Thank you for tagging me, @cielizzydefencesquad. :)
There are a few things here I want to address. Also to anyone who’s reading this beware of SPOILERS for chapter 129. And this might get a bit long and off-topic, sorry for rambling…
Okay, so first of all the spoilers have revealed that there is indeed a twin who’s the real Ciel and despite everything that happened in the cult (the stabbing, Sebastian’s fire) the twin now seems to be doing great (no scars, no visible veins,…). But for all we know the twin should have died. At least our Ciel thought so and judging by Sebastian’s expression when seeing the twin he thought so, too. After making the contract with Sebastian, our Ciel might have asked Sebastian to confirm the twin’s death before taking the Phantomhive ring. And maybe that’s what their conversation in the last chapter was about:
So that would mean that the twin indeed died on that day. But since apparently he’s back now he somehow must have been ‘revived’ and yes, the most likeliest way to do that would probably be as some sort of Bizarre Doll.
However, I think this time it’s a different kind of Bizarre Doll than those we know from Undertaker. Even if the twin is somehow special because of having shinigami blood (I’ll get to this point later) there are three or four more people in this sect who are probably the same as him, namely the other Lords (Polaris, Vega (maybe even two here) and Canopus). I doubt they would all have shinigami blood but I assume that they are ‘perfect Dolls’, like the twin, too, since they were given the same treatment, there’s a high possibility that the attacker with the knives (who killed Agni) was Lord Polaris and since Bravat’s main concern was always with Sirius. So if Sirius/the twin is doing all right now I feel like the other Lords should be doing well, too, and therefore be ‘perfect Dolls’, as well.
I don’t think anymore that Undertaker was the one who created these new Dolls. And there are several reasons for it. First of all, the method how these Dolls were created seems much different now than what we’ve seen from Undertaker before. UT altered the Cinematic Records and therefore he had to leave scars on the Dolls’ heads – something the twin doesn’t seem to have. Sure he improved but he never changed the basics of how he did it. With all the blood involved in the sect’s method it now seems much different.
Also, this sect has existed for much longer than the time UT’s experiment became successful (judging by the date these old guys who got their blood replaced should have originally died). I’m not saying that the sect already began with their creation of the Dolls back then. But they clearly had something like that in mind already. Or maybe they used the blood to keep the Lords in some sort of ‘alive’ state until the sect was able to fully revive them to how they are now. But that doesn’t seem like Undertaker at all to me. Relying on such a big sect, involving high ranking members of the government – I really don’t see him having planned it like that from the start. Undertaker doesn’t seem to trust many people and I rather see him as someone who would do things alone and in secret. (In the Campania arc he didn’t really tell anyone how his experiments worked. UT used Stoker and the Aurora Society rather than working together as it now seems to be with Bravat’s sect. Bravat clearly has more knowledge and authority than Stoker ever had.)
And even more than the different methods, it would seem quite out of character for Undertaker to support this sect, especially now that it turns out that the twin actually has quite bad intentions (he most likely is responsible for Agni’s death and he clearly wants to harm our Ciel). Undertaker never seemed like he wanted to harm our Ciel. Even Sebastian said that.
He’s rather an enemy of Sebastian, but not of our Ciel.
We know that UT had a close relationship to previous generations of the Phantomhives. He has Claudia’s mourning locket and he cried over Vincent’s picture. In encounters with Sebastian UT seemed to make sure that Sebastian would be able to protect our Ciel.
So after all this I really don’t think that Undertaker just wouldn’t care anymore if the twin wanted to harm our Ciel. Or that he would support a sect that uses and endangers Lizzy and our Ciel in order to achieve their goals in such a way; a sect that apparently supports the twin in wanting to make our Ciel’s life difficult.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to glorify Undertaker. He has done bad things and people died because of him. But he clearly has a connection to the Phantomhives and they seem very important to him. As said in the original post, there may even be the possibility that UT is actually Vincent’s father. But even if that’s not true (I’ll get to it in a moment) there’s still the fact that UT never seemed like he wanted to harm the Phantomhives but rather protect them. So he wouldn’t support one twin for the sake of the other. He would try to prevent the two of them to kill each other.
