crack_van | Kuroshitsuji: A Spoiler-Free Introduction

Hi! I'm Phoebe, and I'm back to drive the Van for my new-ish crush, the manga (and anime, and musical) series Kuroshitsuji. Since it's never been featured here before -- it's a tiny fandom in LJ terms, despite being fairly large and active in its home jurisdictions -- I have the excellent good fortune to be able to write the Fandom Overview for the series.

There's just one tiny problem. A crucial part of the entire premise of the series is a big, gaudy spoiler. Trying to give you any sense of the series without giving it away is difficult verging upon impossible; but if you haven't already been spoiled for it, via fannish osmosis or incautious fic consumption, and you're someone who would appreciate the series as it deserves, I would be sad to ruin it for you. So if you've managed to avoid knowing anything about Kuroshitsuji beyond what I tell you here, my advice will be to put this down, avert your eyes from the spoilery full overview that will follow this, and read the first four chapters of the manga. (It's licensed in English, and available from all the usual sources; if you can't wait for the physical book to arrive, you can probably find places to read online while you wait for the order.) And stay away from all fanworks until you have: the very first fic you look at, no matter what it is, will contain the key spoiler.

Here's what you need to know to decide whether it's worth your trouble. Kuroshitsuji -- Black Butler, in English -- is about the life and adventures of Ciel, Lord Phantomhive, a Victorian earl who is, semi-secretly, the ruler of the Empire's criminal underground, intervening in it as necessary to protect the Queen's interests. At the same time, he manages his own legitimate business interests and does his best to also manage the expectations of his aunts and his fiancee.

He's not quite thirteen years old when the series begins, but the underworld treats him as an adult, and a dangerous one, and they're not wrong. That's him in the picture, along with the person who helps make it all possible: his remarkably gifted butler, Sebastian Michaelis.

The series overall is more dark comedy than gothic melodrama -- in Western terms, think more John Wilmot than Charles Dickens, more Congreve than Bronte. If you need to admire your protagonists' moral values, this probably isn't a series for you. But if you often find yourself preferring the antagonists or villains in other series to the protagonists, and wishing you could see more of them, there's a good chance you'll love it. And if you're in a position to read it spoiler-free, I envy you.

I'd burble on at you about it right now, but that would defeat the whole point. Go, read. And then we'll talk.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oh, I just finished watching the second series of the anime about a month ago. It does indeed go some dark and interesting places. Some recs should be fun, looking forward to them :-)

I'm still astonished at how much it doesn't pander to conventional sensibilities. I don't know why the LJ fandom imploded, and I'm not sure I want to; but my hope is that since the manga is ongoing and plenty of people haven't seen the anime versions at all, there are enough people who would love it if only they found it for the fandom to have a revival on LJ.

As you can probably tell, I still have wistful thoughts of Yami no Matsuei fandom, circa 2004/2005. So smart, so creative, so friendly and interesting . . . why can't we do something like that again? A girl can dream, right?

I'm still astonished at how much it doesn't pander to conventional sensibilities.

That's one of the reasons why I watch as much anime as I do. There's so much out there that the US (who produce so much of western TV, whether we like it or not) would never countenance, and the Japanese are aiming it at teenagers. It's awesome!

Edited 2011-12-12 16:18 (UTC)

Picture? What picture? And the overview follows where?

Sorry, but if you put in a link or something, it's not here and I thought you might want to know.

Huh. The picture is embedded, and is showing up for me -- or at least, my security settings in Firefox filter images out, but it's right there when I look at the entry in Safari. Maybe it's a browser thing for you, too?

The spoilery overview isn't a browser thing, though. That will follow when I put it up, which will be after I'm finished wrangling the images, probably in an hour or two but later if there are unforeseen RL interruptions.

i think the problem with the pic is that it's in .tiff format. neither of my browsers will display it (i'm using Chrome, and MSIE) but i can download it and look at it in an image viewer. Safari is one of the few browsers that displays .tiff format, so you might want to change it to either .jpg, .gif, or .png as these are the most widely supported image formats for browsers.

Aha! Thank you: I had no idea. It's the downside of being a Mac user: we don't need to know this stuff, there's always something on our systems that will translate anything.

. . . And that's unfortunate, because all but one of my damn images are in .tiff format. I'd be happy to change them all right now, only I've asked

shaggirl to host them for me and I can't take them down, convert them, and reload them on my own initiative. I will take care of it, but it may take a certain amount of time to get it done. Dammit.

Eeeeee! It's about time this surfaced on Crack Van, and you're just the person to do it. Go get 'em!
(I can see the pic perfectly, btw.)

Edited 2011-12-12 01:47 (UTC)

Thanks!

I've owed

dfledermaus Kuro recs for months now, and it seemed so much more efficient to seize the opportunity to spam everybody with them. I only hope we can expand our evil empire a little: if the fandom is going to be officially Too Big For Yuletide, I feel strongly that it ought to act like it.

Kuroshitsuji: A Spoiler-Free Introduction

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject