Black Butler / Tropes E to G

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Black Butler - Tropes E to G

Tropes E

• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the beginning of the manga, there are televisions, cell phones, and video games.
• Elegant Gothic Lolita: The show has renewed an interest in this style in Japan and there's a line of clothing directly based on what the characters wear.
• Engineered Public Confession: Cole's to the entire academy—and, most importantly, his prefect—thanks to a very elaborate version of the Tin-Can Telephone.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Ciel yes, Sebastian no. Besides which, Ciel's reaction to evil he can't stomach is usually to kill more people to get rid of the problem.
  • Demons don't have morals, but according to Sebastian they do each have their own personal sense of "aesthetics" that dictates what they will and will not do. Sebastian cites his aesthetics as why he would never form more than one contract at a time, saying "it is just not a beautiful thing to do."
• Evil Versus Evil: while Ciel is not shown to be as reprehensible as some of the antagonists, his actions are not good either.
• Evil Wears Black: Sebastian wears all black leather while in his true form and a black tailcoat suit in his human form. He is rarely seen in any other color.
• Exotic Weapon Supremacy: Inverted. Undertaker, who wields a Sinister Scythe managed to effortlessly defeat three Improbable Weapon Users. Admittedly, a scythe is a pretty unique weapon on its own, but it's relatively common compared to his opponents' choices of a chainsaw, a lawnmower and a set of silverwares.
• Eyepatch of Power: Ciel's eyepatch hides the pentagram that represents his contract with Sebastian.
• Eyes Always Shut: Lau sports a variation of this. His closed eyes are not upturned in a foxlike manner; rather, they're more U-shaped, giving him an air of calm.
• Eye Scream: In the second season of the anime, Alois stabs one of his maidservants in the eye. With his finger. Why? "A maid should never look directly at her master!" The other servants understandably have an Oh, Crap! moment, but are then commanded to clean up the bloody mess. It's revealed later that Hannah the maid is a demon. We see in a later flashback of somewhere around that time Alois saying how he's sick of demons and of people looking at him like that.
  • Ciel getting the seal in his eye seemed to have been very painful. Blood is seen dripping from it afterwards.
  • Agni gets one of his eyes sliced in the attack that ultimately leads to his death.

Tropes F

• Fallen Hero: Subverted. Ciel was never really a hero per se, but he used to be just a normal little kid; then his parents were killed, his house was burnt down, he was kidnapped and tortured by a cult, and he became a villain.
• Fanservice: So, so much.
• The Fate of the Princes in the Tower: Ciel and Sebastian find the ghosts of the princes in Ludlow Castle, where Edward has been collecting the skulls of his family in the belief that completing the collection will let them pass on. However, it turns out that Edward and Richard's own remains had been destroyed long ago, which Richard kept from his brother. That revelation proves sufficient to allow them to pass on to the afterlife.
• Fate Worse than Death: At the end of season 2 of the anime, Ciel becomes a demon. The problem with this is that Sebastian is bound to Ciel until he devours his soul, but demons cannot consume each others' souls. Sebastian, for the first time, does not seem enthused with the prospect of serving Ciel "until the very end".
  • Shinigami are former humans who have committed suicide, and as a consequence, are now stuck in the afterlife working non-stop to collect souls for as long as it takes.
• Flower Motifs: The four dormitories of Weston College are each associated with a specific color, animal, and flower (or plant). Scarlet Fox's flower is a rose, Sapphire Owl's is a gentian, Green Lion's is holly, and Violet Wolf's is a dahlia.
• Food Porn: Oh yes. Sebastian regularly whips up some delicious confection for Ciel, along with a little banner describing it, although they're becoming more and more scarce in the latest arcs of the manga.
• Foreign-Looking Font: Just look at the title in the page image.
• Foreshadowing: In Chapter 5 of the manga, Finny is throwing statues at mice that have attacked the mansion. Then cut to chapter 32 and we see him throwing statues at Beast and Joker exclaiming "Found the Mice!"
  • In Chapter 54, we're given cover art of the Undertaker dancing with a skeleton. Cue Chapter 60: Undertaker dancing with one of the zombies in the exact same pose, making a speech about the beauty of his creations.
  • One of the omake chapters has Sebastian drastically increase sales of a new Phantomhive product by getting an actress to advertise it in the middle of her play, tossing out sampler cards to the audience so that the audience is directly involved in even a small portion of the show. Almost immediately Ciel gets the actress to pose for ads that name drop the character she plays, aware that people like to buy things associated with celebrities. About 30-40 chapters later these business tactics get used again and ramped up by Ciel making sure the Boyband he's backing does a lot of Audience Participation and sells merchandise at the show, some of which can be used during the Audience Participation. He even gives the singers "characters" and "roles" similar to how he had the actress do the ads in costume.

