Hasnaa

I think John Singer Sargent's pretty society paintings are probably a good approximate for the veneer these characters project - Madame X for Madame Red, of course, but I've come to think that Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose, his most sensitive work in my opinion, and my favourite, is fitting for the Phantomhive twins.

The vibrant, infernal colour of Sickert's paintings reminds me of Schiele's Madonna and Christ - his fearsomely resplendent, inscrutable, brilliant Mary, the opaque, haunting child. Inevitably, there's Angelina there too - and in Schiele's other maternal paintings, particularly his dead mothers and children, with haloes like rotting wombs, or the other way around. Their desiccation, the blurring lines of viscera rolling into living annihilation is the two dimensional cousin on Donatello's Magdalene - wood renders human anguish in a way stone can't reckon with - and all that agony, that visual grief, that pitiless representation of what happens, is also Undertaker.

Another artist has a selection of paintings that all remind me of Angelina: Edward Austin Abbey's Shakespearean heroines.

Eleanor Cobham - the ambitious duchess, a mistress marrying the husband of a woman she served as lady in waiting, who was accused of witchcraft to get a son with whom her husband might supplant his nephew the king. The real woman was likely the victim of a conspiracy, and had an unhappy and probably undeserved end, Shakespeare's portrayal of her is characteristically interesting enough to make up for its anachronism, and this painting blends both, renders so horribly and marvellously the agony of her despair and shame as she's made to do penance through the streets of London.

The Daughters of Lear makes me think of Rachael, Frances, and Angelina as a triumvirate of Phantomhive (adjacent) women. The Lear sisters and their quasi Judgment of Paris method of courting their father's favour to reap it with his death - well, that can be warped to apply to Kuro in many senses, can't it, besides being consumingly fascinating for itself. Something about all the bodies brought out in the end, judged in the equality of their decay, too.

And my favourite of these, Anne Neville and Gloucester at her husband's funeral - because it's such a vividly, smouldering, glinting painting, because it captures and transmits pensiveness and tension so well, because of my personal affection for Anne Neville as both a character and a historical figure - but the woman grieving her husband, being courted by the lover who plans to kill her, in a play concerned with willful evil and dynastic usurpation and child murder (thematic infant sacrifice, really) - is so, so Madame Red.

She's one of my favourite characters, gone so shockingly soon, (someone said something about the first arc showing the brutality the story is willing to dole out against even its central characters), and not haunting the narrative so much as being inextricably tied to the bastion of memory and dynasty and driving, suffering cause behind it. Another ghost Ciel must run past.

@fervent-fever if I may ask - so many artists remind me of Black Butler in one way or another, but none really encapsulate the atmosphere, let alone appearance, of either Sebastian or Ciel. Are there any who do for you?

I think it’s fair to bring up Thomas Cooper Gotch, whose style and brushwork I adore, especially the way he wields striking red that dominates the rest of the composition. His painting The Dancing Lesson feels like a fragment of Rachel and Angelina’s childhood.

For Black Butler as a whole, Yana’s unique mix, her grounding of the work with verisimilitude and at the same time the freedom she allows herself to stray from the mood and then bring it back, makes it hard for me to pin the series through a single artistic movement or lens. I even feel like she seizes any chance to hop into a different atmosphere, like when she drifted into medieval settings a bit in the Emerald Witch Arc and illustrated (whether herself or an assistant) woodcuts and witch trial stuff.

Overall, I sense that she has a hunger to experiment with multiple moods and move between them rather than mash them all together. What comes out of that, while I personally love the Victorian moral decay vibe, cannot be said to be purely Gothic; she also loves to adorn with Art Nouveau flourishes.

Still, there’s a certain constant spirit in the premise and structure of the characters. I can say Romaine Brooks’ portraits come to mind, and for the moodier, symbolic side, Léon Spilliaert fits.

And since, after all, she is a mangaka, if we’re talking illustrators, I’d also say the way Harry Clarke drew Faust and Mephistopheles is very close to the design sensibility behind Ciel and Sebastian.

It sucks that the music for the anime doesn’t get covers like this anymore, the one for GWA is so barren and wonky lookin. I enjoy Yana sneaking cage bars in her backgrounds occasionally

About the study I mentioned earlier, I found it in Érudit’s archive for Dalhousie French Studies.

Your observation of that archetype and the way you identified so many parallels for Ciel is genuinely amazing, especially since I can clearly see the similarities you mean in Claudia, Amma Crellin, and Damien Thorn. Personally, I’m not always that good at spotting recurring archetypes across characters I watch or read; I usually tend to isolate myself with one character, like in a small cloister, and just stay there, lol. I’d honestly love to read a paper from you exploring that archetype in depth someday.

