Soul Eater

While spending much of May feeling ill, one of the things I did was watch through Code Geass and Soul Eater. While dealing with being sick this month, I watched Blue Exorcist. Over the next couple of weeks, I will be posting my opinions on these series, starting with Soul Eater.

Soul Eater follows Maka, Black Star, and Death the Kid, three student technicians--the licensed version of Soul Eater may use a different term; our copy is a fansub that we purchased before the series was picked up by Funimation. Each of the three main characters is paired up with a weapon, an entity that can switch between human form and the form of a weapon of some sort. Maka is paired with Soul, a scythe, and the character who the series is named after; even after watching the whole series, I'm not 100% sure why it follows him. Black Star is paired with Tsubaki, the one weapon in the series who can take on multiple forms. Death the Kidd is paired with Liz and Patty, a pair of guns. At the start of the series, we learn that a weapon is supposed to hunt down 99 Kishin--best translation I can guess at is corrupted--souls and eat them; then they are to hunt down a witch, kill her, then eat her soul. This process qualifies them to be a Death Scythe, which contrary to what the name would suggest does not have to be a scythe. This is the premise the series starts with, but it quickly diverges from this potentially formulaic plot line.

On the plus side, this made the plot more interesting and less predictable. On the down side, it moved away from that so quickly that it lost relevancy. That goal quickly takes a back seat to the main plot which involves a pair of witch sisters. It is worth adding here that the 99 corrupted souls need to be consumed before the single witch's soul, and doing it out of order resets the count, as does consuming anything other than a Kishin soul or a witch's soul. This further removes relevancy from the initial premise for Soul Eater. I won't go into a lot of detail on the actual plot to avoid spoilers, but I will give my opinion of it. I think it was decently interesting, but at times it was hard to follow, left a lot of unanswered questions, and seemed to have a lot of parts that didn't fit well with the overall story. I still enjoyed the series, even if I felt the plot had problems. The characters were fun, and although it has some dark moments, the series overall has a light-hearted feel to it; at times, it even crosses into the realm of completely ridiculous. I won't say it was my favorite series, but it was worth watching. I might try rewatching it if I can get my hands on a licensed copy because it's entirely possible that some of my confusion of the plot was from a bad translation.