why is it shoujo now

The woke sjws at Cringyroll are out to ruin one more anime...

If you know Cringyroll you would know to stay away from anything they touch.
Real anime fans will not tolerate their woke shit

I knew this show was ruined the moment Soyny and CR were involved...

It always appealed a lot to the female demographic with the 2 mcs being pretty boys. It is something you notice as you get older. I think they chose to keep the shounen tag to try and not scare off the former male audience it had. Yaoi baiting does tank anime ratings since men hate it on average. Kind of like how females generally review bomb ecchi.

@rohan121 as long as they keep the Yaoi a Yaoi and the shonen a shonen I don't care but to come and take anime we loved to tern there characters into this I think that is unforgivable

@kirasan06 literally what changed tho

@MoonSpider
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/735649751755653163/1229664940852248656/image_2024-04-16_062906092.png?ex=663081b7&is=661e0cb7&hm=7cd20dcf70fb68b1cb3b6eab81b6c56fdc5e919ae1339e6ac1a4d8c863a1c055&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=722&height=452
from this to this

My theory is that they were too young to realise anything the first time they watched it and "anti-sjw"/"anti-woke" wasn't really a thing back then and thus they hadn't experienced brain rot because of it.
Also where even is the Yaoi in the first episode?

Idk but Sebastian and Ciel are still cute af

Actually guys, this arc is very different from the others, but that doesn't mean it's shojo, in a few episodes it will return to having an extremely dark plot

Sorry,if what I said offended you but I'm also LGBTQ+ and I stand by my opinion that "anti-woke" is brain rot.

Grell is never addressed as a man in Japanese. He is addressed in a gender neutral manner because that's the default way to address people in Japanese and they male a point to emphasize it even more with Grell. This is a translation error in the English and other language versions.

tbh after all that if you just ignored every weird gay shit in the anime it's pretty fun even the art style is really acceptable

It always appealed a lot to the female demographic with the 2 mcs being pretty boys. It is something you notice as you get older. I think they chose to keep the shounen tag to try and not scare off the former male audience it had. Yaoi baiting does tank anime ratings since men hate it on average. Kind of like how females generally review bomb ecchi.

@Cheeza hey, I'm bi and anti-woke, don't appreciate the stereotyping lol I know that'll blow some minds. Like a lot of political opinions, it be a spectrum, not two sides.

But there's not any "explicit" yaoi in the series overall, just enough to bait female fans who gush over that sort of thing (aka me when I was in high school/college). It's mostly just slow shots that make the men look more handsome with the shoujo sparkles, maybe one or two odd shots of the men in eyebrow-raising posing (for me, that was most notably in the ED in this episode, + the student/teacher cosplay this season's plotline enables), and the existence of one character (Grell) who back when the original seasons was airing I thought, with the rest of the fandom, that "he" was a very flamboyant gay man, not realizing this was a very upfront and obvious transwoman character in the Victorian Era of all times who was just addressed as a man by literally everyone else in the show because, well, it's the Victorian Era.

This really is the weirdest thread...

Black Butler has been fujoshi baiting since day one, so I don't know why it's now suddenly become a problem. Or did everyone just forget the Sebastian dressing Ciel up in a corset from like episode 4 of the first season?

I mean, I love this trash of an anime but it's always been weird as hell.

Later in the manga,in one of the extra info dumping chapters,Grell says he wishes he was born a woman.

@Cheeza

It doesn't matter, many gay men say they wish they were born female.

@rohan121 Butler was, if not the founder, then one of the brightest of the first "fake shonen" shows, which were essentially shoujo, but were published in men's magazines to attract the widest possible audience. Because while shoujo magazines are mostly read only by girls, shonen and seinen magazines are not only read by more guys and girls alike, but are also more mainstream.

