It seems like a slew of manga
I started reading a few years back have come to an end, though really it’s just
this and Deadman Wonderland. I’ve been reading Soul Eater for longer,
though, and in the end have certainly enjoyed it more, so I’m quite sad to see
it come to an end.
When the anime adaptation
ended with a rather rushed and dissatisfying final arc – though I did enjoy
Crona’s central place – my main thought was that it was fine that it got
botched together, because I could continue to read the manga for the true
ending, and hey, maybe one day the rest would get animated in a special, a
movie or a revival. And that’s remained my attitude as the series has faded
from public view (as most manga do when their anime ends) and tied up its loose
ends.
The final arcs have had
problems – I found Noah’s final design very lazy and unappealing, the ‘I am
your brother’ reveal (or close enough) is overdone and rang hollow for me, and
both in the arc where the characters enter the ‘book of Eibon’ and have their
genders reversed and in the painful first half of the very last chapter, which
really ought to have been spent on better things, mangaka Oukubo Atsushi’s
attempts at racy humour are without fail swings that miss. It actually stung
that rather than giving more attention to my favourite character Crona’s grand
and tragic gesture closing out the series, he wanted to do a series of bad boob
jokes.
But still, Soul Eater was well
worth the time I gave it. As I said, I adored Crona, completely
gender-ambiguous, kooky and so vulnerable behind all that strength. Excalibur
remains one of manga’s funniest creations, but his scenes with Shinigami at the
end were judged so perfectly and his presence made the scene so much more
poignant, which was deeply unexpected. Kid became far more interesting in his
interactions with the witches (nyamu!), Black☆Star became ever less of
a cliché (though never main character material) and of course Maka remains one
of the only effective shouen protagonists that is not only a girl, but a girl
absolutely held peer by the fighting boys around her. That she is also not at
all written so that her gender is an issue or even a focal point makes her
remarkable, and she is quite simply a good character at the centre of it all,
which ought not to be something strange, but absolutely is – in all action
series, not just shounen, with her closest parallel in my mind being the
eponymous main character of Avatar: Legend of Korra. Of the newer
characters, I found Gopher to be hilarious, for even if he was somewhat
one-note, the daft variations on that theme were fantastic.
There wasn’t really much in
the manga that would surprise those who stopped at the end of the anime, but
that just shows a consistent story arc throughout a work – and there was one
thing I didn’t see coming, the highly distinctive sun and moon ended up being given
a bit more attention in quite a brilliant little twist. But to really see the
way the story ought to have ended, the manga definitely does what the anime
didn’t manage, which is to satisfy.
Though if we were to have some
more, and there is certainly scope for more about what happened at the very
end, I would not complain. Until then, there’s always the fun little Soul
Eater Not!
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