Enter the World of Soul Eater

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We've written a bit about [Only Registered users can see links . Click Here To Register...] here, both Atsushi Okubo's long-running manga series and the animated version that's just started airing in Japan. What we haven't written, though, is a basic introduction to the series, its world, and its characters, which would help just a little bit to put those earlier reviews in perspective. Doing everything backwards is still an improvement on not doing anything at all, so for newcomers to the world of Soul Eater, here's a basic field guide to the armament, equipment, and personnel of Shinigami Weapons Development.


So What Is This "Shibusen" Anyway? "Shibusen" is one of those Japanese acronyms created by stringing syllables from several bigger words together. Just as "Gendai Shikaku Bunka Kenkyukai" (or "Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture") gets wrapped up in a nutshell to become Genshiken, so does "Shinigami Buki Shokunin Senmongakkou" become "Shibusen" for short. The long-form version of the name means something like "Death God Weapons Craftsmanship Institute." "Senmongakkou" more specifically refers to a vocational school, an institution students attend to learn a practical trade, and that's what Shibusen is for. Located in the aptly-named Death City, it's where apprentice craftsmen learn to make weapons for the God of Death.

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Shinigami-sama, to use his proper name, already has a scythe for reaping souls with, but apparently scythes wear out from time to time, so he needs a steady supply of new ones. Crafting a Death Scythe takes time and effort, though, on the part of both the weapon-smith and the weapon himself (or herself, as the case may be). So How Do They Make These Scythes?

Youngsters attending Shibusen have a mix of book-learning and practical duties. Soul Eater tends to focus on the extra-curricular side of things, since it's obviously not much fun to watch our heroes snooze through their lecture courses. Bringing a weapon into being in the laboratory, anyway, is barely half of the job, which is why the kids can't just hang around school all the time. At any given time, apprentice weapons technicians are usually at work on just one weapon. (This isn't a hard and fast rule, however, as we'll see a little bit further down.) A would-be Death Scythe takes a lot of care to craft, and more to the point, it takes a lot of use. It has to get used to reaping souls before Shinigami-sama can put it to work.

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It has to reap a certain kind of soul, though. A Death Scythe's diet primarily consists of "kishin," which literally means "fierce god." In the context of Soul Eater's fictional world, a kishin is a human soul gone bad, filled with enough hatred and power to evolve into a deadly monstrous form. Scythe-crafters perform a useful service by catching evil souls before they turn into full-fledged kishin, and by feeding those souls to their scythes, they gradually evolve them towards completion.

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The basic math goes like so: 99 kishin souls and one witch's soul. Of course, the witch's soul is the kicker. Witches are among the major antagonists in Soul Eater -- the most powerful among their number can go toe-to-toe with Shinigami-sama and his deadly chop, or close enough to it in any case.

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Once a scythe has eaten its requisite diet of those 100 souls, no more and no less, it's officially a Death Scythe. If it looks like a witch and casts spells like a witch, though, it still isn't always a witch, which gets a certain rookie weapon-smith in trouble right away.


And Who Are These Scythe-Making Kids? While Shibusen is a bustling operation with many students and scythes wandering in and out of the picture, [Only Registered users can see links . Click Here To Register...] largely focuses on three different teams of weapon and weapons-master. MAKA ALBAN and SOUL EATER Played by Chiaki Omigawa and Kouki Uchiyama Consider these two the products of Shibusen's more traditionalist wing. When he's doing his scything, Soul Eater actually looks like a scythe – big long haft, long curved blade. The show's constant warping of perspective does mean he changes size and shape an awful lot, but you can always chalk that up to Shinigami technical know-how.

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When he's not doing the scything, he's harder to handle. All three of the series' central sets of characters are, to some extent or another, an odd couple, and Soul Eater is definitely the Felix Unger in this partnership. He leers, he drools, he enthusiastically nosebleeds at the sight of a pretty girl, and he never stops ribbing his mistress about whatever chink in her armor presents itself. (Unfortunately, we get a lot of the flat-chest jokes that should have gone out of style with Slayers as a consequence.)

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Maka tends to react pretty badly to her her partner's more puerile habits. Her rocky relationship with her father causes her a lot of stress, which is aggravated by the fact that she can't really get away from him – he's Shinigami-sama's current official Death Scythe, and thus an inescapable fixture around Shibusen. Daddy loves his daughter, but he loves the ladies in general a little too much for his own good. It certainly hasn't done much for Maka's opinion of him, anyway.

