Blog Topic #4: Text Connections

Text to Text:
Though the connection may be unfamiliar to most, I have come to see the similarities between Don Vito Corleone of Mario Puzo's The Godfather and Alois Trancy of the critically acclaimed anime series Black Butler. On the surface, it may seem that a weathered mafia don and an abused child ascended to the head of the House of Trancy, their diplomatic dealings, personal losses, and deaths share some like qualities. For example, both know the pain of loss. The Don witnessed the deaths of countless friends, including two sons. He left Italy at the age of 12 with people trying to kill him and went from a poor worker in a grocery store to a multi-millionaire mafia don. Alois was orphaned from a young age, left only with his brother, whose soul was later consumed by a demon. Left to fend for himself, Alois was sold to slavery to the Trancy household, where the unlikely help of the demon Claude Faustus allowed him to ascend from slave to earl. When dealing with enemies, both the Don and Alois rely on others to fight their battles, while they mastermind the plans from behind the scenes (given that one is a thirteen year old boy and the other an aging man). This faith in others proves to be part of their downfall, as both are let down and betrayed by people close to them (the Don, his associates, and Alois, his own butler, Claude Faustus). Finally, both die deaths seemingly unfitting for their characters. The Don, after surviving several deep bullet wounds in the beginning of the book (let alone everything else that has happened to him over the course of his life), dies of a simple heart attack in his own garden. Alois, after trusting Claude to keep him in power and to overthrow the competing House of Phantomhive, Claude kills him in cold blood, and gives his soul to another demon, saying that he had "lost his taste" for a "filthy" soul such as Alois'.