeper. At first he reveals himself to be a pageboy named Finnian.
And then dug a deeper hole for himself when he admitted to living in the East End and having to steal in order to survive.
But his fabrication of lies soon unveils by the end of the arc when Doll eventually finds out that he is their target all along - Ciel Phantomhive, the Queen’s Watchdog.
What’s ironic about this is that Our!Ciel isn’t just the circus troupe’s target but that the circus troupe is also Our!Ciel’s target.
And another interesting parellel to draw is the fact that Doll could’ve lived if she hadn’t arrived at the manor just as Our!Ciel and Sebastian were leaving. I’m quite sure Our!Ciel would have been too caught up in his thoughts and trauma to even think about Doll let alone kill her. And if the situation was reversed and Doll learns that Our!Ciel is the one that Baron Kelvin wants I am quite sure she would be against it and may even help Our!Ciel escape due to her good nature and naïvety (she took his word for not stealing anything and even forgave him and promised not to tell anyone). In other words, they were not each other’s direct preys and could have been spared the pain and mental agony in that moment (or in Doll’s case, death) but due to the circumstances that ensued they both sought to killing each other, and just like every other killing match there can only be one winner.
Another ironic fact about this is Our!Ciel vows to get revenge on those who murdered his family and yet here he is: killing off Doll’s own family and taking away the one thing she’s ever known, cared, loved, and cherished her entire life (much like himself). Doll’s reaction was much like his own; she couldn’t forgive him and was blinded with rage and the only way she could see herself being relieved of the pain and confusion she felt in that moment was to eradicate him (again tying in with how Our!Ciel’s duty was to eradicate the circus troupe for their horrible misconduct of kidnapping children and can also parellel with him wanting to get revenge {which hints at a possible elimination because it’s Our!Ciel we’re talking about} on the people who were behind his family’s tragedy).
Let me bring you back to the point I made about Doll disguising as Freckles which I said I would elaborate on. Another similarity I’ve noted between them is the use of a different name to indicate different sides of them. In Doll’s case, when she was “Doll” she was considered to be a graceful, skilled tightrope walker who’s manner and countenance appeared to be reticent and rather quiet.
However, when under her alias, Freckles, her personality seems to take a 180° turn. As Freckles, she is friendly, warm and somewhat rowdy.
She may or may not have intentionally planned to deceive Our!Ciel into thinking she was one of the guys as she is generally more tomboy-ish in nature and probably didn’t think Our!Ciel would care either way as all the new members of the circus were working and practising really hard to become first-tier members as Doll had mentioned, so figuring out whether a person was actually a guy or a girl would probably be the last thing on their minds. Also, the fact that the circus isn’t exactly the poshest place to be could suggest that its inhabitants were of the lower class and wouldn’t be too bothered to be within close proximity of a different gender as they may have been living in a crowded area or in small spaces prior to coming to the circus.
As for Our!Ciel, he had introduced himself as Finnian (I wrote a theory on how Our!Ciel’s hypothetical name could be Finnian/Finny. If you’re interested or would like to read it, you can click here) and was later given the stage name Smile (Ha. Ha.). Of course, again, this is super ironic considering how Our!Ciel is anything but smiles. But if we think about this symbolically, the contrast in his name could portray the contrast in the real reason why he was employed into the circus in the first place. He was not there to be hired, he was there to investigate the members and the circus under the Queen’s order. Just like how artificial his stage name is, he fakes a smile and makes up a story of how he used to be a thief. A smile is also generally seen as a positive and nice thing. It’s the expression one gives when one is happy or comforting a friend or remembering a miraculous, beautiful moment in one’s life. It’s meant to be something genuine but, of course, this isn’t always the case. Smiles can be feigned. It can be worn to manipulate someone or when one wishes to get back at somebody else and succeeds at doing so or to conceal pain. It’s these dark aspects of a smile that this arc focuses on and is essentially the very core of what Kuroshitsuji is about: darkness.
Smile isn’t the only name Our!Ciel has paraded in.
Of course, back then, it would seem highly improbable for us to guess that there was more to this then what already met the eye. But with all the recent chapters we’ve learned that Our!Ciel wasn’t just putting on a façade as Smile, he was also putting on a façade as Ciel. He wanted to be seen as the Ciel Phantomhive who was strong and omnipotent and ruthless as the Watchdog and earl. His charade went deeper than just an-earl-in-hiding; simultaneously he was also proving to himself that he was the earl.
Something else that caught my attention was Doll’s costume.
The white roses adorning her costume could mean two things symbolically.
● It symbolises the start of new beginnings
I will elaborate on both sides. In Doll’s perspective, the circus was a sign of a new beginning. A fresh start from the horrors of living on the East End and having to fight to survive and barely getting through all the abuse, discrimination, and neglect. The circus would allow them to finally be looked upon with love and admiration. Of course, this doesn’t come freely. Doll and the rest of the circus members had to work really hard in order to be as talented as they were. Now if we look at Our!Ciel’s perspective he had just barely survived a horrible ordeal of summoning a devil and him being the potential sacrificial lamb. He lost his twin brother. But he formed a contract with the aforementioned devil. A contract that would not only erase him of his past self which he deemed as being unworthy and weak, but one that would allow him to reach the impossible: to be the Earl of Phantomhive and the Queen’s Watchdog, and by doing so, would also allow him to come clean (or at least feel some form of fraudulent, brief relief) by seeking vengeance on those who did this to him.
