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Record W4389298589 · doi:10.21900/j.jams.v4.1178

Black Butler: A Neo-Victorian Jack the Ripper and the Child Detective

2023· article· en· W4389298589 on OpenAlexaff
Joti Bilkhu

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Anime and Manga Studies · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicCrime and Detective Fiction Studies
Canadian institutionsYork University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsContext (archaeology)Power (physics)PhenomenonDetective fictionHistorySociologyLiteratureAestheticsArtArt historyEpistemologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In Toboso Yana’s anime Black Butler, she pairs the figures of the child detective with Jack the Ripper to arrive at a complex array of meanings. The Ripper figure continues to have one of the most popular afterlives following its original context of Victorian Britain, with numerous contemporary iterations and adaptations of the 1888 murders visible across contemporary popular culture. This article examines the characteristics that Black Butler’s child detective Ciel Phantomhive has in common with the Ripper (tragic histories, violent behavior, and the strategic use of knowledge). I begin by contextualizing Black Butler in regards to Japanese literature, a world literature framework, and the neo-Victorian genre alike. I then turn to analyzing how Ciel deploys the knowledge he gains from the Ripper case to legitimize himself; he both unravels the mystery of this figure and allows it to persist. In essence, the Ripper phenomenon garners such interest precisely because it is a mystery, and Ciel capitalizes on the same uncertainties and (lack of) knowledge as a form of power.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.073
Threshold uncertainty score0.145

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0150.026
Scholarly communication0.0040.003
Open science0.0010.005
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.045
GPT teacher head0.268
Teacher spread0.222 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2023
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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