• Chapter 73 had the future members of the P5 all standing together in one panel and giggling at Cheslock.

• Fork Fencing: Sebastian carries around a few forks and knives wherever he goes. He's pretty damn effective with them too. Killed an entire room of men with a handful of thrown dinner knives.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The four houses at the private school:
  • Sanguine: Scarlet Fox, the high-born house.
  • Choleric: Green Lion, the "sporty" house. "Green Lion" is also an alchemical symbol for chloride and chlorophyll.
  • Melancholic: Purple Wolf, the creepy artistic house.
  • Phlegmatic: Sapphire Owl, the brainy house.
• Frame-Up: In the "Wordsmith" whodunnit arc, Ciel and Sebastian frame a blood diamond/arms smuggler for the death of a German ship builder who would've made his country's navy more powerful than it should've been at the time. Sebastian's death was just a "joke" by Victoria, who didn't like Ciel's "prank" of completely burning the last Big Bad and his unsuspecting henchmen and victims.
• From Bad to Worse: And the ending theme illustrates it, from Super-Deformed Sebastian performing chores, to normal Sebastian rowing a prone Ciel in a bed of white roses on a boat on the river Styx.
  • There's also when Ciel's parents had been killed. Afterward, his house was burnt down, and he was sold to a religious cult who tried to use him as a sacrifice until Ciel accidentally summoned Sebastian, and then chose to give up his soul in return for Sebastian's help at getting revenge.
    • Worse in the manga: his parents were killed, he found the bloody corpses of the entire house staff minus Tanaka, his house burned down, he and his brother were sold to a cult, the two of them were tortured and raped repeatedly over the course of a month, his brother was murdered in front of him, and then Sebastian convinced him to sell his soul.
• Funny Foreigner: Indian prince Soma, and his ass-whooping manservant Agni. Soma later turns out to be a reconstruction/Aversion, since his behavior has more to do with his individual personality than his nationality.

Tropes G

• Gaslighting: Baron Kelvin to the circus crew, if his interactions with Joker are any indication.
  • In the backstory, Sebastian did this to our!Ciel by convincing him he sacrificed his brother.
• Gender Bender: Very deliberately and very frequently with Angela.

• Giving Radio to the Romans: The Green Witch Arc takes place around 1888 & features technology that shouldn't exist for another 30-78 years, such as computers & WWI tanks, showing just how dangerously technologically advanced the German military has become, and how difficult it would be to defeat them should war break out.
• The Glomp: Four person flying-tackle variety at the end of the Murder Arc, when Sebastian reveals to the rest of mansion that he is not dead.
  • Elizabeth, during her first appearance in the anime, pulls this completely straight.
  • Finny tackles Sebastian like this in a flashback, prompting him to comment that if it had been anyone else, he'd have broken their spine.
  • Sebastian has to stop him from doing it to Ciel in chapter 95.
    Sebastian: He's finally recovered, are you trying to put him out again?
• Grade-School C.E.O.: Ciel, 12-year-old head of a massive toy and candy company.
• Gratuitous English: Sebastian's "Yes, my lord," and Claude's "Yes, your highness".
  • Also present in some of the background music. The phrase "excuse me for interrupting" is heard in the first episode when Sebastian opens the viewer to the oven.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: In the manga, Queen Victoria starts to consider how nice it would be to have zombies at her service after hearing the truth about the events in Weston High.

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