Review of Black Butler

Taking a break from my usual BL/GL binge habits to review some borderline BL content. Which this show definitely qualifies as, to my unending disgust. Now, some background information on Black Butler. The manga is not, and never was, intended to be a yaoi. I don't know where this rumor started, but it needs to die. The BL elements in this series can be laid squarely at the feet of this adaptation, with no input from the original mangaka. Now, it's no secret that Kuro season 1 was adapted from maybe four chapters of manga initially. This has... interesting knock on effects on characterization, but moreon that in a minute. It's a fair looking show for 2008, cgi horses notwithstanding, with fairly crisp animation, and an art style reminiscent of shoujo series for the time. This does, unfortunately, mean that the art is essentially frozen in that awkward sample of what the characters looked like in the first volume of the series, but that's not uncommon for anime. Just compare the art of Stardust Crusaders with its manga counterpart. The art changes a LOT over the course of a manga. The music is fitting for the setting, but I can't say I found it particularly memorable, either.

Anyway, characters. And the butchering thereof. Ciel Phantomhive feels... off, in this adaptation, mainly in that his layered personality was almost entirely stripped away, and his bratty elements flanderized to the point where I initially joked that he was Sasuke in a blue wig. He's edgy, where I felt he should have more weight and poignance to his words, probably because he's based entirely on four chapters of manga before A1 Pictures went off to increasingly do their own random filler material.

Sebastian is a complete mess, his sinister elements downplayed to the point of actually seeming to deeply care for his charge, which misses the point of his character in the source material entirely, while also casting him in the unfortunate role of 'seme' to Ciel's 'uke' in the subtext of the show. More on that little pile of gross in a minute. Essentially, he's a loosely bound eldritch abomination in human skin, a monster hiding behind a mask of servility, who would eat Ciel in a heartbeat should he falter in his agreed-upon task, but this anime turns him into a near-perfect ubermensch character who endlessly quips about how he's 'simply one hell of a butler'. You see my problem. He's an exceptionally flat, boring character in the anime (if you're not blinded by the hawt bishonen mans), and that impression it left of him on me actually really impacted my enjoyment of him in other material. He should never have been cast as a hero, and any producer worth their salt would have understood this.

Grell Sutcliff was flanderized to a ridiculous degree, becoming an annoying fangirl for Sebastian rather than a rather saddening look at the struggles of 1800s transpeople by way of Bayonetta. A1 ironed her character flat.

Elizabeth's writing is a true disservice to fans in this adaptation, treated as an annoyance at best, with a godawful screeching voice in both dub and sub, with none of the subtle touches she had, even early on. Some of her lines are simply rewritten or cut, making her sound uncharacteristically selfish for a character who is(spoilers) actually giving up a lot in a misguided attempt to make Ciel happy. Given the open shipping of Sebastian and Ciel in the anime, this almost feels intentional, to discredit an actually interesting straight ship for Ciel that is also not pedophile bait. I could go on, but the characters all have the same problem for the most part. They are shallow, annoying, and poorly developed, with A1 Pictures clearly having only a surface level understanding of the source material at best.

So, pedo bait, you say? Oh, yes. Sebastian's predatory (literally, he's a demon), mentally scarring behavior is completely downplayed in this anime, and Ciel's PTSD is cut, despite appearing prominently very early in the manga, all in the interest of having shots of Sebastian crouched suggestively over a thirteen year old boy, while statue wings behind him make him look like an angel. As embers from fireworks fall down around the unfortunate pair, I have to wonder, who at A1 pictures was masturbating frantically to shota porn before penning this storyboard. Sebastian and Ciel's relationship is complex, yes, but this series strips all nuance of their mutually antagonistic, predator-prey dynamic and replaces it with gay fanservice. I'm all for gay, just look at my list, but thirteen year old/immortal demon who looks at least thirty is a yikes from me. Apparently PTSD is too dark for this soft, PG production, but man/boy love is A-Ok. To make matters worse, somehow, it's very apparent from Ciel's original characterization that he's a CSA survivor, something that later became cold fact in the manga. Tween CSA survivor x Grown Man. Bad pedo, no biscuit. And speaking of biscuits...

Pluto. Pluto harpoons the atmosphere of the series. It's so bad, he gets his own section. The whole point of Black Butler is that it's 1800s realism with a smattering of supernatural elements based on Victorian beliefs about medicine. Nobody knows Sebastian is a demon, aside from other supernatural entities. The supernatural is hidden from the mundane humans of the setting, barring extreme, often deeply traumatic circumstances. The intrigue of the series relies on this. Pluto is a naked man who acts like a dog, and can transform into a giant, reality-defying, fire-breathing, obviously supernatural dog at will. All this, while also being fodder for the worst filler episodes in Black Butler. Uh... Pluto bad. Next.

Essentially, this adaptation of Black Butler is ground zero for everything wrong with the anime series as a whole. The ongoing confusion amidst fans over how the Book Of series connects to this anime is a great starting point. The mess they made of adapting the Curry Arc, cutting large segments of Agni and Soma's characterization in favor of wacky, non-canon stuff about curry buns curing possession, makes its connection to Book of Circus nebulous at best and jarring at worst. Everything following the curry arc is non-canon, and written like a cookie cutter supernatural shoujo from 2008. It's pretty bad. The villain's motivations don't make sense, Sebastian is treated as the second coming of Christ, and everyone is horribly out of character, even for this show. To make matters worse/even more confusing those who don't read the manga and go straight into Book of Circus, even the first three short arcs are not adapted even slightly faithfully, despite being published at the time, for... reasons? Why, A1? Why did you do this?

In short, A1 Pictures made the Black Butler fandom explode into prominence on the internet, and for that it should be praised, but it also is solely to blame for the most enduringly awful elements of that fandom. If you like shoujo from the 00s with underage gay baiting, you might find it tolerable, if a bit bland. If you want the dark tale of intrigue and sacrifice, heaped upon the shoulders of a small, traumatized boy, and have a pedo-apology free, cohesive, well-written experience, go read the manga, because you won't find it here.

Edit: After watching a video essay on the work that went into adapting the Nabokov book, Lolita, to film, something struck me as applicable to Kuroshitsuji's adaptation to anime. Lolita features a predatory older man abusing a young girl while occupying a parental role, sexualizing her actions, and is told entirely from his warped perspective as an unreliable narrator. A camera is a far more objective lens, and in Lolita's adaptations, Humbert (the narrator in the book) is often portrayed as suave and cultured, almost perfect, as if his description of himself in the book were objective reality. In Kuroshitsuji, there is a predatory eldritch abomination, abusing and traumatizing a young boy while occupying a parental role, portraying himself as the perfect butler on the outside. He shields Ciel from the light, anyone who would think to help him, and intends to devour him. He blinds others with his seeming perfection, so that they don't question his intention, or notice his lies. He jokes that he is 'simply one hell of a butler' as a way of poking fun from behind his facade, of signposting that he has pulled the wool over the onlookers' eyes to the point of being able to joke about it with none the wiser. The anime, likewise, takes this mask of quasi-angelic perfection that Sebastian uses to disguise his intent as a predator, entirely at face value, just like what happened with Humbert Humbert, the pedophile in Lolita. Both cases feature an adaptation of works staunchly condemning child sexual assault that end up sexualizing children instead. Regardless of A1 pictures intent in making this adaptation, they've warped and distorted the intended message of the series beyond recognition by buying into Sebastian's act, in the same way Kubrick did when he made the Lolita film adaptation.