OP: “MAISIE” by Cö shu Nie feat. HYDE

As long as Kuroshitsuji and Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun want to play GFantasy tag team with the anime schedule, that works for me. We’re covered at least through summer, and it’d be great if they just kept at it till both series are fully adapted (or caught up to the manga at least). That won’t happen of course, but this is definitely progress, especially for Hanako-kun. Both series are massive sellers and have plenty of unadapted material, and both deliver the goods consistently. Keep ’em coming.

Indeed, Black Butler does seem to be getting more consistent as it progresses. Not only that, it should be noted that that the standard for opening and ending themes with this show is crazy high. Every iteration seems to have at least one banger. And while the OP here is very good, it’s the ED that absolutely kills it (both sequences are extra long, at over two minutes). Boy band Ryugujo have never done an anisong before, and this one is excellent. But it’s the animation sequence (mainly the talents of Okazaki Oka) that lifts it to God-tier levels. I’ll be surprised if we get a better ending sequence this year.

And so we begin the “Emerald Witch” arc. And it’s going to be 13 episodes, which is notable because Kuroshitsuji doesn’t always not a “normal” cour – they tend to use however many eps the arc needs (which is a good thing). The action is going to take place in Germany – as Ciel notes, the second time he and Sebastian have been sent abroad by Queen Victoria on an investigation. There have been a series of mysterious deaths, blamed on a cursed “werewolf forest”. Victoria was for all intents and purposes a German, and her grandson William the emperor. Since she’s not getting any official response to her inquiries, back channels are required.

Ciel is suitably annoyed at this assignment, not least because his German pronunciation sucks (which to be fair can be said of all dozen or so seiyuu who spoke it in the premiere). He does check in with Chlaus, his family friend, who’s based in Germany. He investigates but is only able to provide bits and pieces of information. There’s another Phantomhive ally in Germany – “you know who”, as both Sebastian and Chlaus call him. It may be that we’re supposed to know who this is but if so, I’m whiffing. He’s a schoolmate of Ciel’s father, but I only know that because of what we were shown in the episode itself.

Upon arrival in Germany (with the full Scooby gang in tow), Ciel is horrified to hear the locals speaking East Franconian, a local dialect indicating that this is probably in or near Bavaria. They track down a carriage driver who witnessed the death we saw in the cold open, but he refuses to take them into the Emerald Forest and face the witches’s curse. He tells them the second man survived, but his mind was broken and he was hauled off to a hospital somewhere. There’s talk of an epidemic but clearly, this is no normal disease at work.

It’s interesting to hear Ciel – a boy in contract with a demon who’s encountered shinigami and other oddities – be so dismissive about the idea of witches and curses. Sebby points this incongruity out but Bocchan is pretty unfazed. His solution to the carriage problem is just to buy two carriages and drive themselves, which they do. And in fact they survive their passage through the spooky forest until they reach a village. We’ve already had one werewolf village anime storyline in recent years with Undead Girl Murder Farce but this seems a little different. This is, if anything, a witches village – witches who fled to escape the witch trials which plagued the region for centuries. The werewolves seem, if anything, to  be bodyguards.

The women in the village are keen to kill the intruders. But the leader shows up – a little girl named Sieglinde Sullivan (Kugimiya Rie) carried in the arms of a bearded hulk named Wolfram (Kobayashi Chikahiro). And she’s keenly interest in “chibi” Ciel. She orders Wolfram to invite the intruders to stay one night at her home, Emerald Castle. And that’s where the true nature of this mystery will slowly start to unravel. You don’t tend to get much real info in the first episode of a Kuroshitsuji arc – sometimes you get an episode mostly unrelated to the main plot, in fact. Here we’ve pretty much hit the ground running, and with this being Black Butler what follows is pretty certain to be a very entertaining – and dark – ride.

ED: “WALTZ” by Ryugujo (龍宮城)