Book of Circus
The 2014 anime season that sends Ciel and Sebastian undercover in Noah's Ark Circus.
Black Butler: Book of Circus is the third anime series of Black Butler, broadcast between July and September 2014. Unlike the previous seasons it is a close adaptation of the manga, adapting the "Noah's Ark Circus" arc, and it serves as a soft reboot of the anime that ignores the anime-exclusive events of the first two seasons. It was directed by Noriyuki Abe at A-1 Pictures, with Hiroyuki Yoshino in charge of scripts.
Lore & Background
The Queen orders Ciel Phantomhive to investigate the circus' possible connection with missing children, as children have vanished from every town it has visited. Ciel and Sebastian join the troupe undercover and discover that the Grim Reaper William T. Spears is also working there, because a huge number of souls are soon to be collected at the circus. Ciel is paired with a recruit called "Freckles", who turns out to be the first-string performer Doll, and Sebastian seduces Beast into telling him the name of their leader.
Reader's Guide
Joker's adoptive father, Baron Kelvin, invites Ciel to a banquet where brainwashed children are killed in a gruesome show, and shows him a room built exactly like the one where Ciel was tortured by the cult after his parents' death. Ciel shoots the Baron dead; the circus doctor reveals that the prosthetic limbs he developed are made from the bones of the kidnapped children, and Ciel has Sebastian kill him and burn down the mansion. The circus members sent to the Phantomhive estate to capture Ciel are disposed of by Mey-Rin, Baldroy, Finnian and Tanaka, and the orphanage the performers believed they were protecting turns out to have been abandoned years before. The series was followed by the two-episode OVA Black Butler: Book of Murder.
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Elsewhere in Black Butler
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