Is Yana losing interest in Black butler?
This is something I've been seeing for the last couple of years. A lot of people, especially after the most recent chapter (210), are saying that yana has lost interest in black butler and that it is apparently evident. While no one knows for certain if she has actually lost interest in it, I would like present some of my thoughts as to why I don't think she has lost interest in it.
First of all though, why are people saying that she has lost interest?
It has to do with a the slow pacing of the story which has been a complaint for a long time now. The chapters typically don't have more than 20 pages nowadays and the most recent one had only 11 (9 if you don't count the chapter cover). It's frustratingly slow and always ends with another little cliffhanger.
Naturally a lot of people are fed up and lose motivation to continue reading it monthly since it feels like we're barely advancing with the story and because of this slow pace, people are saying that yana doesn't have any motivation to continue it further.
Now the reason why I think the pacing is so slow is because of twisted wonderland, the game she is in charge of. She is responsible for the main concept, scenarios, character designs and also creates most of the art in the game herself. That's a lot of work she has to do, especially if you consider that she's also working on black butler.
The number of pages a chapter have started dropping since the blue memory arc. From what I've seen, a lot of the pages back then started to have only 20 pages and the drop to the 10-20 pages seemed to have become a thing around the start of the blue revenge arc. And since then the number of pages is different depending on what happens in the chapter. We already had a 9 pages chapter back in 167 so it's not that she goes increasingly lower with the pages number.
The blue revenge arc started in 2019 and considering that's also the year that the game twisted wonderland got announced, I think we all can think of why the pages number started to drop.
So to me it doesn't look like that she's intentionally keeping the pace slow because she lost motivation, it's because she already has a lot of work to do with twisted.
I've seen someone say: "but why doesn't she go into hiatus if it is so much work? Wouldn't it be better if she put black butler in hiatus to work on twisted and then later return to finish it properly?"
Well she could certainly do that but you have to consider that twisted wonderland is a gacha game. Gacha games require continuous content even long after the main story ended. Events that can draw in the players to continue playing and pull for the characters or cards they like.
So if she were to put black butler in hiatus to focus on twisted, it would be a very long hiatus, one that she would probably not get out of unless she handed her job to someone else.
Now onto the chapters itself. While the pace is indeed very slow, one thing that I've noticed is that she puts more effort into the chapters art. And I don't mean the characters, they of course look great.
I'm talking about the backgrounds.
Back then, a lot of the pages had blank backgrounds with a certain few having a little background. Of course there were also a lot of pages with very beautiful and detailed backgrounds but I'm talking about the smaller ones.
While the newer chapters still have a lot of blank backgrounds, they do feature more panels with a background than the old ones did
There several panels in the new chapters where I would have bet that the yana could have put a blank background but she didn't.
So while the pacing is still slow, the chapters have a lot more detail art wise in my opinion. That alone says to me that she didn't lose interest in black butler.
There's probably more that I could talk about that I will later notice but I don't want to make this post too long.
Please remember, this is just my opinion.
I'm not trying to excuse the slow pace of the chapters by the way, I'm just as frustrated as everyone else. I'm just providing some of my thoughts as to why I don't think yana has lost interest in black butler
