Kuroshitsuji Second Season Announced

Huh?

So, its been announced that Kuroshitsuji will be getting a second season. Now, normally I wouldn’t bother to make note of such a thing, as I wasn’t terribly fond of the first season (in fact, I found the total waste of potential to be fairly aggravating), but in this case I was so baffled by the announcement that I felt a desire to shout that fact to the world. Or, y’know, the aniblogosphere.

The anime diverged a bit from the manga, as the manga was (and still is) incomplete at the time of the TV series airing. And, in diverging from the manga plotline, we got something fairly close to a ‘LULZ EVERY1 DI3D!!1’ ending. Ciel dies, and it is heavily implied that Sebastian then eats his soul. The household help are shown strewn on the ground unconscious as London burns, and when someone asks about them later, it is stated that their fate is unknown, which to me points heavily in the favor of them being dead. Queen Victoria is dead, replaced with a non-loli impostor, and it is revealed that the real queen had sought to destroy the Phantomhive family once and for all.

So how exactly to we manage to finagle a second season out of such an end?

Ok, so I suppose this shouldn’t actually be all that confusing – we might be getting a completely new adaptation of the manga material, with the newer story arcs involved; see Negima! and Negima?! for instance (although I’d say that Negima! was and is quite a bit more popular than Kuroshitsuji could ever dream of being). We might be getting one which pretends the anime original stuff never happened on the first go-round, although this would be a little bizarre. But if it turns out to be a direct sequel… well, it’ll involve a lot of maneuvering, and even that would have a pretty high chance of simply looking dumb.

But, ultimately, I probably find this news so puzzling simply because, if I had to pick a show from the fall that would be the last one to get a sequel, this one would probably be it. For one, it wasn’t terribly popular. But maybe even more convincing of its lack of hope for a second animated installment was just how definitive the ending seemed – there really was no room left for any more storytelling – Ciel’s soul gets nom’d. You can bring back a dead guy, but how the hell do you resurrect someone who doesn’t have a soul any more?

But, hey, I’m probably just ticked because this dreck is going to get a second season, while better stuff will continue to languish sans animated versions. This, of course, is pretty par for the course, as this is how things tend to work out. But the lack of popularity for the animated incarnation of the franchise does make it a curious choice for a second season. Oh well.

EDIT: OKAY, I ADMIT IT – I JUST WANTED TO BITCH ABOUT IT!