Soul Eater is Still Amazing | Manga Mondays

 Hey hi hello friends, and welcome back to my blog!

What up it's been 82 years since I've posted a Manga Mondays but here we fucking are, I guess. 

Let me give you some backstory for reference. 

The year is 2011. Past-Ally has just entered high school, a small freshman trying to establish what her "arc" will be in the next four years. Will she be a jock? A nerd? Maybe she'll join band even though she has never touched an instrument in her entire life? Enter...Soul Eater. 

So, Soul Eater totally and completely consumed my life freshman year of high school, as it did with most of my friend group, too. My friend Emily was the one who introduced us all, and we took it and ran. My friends and I have so many inside jokes that are nearly a decade old about this show. Also, let it be known this was the first time I fell in love with a 2D animated character. Death the Kid still remains one of my favorite anime boys (can you tell I have a type when it comes to anime boys? Kid, Shouto Todoroki from My Hero Academia, Tobio Kageyama from Haikyu!! it's a sickness, really). Like, Emily literally drew me as an anime character next to Death the Kid and I kept it in my binder for years. I wonder if I can find a picture of it...

EDIT: OH MY GOD I FOUND IT--

(I was the most pathetic 14-year-old holy shit.)

Yeah. This was the beginning of my potato, weeb life. 

Anyway. Soul Eater follows students of the Death Weapon-Meister Academy (or the DWMA) as they train to battle Kishins, beings that have consumed innocent human souls and become corrupt. Meisters work with Weapons, people that can turn into special Kishin-killing machines in order to rid the word of them. If a Weapon consumes 99 Kishin souls and 1 Witch soul, they will become Lord Death's personal Weapon, a Death Scythe. (By the way, Lord Death is the ruling Shinigami protector of this world. And Death the Kid is his son, a Shinigami in training.) We follow three particular Weapon-Meister pairs as they battle to create the next Death Scythe. 

The animation style was what originally drew me in, and then I disappeared into the rabbit hole. To this day, I still know all the words (yes, the Japanese) to the OPs and EDs. I can quote most episodes. I was totally obsessed. 

Last year, I introduced Angela to the anime and was thrilled when she enjoyed it, too! I always felt Soul Eater was a kind of particular fandom and couldn't find a whole lot of other people who liked it, except for my friends in high school, and they definitely don't think it holds up still after all these years like I do. So to have my best friend and fellow weeb love this anime of my teenage years? It meant so much to me. I finally had someone to talk about it with again!

(She totally binged the series, too. It was great.)

Okay, back to the point I was gonna make with this MM. I'm reading the manga!

For my birthday I decided to splurge and get the first two omnibus volumes, named "The Perfect Editions."

I love it when publishers revamp old manga in omnibus and special edition volumes (and I definitely like to collect those, since there are usually less of them). Of course, I already own the first 11 volumes of the 22 volume series, and I plan on getting the second half as well, but considering how much I love this series, I figure I'm okay with having two sets. 

The biggest thing I've noticed is that the art style of the manga is really different from the animation style! I wasn't expecting that, since the animators typically try to keep as much of the artist's original style as possible. I'm definitely not complaining, the manga style is a bit softer than the anime and therefore I find it a lot cuter. 

Also one thing I do know, is that the anime writes its own canon and takes a different ending from the manga. Typically that happens when the anime runs out of manga content, and can't wait until the next volumes come out to keep writing the show. The same thing happened with Tokyo Ghoul and the original Fullmetal Alchemist anime. However, I don't actually know how the manga ends, so I'm super excited to see how it turned out!

Well oki-doki, I think that's all I wanted to gush about today. I hope you enjoyed the little look into my brain as a teenager, and please be rest-assured that I am nothing like that anymore but I am still a simp for Death the Kid. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Until next time!