slaveofliberty:

As someone else has already pointed out, Ronald seems to have a rather particular and oddly light approach to what would seem to be “dark matters”.

First, he mumbles on how he’ll be “killed for real” if he’s late for his job on the Campania ship.

Then, once he manages to board the ship, he says that “the future is looking bright”.

He seems to laugh at Sophie Smith’s dead body.

Sure, in these circumstances, these would appear to be casual statements made in moments of respectively hurry, relative calmness and “ordinary administration” but considering how:

A) he’ll be “killed for real” when he’s a shinigami exactly because he killed himself;

B) the “future” he talks about is circumscribed within the actions perpetrated by the bizarre dolls and it comprises blood, deaths, despair, and tragedy;

C) he doesn’t seem to be a totally unsympathetic person in general (see his reaction at Sebastian’s weakness at the end of the Arc. If he really was a cold-blooded bastard with no morals “picking on the weak” wouldn’t have been a problem to him in the slightest)…

Ronald’s behavior is a bit off. 

On one hand, as someone who’s not human anymore and who, thus, has “lost his humanity” and is now a superhuman creature, certainly factors that could be typically considered to be of human concern do not pertain to him and as a natural consequence of this fact it’s only obvious that a “human tragedy” doesn’t come across as “tragedy” at all from his non-human point of view.

On the other hand, I’d like to point out how his and William’s attitudes were different in regards to lobotomized children’s souls having to be reaped back in the Circus Arc and I think the anime has somehow emphasized it (well, the dubbing helped, no doubt).

William starts to repeat how shinigami only have to reap souls accordingly, without leaving emotions getting in the way (let’s not forget that he cried the first time he did, heh), he keeps his usual cold, mechanical and professional mask but still, his OVA makes it very clear that it’s fake so I’m fairly certain that even in that moment he was probably having an internal conflict with himself to fight against his intimate and deeper feelings.

Ronald instead seemed to be pretty chill by contrast. He comes late (even if he says he hurried), he teases William as soon as he arrives, he muses on finishing the work fast to go to party and in general he acts rather laid-back and easy-going.

(I don’t exclude the possibility that perhaps Ronald was actually coping as much as William was, just in a different way, but still… Also, to know that Grell was assigned to the Phantomhive Manor and as someone who seems to check his Death List pretty often, I doubt Ronald wasn’t aware of the situation at hand. Also, the anime reinforced this point, having him witness the kidnapping of the little girl and the killing of the officers while smirking…).

Making light of subject matter that is normally considered serious or painful to discuss such as death is the literal definition of black comedy also known as black humor, dark humor or gallows humor.

Studies indicate that appreciating black humor indicates higher intelligence and emotional stability.

Higher Intelligence?

A team of researchers asked 156 people, who had an average age of 33 and included 76 women, to rate their comprehension and enjoyment of 12 darkly humorous cartoons.

Participants were also tested for verbal and non-verbal IQ and asked about their mood, aggression, and educational background.

The study found three groups of participants. The group with the highest sick humor appreciation and comprehension scored the highest in verbal and non-verbal IQ tests, were better educated, and scored lower for aggression and bad mood.

The findings suggested that the link between IQ and affinity for black humor is likely due to the fact that appreciating black humor is a “complex information-processing task” in which negative moods and high aggression levels could cloud people’s ability to get the joke.

Emotional Stability?

Other researchers have tried to give an explanation as to how laughing at tragedy would indicate emotional stability, formulating the “benign-violation theory”.

The theory is grounded in the idea that people are amused by moral violations — threats to their normal worldviews, for instance, or disparaging statements — but only so long as those violations are harmless. When the tone of the threat is playful, or the setting safe, a violation that might otherwise elicit sadness or fear instead leads to laughter.

What transforms these threatening violations into harmless jokes, according to the theory, is psychological distance. That distance comes in four varieties. It can be: 

1. Spatial (a tragedy on Mars isn’t likely to haunt many minds on Earth), 
2. Social (if your grandparent is a survivor of a certain tragedy, he/she might find jokes related to that specific event more disturbing than amusing),
3. Temporal (yesterday’s hardship is different from one that occurred decades ago),
4. Mental (hypothetical events aren’t as threatening as real ones).

I think this theory is rather interesting because it reinforces the point that there’s indeed a certain psychological distance that this character apparently puts between himself and everything human else.

Of course, that’s what he’s supposed to do as anyone else like him but I find it particularly interesting in Ronald’s case because as the youngest shinigami he committed suicide at the youngest age and the most recently.

Before these experiments and theories were put in place, Freud had something to say about it as well.

The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.

Meaning that black humor could also be viewed as a coping mechanism as well.

Black or gallows humor has long been recognized as having therapeutic value, particularly when used by individuals dealing with traumatic incidents. […] It is a coping mechanism which can contribute to the resilience, health, and well-being […].   

They say that “time heals wounds” but looking at all the shinigami,  I wouldn’t say so.