Seel! Wait, I mean Ciel!

If you follow me on twitter, you might remember that I complained quite a bit last weekend about sitting next to a guy wearing a skirt.  If you don’t follow me on twitter, that’s cool because I’m going to relate the entire story anyway.

This past weekend was Naka-Kon, a Kansas City anime convention running for its sixth year at the Hyatt Regency Crown Center.  I had applied to be staff this year, and I could be found at the Volunteer desk.  Whenever my director was away from the desk for a while there was usually another staff member sitting there with me.  One happened to be a guy cosplaying Riku Harada from D.N. Angel.  His costume was nice, it was just too bad that he completely acted like a guy.  Wearing a dress.  He would sit in his chair with his legs wide open, and then turn toward me to stare at what I was writing.  It was terribly awkward for me, mostly because I couldn’t leave, and I didn’t want to speak to him.  He’d already tried talking to me, but just quit after I didn’t show any signs of being impressed by what he was saying.

The funny thing is he’d talked to my roommate the day before.  Unfortunately that bit of conversation formed my initial not-exactly-positive image of him.

Him: Hey, you’re Rikku!

Roomie: …..yep.

Him: I’m Riku too!

Roomie: …..that’s cool. (shifty eyes)

Him: We should get a Riku from Kingdom Hearts, and (something I don’t remember), and make a whole group of just Rikus!!

Roomie: …uh….yeah.

Then we took our leave of him. Quickly.

I was happy to see a pretty complete cosplay group for Kuroshitsuji at Naka-kon.  I was surprised too, since the anime is (to me) pretty new, and not licensed (as far as I know).  I had personally just started watching Kuroshitsuji a couple weeks before Naka-kon, so I was especially tickled to see the cosplay group, and since I was working, sent the roomie off with my camera to get pictures of them.

Which brings me to my main-ish subject of this post: Ciel Phantomhive.  Starting Kuroshitsuji, I really didn’t like Ciel all that much.  He just seemed to me to be your fairly typical young, educated/smart, aristocratic, expressionless male.  In short, he’s better than everyone, and lets them know that they bore him.  It’s really overdone, so I’ll admit that I wrote him off.

Then I saw the episode of the anime where Ciel had to be disguised as a girl, wearing one pink and frilly dress.  That’s cause for chuckles normally, but it actually got me to like him.  The reason I started liking Ciel with his whole cross-dressing fiasco is that he was visibly uncomfortable with his situation.  His stance and expression showed his discomfort and the fact that he definitely did not want to be doing that.  Having to avoid his fiancee helped with the humor/discomfort.  For me, that made Ciel relatable.  He didn’t do the “cool guy” thing of showing absolutely no change in expression, and that’s why I now like him, at least more than I did.