What is Soul Eater?
Soul Eater is a Japanese manga written and illustrated by Atsushi Ohkubo, serialized in Square Enix's Monthly Shonen Gangan from 2004 to 2013 and collected in 25 volumes. It is set in Death City, Nevada, a Halloween flavored town built around the Death Weapon Meister Academy, the school run by Lord Death himself.
The academy's students work in pairs: a meister who wields, and a demon weapon, a human who transforms into a scythe, gun, sword or other arm. Their assignment gives the series its clean quest structure: collect the souls of 99 evil humans and one witch, in that order, and the weapon becomes a Death Scythe fit for Lord Death's own hand. One mistake resets the count to zero.
The leads are Maka Albarn, a diligent scythe meister, and her partner Soul Eater Evans, a laid back scythe who would rather look cool than study. Around them Ohkubo builds an ensemble: the loud assassin Black Star and his weapon Tsubaki, and Death the Kid, Lord Death's symmetry obsessed son, with his twin pistol partners Liz and Patty Thompson.
Under the school structure runs a darker plot about madness. The demon sword Ragnarok, the witch Medusa's experiments on her own child Crona, and the Kishin Asura, a god of fear sealed beneath the academy, pull the comedy cast into a war over whether the world runs on order or insanity.
The series became one of the defining shonen titles of its decade, selling over 19 million copies, anchoring Square Enix's Gangan line in the West through its Bones anime adaptation, and launching Ohkubo toward Fire Force. Its 25 volumes are complete, which makes Soul Eater a closed, collectible shelf.