That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a role in this arc. But instead of being the mastermind of the sect and supporting it I could rather see him trying to prevent or delay the sect’s success. The one time we saw him he gave one of the Ciels (and it was probably the twin) some liquid and remember his words?
When he visited the twin/Sirius that night the twin’s condition seemed quite well. Afterwards, however, we saw him having these arms:
So UT may have intentionally worsened the twin’s state. Not with the intention to kill him, of course, but he may have tried to delay his full awakening in order to get time to maybe solve this situation in order to help both twins, not just one.
These are all reasons why I don’t think these new ‘perfect Bizarre Dolls’ are really UT’s creation. @midnight-in-town has written an alternative to who could be behind that, which – in my opinion – would make more sense at this point (take a look here, I don’t want to get too much into detail about it for this post).
So if someone else is responsible for the twin’s revival it’s also not surprising that the outcome is different from what we know from UT’s Dolls. Therefore, whether the twin has some shinigami blood in him or not doesn’t even necessarily play a role here.
As I said in many posts before, I’m skeptical about whether UT is really Vincent’s father. I mean, yes, it would explain a few things (like, why Ciel can see a shinigami when they choose to be invisible to humans) and I do agree that he and Claudia may have been more than just friends. But it would also mean that a shinigami can reproduce and since they technically already ended their human life, they seem to be in a state between life and death, their service as a shinigami is considered a punishment and they basically stand for death, I found it not so fitting if they can have children. So I’m really not so sure about that. But I do admit that Undertaker not revealing his true name, almost no knowledge about Ciel’s grandfather (aside from his name being Cedric) and UT’s obsession with the Phantomhives are indeed suspicious. So now that the 2CT has proven to be true, maybe the Cedric = UT theory is true, as well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But that does not mean that the Phantomhives can’t be killed without a Death Scythe. It’s not even certain if a shinigami can only be killed by that. Yes, they are more resistant than humans as was shown when Grell was beaten up by Sebastian. But I don’t remember that it was stated anywhere that a Death Scythe is the only thing that can kill a shinigami. And even if it is, that doesn’t have to be true for their offspring. Claudia’s children and grandchildren have developed normally, unlike shinigami who are not aging. Ciel isn’t able to see a Cinematic Record while shinigami can. So even if UT is their father/grandfather, some features of a shinigami (not aging, seeing CRs) don’t seem to be passed on, so the ‘not dying’ part may not, either.
Vincent could die. Even Undertaker doesn’t seem to think that it’s able to bring him back. The twin probably died, too. Sebastian most likely confirmed it. So I believe that they can still die normally even if they have some shinigami blood.
So in conclusion, I think someone other than UT ‘revived’ the twin and also the other Lords and that’s why they are different from what we know of UT’s Bizarre Dolls. Whether the twin has shinigami blood or not probably doesn’t play much of a role here (in my opinion) since there are probably also a few other Dolls who were a success.
I don’t know how someone who died would get his soul back. But we know too little here to say anything for certain. Did the twin really die back then? Is it possible for his soul to have been ‘stored’ somewhere so that a shinigami wouldn’t have been able to take it? Could the twin be revived without his soul? UT wasn’t able to make Bizarre Dolls with souls but could someone else do it?…
I do agree that it’s likely that the attackers on the Phantomhives who killed Vincent were supernatural. But not because he may have had shinigami blood and therefore was harder to kill but because he probably had very skilled servants and for someone to invade the manor and just kill him and Rachel that easily is quite impressive.
Of course that’s just my opinion and you’re free to disagree. We still know too little to say anything for certain. And sorry if this got so long and probably way off-topic. ;^^
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