“This is fear. That's good then, I had forgotten what it felt like.”
Franken Stein Quotes
2 quotes from Soul Eater, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
The teacher with a screw through his head that he turns himself, who dissected his own partner in his sleep and greets the return of fear with relief. The villain's argument in a lab coat, and the school's best meister.
“I have a simpler motive. Experimentation and observation that's all a true scientist cares about. And I am a scientist. Everything in the world is an experimental test subject, of course that includes myself as well.”
He means the last clause literally. The screw through his head is one he turns himself, and the flashback to his student years shows him dissecting his own weapon partner, Spirit, in his sleep for years without telling him. The line is delivered as a creed and lands as a confession, because the person he has experimented on most is the one saying it. Where he starts is a boy the school could barely keep in a classroom; where he ends up is the teacher the school trusts with the class that includes Maka, Spirit's daughter. The series lets him keep the creed and simply surrounds him with people who count as exceptions to it, which is a slower kind of reform than a speech.
Read Franken Stein's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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Against Stein, the best case is that he is the villain's argument walking around in a lab coat, and this line is the evidence. He greets the return of fear with relief, which is exactly what Asura preaches: madness as honesty, the mask coming off. But watch what he does with it. Stein uses the fear as a reading, the way he uses his soul perception, to tell where the kishin's wavelength is and how far into him it has got. Asura wants fear to end thought; Stein wants it as an instrument. That he later loses the argument and has to be pulled back by Marie is a concession the show makes without flinching. The line is not a fall. It is a scientist noticing a symptom.