Content Warning: Discussion of child sexual abuse, sexual assault, physical and emotional abuse, sexualization of minors, mental illness, PTSD, slut-shaming, and gaslighting; NSFW images (nudity).
Spoilers for Black Butler II
I remember the first time I encountered Alois Trancy: Black Butler II opens with him naked on a canopy bed, dishevelled and bruised all over, sitting next to a naked old man in a red, luxurious-looking room. In that moment he formed a contract with a demon while repeating to himself, “I choose this, I want this.” This scene was relying on its shock factor to introduce the audience to Alois’ tortuous narrative arc, and for me, it fulfilled its aim well.
I rewatched these few minutes many times in a row to fully grasp what I was looking at. What struck me was both the implied crudity of the scenery and Alois’ apparent agency. Since then, despite the fact that he’s a character quite hated by the audience, I’ve loved the Earl Alois Trancy as a multi-layered character that carries many intertwined themes around child abuse, queerness, genre influences and slut-shaming.
Childhood Disrupted
Black Butler is a show in which the exploitation of children is rampant and central to the intrigue. Alois Trancy’s main role throughout the season is to play the antagonist to Ciel Phantomhive, the pre-established protagonist from season one. Alois exists as a foil to Ciel and stepping stone to the development of Ciel’s story, as what defines him first and foremost are the similarities and differences between the two boys.
Their primary commonality point is the abuse they suffered at the hands of the adult world.
Both of them make demonic contracts with butlers Sebastian and Claude to achieve their respective goals, which are to avenge the death of their families. Ciel seeks revenge against the child-trafficking cult that killed his parents and kidnapped, tortured, and raped him. In many of the cases he has to solve in the role of “queen’s guard dog”, he enters the seedy underworld of a late nineteenth century London filled with underground crime and child labor, and so is faced with abused children who echo his own past. Ciel continues this traumatic work with cold dignity, on his covert mission to unmask his own assailants. Alois, meanwhile, has a tale of trauma and vengeance that employs different methods.
Both Ciel and Alois head high-ranking families. However, if Phantomhive heir Ciel represents the established social order, noble by bloodline and loyal to the Queen (herself a figurehead to the powers that made his abuse possible), Alois is an implicit threat to that system. His circumstances and therefore motivations are different and complementary. A common-born orphan with no generational wealth to secure him after his parents’ death, Alois was abused both by the villagers of his hometown and the noble who rounded him up to serve as a sex slave. But contrary to Ciel, Alois acquired his position by weaponizing his abuse and sexuality for his own security. He consciously seduced Lord Trancy and gained his favor before faking Trancy’s natural death and claiming the inheritance.
While Ciel is obsessed with “pride” and “dignity” (particularly that of the Phantomhive name), Alois is by no means concerned with restoring a pride or dignity that would have been supposedly taken away from him. He is repeatedly referred to by others and himself as dirty and in danger of defiling what he touches, particularly Ciel. Despite his dark past, his sadistic and unpredictable behaviors, he acts more his age than Ciel–dancing, laughing, and cowering from the dark.
Having reconfigured his victimhood into a power play to his own advantage, Alois doesn’t follow any order outside of his own whims thanks to his schemes where he took advantage of being a victim of pedocriminality. When it comes to the future of the Victorian social order, Alois embodies its failure. He is a pretender to nobility, and the fact that he is not a genetic noble becomes tied to how unfit he is to carry out his duties. As the series villain, he becomes a scapegoat outsider, distracting from the noble-blooded cultists who abused Ciel. Likewise, the way the series treats Alois’ trauma responses versus Ciel’s, the way Alois is slid into a villainous role through his actions, shines a grimy spotlight on some storytelling double standards.
The Pure and the Filth
Black Butler is a story in which the abuse of youth stands alongside erotic titillation. Sebastian and Claude’s often-eroticized relationships with their masters are revealing of the ambiguous status of the child both in the series and in society. Their relationships to their young masters are often sexualized. They speak about Ciel and Alois as food, they obsess about the “quality” of their souls and how they will “consume” it. Despite assisting their masters in their schemes to avenge their trauma, the two demons participate in the re-objectification of those same children.
A preoccupation with the thin limit between manipulation and agency is at the core of Black Butler. Everything is made ambiguous when it comes to the protagonists’ freedom of choice. In common, oftentimes sentimentalized conceptions of childhood, minors can’t make informed decisions. They are, by definition, denied agency to protect themselves and the social balance. Ciel and Alois are given no other choice but to take their decisions in this framework as abused minors. They are survivors, and lack the maturity to make informed decisions. They are at once realistic and disillusioned. They chose to sacrifice their souls to demons in exchange for their assistance to accomplish their wishes, but while Ciel sees the relationship as a means to accomplish his goals, Alois sees the pact as an end and source of comfort in itself.
