“No. 578: The hero must never tell a lie.”
Excalibur Quotes
2 quotes from Soul Eater, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Read the character analysis and its source limits
The holy sword, the strongest weapon in the world, unusable because of a thousand provisions and a personality. One of the provisions is not a joke.
“My legend dates back to the 12th Century thank you very much.”
The English of it is Funimation's, and the choice of register is the joke. The dub's fool, delivered with Troy Baker's clipped, faintly aristocratic sniff, turns a generic insult into a character: an Arthurian relic with the manners of a bad dinner guest. This line's thank you very much does the same work, importing the intonation of a British stage grandee into a dripping cave. The Japanese cannot do that, because the accent it would need does not exist there. It is one of the few cases in the corpus where the dub is straightforwardly funnier than the original, and it is funnier by giving a sword a nationality.
About Excalibur
Guides
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- The Best Soul Eater Quotes, Every Line Checked
- Soul Eater Watch Order: The Anime, Soul Eater Not! and the Manga
- Soul Eater Manga Buying Guide: Paperbacks or Perfect Edition
- Soul Eater: Sub or Dub?
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Around Soul Eater
More from Soul Eater
Read Excalibur's story from the start
Explore Soul Eater in book form. Check the listing for the edition, language and volumes included. The source beside each quote records where its wording was checked; it may differ from the wording in this edition.
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It is the one provision on the list of a thousand that is not a joke, and it is buried between the one about walking three steps behind him and the one about the freshest ingredients. The usual reading treats Excalibur as a gag character, the legendary sword nobody can stand to wield. The gag has a point the anime plays straight: he really is the strongest weapon in the world, and the price of using him is a set of rules that are mostly vanity and occasionally the actual code of a hero. Kid and Black Star walk out. Neither is willing to keep the ridiculous rules for the sake of the one that matters, which is a fairly exact description of both boys.