fujoshireviews | black butler: a devil in the details

Content Warning: This anime deals, however indirectly, with CSA and its consequent trauma. This review discusses underage ships and content. If you don't want to read about these things, please skip this and join me next time.

I wasn't sure if I really wanted to review this. I wasn't even sure I wanted to tell people I watched it. What do you say about something you avoided for years that turned out to be 200% your jam? A lot, turns out! I watched this series and the first anime in less than a week. I binged that shit like a wine mom with netflix. I stayed up late the night before a job interview to finish it. I was fucking enraptured with a series that, to be honest, I'm still not sure is very good or not! For the sake of moe science, and for myself, I'm going to get to the bottom of it.

The first, more popular version of Black Butler aired over ten years ago, so many of you may not have heard of it. Still other may have heard of it but have no fucking clue what it's about. In short, it's 1889. Queen Victoria reigns. The Eiffel Tower is new, and ugly. A 13 year-old earl runs a toy company with the help of a demon butler to whom he has promised his soul. Together, they solve mysteries for the Queen, and terrorize houseguests. If this sounds tiresome, it's because it is. Luckily only half of these things come up at any given time, and the first episode is kind enough to explain most of them despite having technically dropped you in the middle of things.

Having dropped you into the middle, let me explain a few things. The first Black Butler anime happened in 2008, when the manga it was based on was like. 25 chapters. It's mostly known for blowing its load on crossdressing in the third episode, and, relatedly, being really horny. I may cover it and its sequel one day, when I'm out of good things to review. The series I'm covering today, Book of Circus, came out in 2014, and starts from the point where the first anime ran out of manga. Despite that, it's pretty self-contained, and explains stuff to you as if you're a newcomer. It, and I, would really like to pretend that first anime did not happen.

While the Black Butler manga refuses to pick a genre to this day, Circus is firmly Gothic horror, in both senses of goth. Like many goths, it's horny in most directions. Like many horror movies, it struggles with tone sometimes. But the atmosphere is unmistakable; dark and dreamlike. It's an aesthetic that either clicks with you or turns you off instantly. The whole thing's like that. It's not a slow burn where you wait for it to get good. The show tells you what it is and what it's doing from jump street. Either you're here for it or you're not. But It can be quite a few different things. What made me so excited about this thing I want to tell no one of?

Is it the butler thing? I mean, yeah, a bit. The butler thing isn't as much my thing as it is some people's, but only fools and liars don't want a butler to serve them cake and stab people they don't like. And while this is definitely the butler thing for those who have a butler thing, my thing is a monster thing. Sebastian, the titled Black Butler, is a proper monster, his handsome face belying a heartless void that eats souls and irons the morning paper. The contrast between English propriety and gleeful murder is its own appeal, but what surprised me was his consistency. He remains inscrutable throughout; just mean enough to remind you he's a demon, and just nice enough to make you glad he's around. It creates a fascinating tension in something that's told you pretty clearly how it's supposed to end. Whatever human villains you face, you're never allowed to forget the horror movie monster that puts on your socks in the morning.

The butler's master, Ciel Phantomhive, is a teenager with a lien on his soul, out for bloody revenge against the people who killed his parents and sold him to a hell cult. He's a spoiled, bratty know-it-all, with a personality tempered by his also being a gothic lolita cupcake with asthma. He uses a walking stick just infrequently enough for it to be funny every time you see it. He powers through PTSD flashbacks on pride alone, and assures us that his revenge is for his sake, and no one else. I love him and want no harm to come to him, however, this is not that kind of show. I know that for a lot of people the dealbreaker is terrible things happening to children, so this is the warning for that. This is a dark, violent series, with a children as the lead, so. Most of the terrible things happen to Ciel. To call him tragic or broken is a disservice, though, and annoying. He is little and cute, and he will face God and walk backward into Hell.

You may have noticed that none of this sounds particularly romantic, except in the sense that like, Dracula is Romantic. The thing that surprised me most about this show was that it's not, in the least. The whole master/servant, predator/prey dynamic is suffuse with weird, intense energy, not to mention some very questionable talk about dinner. But, it's never supposed to be good. We watch Ciel pull away from much nicer people again and again, because the only person he trusts is the butler he can magically compel to obey him. We watch Sebastian get offended that his dinner hasn't told him about all of his childhood illnesses. Whether this weirdness is abusive or unhealthy is super missing the point.*

What is the point?

Searching anime for BL-type moe, one inevitably begins to grow weary of hints, subtext, and obfuscation. Often a series will organically grow a relationship, then walk it back when they noticed they accidentally made someone gay. Anime, being a commercial product, does this with a lot of risky topics and ideas. Book of Circus had every reason to adapt Yana Toboso’s wildly dark manga into something that they could air before 10PM. It could have done literally anything to assure you that this butler’s weird vibes were not what you were thinking. Instead, it goes out of its way to keep those associations in your head. At the end, it confirms the ugliest of its implications, leaving its central relationship as ambiguous as it ever was.

This show offers no comfort. Levity, yes. There’s enough hit-or-miss humor for comedy to be a tertiary genre. But, no one’s trying to make you feel better about anything else that happens. I. kind of like that, to be honest. It’s weird, maybe, for this, a blog about moe, to so wholeheartedly endorse something that makes me feel bad. But sometimes, I like feeling bad. Not even sad, just. Ugly. This makes me feel ugly, and I love it.

Either you’re here for that, or you’re not.

*Obviously any relationship with a 13-year-old is bad for everyone involved. This particular one is also a literal Faustian bargain, so I felt like that went without saying.