Ciel is used to being obeyed; he’s quite shocked when he discovers Sebastian has been manipulating him to achieve his own goals, and disillusioned by realizing how little power he actually has over a demon and in society. But unlike Ciel, who understands that Sebastian is only obligated to him by an agreement, Alois is not as driven by revenge. His quest is far more about being properly loved.
Almost all of Alois’ actions aim at provoking an emotion, positive or negative, on Claude’s part. Alois is desperate for his attention and hunger, but he is denied even that maladaptive love, as Claude considers his soul “tainted” in comparison to Ciel. In one pretty pathetic scene, Claude is standing in awe after tasting Ciel’s blood while a wounded, bleeding Alois is begging for his help at his feet. Claude becomes obsessed with Ciel’s soul from then on, saying: “he knows blood and death, and darkness, but still his soul is pure, untainted, immaculate”.
Before his lonely death scene, Alois calls for Claude, hoping the object of his affections will look at him not with the contempt or hunger he’s used to but with a love he’s always craved. He declares to the demon “You’re my highness,” echoing the servile sentence the butler delivers after each command: “Yes, your highness.”
What Alois was looking for wasn’t revenge but love. Claude, with a pleasant smile, answers “what a thing to say to a butler”, and kills him with no regard for their contract anymore. He’s no longer interested in eating the soul of someone deemed as lowly as loving someone beneath him in the social hierarchy. He plainly says, after crushing Alois’ head: “Yours is a crass soul who would give his love to a butler. I could hardly work up an appetite for that.” He treats Alois as a mere pawn on his board, barely more precious than a disposable good.
Alois is again revealed as “unworthy” of his social position, and thus unworthy of love and admiration. When Claude briefly becomes Ciel’s butler, he’s shown lusting over Ciel’s body, smooth legs, and unsullied soul in a dressing scene mirroring the earlier one with Alois. But while Alois sought Claude’s touch, Ciel kicks him in horror, which only serves to thrill Claude even more. That is the ultimate spit at Alois’ face: the mere act of desiring touch serves to make Alois unworthy of it.
Because he’s broken and needy like the traumatized child he is, Alois’ soul falls out of favor. Taking advantage of his offenders’ lust and growing power from its fruits makes him the lowest of the low, even in the eyes of demons. He’s denied love because of this choice.
While the two boys share similar trauma, similar sparks that got them to contract with demons, their coping mechanisms are notably divergent. While Ciel is closed, cold and angry, Alois is aggressive and flirtatious; they pretend at very different kinds of adulthood. While neither coping mechanism is more correct than the other in the real world, fiction has very clear lines as to which of these behaviors make for an acceptable survivor.
Put simply: Ciel is worthy, and Alois is filthy.
Queer Heritage
The Black Butler universe makes the fetishization of children possible by aestheticizing abuse. It is even more obvious when one is familiar with Boys Love tropes: Black Butler is at times dangerously close to shotacon (a subgenre of Boys Love that depicts sexual relationships between adults and underage boys, sometimes getting away with juvenile-looking men instead). Knowing manga creator Toboso Yana (under the name Yanao Rock) published yaoi like Glamorous Lip before Black Butler makes it difficult to brush off the evoked tropes as unintended.
Coercision, sexual abuse, and rapes are common and romanticized as desirable and proof of the love between the seme and the uke. The seme is stereotypically a manly man while the uke is feminine-coded. Alois is very close to the stereotypical archetype of the broken, beautiful boy, “slutty uke” or “poor hooker”: usually blond with fair skin, gorgeous, exploitative of his sex appeal and traumatized (Gilbert Cocteau in Kaze to Ki no Uta, Ash Lynx in Banana Fish, Yashiro in Twittering Birds Never Fly to name some that affected me).
His queerness is rooted in pedocriminality and trauma, which echoes old stereotypes about queerness being a disease or mental disorder afflicting the abused. Still we know that queerness and trauma can have a lot in common without it being the only component of queerness. The Japanese terms “fujoshi” and “fudanshi”, meaning “rotten girls” and “rotten boys” and used as originally derogatory titles for BL fans, find an echo in Alois’ filthiness. But we don’t need to be acquainted with Boys’ Love to get the hints: it just brings up how a character like Alois is at the crossroads of different genre traditions, and how his trauma, immaturity and queerness are at once fetishized and shamed.
Another common ground of these “broken boys” looks an awful lot like the “bury your gays” trope: they mostly die in the end. The logic often works like this: they have to be punished for using sex to manipulate others, especially since they have been raped. As victims they ought to be devastated (and sexless; in the case of Banana Fish, Ash’s healthy relationship with Eiji is marked by being romantic but chaste) but they aren’t, or if they are they are also manipulative, then they’re not fulfilling the role of the “perfect victim” which is not to be pardoned for a sexual violence survivor. They shouldn’t gain anything from the aftermath of their trauma, let alone weaponize it.
