Category: Soul Eater

Well, I asked this at my Nijuu Mensou no Musume-entry already, but it doesn’t hurt to ask this again, in order to get some more reactions. Another thing that caught my attention at the reader-survey was the relatively large amount of people who’d like to see those quick synopsises that I had about a year ago back.

For example:

Short Synopsis: As it turns out, the “secret training” turns out to be getting Soul and Maka to argue with each other in order to get them closer together.
Highlights: Makes sense; character-development; finally an exciting fight in this series.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10

(Yeah, I dropped the “bad”-part of this synopsis. If I recall correctly, the original reason why I dropped it was because this forced me to say something bad about each episode).

I must say, I’m impressed. I’m still not sure why, but this fight was the most exciting of the entire series. There was a pretty nice combination between humour and character-development. That werewolf was a pretty interesting enemy to fight against. On top of that, Maka’s blood turning black was an interesting new plot-twist, making me wonder which direction the creators plan to be heading to.

On a more serious note, Windspirit rather confirmed something that I’ve been noticing for a while now: Soul Eater isn’t the right series for me to blog. It’s not a bad series by far, but I’m always struggling to say something interesting about this series, so I just tend to fill space by nitpicking on useless details. There’s an interesting line-up standing for the upcoming Summer season, and I’m already planning to blog a lot of the new series. So yeah, don’t be surprised if I end up dropping this series from blogging next week, in favour of a new series. Even though this series ironically is my biggest source of readers at the moment. ^^;

This was another one of those building-up episodes, mostly dedicated to show how l33t the powers of Medusa are. That’s one thing I rather dislike of shounen-series: it takes ages to get to the good stuff, and the building-up episodes hardly provide anything interesting.

This episode was decent enough, I suppose: we see the identity of the head witch and Maka finally stops angsting over Soul and in the next episode, she and Soul will get some special training in order to power up. I really hope that the creators won’t end up god-moding their characters this way… a common pitfall of these shounen-series is that they power up their lead characters way too much, instead of choosing for the more continuous growth. Claymore is one of the few who actually avoided this one.

In terms of the serious side of Soul Eater, this was surprisingly the best episode yet. It’s indeed really good to see Tsubaki finally do something on her own, without watching from the side-lines. The fights themselves in this series may be nothing special, but the characters really succeed in bringing them alive.

Black Star getting repeatedly bashed on the head by these villagers may have been a bit too much, but it does show that the guy is an excellent spectator. Guys like him often are great when they just watch a fight and don’t interfere with it. I guess that it’s fresh from the usual where the energetic ones are fighting and the quiet ones do nothing.

First, I’d like to thank everyone for voting for Star Crossed at the Anime Blog Awards. While it was indeed obvious that Random Curiosity would dominate the category for “Best Episodic Blog”, I’m glad to see that I managed to walk away with the bronze award.

Anyway, about Soul Eater: this episode was another one o those building-up episodes. Tsubaki’s brother seems to be causing trouble, possessing his victims and forcing them to go on a killing-spree, so Tsubaki goes after him. The next episode should tell us more about why the heck he’s ended up doing things like that.

But really, is it me or is Black Star a bit too similar to Naruto? Sad past? Check. Shunned for things that aren’t his fault? Check. Acting highly energetic because of this? Check. Stupid haircut/outfit? Check. It’s good thing that he’s not involved in any rivalry, and his relationship with Tsubaki has done a lot to make up for this. I especially liked how he doesn’t seem to care whether Tsubaki uses him for her own goals or not. I’m still not impressed by the fights in this series, but the special bonds between the weapons meisters and their weapons have been getting better and better.

After the rather serious previous episodes, we finally get another comedy-episode, in which the strange fairy-like creature of the OP gets introduced. It turns out to be Excalibur, with a head so full of himself that it makes even Black Star sick. This episode was downright hilarious, with many thanks to the wonderful combination of Death the Kid and Black Star.

One thing I’m wondering: we see Black Star read an English comic in this episode, and yet he had huge problems with reading the word “Excalibur”. Small writer’s mistake?

In any case, what I’d like to see in the next couple of episodes is more about Tsubaki. For the past number of episodes, all she did was watch from the side-lines, do nothing, and clean. I’d love to see her in a situation where the writers make fun of her personality.

A pretty decent conclusion of the previous episode. It’s nothing deep or special yet, but it does the job of keeping my interest. Soul and Maka were bound to get saved somehow, and so Stein and Maka’s father pop up at the exact right moment (was it explained how they knew that Chrona would be at the same place as Soul and Maka? I couldn’t quite catch that in the raw). The Witch Medusa also is also one of those villains with the “Sailor Moon”-syndrome (just put on a different outfit, and nobody recognizes you. I can understand Maka and her father not noticing this, but Stein seems like a sharp guy; he could have easily recognized her).

