“If you forget your fear you become reckless.”
Soul Eater Evans Quotes
3 quotes from Soul Eater, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Maka's weapon, a scythe who is also a pianist from a family of musicians he left. In the manga he becomes a Death Scythe; in the anime he does not, and gets to be happy about it instead. His fear is the sensible kind.
“As far as I know, music isn't picky about when it gets played.”
The reason he can say this is a scene the anime keeps in the black room: Soul at the piano, playing for Maka the piece he refused to play for his family. He is an Evans, from a house of musicians, and he left because his brother was the prodigy and the piano was a thing he was measured by. The series makes his soul resonance literally a performance, a tune played to synchronize the team, so the joke in this line is that the boy who fled music has made it his weapon technique. Nothing about it is said out loud; the show trusts the audience to have noticed which instrument is in the black room and why.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“You did it, Maka. You really are amazing. Coolest partner ever.”
What it commits the anime to is a Soul who never becomes a Death Scythe. In the manga he does, by eating Arachne's witch soul, which is the goal the pair have been chasing since the first episode, when they lose their ninety-ninth soul's worth of progress to Blair the cat. The anime skips the promotion, has Maka win with her hands, and gives Soul this instead: praise for a partner who did not need him for the final blow. It is a generous line and a strange place to leave a weapon. The manga's Soul gets the title; the anime's gets to be happy about not being the one who mattered, and the show ends before anyone asks him whether that was enough.
Read Soul Eater Evans'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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Maka's line that people need fear to grow stronger sits next to this one, and the two partners turn out to be saying different things. Hers is about growth. His is about survival, and it is the more experienced claim, because Soul is the one who has already had the black blood in him and knows what happens when the thing inside stops being afraid. The manga makes this explicit through the little demon in the black room, who offers Soul exactly that trade: forget the fear and take the power. He turns it down every time. The weapon's version of the lesson is more cautious than the meister's, which fits a character who spends the series as the one being swung.