Disability in Soul Eater, part 3: The Mad Scientist and his Assistive Device
Part three of a series. Part one and two)
Contains: discussion of psychotic experiences and violent urges, including harming animals and people. Also, spoilers GALORE and lots of pictures.
Note: The manga panels are read right to left.
In Atsushi Ohkubo’s manga Soul Eater, the Grim Reaper runs a school for humanoid weapons and the people who wield them (meisters). The weapons eat souls; when they’ve consumed the souls of 99 evil humans and one witch, they become Death Scythes, fit for the Grim Reaper’s personal use. There is much ass-kicking, playing with Cthulhu Mythos, body horror, some fanservice, and quite a few neurologically atypical beings. Most of them are just members of the cast who are (mostly) accepted by everyone else and whose disabilities are just a part of who they are. Some of its madness gods are actually disabled, as is its mad scientist:
This is Doctor Herbert West Franken Stein. He’s one of the teachers at the Grim Reaper’s school, and is obsessed with dissecting things--including other people:
and himself:
Stein is the greatest weapon master ever to graduate from Shibusen. (He used to cut up his own weapon every night--this weapon, who’s now the Grim Reaper’s official Death Scythe, is terrified of him.) Stein’s so great he doesn’t even need a weapon to fight: as the Grim Reaper explains it, while most meisters need a weapon-amplifier to play their spiritual electric guitars Stein can blast you with his soul wavelength directly. Our heroes find this out the hard way…on their Special Lesson of Doom. In fact, Stein was so scary that the Grim Reaper’s own son was afraid he would kill them.
Oh--and he’s one of the good guys.
As his wiki entry points out, Stein is named for both Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his creature in Mary Shelley’s novel. He has a screw in his head and a weapon who uses electricity to speed up his reflexes. These things are references to Frankenstein’s monster, certainly. But they’re also popularly associated with mental illness: his weapon’s special ability calls electro-shock therapy to mind, and he literally “has a screw loose:”
When Stein was a child, doctors tried to find out why he was obsessed with dissecting things and couldn’t. I love that the series doesn’t offer a reason why Stein is this way. (But then, I have a huge narrative kink for disabled characters who are allowed to just exist without being pathologized to hell and back.) As an adult, Stein knows it’s bad form to cut his students into pieces, so he channels his obsession into pursuits that are…less fatal harmful to minors likely to kill people he works with. Like, oh, bringing endangered animals for his class to dissect:
and writing brutal exams:
Not dissecting people takes effort, and Stein doesn’t “overcome” this obsession so much as be able to teach and save the day and generally function in the world through lots of hard work. For this reason, he’s the person most sensitive to the Kishin’s madness wavelengths. The Grim Reaper assigns him a weapon partner whose soul wavelength will help protect him. Her name is Marie:
Marie Mjolnir and Stein went to school together, and she had a crush on him. (She may still.) She gets along with almost everyone, even the person everyone else calls the “Queen of Committee Chairmen” because she never let them get away with anything when they were children. They chat in the restroom now and then and seem to be friends.
Marie also has no sense of direction whatsoever. It can take Marie hours to find places in Shibusen that would take most people a few minutes--and she went to school there for years.
In fact, Marie was a major reason I started watching/reading Soul Eater, as I have a Thing for characters with navigational impairments. (People like me! On TV and in books! And so many!) I don’t know if Ohkubo considers her sense of direction a disability, and she certainly breaks the pattern he’s set up. Marie’s a weapon and the other disabled characters are meisters. While the other disabled protagonists have people who help them function--Marie herself is this person for Stein--there isn’t a specific person who helps her navigate. In the anime she and Crona go on a mission together and Crona leads the way (after Marie’s disastrous attempts to find the place):
Marie’s soul wavelength should help Stein keep the Kishin’s madness at bay, but thanks to the villains and Crona. Dammit, Crona something goes horribly wrong. Being near her actually makes the madness stronger. Stein starts hallucinating and is sometimes incapacitated on missions; eventually he stays in his lab, unable to teach or go on missions.
Stein “fights off” the madness in the same way he keeps himself from cutting up everyone around him. He smokes incessantly but gives up cigarettes because “If I can’t stand not smoking, I certainly won’t be able to stand the insanity.” He reminds himself what’s real and what isn’t, muttering “That’s not there” when he sees the Kishin’s eye-symbol on the walls. Stein has to know how his body works so he can experiment on himself without dying; he also has to be very familiar with his mind to not kill other people function in the world.
It’s hard to tease out my feelings about Stein. On the one hand…psychosis associated with someone who does really scary things to people. On the other hand, he actually avoids doing scary things to people most of the time. (Of course, he’s not above messing with people’s heads, like the time he told the Death Scythe that he’d switched his middle toes while he was sleeping. Poor Death Scythe.)
Though one of the characters claims Stein has no love in him, I disagree. He may not be cuddly and overflowing with praise, but he doesn’t hold the people he works with in contempt--unlike, say, the headmistress in Roald Dalh’s Matilda, who admits she hates children and is glad she never was one. Stein is loyal to the Grim Reaper and protects his students without babying them. Hell--after the kids pass his Special Lesson of Doom, he offers to let them stay the night:
After getting to know him, Stein’s students all respect him and, like any good teacher, he knows how to push them without breaking them. He and Black Star spar by blasting each other with their soul wavelengths directly. The match is intense and disturbing to those watching, but they know it’s just a game--or perhaps an all-out test--between a really powerful teacher and his student.
In a way, Stein’s care for the Shibusen students is most obvious when compared with Marie’s. She packs the kids picnic lunches and offers them tea and a listening ear when when they drop by her office. But if they do something really reckless, she threatens to expel them. And when Death the Kid one of them was kidnapped, she yelled at his father the Grim Reaper himself:
Marie may be kinder than Stein, but she’s no pushover. Her students don’t take advantage of her kindness (except for Crona that one time, who was also taking advantage of her poor sense of direction), and genuinely like her. But if you try to hurt anybody, she and Stein will beat the crap out of you. And her nickname isn’t “Marie the Pulverizer” for nothing:
(That was a toilet before she punched it).
In conclusion…ladies with navigational impairments REPRESENT!:
(She’s using her electricity powers to burn the villains' listening device out of her chest.)