I’m not sure if my fixation on the visual and compositional side comes from being a film person first or not, but lately I’ve been following the neoformalist line of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, and I’m pretty sure the same methodology can be applied to mediums beyond film.

Yana, as a mangaka, never skimps on detail and alters panel composition as much as possible. But what I find odd is when the fandom notices, say, a flower and immediately goes into decoding its symbolism (which is great, the manga is full of symbols and it’s not that symbolic reading is wrong but it’s just incomplete without acknowledging how visual rhythm and framing shape the viewer’s affective response), yet completely overlooks the visual composition itself, which often oozes with suggestive charge just as much as the literary metaphors or symbolic elements do. I sometimes exaggerate in my readings, sure, but here it feels so deliberately presented that I don’t need it spoon-fed to feel something insinuating.

Everyone has the right to focus on the part that resonates and ignore what doesn’t, but the blindness and total erasure of that layer are a bit frustrating to me.

And don’t worry about it at all I don’t mind the delay or whether you reply or not. I’ve been a bit busy too, so I totally get it if others are as well, or if they just didn’t notice, especially since you had tagging turned off for understandable reasons.

Curiously, his role doesn’t just follow demonic tropes but also takes on a vampiric form. He’s nurturing, yet preys upon the one he nurtures. It’s very reminiscent of a vampire siring a human, yet the end goal in this case is demonic, Sebastian aiming to win their game and claim Ciel’s soul.

Of course Sebastian is perverse. Of course his and Ciel's relationship breaches the boundaries of normalcy. It’s predator and prey, parent and child, sexuality through consumption. 

Sebastian and Ciel’s dynamic embodies much of the Lot complex. Debbie Joyce Chung goes into depth on this concept in her article "SUCH BLOOD, SUCH POWER": THE LOT COMPLEX IN ANNE RICE'S INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE. To quote some key parts:

“Broadly speaking, both the Gothic tradition and the Lot complex emphasize desire and transgression, subversion and the unconscious, doubling and projection. ‘The horror’ in eighteenth-century Gothic literature often pertains to incest, homosexuality, revolution, the pollution of lineage, and the disruption of linear succession of property” (173). While we’re mostly talking about transgressive sexuality, this excerpt has an interesting note about doubling and projection. Sebastian is absolutely a double for both the twins and their father, projected straight from O!Ciel’s own image.

“[V]ampires procreate, like Lot and his daughters, through a form of incest that involves penetration and the exchange of bodily fluids (blood) with their offspring. Their blood symbolizes life, family, and racial ties; it is the fluid of reproduction, the seed of the father” (174). We see blood and consumption take on this sexual undertone a lot throughout Kuroshitsuji media. While vampires procreate more directly, it’s interesting that Sebastian is forming Ciel in his own image.

“Through vampires the Lot complex transcends normal male-female gender categories, for vampires do not engage in genital sex and possess a relatively gender-free perspective” (174). The relevance of this is also pretty evident. Ciel and Sebastian are often queered from a gender perspective, whether in form of dress, pronoun or title use, mannerisms, etc. I would also argue that Sebastian is asexual (I even have a whole analysis drafted about why that is), and Ciel could be read as such too. Sexuality between them takes place in wholly inhuman terms (feeding and ownership).

Hold onto your hats, because I’m about to quote a quote within a quote when Chung describes how Claudia “is simultaneously innocent and monstrous, a literal and literary construct of our culture's anxious vacillations ‘between perceptions of children as little angels and as little monsters [. . .] sexually attuned, sometimes even predatory’ (Warner qtd. in Edmundson 34)” (175). We can see this perception forced on Ciel throughout Kuroshitsuji. This perception is reserved for children and women, once again demonstrating the queered element. Not only is Ciel the victim, he’s also the corrupted young maiden of the narrative, innocent and monstrous all at once.

“Incest is not limited to the physical: Lestat and Louis commit ‘emotional incest’ upon Claudia as she ‘grows up’; to them she is a magnificent and deadly ‘magic doll’ upon which they can lavish presents and affection (Interview 103). They dress her exquisitely in the latest children's fashions, disguising her as ‘a golden-haired child, a Holy Innocent, a little girl’ to fool her sentimental mortal victims, usually kindly, admiring adults (Interview 116)” (175–176). This one’s also pretty self-explanatory. Sebastian takes far more pleasure in dolling Ciel up than would be normal, especially when Ciel uses the guise as a means of deceiving enemies.

