Victor/Pluto

Mochijun loves a VnC character who's alive and walking, yet symbolically already dead. Vanitas is already dead. He's dead in the future as Noé recounts his story, and he's "dead" in the present because he's lived past the point where he wanted to die and is driving himself into his grave with the Book of Vanitas and his vengeance. And he walks around wearing an hourglass in which the sand has already run out. Jeanne is supposed to be dead, or at least all aspects of her individuality, her personhood, were supposed to have died the moment that she became a bourreau. And she carries her gauntlet, the embodiment of her bourreau self, in a coffin.

Given that precedent, I don't think it's a stretch to say that on a symbolic level, Astolfo has been trapped in a kind of hellish afterlife since he survived the attack on his family. He's like a vengeful spirit: existing as a shell of himself cut off from the growth and change that real living should grant. He's been deprived of real life since the moment that Charles manipulated him into weaponizing his hatred against vampires as his sole reason to live.

That manipulation into desperate cruelty, that offer of violence to redirect and distract Astolfo from his deeper self-hatred, is the act of Astolfo being fed his pomegranate seeds. Propaganda and rhetoric fill the role of literal seeds, and Astolfo swallows what he's given because he's desperate for something to hang onto in his misery. It's food as a metaphor for ruinous indoctrination—drinking the Kool-Aid. Thus he eats the (symbolic) pomegranate seeds, and he is trapped indefinitely in the underworld that is chasseur-hood. He even starts to live underground.

In the lineart version of Astolfo's feature cover, we see pomegranate seeds which fall and become spatters of blood, which in turn fall onto a pile of vampires' skulls. The desperate, hateful rhetoric that Astolfo swallows becomes violence, which becomes dead vampires. The internalized ideas which trap him in the "underworld" of emotional undeath also ensure his place in the cycle of vampire-human violence.

The point of Astolfo as a character, in large part, is to serve as a foil for Noé and Vanitas. Noé points this out directly on the Vanitas side—Astolfo is what Vanitas could have become had his path not diverged by the happenstance beat of a butterfly's wings. Small choices, brief moments in time, can send two people down two wildly different roads. And each moment that Astolfo falls for and falls deeper into Charles's manipulation is a moment of him choosing the worse road at a branching path, a moment of him eating yet another pomegranate seed that ensures he stays trapped in his personal brand of symbolic and psychological underworld.