A special school exists for strong and talented students. It is the Death Weapon Meister Academy. Students are paired up into field-ready combat teams to hunt and capture evil souls. One student acts as a meister, the weapon master, and the other student acts as a weapon, transforming into a magical tool for specialized combat. The students aim to collect 99 evil human souls and one witch, in that order, to prove they are worthy of being used by the headmaster of the school.
Soul Eater focuses on three sets of students attending the Death Weapon Meister Academy. Maka Albarn is the perfect little student whose hard work is set back to square one when she and her weapon partner Soul Eater accidentally capture a shape-shifting cat's soul (one of nine, to be exact). Black Star, a trained ninja, comes from a disgraced family of criminals. He's teamed up with the exceptionally talented and patient Tsubaki Nakatsukasa who can become multiple weapons and steer Black Star in battle. The last team is Death the Kid, son of the headmaster, and Liz and Patty Thompson, homeless pickpockets turned magical guns.
Soul Eater follows longer story arcs with extended strategic battles against powerful witches like Medusa, Crona, and Arachne. The antagonists tend to target the more powerful students in an attempt to control or destroy them. The goal of the death scythes--weapons who reach the 100 soul threshold--is to kill witches. The witches fight back in an effort to dismantle the Death Weapon Meister Academy from the inside out.
A lot of Soul Eater is your typical wacky shonen action/fantasy/comedy series. The characters have big over the top reactions to everything they encounter. They do a lot of physical comedy and have funny catchphrases and quirks. For example, Death the Kid has severe OCD and cannot function in battle if everything is not perfectly aligned, including the Thompson sisters. His outbursts cut the tension and endear what could be a very unlikable character to a wider audience. I honestly expected to be offended by this treatment of OCD but it feels pretty accurate base on my own experiences in stressful situations.
The crux of the series, though, is the heart of the characters. More so than Naruto and other like fighting school anime/manga properties, Soul Eater is about building bonds with people. The students are pulled aside on a regular basis for private tutoring in teamwork and reading each other's needs on the battlefield. A weapon can only be used effectively by a meister who bonds with her. The characters are literally more powerful working together than they are apart.
Going beyond the individual pairs of students and instructors, Soul Eater constantly preaches about the value of kindness and compassion toward others. There is a rather unfortunate character named Crona in the series. This child, androgynous in appearance though referred to as male or female on rare occasion in the manga, flips between being a villain and a hero. He is a pathetic child, weak-willed and unable to control his weapon. His weapon, Ragnarok, actually bullies him into harvesting innocent human souls, which turns Crona's soul evil. The child, however, has no control over this thanks to the black blood--a biological insanity serum--running through his body.
When Maka and Soul Eater fight Crona, they cannot get through the black blood barrier with physical attacks. It takes actually showing compassion and reasoning with the unfortunate and unwilling villain to be able to gain the advantage in the fight. They are so empathetic in their second battle that Crona enrolls in the Death Weapon Meister Academy to learn to control Ragnarok. Any time Crona is in peril, he only escapes when assisted by the other students and faculty at the school.
Even the faculty is not immune to needing a leg-up once in a while. Franken Stein is a genius scientist and caring teacher who is prone to bouts of insanity. The students and staff constantly have to work together to help balance his mental wavelengths so he's safe to be around. Sid Barrett, another teacher, is only able to continue working at the school when Franken Stein has Maka, Soul Eater, Black Star, and Tsubaki bring him back as a zombie. Even Death himself, the headmaster of the school, has to call on students and faculty to help him run errands. He appears through a magical mirror and cannot abandon his post without risking a total takeover of the school.
Though teamwork is a pretty basic theme to riff on, Soul Eater doesn't dwell on it. It's a natural extension of the conceit of the series. Writer Atsushi Okubo establishes the meister/weapon relationship in the first issue and never includes exceptions. The characters literally cannot function or win in the Soul Eater universe without teamwork, so the value of teamwork is intrinsic to the series.
You can stream all 51 episodes of Soul Eater dubbed in English on Netflix and Hulu Plus. You can also watch the subtitled episodes at Funimation. Or, if you're really ambitious, you can buy the four seasons at iTunes. Pt. 1 Pt. 2 Pt. 3 Pt. 4
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