Series in one sentence:
The one character you love and the romances you want to see are completely absent.
Series in more sentences:
Death has set up a special school for students who want to become "soul hunters" and rid the world of evil beings who try to eat the souls of innocent people. The students plan to use the evil they've defeated to turn their living fighting tools into a "death scythe"; a weapon worthy for Death to use.
We follow the life of three different teams, who end up fighting the biggest threats the world has encountered so far.
When I originally started this article, I gave it the rating "good", but that was before I was halfway through the series.
It left me disappointed. The relationships between the characters seemed very wobbly; one moment they're bff's, having dinner together and ready to die for each other, but in the next they're snarling and fighting. Especially the characters Black Star and Maka are loose cannons that the series describes as the ones with perfect loyalty, like they're the heroes everyone should strive to be like, even though these two continuously scold their friends whenever they're in an angsty mood created by their own non-existent problems and overdramatic worries.
The series starts off with the introduction of the coolest character ever, Soul, but there's so little of him in the entirety of the series, he was an episode away from being a side character. The later introduced Black Star got way more development than him.
The first episode portrayed Soul as cocky and cool, but he quickly functioned as the voice of reason in his friends' moments of insanity -a role that Black Star's partner was also given- and I wouldn't have minded this change if the anime had invested any time in Soul's character development. Nothing was revealed about his past, personality, likes, dislikes, or anything that would make him human and interesting. Soul was often "just there", and I can only assume that the manga reveals more about him, but since we're dealing with a series that has this character's name in the title, you'd think he'd be on the foreground of things, no matter the media output.
Still, it was nice seeing him on screen, he's one of the few people in the show who keeps a cool head and stays polite, even after being sneered at by his so-called best friend. Which is always.
The further you get into the series, the less you believe these two to have much of a friendship at all, which is a tremendous failure of the anime's creators. They're supposed to be a tight fighting duo, the point is that they need to trust each other in order to succeed, but Maka makes that very hard for Soul. She is one of the biggest pieces of shit and her reactions towards people and events hardly ever makes sense. And as if that's not enough, she turns into a lazy sulking crybaby further on in the series.
Your willingness to like her has pretty much disappeared at that point. Much like your willingness to ship her with Soul. Don't deny it, I know you've tried, but why even waste your time doing this, she obviously has a boner for the gender-confused Crona, the only character in the series she's actually nice to.
The ending was an insult to injury, they basically borrowed it from a Care Bear episode. In the final battle, Maka was close to receiving an epic reveal, something that would've made her shitty character somewhat cool again, but it didn't even last for 5 seconds. She was back to her old lame self without much explanation given to what the fuck even happened.
Her almost-reveal proved to have been such a waste of animation, she managed to defeat the villain in the most laughable way possible, without her gift making a return. Laughable, not because the method is bad, but because the person who was claimed to be "the ultimate representation" of this method is bad;
Maka was put on a pedestal as the embodiment of "bravery", and this made her win the battle somehow.
I had to agree with the villain's words, which was literally this: "I don't get it. Why do you (her friends) have so much faith in her? She's weak! She isn't special! She's nothing more than a human! What is bravery?"
Maka is the worst fighter and person in the world, nothing she did throughout the series impressed me, yet she's the ultimate braveheart? This personality trait that every single character in the show exhibits? But unlike Maka, they are strong, nice, intelligent, and actually get things done? Even she claimed that all people are brave -which isn't true, idiot- but at least she acknowledges she's indeed nothing special.
The ending battle also made me realise something about the fighting scenes in general, and that's that the fighters who were first announced as incredibly talented and strong got easily defeated when necessary for the story, every time again.
For example, here you had Death successfully blocking all the villain's attacks, but then he gets nearly killed by a blast he effortlessly deflected twice already. The same thing with these kids who were fighting the villain. They couldn't land a single scratch on him, then suddenly, they destroy him, but then they're lying knocked out on the ground again. This is a lazy way to create tension in an action scene.
Perhaps the series would've worked better if there wasn't a main plot. The episodes and scenes where they fooled around were more entertaining than the ones that progressed the story. The characters appeared fun and relaxed in those.
I hoped to had found another gem left ignored for all these years, but Soul Eater never gave me what I wanted to see most, so I'd rather forget I ever watched this and move on.