@MoonSpider Subtext, if there is one at all, and text are two different things. For example, Moriarty always had a strong BL bait as the direct successor to Butler, but the author has probably already developed a nervous tic from constantly trying to convince people that the manga doesn't intend to be BL. It got to the point where even the actor playing Moriarty in the theater production was forced to apologize when he made a joke about their love at first sight and people misunderstood him. So, my point is that people should differentiate fan service from the content itself.

@RobertBobert I'm not sure what comment you're responding to or what the overall point being made because... I agree? Mostly?

I mean, fanservice, as a term, references what's actually in the content itself, not just general vibes or word-of-god that may have been misinterpreted through language barriers. So there's not a lot of differentiating, the scenes are literally in the canon, ala the infamous corset scene, Season 1 and more. Of course THAT should not then be extrapolated into shipping and fighting over stuff that most likely won't happen because this is a gothic action/mystery/supernatural series first and foremost and all fanservice IS strictly for show and pretty surface-level with fake-outs and some eyebrow-raising posing and not much else.

So like... yeah? I think we're on the same page? I'm not sure what we're talking about specifically though.

@MoonSpider I wanted to point out that the abundance of BL bait fanservice in The Butler does not yet make this BL show aimed solely at a female audience. No one denies that the show has a huge appeal to girls, but people often oversell it by calling the anime a literal shotakon.

@RobertBobert I mean, I never used those words to describe the series as a whole. At worst, in comment 7, I simply meant that, by virtue of any slight fanservice primarily being between Sebastian and Ciel, it's technically the majority of BL subtext being shown through the series and this primary dynamic that's shotacon implications (though obviously the female audience is too busy looking at Sebastian and other characters, mostly).

But again I did go through pains to state before that the fanservice itself is very shallow, most definitely compared to any actual BL series and/or ecchi series that would use the term "fanservice". Hell, Interspecies Reviewers is in my Top 10 Anime, and I just finished watching "Cherry Magic! 30 Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?!" (or some such title) this past season. (Line-pushing ecchi high fantasy series, and BL-focused slightly-supernatural romantic comedy, respectively). In Black Butler, you get pretty boys, longing looks, and questionable posing. That's really it, and that's all I said about it.

Granted, that's enough, I would think, to understand that element of the show even from Season 1, which led to my bewilderment at OP's shock at its very presence, as if they weren't there for the prior seasons (though, most likely, it's been about a decade since they watched the original and, through rose-tinted glasses, thought that there was nothing of the sort before the Public School Arc). That wasn't me trying to overplay it, and I also said a great many times that, first and foremost, this is a gothic action/mystery/supernatural series.

@MoonSpider Well, as I said above, The Butler is a typical shoujo-vibe anime that is published in a shonen magazine to attract both male and female audiences due to the latter's love for shonen-vibe anime. This is a very old practice and you can also find a lot of shonen-vibe manga in shoujo magazines in less successful but still deliberate attempts to attract a male audience. For example, at one time, Sailor Moon was criticized for the sexualization of female characters, which led to restrictions on male fans at fandom events in the future.

@RobertBobert I'm unsure of the relevance here, as we seem to be on the same page?

Also why do keep calling the series The Butler?

@Absurdo_N Unless that's in reference to either a drag persona, a quick colloquial "girlies~" or an equivalent that means nothing, or self-hatred in thinking they wish they weren't born gay so their life would be easier... no, it's really not common to reference yourself as the opposite sex because you're gay. ESPECIALLY not often enough to where you pretty much refer to yourself as such exclusively, in just about any conversation and context...

Acting feminine =/= "I am a woman", "I'd bear your children, if only you'd let me". [Important note, re: your comment, Grell never says iirc "I wish I was a woman", but simply, "I AM a woman", a good handful of times even referencing a non-existent womb in her to make babies...] Idk who "many gay men" are, but no one who knows anything about gender identity hears that and goes "Mhm, yes, gay man then. Very flaming gay." Like idc what the author may or may not have said, you can't tell me the sky is green. It's literally in the canon behavior.

Never fails, Black Butler comes back and we're back in THE Grell debate, lol. I switched sides from back then though