Mifune Quotes
2 quotes from Soul Eater, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
A swordsman guarding a child witch, who will not kill a boy for money and says so mid-fight. The series' most respected adversary; he dies in the anime and teaches at the academy in the manga.
“If I killed a kid, that would give me nightmares.”
He says it to Black Star's face, mid-fight, as the reason he will not finish him, and it is where the character starts. Mifune is introduced as a swordsman of the kind this genre normally makes disposable, a hired blade standing between a gang and a witch's castle, and the line is the first sign that the show has other plans. The refusal is not mercy in the abstract. He is raising Angela, a child witch, and a man who has taken that on cannot kill children for money any more, whatever his contract says. The series builds its most respected adversary out of that one limit and lets the boy he spared spend the rest of the story trying to deserve it.
Read Mifune'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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The question commits Black Star to answering it, and his answer, that he walks his own path and nobody else's, is the loudest line he has. The quieter fact is what the question costs Mifune. He asks it as the bodyguard of a witch child, Angela, and the academy he is fighting has a policy of killing witches; in the manga he ends up teaching at the DWMA on the condition that she is kept safe, and in the anime he dies. The man offering the two paths has already chosen a third, protecting someone he has no obligation to, and the series treats that choice as the one that makes him worth beating. Black Star has to win the fight to earn the question.