Black Butler II

This review contains spoilers for seasons one and two of “Black Butler”.

Things can get worse. They can always get worse. Ordinarily I don’t actively go out of my way to watch bad anime or things that clearly are not going to appeal to me, but I do make an exception on occasion. At the start of every year I challenge myself to complete an anime that I just know will be so bad that I’ll walk away with a new sense of what bad truly means. Some might call this masochism, some might call it a waste of time. But honestly there is a value to doing something like this. It can make me look back at other anime that bothered me and start appreciating things about it. It can make me go through a new seasonal anime and think “yeah this isn’t good, but at least it wasn’t like that”. It’s the same kind of logic as standing next to an ugly person to look hot. So in a way watching a piece of trash has its perks. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that what we have here isn’t one of the worst things I’ve ever had to see. Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. “Black Butler II” is the 2010 follow up to 2008’s “Black Butler”. While the first season adapted content from Yana Toboso’s manga and then split away doing its own thing, the same cannot be said for the sequel. It’s all original content for the anime as written by the screenwriter for season one, Mari Okada. So you know who to blame. Fans will often discourage people from watching season two because its filler, but while I think that’s along the right track for why this is terrible it doesn’t quite capture the problem. The issue isn’t simply that they didn’t adapt Toboso’s story. It’s that they could have done anything they wanted and went with the most aggravating, the most tasteless, the most mind numbing thing possible. Get ready, we’re in for a long ride.

“Black Butler II” starts us out with a boy named Alois Trancy who has made a pact with a demon named Claude Faustus. Both characters created for the anime. Alois is the arrogant and violently abusive heir to the wealthy Trancy estate while Claude has the emotional range of a brick. One night a strange figure that is obviously Sebastian Michaelis appears on their doorstep carrying a suitcase. He’s allowed in and after a while makes his way through the mansion and finds a tin of tea that results in a fight between him and Claude. Eventually the suitcase is opened revealing the unconscious body of Ciel Phantomhive. Sebastian manages to escape with Ciel and the tea which is revealed to contain Ciel’s family ring. Once he places it on Ciel’s hand the boy wakes up, but it’s discovered he has amnesia and cannot remember the majority of events that took place during season one. How I wish that was me. As the episodes play out Ciel and Alois’s stories intertwine and we experience a tale of lies, revenge, schemes, and very uncomfortable sexual fanservice.

One of the biggest issues I had with this anime was its writing. It feels like Mari Okada just made the story up as she went along without having a coherent plan in mind. The first episode spends all of its time with Alois and Claude, but then the next several episodes only vaguely make mention of Claude until he appears again in episode four to invite Sebastian and Ciel to the Trancy estate for a costume party. As much as I disliked their characters it still felt strange placing so much importance on them only to just dial it back to showing Ciel and Sebastian solving mysteries like they did in season one. And when your anime is only twelve episodes long you can’t really waste time like this. You would think the subplot about Ciel’s amnesia would be something sufficient enough to make those episodes interesting, but it isn’t. The way it’s handled makes for a rather confused viewing experience. Sebastian told the other characters to just roll with things and act like nothing is off with Ciel. But the way the anime handled that ended up making it feel more like the show just forgot the events of season one. For example, Lau and Ran-Mao are back and alive and nobody reacts to this. And we aren’t told how they’re still here until literally the last six minutes of the final episode. Once we do bring Alois and Claude back into the forefront it actually gets worse. Episode five is the point where I just knew the anime was never going to redeem itself. There we see Alois force his maid Hannah, who’s eye he gouged out in episode one because she looked at him when he intentionally spilled a drink, to strip off her clothes in a moment of male gaze fanservice so that he can go about his costume party dressed as a girl despite having other dresses to choose from. He manages to get Ciel alone and waxes poetic about the deep blue of his eyes and then licks his ear so that he can distract him long enough to steal his eyepatch while I feel my brain turn to butter.

The shota fanservice in this anime is really horrendous and believe me we will talk about that later. But as things transpire from this point until the finale everything just gets so convoluted and frustrating. Conflicts that you don’t care about because you know it isn’t canon, drawn out backstories that disgust you instead of move you, reveals that feel like unnecessary padding more than anything. Things that you’d expect them to expand upon feel glossed over, like why Claude cared enough about Ciel to steal his soul at the beginning, and then we waste a lot of time on things that ultimately impacted nothing like Grell. It quite honestly winds up becoming an incredibly stupid anime that never feels like it has a clear sense of what it is doing and why. It just knows it wants you to see grown men kiss pubescent boy’s feet. Anything else is inconsequential.

