Black Butler, up to chapter 42
Mar. 3rd, 2010 12:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snarpI think Black Butler might secretly be performance art. It is incapable of doing a single thing that is not offensive!
Summary of the First Plot Arc - It's fine to be a drug dealer as long as you're a rich classy guy, but sex worker ladies are bad and evil and totally deserve death! Particularly the ones who get abortions! Women who can't have kids will totally go crazy and become serial killers, especially if they keep working after marriage! Transsexuals are gross, but it's fine to cross-dress for work-related reasons as long as you don't enjoy it!
Summary of the Second Plot Arc - Indian people are poor and dirty and sneaky, unless they're rich and stupid and comic relief! Women who don't reciprocate men's affections are evil hussies! If in addition to that they're poor and would rather not be, they deserve death! Indian culture is centered entirely around curry! And apparently you're forgiven for selling children in the first arc if you do something goofy in the second arc!
Summary of the Third Plot Arc - People with physical disabilities are scary and cannot be allowed out into society! Because if they are, they will kill children! But maybe we should sympathize with the hero when he's the one killing children? After all, children who have been abused are ruined for life and better off dead! All women deserve death, as usual! And the scanlators invent strange new accents.
Summary of the Fourth Plot Arc - Arthur Conan Doyle is here! (Why?)
I really do think that this series is intended at least in part as a kind of shock art. Toboso is not Yuki Kaori or Anne Bishop - she lacks that irrational affection for her unpleasant characters, and as a result, her heroes are surprisingly unsympathetic. Her plotting strikes me as unusually calculated, and I don't think she's working from her own id so much as she is from close observation of other people's. Which is interesting to read - the apparent cynicism about the genre is refreshing - but not all that fun.
Summary of the First Plot Arc - It's fine to be a drug dealer as long as you're a rich classy guy, but sex worker ladies are bad and evil and totally deserve death! Particularly the ones who get abortions! Women who can't have kids will totally go crazy and become serial killers, especially if they keep working after marriage! Transsexuals are gross, but it's fine to cross-dress for work-related reasons as long as you don't enjoy it!
Summary of the Second Plot Arc - Indian people are poor and dirty and sneaky, unless they're rich and stupid and comic relief! Women who don't reciprocate men's affections are evil hussies! If in addition to that they're poor and would rather not be, they deserve death! Indian culture is centered entirely around curry! And apparently you're forgiven for selling children in the first arc if you do something goofy in the second arc!
Summary of the Third Plot Arc - People with physical disabilities are scary and cannot be allowed out into society! Because if they are, they will kill children! But maybe we should sympathize with the hero when he's the one killing children? After all, children who have been abused are ruined for life and better off dead! All women deserve death, as usual! And the scanlators invent strange new accents.
Summary of the Fourth Plot Arc - Arthur Conan Doyle is here! (Why?)
I really do think that this series is intended at least in part as a kind of shock art. Toboso is not Yuki Kaori or Anne Bishop - she lacks that irrational affection for her unpleasant characters, and as a result, her heroes are surprisingly unsympathetic. Her plotting strikes me as unusually calculated, and I don't think she's working from her own id so much as she is from close observation of other people's. Which is interesting to read - the apparent cynicism about the genre is refreshing - but not all that fun.
Hi, I'm a stranger who was late to the party. \o/
Date: 2010-03-28 07:32 pm (UTC)