● It symbolises a token of remembrance
White roses are often gifted as an act of reverence. In Doll’s case, I suppose this would be more sentimental as the roses could pay tribute to her as a character, as a person. She had assisted in a terrible crime - child kidnapping, and yet she herself is a child at heart. Buoyant, light-hearted, and terribly naïve. It was due to this childlike innocence of hers that lead her to her impending death. And yet we don’t see Doll (or other of the circus troupe members as a matter of fact) as gruesome villains despite the severity of their crime-doings. In Our!Ciel’s case, this symbol of reminiscence could hint at the fact that he has buried his past self, or as mentioned in Chapter 140, ‘the one who died on the altar’. Or it could also be interpreted as Our!Ciel taking on Real!Ciel’s identity as a way to commemorate and preserve his twin brother.
Now that we’ve looked at the similarities, I will dive into the opposite parellels of Doll and Our!Ciel.
First things first, I think it’s save to assume that Doll and Our!Ciel basically have opposing personalities. Doll is far more caring, naïve, and high-spirited. For instance:
Even when she disguises herself as “Doll” the tightrope walker she still retains her good nature despite appearing rather stoic and aloof.
Whereas Our!Ciel is far more cautious, calculative, and detached.
In Doll’s case, even though she was a part of an illegal and horrible activity - child kidnapping - she never really preserved any of the abominable traits that one would expect from a child kidnapper such as being remorseless or vindictive. Ironically she’s still a child herself and enjoys having a good laugh every now and then just like any other child.
I’d again like to bring your attention back to Doll’s costume but this time instead of mentioning its pieces I shall talk about its colour.
I think we all know the symbolic meaning behind this colour. White represents purity and linking this back to Doll and her guileless naïvety in the way she treats Our!Ciel, like easily forgiving him for his act of ‘stealing’ and sharing her food with him after she saw he only got some measly bread (if you love bread don’t let me stop you), it emphasises and ties in with the point I made above about Doll still being a child herself.
White is also associated with light and goodness, and this can be further elaborated by Doll and her family, the other circus members, who only did what they did simply because they felt in debt to Baron Kelvin for taking them in and giving them prosthetics so that they could feel ‘normal’ and function better. In addition, they kept up with the kidnapping because they were under the belief that there were other children back at the workhouse they came from who needed support. But, of course, by the end of the arc we find out that Baron Kelvin was lying all along and that the workhouse has long since been abandoned. But it’s this fact that clearly highlights Doll’s sincerity, innocence, and purity. She was willing to trust and put in her all for the ones she loves and feels thankful for despite not really knowing whether the other person was really being genuine (like Baron Kelvin’s story of the children back at the workhouse and Our!Ciel’s forgery of being a pageboy and a thief).
With Our!Ciel this is not the case. He goes into a situation with forethought to its consequences and meticulously scrutinises each detail he is presented with. Unlike Doll who is terribly gullible Our!Ciel finds it hard to trust people and have people around him, or be close to someone. He would not be friendly to someone unless the situation reads otherwise, if its to carry out the Queen’s orders, or if it’s beneficial to him in some way (take for example in Chapter 96 where Our!Ciel thanks Sieglinde for helping him after she refuses to go along with him to see the ‘outside world’ but in reality he is trying to manipulate her into accepting his proposition as the Queen wishes to see her, or in Chapter 30 where he thanks Soma graciously for nursing him back to health after he contracted a fever when really he’s just taking the opportunity to try and escape from the prince’s clutches of making him stay in the townhouse).
Another thing that got my attention was this:
This is the line drawn between Doll and Our!Ciel. This is where their views are no longer the same. Where Doll hesitates Our!Ciel will and does not. Doll retains more compassion in her heart while Our!Ciel is brutally ruthless. Given how they both experienced abuse and neglect at a young age it would not be a surprise if they both ended up with similar personalities and views on life.
But this is not the case.
For Doll, her maltreatment soon ended after Baron Kelvin took her in to his workhouse along with the rest of her family - her loved ones, and from there she was able to shine as Doll the graceful tightrope walker. Just as she is dubbed the ‘princess of the circus’ she seemed to live in her own fairytale world and eventhough her good nature had cost her life in the end, she had died along with the rest of her family and in this sense didn’t actually die in vain as she could possibly reunite with them in the Afterlife which really brings the term ‘happily ever after’ to life. However, this story is reversed for Our!Ciel. His ‘happily ever after’ died on his 10th birthday and from there it was just darkness and isolation. No one was coming to save him. His only loved one left was his twin brother who promised that they would return home together but he had died along with the rest of his family leaving only Our!Ciel. Therefore, it is only natural for Doll to assume a positive disposition as after her horrible mistreatment she was shown love, care, and kindness. But Our!Ciel was in the opposite situation. He had been given these things from the start only for them to be snatched away from him and that is where the tragedy lays.
If you’ve read up to here thank you! I hope this little analysis sheds more light on the parallels between these two wonderful characters. Feel free to comment more similarities or differences that you’ve noticed and tell me what you think~
