Reviews

Sep 8, 2016
Soul Eater (Anime) add
gwern
Fairly generic shonen anime along the lines of more popular ones like _Naruto_.
(In fact, the similarities between SE and _Naruto_ - whose manga started several years before SE's manga and was a big success by that point - are glaring enough as to straddle the line between legitimate borrowing and plagiarism, from the visual design of the iconic ninja vests & headband to the eccentric powerful but dark white-haired mentor to the immensely powerful ancient city leader being trapped in a magical field while an epic battle rages.)

SE's best aspects are its visual style. Some scenes and designs are memorable: the moon, whether it's grinning or dripping blood, is regularly disturbing in a Tim Burton-esque fashion, the little demon in Soul is an interesting take on the Devil and suits (and the hand-biting an excellently disturbing mannerism), and the revival of the Kishin is fantastic, whether it's the extremely creepy hallucinations afflicting characters before the revival or the animation of the body reconstructing himself and learning how to move again, or Medusa's 'vector' weapons. Character designs are also sufficiently memorable that one is unlikely to confuse anyone, and are colorful enough that one rarely gets bored of watching the main characters (although I wish Maka Albarn's face & eyes were less of a cipher, Kid Death makes up for it with his wardrobe and peculiar martial arts). I must of course mention Excalibur, who is both visually striking (what is he, anyway? an anteater?) but also quite funny.
The OPs and EDs are likewise excellent pairings of visuals and music.

The characters are decent (once their shticks stop being run into the ground), but the plot is even weaker. Reviewing the overall plot, it feels like the SE anime almost made a point of failing to explore intriguing possibilities and leaving Chekhov guns unfired.
The first time we see the Kishin's face, it is a shock as he is instantly recognizable as looking like Kid Death, down to the white hair highlights; one assumes that Asura is actually Death's son and Kid's brother, and this will be extremely important - but nothing is ever made of this and Asura is implied to be human.
The series drove me nuts by name-dropping Maka's mother constantly, but never once showing a photo of her or her on screen or giving any information whatsoever about her - surely once we finally learn in episode 39 or 40 that she's still alive and traveling the world and has a unique powerful magical ability, she will turn out to be critical to the war against the Kishin and has been engaged in extremely important work for the DWMA and will be a major character? Nope; all we learn is that she's fat.
The danger of the Kishin's madness infecting the world is emphasized again and again, and the danger shown in one of the most memorable scenes during the escape of the Kishin; surely once he escapes, the series tempo will speed up dramatically as the world begins to fall apart, everyone from Death on down begins to go insane, and tough choices will be made, showing that SE can pull off the classic escalation formula of starting as comedy and turning into dark action-drama that made other series like _Fullmetal Alchemist_ so memorable? Nope. Stein is literally the only character to go mad, and the series tempo slows down, if anything, and the striking visions are totally abandoned even in the final battle face to face with the Kishin inside his bubble.
Speaking of Stein, since he's the only one who goes mad and this is a major plot point over dozens of episodes and a core part of Medusa's schemes, surely the consequences of his insanity will be equally major and core to her plan? Nope and nope.
Well, what about the hints that Death is not such a pure and noble defender of order and has a sinister background scheme going on which may betray the efforts of the protagonists and justify the criticisms of the 'evil' characters, in a subversion that leads to meaningful conflict and weighing difficult moral choices? Hah, nope! Nope, Death really is a great guy, you were just being paranoid.
How about all the witches who would awaken, under the leadership of the 'Old Witch'? Nope nope.
Or what about Black Star, the most mentally unstable and dangerous of the 3 protagonists, who you keep expecting to go off the reservation? Nope.
How about Excalibur, who gets an entire episode demonstrating how he is the most powerful weapon in the world and is a Chekhov's gun among Chekhov guns - I will eat my hat if he doesn't even fight by the end! Nope. It's a good thing I didn't make any bets about that one since hats take a long time to cut up and eat.
So weirdly, while it certainly feels that SE could fill up 51 episodes without any problem, it winds up being surprisingly empty and full of MacGuffins and unimportant one-shot episodes.
(Reading the WP summary, the finished manga plot is quite different. I wonder how many of these problems stem from the adaptation challenge where the anime studio tries to avoid making changes or anticipating the manga.)

SE's aversion to ever killing off a character, no matter how minor or merited, removes any sense of weight or impact from plot twists. It doesn't matter if Soul sacrifices himself - you know he'll be fine no matter what. Or Medusa. I simply sighed when I saw the epilogue implying she had survived. *Again*. I thought Medusa surviving once was a bad decision as it took the accomplishment away from Stein and meant his 'fall' was less a lingering legacy of Medusa than some more of her scheming and so less due to Stein himself (a fall because of internal character conflicts is far more interesting and tragic than a fall due to the machinations of a tempter), but surviving twice is just in bad taste. How can any victory ever feel satisfying or any defeat tragic when the series refuses to let there be real consequences?
Often plot twists or endings come off as feeling deeply cheap and unearned and by authorial fiat. The Black Star / Tsubaki episodes tend to be particularly flawed: when Tsubaki defeats her brother, how exactly did she resolve her brother's problems? You can't tell me because the episode jumps straight from his festering resentment of her to her killing him somehow. Or consider Black Star's final duel with Mifune: Mifune quite reasonably thinks Black Star is a mad dog who needs to be put down before he becomes a demon like his father, and Black Star declares that this will not be a problem... because he'll simply be better than that, somehow, and cuts down Mifune. To say that this is an inadequate resolution of the problem is to dignify the episode by implying it had any resolution, and a particular pity because Black Star had the most genuine character growth over the series

What the 'meaning' of the whole series is supposed to be aside from the usual shonen tropes is unclear. Asura is clearly intended to be some form of Buddhism, as his name references the class of both benevolent & malevolent warring gods a level up from humans that Buddhism adopts from Hinduism, his weapon is a vajra (the double-ended dagger symbolically associated with Buddhas and enlightenment), vajras symbolize an entire branch of Buddhism (Vajrayana, as opposed to Hinayana or Mahayana), I think the triple-eye motif may be drawn from somewhere in Buddhism as well, Asura's appearance of rags closely resembles a mendicant priest, his third eye opening is another Hindu/Buddhist trope, he makes mystical mudra gestures (also associated with esoteric Buddhism), and his talk about killing his imagination to avoid fear could be very vaguely considered akin to Buddhism's goal of eliminating craving and hence suffering; but what does it all amount to?
And what was the role of the black blood? I thought it was supposed to reflect the Kishin's madness in some way but it never winds up being given any particular importance (quite aside from the cheap and easy way that the black blood madness infection keeps being resolved).

Overall, was this worth 51 episodes? No, not really. (Feel free to watch on 2x.)
I found this review Helpful