Unless these characters show sufficient penitence, the audience–at least in my experience–will be pretty unforgiving. Allegedly this is because these characters “don’t respect themselves.” They have to try to “heal,” which is defined by a strictly prescribed set of behaviors. Their “lack of self-respect” becomes a greenlight for some good ol’ slut-shaming. Once abused, always stained. In our world, aside from a “seme”, sexual agency of any sort or motivation is not rewarded, under this warped ideology of “self-respect”.
Fetishized Trauma
Alois’ sexual aggressiveness is a key part of his role as antagonist. His post-traumatic symptoms–self-destructive behavior, explosive anger at certain triggers, regressive behavior when frightened–become part of his expression as a “camp” villain. His grandiosity and quirks are like bombs ready to destroy any order. His surface chaotic randomness makes him even more menacing, thus even more queer. This apparently moralistic stance in Alois’ characterization left a bitter taste in my mouth, as moral righteousness doesn’t sit quite well in a show that relies as much on the sexualization of children as Black Butler. Alois’ playacted sexual maturity is nothing more than a deeply traumatized response to his own shaky worldview. This depiction struggles to land when paired with the franchise’s ever-present problem of child sexualization and the overall story’s need to present Ciel as the “better” character.
Season two’s climactic maze scene in the eleventh episode of the season two is eloquent. Claude and Sebatsian are made to go through a labyrinth that represents Alois’ psyche. They have to answer questions about Alois in order to progress, and they soon realize that the path is paved with lies. The correct answers are never the right ones but the things Alois wishes were true. They have to give Alois’ what he wants to hear, and not the truth. He’s blatantly in denial. He’s been weaponizing his abuses and denying their existence at the same time. He’s dirtied in the eyes of the demons, because he seemingly indulged in his trauma by becoming oversexualized and hiding in delusion.
For this, both dismiss him out of hand. In that regard, I would say that our two demons for preferring “pure” over “sullied” are strangely aligned with the worldly tastes of society. They reproduced exactly what adult humans do to children and survivors: they treat Ciel and Alois as objects, Alois even more so.
As a viewer, seeing Alois given some agency brought me a feeling of relief. His thinly justified revenge against Sebastian always seemed like a pretext to actually fill the void he’s been left with after repeated abuses, and this turns out to literally be the case. When meeting Claude for the first time, he is unable to form a pact with him as he lacks a purpose to do so. He had to be manipulated, by Claude, into believing Sebastian caused his brother’s death–this pushed him to win over Lord Trancy and execute his plan to gain power. He is admittedly manipulated, but he also took action of his own accord.
As a viewer, seeing Alois given some agency brought me a feeling of relief. This reveal gave me an outlet for my own ways of dealing with trauma that may not coincide with common concepts of “self-respect”. He’s a poster child of internalized shame. What does it mean that an adult is being healed by a fictional child’s misery, in a show about child exploitation? In a less honorable way, his apparent agency prevents the audience from the responsibility and thus guiltiness of enjoying the constant fetishization, since he seemingly brought it upon himself. It’s like a back and forth between reality and fiction, adult and child, like a snake biting its tail in a never-ending mindfuck. When one is willing to suspend their disbelief, it allows us to be healed by such tropes, despite their arguable implications.
This is what makes Alois such a treasured presence in my eyes. I need to see characters that deal with their trauma without trying to bring back some “dignity” they would have lost. I need to see characters that don’t grieve over the parts of themselves ripped out by violence but who, on the contrary, incorporate it as something that simultaneously destroyed and built them. It goes beyond the dichotomy of healthy/unhealthy or toxic. I’m looking for models that aren’t “good” ones, that don’t per se show how to manage in real life but teach that there are other paths than the victimization and internalized shame so often imposed on survivors by the outer world. They absorb their trauma and own it. They endanger the socially expected cycles of guilt and mortification.
That is the reason why, despite the very questionable nature of the broken-“gay”-slutty-beautiful boy archetype Alois embodies, he has a contradictorily reassuring effect on me. These boys encapsulate the multiple layers of the history of shoujo manga and Boys Love like palimpsests, and I firmly believe that the reader/viewer can sense this complexity beyond the appearances without being fully conscious of it. The clues can be perceived without factual knowledge—this is the strength of fiction. That is why, as a lesbian, I actively read Boys Love and consume it as a mimicking, artificial, bigger than life fictional world that still speaks to the emotional truths of ours. That is why I cherish Alois Trancy. I might wish I was more like him: brazenly broken, seen through like an open book.
In other words: I will always side with the sluts.
To Alois, with love.
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