Salut :) Just wanted to ask you if we could consider Undertaker from Black Butler as a villain or not. I mean, yeah he wanted to plague America with Bizarre Dolls and so many people on the Campania got killed because of him, but he doesn’t want Ciel anything bad. Maybe he is a side villain or something like that.

Oh hey, and in French too? Super cool, Anon! 😉
And maaan, didn’t you choose my favorite subject in Kuro~~ I’ll try not to ramble.

This answer will 100% be personal opinion but yes Anon, I totally consider UT as “a villain”, and as a bonus I’ll even say that he also fits the Byronic hero trope for me. 

The thing is, nowadays in fiction being a “villain” is really a general term and that doesn’t mean that the character automatically has something against the MC, because it’s true that, when you see UT, he isn’t particularly against Ciel himself (I’d rather say he’s against Seb and Queen Victoria probably), even if his actions understandably don’t put him on Ciel’s good side. 

And, when you consider his character, not only what he’s doing doesn’t suit Ciel (and Seb), but it’s also something we readers can qualify of horrible (since many people ended up dead because of something he started and that’s without mentioning his unethical work on dead bodies and what he’s probably currently planning). 

That’s the great thing in fiction nowadays though: being a villain doesn’t mean we have to qualify the character of being 100% bad or good, a spectrum of grey morality is something that’s often used in Yana’s characterization; it just seems more unbalanced for UT’s character in comparison to other characters (like the ones from Noah’s arc for example) because he’s the third main guy of the story (so inherently he got more development).

In any case, it’s easy to see what kind of character UT really is: he is broken, sad and getting more and more desperate, but his actions make him a villain because he’s being a pain for our MC + we readers (apologists aside) can condemn that he’s doing more harm than good in general. 

So yep I totally see him as a villain.  

Now if you’re asking me whether he’s the main villain or just a side villain when it comes to the plot, then that’s different. For me, the current main villain of Kuro is the target of Ciel’s revenge (aka the one who killed Vincent and Rachel, the reason Ciel ended up with the satanic cult) and that person certainly isn’t UT considering how much he seemed to like Vincent. So you could call him a side villain, I guess?

The thing is, UT’s character is fascinating because we know he’s fundamentally not against Ciel (if anything he could provide to be of help with the contract, which is technically a good thing) but still, he is a villain. He might not always stay that way, we don’t know, but for now that’s what he is. At least for me. 🙂

I hope this makes sense somehow and that it isn’t full or rambling. I love UT because he’s the character he is but that’s also why I like to call him on his madness, haha!
…Yeah…He’s going to cross another line and fuck shit up pretty badly if we’re to take Vincent’s words in ch107.5 as foreshadowing, and he might realize it too late and suffer even more as a result (besides all the damage for the other characters involved), but oh well. That’s what he is lol.

Thanks for passing by Anon 🙂 Et bonne soirée 😉