am curious, do elaborate on your feelings of the red butler arc if you feel like it, please.
Okay what I was thinking about was this: my first encounter with the story was the anime (rip me) and then I read the manga, so as I was rereading the red butler arc now it was notable to me how Grell is really not... A character in it. I was posting all of the little tiny Grells (cute) and really, it's because that's all we see of her. She has maybe five lines before the reveal and then she never shuts up. And I realised (after my disappointment) that that's the point. Grell is not only a background character in the manga, she's a background person in the main character's lives. It's so effective to have not only Ciel fail to take notice of her because she's masquerading as a servant, but the entire narrative as well. In the anime however, she's a character with comedic (depending on your taste 😒) gimmicks and lines out the wazoo and it's too much... It cheapens the reveal- it's always the one you least suspect. In the manga she's clearly present the whole time, so it's not like "and the culprit is... this random stranger!". But to know anything about her or to take any notice of her at all defeats the clear purpose of her early character (and, importantly to me, disrespects her acting skills). And she's not even that incompetent in the manga- because she's not anything at all! The anime made the strange choice to have her act involve the most extreme comedic incompetence (not knocking her acting skills, fantastic choice queen) and extreme comedic stupidity. Idk it just strikes me as a stupid choice for the anime. The manga, to be fair, faffed around a lot less and so perhaps it simply didn't have space for such things, or perhaps it was just purposeful in its storytelling. It's not as though the anime needed an extra source for comedy because like the manga it had plenty. It simply serves to.. kind of cheapen the reveal. Grell's true self is flamboyant and outrageous and impossible to miss, so when Grell's persona is... Also flamboyant and outrageous and hard to miss- just in different ways- instead of perfectly unassuming and 100% under the radar, then it doesn't work.
Tldr: anime Grell too stupid to live, god bless her, and I think that the anime should have had her be smart and stealthy like manga Grell to make the reveal of her true self and the solution to the mystery more effective.
Then again maybe the solution to the mystery is just 50% anticlimax and I'm reading into it too much lol what do you think