My favourite part of this episode was without a doubt the scene where Black Star suddenly barged into the hospital room. Maka was about to get a bit too angsty for her own good, and his entrance was perfect to lighten up the mood, and downright hilarious as well. This show really is at its best when it focuses at the banter between the various main characters.

Well, we finally meet the major antagonist for at least the first part of this anime. The comedy in the fights was abandoned completely unfortunately, but thankfully the chemistry between Soul and Maka continued to be very enjoyable. At the moment, I can’t really place Soul Eater among the best series of this season, though. It’s good, but there are many better series in my opinion. I think that the biggest reason for this is that it spent too much time on flashy fights so far, while it could have used this time to flesh out the characters a bit more. But then again, because this series has 51 episodes, it does have much more time to do this than most other series.

I do want to say something about the use of thugs, though. Not just here, but many anime seem to be really lazy when handling them. They’re nearly all just a bunch of loudmouthed stereotypes, and unfortunately they too are just cannon fodder in Soul Eater as well. I think that that’s why the punk enemy in the Law of Ueki worked so well: he made this punk-stereotype completely ridiculous with his obsessions.

In other news, it turns out that the reason why we never see anything of Maka’s mother is because she divorced a month ago. Now I also understand why Maka’s father is so hopelessly fooling around with other women. Something’s telling me that he’s trying to forget her by doing this. 😛

Here’s a strange phenomenon I have no explanation of: due to the recent arrests, a large amount of the Share-users have stopped uploading their files by now, though the few that remain find it for some strange and inexplicable reason a good idea to release in a high quality video-file as possible. Suddenly, 75% of all new files are in some kind HD .mp4 or .mkv-format. So… yeah. If you’ve been wondering why I’ve been so slow for the past few days: my pc doesn’t support HD video-files.

In any case, I’m glad that this series is really taking its time exploring its concepts. This time, we see that not just any weapon meister can team up with a random weapon, even if the two of them are best friends. Their souls need to be in resonance in order for this to happen. The key is much more to understanding each other.

The thing I’m waiting for right now is to see Soul or Black Star, teaming up with Kid in a team-mission. Death the Kid really seems like a person who prefers fighting alone (or alone with his weapons). I can imagine how he’ll have huge amounts of trouble, trying to work together with the asymmetric idiots that are Soul and especially Black Star.

Now this is more like it! This episode showed none of the weaknesses I spotted in the last episode, and delivered both an entertaining fight and good comedy. This is exactly what I look for in a shounen-series, because series of this type shouldn’t take their story too seriously. Soul Eater so far has managed to deliver a pretty good combination between serious and semi-serious scenes.

I’ve noticed that the creators like to use anti-climaxes a lot. They build up tension, only to go into a completely different direction when the tension’s about to reach its height. This should prove to be quite interesting once they start playing with it as the series progresses and develops. One thing I do hope that the creators realize is to not make the fights go on for ages. Kekkaishi did this well: only the big fights went on for longer than one episode, and even that felt too long. Fights are the best when they’re short and sweet.

Frankenstein has indeed proved to be an interesting character, who likes to perform experiments no matter what. He also used to perform lots of experiments on Maka’s father when he was asleep. 😛 So far, it also seems like he’s not totally dependant on this stereotype, and this sounds more like a part of the guy’s personality. A lot of comedies need to learn that energetic characters don’t need to be energetic all the time, ill-tempered people don’t need to be ill-tempered all the time, et cetera, et cetera. Showing a carefree person suddenly getting serious isn’t development, it’s just fleshing out the guy’s character.

I’m wondering… why does Tsubaki get naked when she’s in weapon-mode, and yet Soul gets to keep his clothes? I mean, I can understand how a bit of fanservice here and there is nice and all and how this would scare off the guys who are afraid to see other men without any clothes on, but at least keep things a bit consistent.

In any case, this episode started a bit disappointing, where Maka beat up Soul a few too many times. Jokes like these stopped being funny ever since Love Hina overused them. Thankfully, as this episode went along, it introduced a few new things, including a resonance-mode that goes wrong. And a Black Star who is actually calculating when he doesn’t need to ambush anyone.

Having said that though, this episode was the least funny of this series so far, since more than half of the jokes were just reused from the previous ones. The bad guy of this week, a teacher turned zombie that uses his own gravestone as a weapon, didn’t feel that inspired. This can mean two things:
1) This series already used up its best jokes and has run out of inspiration. Things would be pretty bad if this was the case.
2) Seeing as it’s 52 episodes we’re talking about, the creators cleverly decided to use their best jokes for later, when the characters are actually developed. Sortof like the Law of Ueki, which also was rather dull at this point. The next episode should be better, as it’ll introduce another major character: a certain Dr Frankenstein who used to partner up with Death Scythe before he met Maka’s mother (speaking of which, what happened to her? Heck, where has Shinigami’s wife run off to?)