Again, They were Battered by the ….Truely, UnSympathetic, British Self-Righteousness & Superiority thinking of OTHERS!!! The So called, New Atheists, in Film,who spoke repeadtedly of “God-Talk”,which was Clearly evidance of showing evidece of Christian Beliefs, but No Church & Pride & your own Self Righteousness by not listening to the Needs & knowing they needs to have Courage to Speak About the Exact Ideas You Criticized for Not doing or Speaking Previously about the Exactly the Same Ideas you again Judged them. & Criticized them for every word said, every movement & action Was Always Criticized as Wrong and made sure victim knew there worthlessness & utter ignorance, leep the weak sick & less te

Intollerance for Capability to Speaking ….And Having the Same Priviledges Brutish Catholitics always Had.

So, again your critic of characters was WRONG & You Were, Intollerant of weakness in them in begining. And Intollerant of Their New Ability to Speak Openly Oppositionally & Kknowing the Reality that They Would To Face in Doing So. Christians…Which were Be Flidiculed Either Way. iIDEASracterized In Film as American Reality. Well we all know that Speaking the Truth is considered uncouth & possibly bullying by those who only know the British christian’s Public Falacy. The uncouth, New Athiest as u call the subject of ur fury, Knows & Remembers the British Brutality on New America & the Reason they Fled England due to Different Religion, believing in the same God as British Monarchy. Britain Rulers Tortured & Tax any Intolerance to Have to Deal With Such Intelectually Stinted Ideas of worthless people that you’d rather stomp a boot on them…,.Since you value Them Personally & Much Less Value their Opinions & Ideas Wasted Your Time.!!! Time you as British Royalty could use for Constant Persicution having Drinks & Talking about How Intelectally Stinted They were & Boasting to one Another British Drunks Wasting in a Room Only Creating Conversations of Malioious Talk of the Un couth & Intelectually Stinted people you needed Them to be Less Valuable to Conversations & Society. Keeping them in Their Place, as Worthless & Useless for even your glance.. as an Ant or Bug Bothering YOUR Existance of British Royalty Their Catholic Religion Practices! all the Alcohol & Critical judgments of the Unclean, really the Poor, unwealthy or snyone they deem unworthy.. Talking Teash in lFancy Sitting room. Only the Best Money & British Royalty “Deserves”. Listening & Dring the Nights away talking Trash about other men Drunk & ignoring the also less valuable women not rven a thought about whether they existed, plenty of Stupid women kept stupid to better mans Ego.White British Royalty who does whatever & whenever they please with human objects to play with or enjoy beating inorder to keep their Position as Better than All & free to do as they liked without question! Women are Worthless but for momentary pleasure, bearing children, & servants. to Pathetic Btitish Men kept in Packs to Constantly tell Each other how Superior they are.

In order to understand where I was coming from with this review, you have to understand the context in which it was written. The review was published on a generalist film site and I am very much a film and genre reviewer. What this means is that while I had seen and reviewed a lot of anime over the years, my knowledge of the form was very much that of an interested outsider with a casual interest. In fact, back in September 2011 I was not all that familiar with the concept of fan service.

Because of the context in which I discovered the show, my attention was indeed drawn to the shonen-ai elements as these are the elements that seemed fresh to me. I had reviewed and watched loads of action/adventure anime and encountered quite a bit of steampunk and so these elements of Black Butler struck me as boring and derivative. Conversely, the tendency to stick the main character in a dress and have him flirt outrageously with his demonic sidekick was really quite new and engaging.

I disagree with you that the show isn’t ‘about’ the shonen-ai elements as I think that fan service is as much an element of this show as the action adventure stuff. In fact, the yaoi elements really were what made the show interesting to me and had the show not contained those elements I would not have hesitated to describe it as dumb and derivative.

Six months down the line, I am now a good deal more familiar with both anime genres and the eccentricities of anime fandom and so I now realise that putting a male protagonist in a dress and having him flirt with another guy is very much a cliche. I accept that now but it doesn’t change the fact that I had not encountered these elements before Black Butler and that they captured my imagination in a way that the non-yaoi stuff failed to do.

Yeah, I picked up on that too…

I think half the problem with gay cinema is that inferiority complex that Glen alludes to. Interestingly, I don’t think that lesbian film has the same problem as lesbian films are quite frequently picked up by art house distributors and marketed at a broader (and straighter) market. If you look at IMDb, the posters for Haigh’s previous film provides a neat illustration of the problem: they look like the kind of adverts you see in the windows of up-scale shops in Soho right down to the attractive guy in the foreground and the slightly clubby atmosphere.

Interesting take on the scene with Russell’s friend as I read it quite differently. I assumed that Russell’s irritation was due to the fact that his friend was suddenly wanting an emotionally open relationship whereas before Russell had kept his private life to himself. I read that change as being due to the fact that the straight bloke was suddenly confronted by the realities of his friend’s sexuality and so over-compensated in quite a jarring fashion.

Glad you liked the film too though, it’s definitely one of the best films I’ve seen in the last year or so.

is also a great study of internalised homophobia which you don’t really see except in fairly broad strokes (like Roy Cohn in Angels in America) ie when Russell’s friend is kind of irritated by his reticence at the end of the film and Russell thinks he’s doing him a favour not sharing details of his life with him.

It seems faintly absurd that, in this day and age, we should feel obliged to make the case for why it is that more straight people should watch gay films.

Haigh sort of comments on the weary state of gay cinema when Glen says about his art project something like “Straights won’t care and the gays will only come in the hope of seeing some cock”

it doesn’t stop him presenting copious male nudity to his gay male audience however