Not only is this a mess on a story level, the dialogue also needs mentioning. You see this isn’t just a dumb anime, it’s the kind of dumb anime that still somehow thinks its saying something. Characters will often speak in dramatic monologues using all kinds of metaphors that give the impression that something worthwhile is supposed to be said, but it just ends up feeling like listening to someone drone on and on because they like the sound of their voice.

And yet despite that the anime still takes it upon itself to explain incredibly obvious things to the audience, just in case you don’t get it.

So we basically have a show with its priorities all over the place with dialogue that suggests it thinks it’s smarter than it is, but that you the audience are too stupid to understand obvious things without them telling you. And yet so many plot significant things feel underdeveloped or get explained in a blink and you miss it style moment. This is probably the worst thing Mari Okada will ever write and frankly it’s not surprising to me that she didn’t bother returning to write any of the other installments after this.

So we need to talk about Alois. His character ends up becoming one of my biggest issues with the entire anime, but it isn’t because he’s annoying and made incredibly unlikable from day one. I mean, he is, but that isn’t the only problem. The problem is his character feels like it exists for the purpose of pandering to shotacon and anything else is just pretense. Literally the first scene of the entire anime is us finding him bruised and naked in bed with the elderly Earl of Trancy. Because the mark of his contract with Claude appears on his tongue we regularly get shots of him licking his lips, then as we observe him through his interactions with Claude we get a strong sexual vibe with them. The scenes with him and Claude are very uncomfortable to look at. Alois’s attachment to him is so creepy, but the anime just treats it as another outlet for fanservice. The worst though comes when we get to his backstory. Alois was born a poor boy named Jim Macken who lived on the streets with his little brother Luka. One day everyone in the village including Luka dies and he is kidnapped and taken to the Trancy estate to be a sexual plaything for the Earl. He overhears other boys who’ve been brought to the mansion talk about how a fairy will grant your wishes and this leads to his first encounter with Claude. Afterwards he has decided to actively seduce the Earl to become his favorite and he acquires his new name and status and eventually takes over after the Earl’s death. From there he is shown to be either an abrasive tyrant who hits women, a sniveling crybaby who needs Claude to function, or a sexual object.

You got all that? Because you need to understand that this was so unbearable for me to sit through that I got a headache. Seeing him seduce this fat pig of a man and have it be framed like “check it out he’s taking back control of his life through his sexuality” was disgusting. It does not matter how hard Okada tries to push the idea that this child is in control of the situation, he is still a kid being raped by an adult man. And there feels like no awareness to the fact that in this situation he is still a rape victim, he is still a child being taken advantage of by an adult. Just because he is intentionally trying to win the favor of the Earl it doesn’t mean he has the power that the anime thinks he does. And it’s all for the sake of contextualizing the way he’s sexualized throughout the anime. This isn’t some kind of portrait of a person internalizing their own trauma and falling into similar situations because they don’t know another way. That is giving this anime way more credit than it deserves. This is all just an excuse for the anime to show off that they made a sexy twelve year old. The fact that it made me write that sentence already makes me want to die, but knowing that it never thinks twice about doing such things makes the anime just reprehensible. The shota fanservice was present in season one, but not to this same degree. Ciel was sexualized, but he still felt like he existed for reasons beyond that. Alois doesn’t and given his importance throughout the anime it makes sitting through it nauseating.

The other characters aren’t much of an improvement. Ciel was never that interesting to me, but he manages to be the best character in season two purely because everyone else was so bad. Sebastian is a boring character that the anime tries very hard to hype up as interesting, but I just didn’t care about him and Claude’s competition for Ciel’s soul. The fact that he’s created to always be perfect at everything just makes watching him dull. Claude basically has no personality outside of being a sexual predator. The sexual overtones to his character aren’t subtle, you can hand wave all you want and say “no, no, he just wants to eat souls because he’s a demon” it doesn’t change the fact that there’s an obvious sexual layer behind how it’s presented. And it’s the closest thing to an identity he has. And while I know I just spent a lot of time talking about Alois, Claude ends up being the worst character in the anime because the predatory aspects of his personality are all that define him. I was going to call him Diet Sebastian, except that would be unfair to Sebastian. Walking talking cringe compilation Grell Sutcliff is back and this time her role consists of two things: wanting to be Sebastian’s toothbrush and reaping Alois’s soul. Except she doesn’t end up doing that. Claude steals Alois’s soul and then she does her best Ryuuk impression by telling him that she’ll just observe from now on because this is interesting apparently. Anything after that is just Grell following Sebastian around with a camera and getting hot over the sight of his ankles because this anime has a foot fetish. As I mentioned before Lau and Ran-Mao appear despite that they were killed off in season one. How are they alive? They faked their deaths and Sebastian let them get away. That is your only explanation. That is all you get. Finny, May-Rin, and Bardroy provide some mild comic relief but barely show up. Lizzy appears a few times, but she doesn’t really amount to much of anything. The most prominent female character in this anime is Alois’s maid Hannah who spends majority of her scenes being abused and degraded for fanservice while wearing a passive expression. Even when it’s revealed she’s this powerful demon and serving more of a purpose to the story I still am left feeling like she was a wasted character who’s purpose was to be abused since hurting women is the laziest way to show someone is evil.

