Professor Irony said:
I don't understand why Black Butler holds any appeal to heterosexual men.
I'll take this as honest curiosity!
Many heterosexual men are relaxed enough to be able to enjoy things not oozing with machismo without having to question themselves. My husband loves it, and he also loves focused girly manga like Peach Girl (he collects more shoujo manga than I do). I am reasonably confident however, that he is a heterosexual male. I too, as a heterosexual female (sadly I'm not a lesbian elven warrior), can enjoy series such as Queen's Blade, and if Black Butler was exactly the same series but with attractive women making up the roster I'd still enjoy reading it. It's a mystery series about demons, with comedy and historical trappings.
The main character in Black Butler is a kid, but male. Sebastian (the titular Black Butler himself) is a charismatic idealised man - aesthetics aside this is not altogether unlike James Bond or other popular male figures of aspiration. The female characters are drawn to be beautiful and desirable (if often flawed, like the males). Furthermore, there's no BL content at all, other than jokes, whereas there is evidence of heterosexual content in the series. The series does play around with sexuality with a few secondary characters (
hermaphroditism in the anime, trangenderism in both), but I would like to think that men too can enjoy this kind of thing without getting upset.
It's fine not to like Black Butler as either gender, but sweepingly implying that there's nothing there for anyone who isn't mooning over the pretty guys in the series is doing it a huge disservice.
I asked a few of my Black Butler-liking heterosexual male friends for their views, in the name of science. One provided some detailed thoughts.
"That is a strange comment, I thought it was very strongly plotted and thematically clever. Even had the characters all been trolls the concept of a Faustian deal that we never quite see the details of is very compelling."
This friend then expanded further on the sexuality aspect.
"I don't think they have conclusively stated that the Demons have gender (I certainly haven't seen any female ones in the volumes I have read) so my working assumption is all demons are Demon gender. Although that argument is pretty moot, because even if he [Sebastian] was definitely confirmed to be male he is still too awesome for that to be a consideration."
R
And I called myself a anime fan.....