“Interview follows the Lot myth's subversive pattern of the powerless achieving power, but it is a Gothic novel, so Lot strikes back in a horrific return of the repressed. Nothing more is heard of the biblical Lot after the incest episode, but Lestat twice reappears to terrorize and punish his rebellious offspring. Both of his attempts are thwarted by enormous fires, reminiscent of the purgation of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and brimstone, that enable the culprits to escape” (177). Notably, Toboso utilizes purgation by fire often in Kuroshitsuji, which doesn’t necessarily implicate the Lot complex, but it does, intentionally or not, mimic the biblical punishment.

“The incest between Lestat and Claudia is therefore a Gothic version of the incest between Lot and his daughters. It is committed not for the positive end of ensuring the survival of the human race, but for the negative ends of revenge and domination, rape and patricide. . . . Claudia's story has neither happy endings nor beginnings. Forced reenactment of the original incest is Claudia's weapon of vengeance, expropriation/preservation of the father's seed/blood her goal. The pattern of victimization and incest comes full circle, as Louis senses beforehand” (177–178). Another part of the Lot complex is the ultimate turning-back of this predation on the predator. I’m curious to see if Toboso will adopt this as well, but we’ll just have to wait and see. I personally think it would be really interesting if rather than condemning Ciel to lose his soul, or alternatively saving his soul, Toboso instead turns Sebastian’s own predation back on him.

“There is no escape from Sodom and Gomorrah, but the fascination of Interview, like that of Lot's wife, is that it looks back to them longingly, and envisions as strangely beautiful and passionate and tragic, the doomed cities and their now immortalized inhabitants” (180). This conclusion would make for an apt summary of Toboso’s story. As Louis narrates his Lot family tragedy, so does Sebastian—immortal, horrid, otherworldly, monstrous, beautiful.

Kuroshitsuji embodies many Gothic themes. It makes sense that Sebastian and Ciel’s dynamic blurs between familial and sexual. This is super common in the Gothic, but I think Kuroshitsuji’s Western audience, for the most part, isn’t really in touch with the genre’s history. As such, a more fandom-typical interpretation emerges. If the reader dislikes taboo themes, they choose the safety of the found family trope. If the reader likes engaging with taboo themes but more from a fandom perspective than an analytical one, they may romanticize the dynamic to suit fandom shipping tropes. Either way, the original character dynamic is lost to some extent.

The original post actually makes several points with which I agree, and the comparison with Interview with the Vampire is particularly effective, as it is full of narrative and visual parallels, given that we’re operating within the same Gothic framework after all.

From a formalist perspective, the shift from literary metaphors to visual action in a medium like manga or anime amplifies and crystallizes this kind of thing, because the metaphor becomes a tangible act. The mise-en-scène and framing play a major role, and I don’t really get why they’re often ignored when people argue about what is canon and what is bait. I also find it odd how the word “bait” is used in fandoms, because yes, it’s primarily a promotional device, but that applies to moments like the corset scene, for example, lol. After that, the relationship dynamic is stripped of anything bait-like. But in the case of Black Butler, if we decide to detach the two characters from the charged atmosphere between them and remove the scenes that carry symbolic eroticism, that would completely change them, because it’s something integrated into their duality, not just a few isolated scenes aiming for fujoshis.

Back to composition, suggestion in a visual medium like Black Butler really turns into a visual ritual and relies on aesthetic containment. The moment when Sebastian tried to devour Ciel in EWA or at the start of the manga when he dipped his finger into that chocolate cake he made for Ciel’s birthday (the hat in particular) carries a kind of visual insinuation that’s integral; I don’t like stripping it away.

The panel flow and onomatopoeia are part of the scene’s construction, using the mechanics of visual arousal. It reminds me of Linda Williams’s study on the three “gross” genres and how what seems excessive or obscene is actually a coherent semantic and formal system.

That’s especially clear in certain recurring panels throughout the manga, not all of them, of course, since it often moves through other modes like fantasy and comedy before closing back in on itself within some Gothic drama, in scenes where the momentum slows down a bit.

You can also see that in Yana’s own artworks or in the chapter covers. There are moral decay, indulgence, contaminating, and staining forms of devouring, like the cover of chapter 137 “HE STANDS, SUPPORTED BY SLAG AND SLUDGE”.

Also not forgetting the framing of ones where Ciel is spread out and laid like an actual feast.

There was an article, a study I read a while ago, about a novel I haven’t actually read because it hasn’t been translated into English (or Arabic either). Ananda Devi’s La Vie de Joséphin le Fou, which could also be put in the same comparative frame as Black Butler, since it deals with literary elements of devouring and corruption involving children, a human-eel monster, “vore” and abuse versus protection.