#but murder and atlantic are def better in the manga and there's a lot of inbetween chapters that never got animated at all

[teatitty]

I've only watched Kuroshitsuji in its first season, so I really don't know anything, but I would assume that comments like "half a century" are worded like this, because they are not exact. Creatures who exists as long as Shinigami do may not even realize so much as 20-30 years a difference, if that makes sense. I literally don't know anything else, so I hope this makes sense and is not completely rude or stupid of me to add.

I would normally agree with this and I honestly don't blame you for thinking this because the manga is so vastly different from the anime even when the anime started properly adapting the canon, but timelines and dates have always been incredibly important to Black Butler's lore and mysteries and Undertaker himself has very close ties with Ciel's family and dead father, Vincent [there's even been implications he may have loved Vincent in a romantic fashion] so despite being one of the oldest Shinigami we've met so far [and we don't even know exactly how old he is] Undertaker also puts a lot of importance on dates and years, even going so far as to keep a chain of lockets all inscribed with death dates on them and those lockets are the things he treasures most in canon

So for him to say it's been "half a century" since he was last called a Shinigami is actually a huge deal for us readers and gives a big clue as to what was going on with him back then! Deserters are rare, and the most we know about what happened are during Campania when Undertaker whips his scythe out [heh] and says he took "great pains to keep it" and then later on when Othello tells us that he "destroyed half the headquarters" when he deserted [my theory is this was him getting his beloved scythe back] because Othello is the second oldest Shinigami we know of that I can remember and he was around during that time

It honestly wouldn't surprise me if that 20 year gap was him being hunted by other shinigami for his desertion and it wasn't until he'd successfully gone "underground" that it all stopped. We're also being constantly reminded that the london/british branch is understaffed, which may be a clue that Undertaker might've killed a shitton of fellow Shinigami when he destroyed the headquarters