And the animation. We have got to talk about the animation. You might be thinking the screen caps I’ve been showing don’t look so bad, but they aren’t good representations of how it looks in motion. The quality is all over the place. I know this was before A-1 started raking in all that sweet “Sword Art Online” money, but this feels particularly abysmal like they didn’t care. The animation is stilted a lot of the time and then when it tries to do something more action packed that requires a more skilled hand it just gets laughable. But even during scenes that aren’t focused on the action it gets bad. Trust me.

The anime itself just has a very cheap feel to it. I’m not sure if the money went towards getting the GazettE to do the opening song or towards the seiyuu cast, but clearly the priority was not good animation. Speaking of the seiyuu, my goodness was this cast wasted. Maaya Sakamoto, Daisuke Ono, Nana Mizuki, Takahiro Sakurai, Jun Fukuyama, Junichi Suwabe, Yuuki Kaji, Emiri Katou, and of all people Aya Hirano. How do you acquire a cast this strong and not use them to their fullest potential? Well you designate certain seiyuu to side characters that don’t do or say much or in the case of our leads you give them terrible dialogue and roles with little personality to work with. I love Takahiro Sakurai, but as Claude he just sounds like he’s speaking words. This is a man who has been able to convey charisma without playing characters with huge extroverted personalities, it’s not as if he needs to be playing a Reigen or an Osomatsu to emote, so I’m thinking with Claude he just decided to phone it in or the direction was bad. Nana Mizuki tries to make Alois work, but unfortunately she can only do so much with a character this badly written. It’s a pity.

If I had to describe a good word for “Black Butler II” it would be exasperating. I felt so drained by the time I was done with the anime. When it wasn’t pandering to a lowest common denominator audience I’d sooner bite than shake hands with, it was just meandering around with no real sense of what to do with itself. One of the big questions I asked myself after finishing the show was “is this worse than the other anime I hate” and my answer is a definite “yes”. I hated anime like “Desert Punk”, but that anime knew what it wanted to be and stuck to it. I hated “No Game No Life”, but at least that had a very alluring visual style. This anime is even worse than things like “Twinkle Nora Rock Me” and I’ll explain why. “Twinkle Nora Rock Me” has the excuse of clearly having no budget, it’s incredibly inept but it obviously wasn’t working with much. This however was made by A-1, they have money. Mari Okada is a prominent screen writer who has written for anime like “Toradora”, “Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans”, “Wandering Son”, and the “Aria” series. You had money and talent behind this, yet this is what we get. It truly is baffling on every level. And honestly the “Black Butler” fans deserve better. Assuming they haven’t already skipped to the bottom to read my score and give me a down vote I just really want to say that I feel sorry that this is the anime you were given. I didn’t like season one, but I can see why it drew in its audience. And having watched season two I can see why a lot of that audience wants nothing to do with it. It’s offensive, it’s trashy, it’s stupid, it’s lazy, it really is bad on every level and I felt actively insulted by it. Usually when I watch an anime I don’t like I don’t bother reviewing it, I try to move on, but with this I just felt like I had to. There’s only one reason why you’re being reviewed “Black Butler II”. One simple answer. You pissed me off. But for what it’s worth having completed something as disastrous as this I know there’s no way I will see anything worse throughout the year. “Black Butler II” is a complete failure of an anime, but it did help create a new standard for what I consider a failure. Some people are out here still acting like “Sword Art Online” is the worst anime ever and while I never agreed with that its seeing anime like this that make me realize what truly makes a bad anime bad.