Is Tanaka a bad influence… or a good one?
I’m coming down from some weird high brought on by cramming three Junji Ito books into my head over the span of roughly five days.
And soon after my previous (really long) post about Tanaka and what he might know about Sebastian, Vincent, etc. last night? I started to think about Tanaka differently. Ito-sama likes to trick the reader… and so does Yana-san.
You know how Undertaker says our earl is different from his predecessors, and he makes note of it when our earl is trying to protect a fellow classmate from a bizarre doll?
Instead of Vincent’s evil streak being brought to the forefront by Tanaka… what if Vincent was extremely evil, and Tanaka was a force of good around him? What if Tanaka acted to make Vincent nicer to others?
I mean, Tanaka is always shown being good to our earl and real Ciel when they were younger. He’s tried to lessen the hurt they feel, particularly our earl when he feels left out. Offering to play chess and supply him with chocolate cake. We’ve never seen Tanaka doing anything to make our earl feel worse — or more importantly — act worse. Have we? Not even once he returned to the manor and resumed his post as House Steward.
He’s basically “Sure, use my tea set and tea! Yay dessert! Yay paper cranes and paper planes! Yay yaki mochi for New Year’s! Ho! Ho! Ho!”
He only acts (and looks) serious once things get serious, so besides his parallel to Leder in Mother3 theory, he’s also basically a joy… when there’s joy to be had.
Who knows, Tanaka might have been selected by Cloudia/Claudia because young Vincent needed a good influence in his life… and that couldn’t just be left up to his sister, since she’s also a Phantomhive. They needed an external good influence.
Seriously, idk… but it’s interesting to think about. We could have had Vincent and Tanaka (personality-wise) switched around this whole time… simply because of a teaser in an old tweet. She doesn’t say what Tanaka is really like; he could have a heart of gold.
And Tanaka being a good influence fits better with Leder anyway. 😮💨 😆