Lau and Ciel Doujinishi P 2

PAGE 2 OF 5.

This is a humble little doodle-fest dedicated to the complicated PLATONIC relationship between Earl Ciel Phantomhive and the longtime Phantomhive family friend and business associate (both for Funtom and the Queen's Watchdog), the trade manager and young Shanghai mob lord Lau Tao.

I've had several long conversations with and about Lau's relationship with Ciel. The consensus is that Lau genuinely cares about Ciel but also is mindful of business acumen and hastens to do Ciel's bidding in order to benefit from the good graces of someone so close to Queen Victoria, when otherwise his less legitimate business of opium dealing would be viciously outed. However, going back to the "genuinely cares" part, this is something the three of us firmly believe. Lau can be pragmatic and self-serving, but simultaneously deeply concerned that Ciel uses a self-destructive way of dealing with hardship and childhood trauma, with an obsession for vindicating crimes of the past and an excessive pridefulness about not asking for help. In fact, Lau has even openly stated that Ciel will "continue to sink into the mud/quicksand" because he refuses to scream for help from even his closest friends when it is needed. Because Lau copes with his own childhood trauma (markedly similar to Ciel's in numerous ways--a loved one died violently and then was burned in a fire when Lau was a child, and indubitably because Lau was in line to fulfill an awful and burdensome family-business role) by suppressing it, smiling, running from it, and anesthetizing himself with drugs and women, rather than ever facing it head-on, he finds Ciel's methods puzzling, troubling, and fascinating. Since he has said before that he helps the despairing deal with the "cruelty of reality" by "selling dreams" (which is certainly also lucrative), since he has said he is "fond of Ciel's still being boyish," I think Lau sees himself as sort of a buffer for Ciel whenever Ciel will still allow himself to be young. He also sees himself as a willing "do the dirty work" yes-man. Finally, as I've been informed by , it is and has been a traditional Asian cultural value to efface visible evidence of personal discomfort/personal problems, particularly to an authority; it is considered weak and unseemly. Therefore Lau's "hide it with a smile and cover your eyes in butterflies" (my writing) strategy is heightened still more by Lau's proud self-identification as Chinese.

All of that is what I am trying to articulate here.

Kuroshitsuji (c) Yana Toboso.