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BLACK STAR and TSUBAKI Played by Yumiko Kobayashi and Kaori Nazuka In theory, at least (more on the practice later), these two represent the stealthy, assassination-oriented approach to soul collection. Alone among the weapons featured prominently in the series, Tsubaki can shift into many different forms. When she's not a tall, gorgeous young lady in an understated outfit, she's a set of kusarigama (two one-handed sickles with a chain stringing them together), but she can also turn into a giant shuriken, an explosive smoke bomb, or a sneaky duplicate of Black Star himself.

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This would work beautifully in the hands of the right wielder, but of course, it's not that simple. Star's great weakness is…well, himself. More specifically, his very high opinion of himself. He tends to spout noisy proclamations of his greatness at the absolute worst possible time – when he ought to be reaping a roomful of demonic gangsters, say. When he can stay focused on the task at hand, he's incredibly dangerous, but he's not all that focused all that often.

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Star also shares Soul Eater's fondness for pretty ladies, and his own partner in particular. He's forever trying to peek at her in the Shibusen bath-house, but of course, he tends to announce his presence a little bit prematurely. Given what a man's man he considers himself, he'd probably be mortified to learn that he's voiced by a woman.
DEATH THE KID and the THOMPSON SISTERS Played by Mamoru Miyano, Narumi Takahira (Patty), and Akeno Watanabe (Liz) Death the Kid (yes, that's his given name, by all accounts) has a special place among the students at Shibusen. You might say he's on the fast track, on account of his unusual parentage. When his father passes away, or perhaps simply retires, he'll probably become the new God of Death himself. Yep, Death the Kid is Shinigami-sama's son. He doesn't much take after his dad, though, in any area except his monochromatic fashion sense. His father is calm, relaxed, fairly restrained, and has a pretty decent sense of humor for a Reaper. Death the Kid, on the other hand…is not.

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Unlike Maka and Black Star, the Kid carries two "scythes" at once. When they're working, Patty and Liz Thompson take the form of two ornate automatic pistols, right out of the John Woo playbook. In their human form, they're two pretty young women in goofy ear-flapped hats. Liz is the smaller one in the poofy shorts, Patty is the tall one in the hipster jeans. While it seems like he might have a big advantage in the weaponry department – one sister can even fire the other, in a pinch -- the Kid has his share of issues holding him back. Mainly he suffers from what you might call a fixed idea, an obsession with the idea of symmetry. He likes everything to look nice and neat that way, and seeing an otherwise symmetrical arrangement knocked out of whack can send him into a literally homicidal rage. This gives Mamoru Miyano all kinds of opportunities to work out the bits of his range that he used in Ouran Host Club, veering off into hilarious tantrums out of nowhere.

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It's not hard for his wrath to be directed inward, though – note that those three stripes on the left side of his hairdo are not mirrored on the right. The Thompsons also have to put up with a dose of his OCD from time to time, since when they're in human form, they obviously don't quite match.

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In other evidence that he may have a screw loose (or maybe this is an example of his creator's peculiar damage), he prefers to grip his handguns upside-down and pull the triggers with his pinky fingers. American comic artist Adam Warren cracked that exact same joke in his first Gen13 story, so hopefully he will be able to secure damages for gag infringement. So Who Runs This Whole Shebang?

As gods of death go, Shinigami-sama is pretty relaxed about his job. Shibusen is kind of like the inverse of Bleach's Soul Society, in that folks seem to develop a better and better sense of humor about their work as you make your way up the hierarchy.

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Rikiya Koyama (probably best known as Takamura in Fighting Spirit) puts a spin on his voice that's almost impossible to describe. He does not, at least, sound like you'd expect Death to sound. He's definitely the right Death for Soul Eater, though, and he can still lay down the law when he needs to. The universally-feared One-Hand Shinigami Chop can lay low even a full-fledged Death Scythe, and it frequently does just that. Shinigami-sama sums up a lot of what makes Soul Eater an entertaining show. He manages to be weird, foreboding, dark, and really funny all at once. He's also more than a little bit silly from time to time, but not so much that it ever gets out of hand.