My Undertaker character analysis
I originally posted this on TT but I also thought tumblr would be a good place for this. The Undertaker is a very important character to me so I wanted to do a character analysis on him and how I perceive him and his actions.
The Undertaker is a very complex character for many reasons. During the plot he is obviously ressurecting people from the dead and even engaging in experiments/ causing the death of many people but we don't actually know his reason for doing so.
Whilst canonically we know very little about his character we do know that he had taken his life and that is how he became a grimreaper, we also know that during his time as a reaper he was rather serious about his job and he was good at what he did.
This sort of seriousness is something we see in a lot of the reapers but is something that hadn't been present since his 'retirement' about 70 years prior from the current plot of black butler.
A lot of people consider this switch in his character to be the introduction of human life in another way again and also think it's specifically due to the phantomhives. Whilst I agree with this perspective to a certain extent I think there are other reasons behind it.
First off we don't know what happened while he was a reaper but we know he worked for a long time, and based on how serious he was at the time something fundamental had to have happened in those years to result in the break away from the dispatch and the return to the human world.
The reapers themselves became reapers as punishment for taking their own lives and in return need to work as apart of the reaper dispatch in order to attend for their sins and pass on.
As we know based on the things Othello said Undertaker was a serious and hard worker, even to the degree that he didn't even give himself a name and went by his afterlife citizen number ( afterlife citizen #136649),
so it's very unlikely that he logically wouldnt have passed on from how long he had been there but I think that's likely what caused the snap.
Whether he simply decided up on a different path with how many lives he had collected throughout the years or in a more darker turn realised that they were being fed a false narrative and they could not pass on this way I couldn't say but he was already not of sound mind at his arrival and he certainly wasn't at the departure.
A lot of people think that Claudia in particular is the reason for his actions as they believe in the theory that he was in love with her or possibly even her husband. I personally don't think so and I don't like this theory either. ( I have other reasons for this I can divulge in on another time if I feel like it).
In the human world he would have had interacted with humans again in a different way, after years of only being there to collect their souls it definitely caused him to dissociate these people from their actual lives since it all became apart of the job.
Even now that holds true for many people but during his time in the human world he connected with several humans enough to see their lives play out and be apart of them before their deaths for the first time in likely more than over 100 years.
The phantomhives, being his main friends and acquaintances due to their colliding professions, became a main focus of this. It's overlooked how different of a change especially emotionally it would be for Undertaker to go from all these years only actually engaging with people who could not die and only watching human lives through cinematic records to being actively apart of a humans life and then watching them die.
He can't detach himself from that anymore and that would only cause a greater decline of his mental state. His personality that we see through most of the series, with the exception of serious moments, he is seen as this sort of crazy silly man who laughs all the time. This is likely a mix of things, one being the fact that he has genuinely gone crazy, and the other being an attempt to reconnect with the human world.
He actively watched people both from afar and then later up close treat their lives like nothing and even when they had things better not appreciate the value in life. He actively warns people on multiple occasions that they only have one soul and to treat it carefully because he is actively witnessing the people he is in contact with not seem to fully grasp their own mortality.
I think this leads me onto my other perspective of his personality that is his obsession.
A lot of people seem to think he loves the phantomhives but I don't think its love, I think its obsession and a need to control. This isn't to say he doesn't care about the phantomhives because he clearly does but I don't think he loves them.
A lot of people like to believe that Undertaker is bringing people back from the dead specifically because of the Claudia and the other phantomhives but I don't think that's the case.
I think this again derrives from his obsession with life and death and his need/ desire to control it.
Especially with his position as a reaper he was in control of death for a while, deciding if people should live or pass on and deciding where their souls would go. It's only natural especially with the split off that he would then start to question not only why but if he could control life as well. I think the deaths of humans who's lives he was apart of only aided in his speed to discover a way to bring back the dead and have this control over life ( which based on his mourning locket was far more than just the phantomhives).
Fundamentally I think Undertaker's character is that of a broken and mentally ill man obsessed with the idea and ability that he could control life and death and bypass what people thought would be natural.
He doesn't care how many people he sacrifices along the way as long as he reaches his end goal of perfecting ressueection and the proof that death isn't the end. This line of thinking can and did very quickly spiral out of control.
Just because he is obsessive in his desire to control life and death doesn't make him any less intelligent though and it's clear based on how he conducts himself as well as how well he hid his identity and actions that he is incredibly intelligent and he should be given credit on that as well.
But anyway he is not some love sick man who can't cope with the loss of his partner or a silly guy he is genuinely crazy and intelligent and will do anything he can to obtain his obsession and need for control even if it means the loss of many lives along the way.
