“I'll admit Black Star makes some dumb calls from time to time, but the important thing is I'm here to back him up no matter how big a fool he is. If we're fools we're fools together, that's the kind of team we are.”
Tsubaki Nakatsukasa Quotes
2 quotes from Soul Eater, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Black Star's weapon, named for a flower without fragrance, who carries her meister through fights he picked and gets one arc of her own, about her brother, fought inside her own blade. Her loyalty is the mechanism the partner system runs on.
“I have a friend who has helped me realize something. He's helped me see that a Camellia does have a fragrance!”
Tsubaki is the Japanese for camellia, and the flower that proclaims nothing and drops its whole head at once is a standard image for a quiet death, which is how she introduces herself. The dub keeps the botany and loses the name, so an English viewer hears a girl talking about a flower and a Japanese viewer hears a girl talking about herself. The line is her reversing the introduction, and the Japanese audience gets the reversal in one word. The friend is Black Star, the loudest person in the series, and the show's argument is that a flower without scent needs someone who cannot stop shouting to be noticed at all. Whether that is a compliment to him or to her is left to the viewer.
Read Tsubaki Nakatsukasa'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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Call it a doormat's creed, because that is the strongest objection, and the series does not entirely rebut it. Tsubaki absorbs Black Star's mistakes for fifty episodes, carries him out of fights he picked, and gets to be the protagonist of exactly one arc, the one about her brother Masamune, which she wins alone and inside her own weapon form. So the objection stands as far as screen time goes. Where it fails is the word team: the weapon-meister system runs on resonance, two souls matching wavelengths, and the show's lesson from Kid's early asymmetry panics is that mismatched partners cannot fight at all. Tsubaki's loyalty is the mechanism, and she describes it accurately. The cost of it is that her own story had to be told in one episode.