While watching Soul Eater: the crazies and their meaningful statements within entertaining shows

[juushika]

Because my sense of it is so narrow, I'm not really one for humor. This comes as a great surprise, I know. Soul Eater's humor doesn't actively irritate me, however, and some of it is delightful—and I love the characters, and the show is so perfectly timed given my current autumn/Halloween obsession that I can't help but watch and enjoy it.

But behind the humor there's some rather miserable stuff. Kid's debilitating OCD. Crona's literal internal contradictions. There are some aspects which are played for laughs and emotional appeal (take, for example, Maka's relationships with Soul and with her father). If they weren't played for laughs, these other darker aspects would be outright disturbing and out of place. But I hope the show finds something serious and meaningful in them, somewhere along the way. Failing that, I'd love to see it somewhere in fandom*: a story about the real, detrimental, debilitating effects of Kid's neuroses, of why they exist and how he tries to control them, of how they control him; a look into what it means to be in Crona's head, Crona's body.

Because it was the above screenshot that lead me to finally watch the show (although, I admit, it was Kid's character design that drew it to my attention in the first place, and he is my absolute favorite)—

Because it is true, you know.

Hell is in here.

My mother was telling me about some documentary on emotions (This Emotional Life, maybe?), wherein one focus was people who worry over past events, and the emotional stress and strain that comes with that sort of thinking—and how weird the concept was, to her, that someone would do that. That is more than what I do—that is who I am. I actively fret and panic over events that occurred when I was a child, I relive experiences, I torment myself with little fragments of things I did wrong which the wronged have long forgotten—I think about these things obsessively, compulsively. And yes, it comes with significant emotional stress and strain.

Hell is in here, inside your head.

It doesn't take a show to tell me this (oh, believe me, I know!), but it is oddly satisfying to find it here, expressed in a way that makes me pause and nod, midst Halloween witches and glowing blue souls and swords with big red mouths on them. I'm more or less content with the balance between humor, plot, and emotional appeal that Soul Eater has thus far, but I treasure the moments like this—ones that capitalize on the humor to lull you into comfort, capitalize on the bizarre and exaggerated world in order to bring characters like this to life, and then, despite the laughs, despite the exaggeration: say something, mean something, and say something that means something to me.

* Although I don't have the energy to try to dig into that fandom, you see. I feel like this is a frequent problem: because I go all the way or not at all, I find it easier these days not to bother with fandom at all—and thus not lose entire months of my life. The downside is, of course, that I don't get anything out of fandom—including those things which I do still want.