Soul Eater Not! – 09-10

Oh, the things one ends up doing for one’s roommates…

What a great couple of episodes these were, the first time that Soul Eater Not! has strung 2 of them in a row! I have my complaints about the pacing in episode 9, but it also featured a very strong first half that was filled with more fun than most full episodes of the show so far. Then the show followed up with episode 10 where shit started hitting the fan one after another. I could’ve used less meandering and pointless episodes to get here, but the pieces are finally starting to fall into place for what could be a fantastic finish to this show.

I loved seeing the girls’ clothes actually changing for each of the pumpkin-watering shots.

So the 9th episode felt like just an excuse to push time along to Halloween, featuring a series of side stories loosely connected by the trio’s planting and growing of their pumpkins. Again, I don’t know why Shaula has to wait all through Summer until Halloween to make her 2nd move, but any frustration I may have felt at that was negated by the quality of the stories in the first half. First, we got to see Anya fighting Meme at her best, i.e. while sleeping. And this looked a lot like the fights early on in the show, i.e. good, and very unlike that one fight between Maka and Eternal Feather a couple episodes back. Plus, it culminated in Tsugumi awkwardly putting clothes back on a stripping Meme and then all 3 of them sleeping together in the same bed. Hawt Adorable.

Then we got a taste of Meme’s memory-loss misadventures, in a story that unfolded via flashbacks as she worked to piece together what she had done the prior day based on such left behind evidence as a shaved-off eyebrow and a sloth left on Eternal Feather’s head. Larger story about the cause of her amnesia aside, this segment was brilliant and should have lasted the entire episode, either by having more events for Meme to uncover, or by having her uncover them more slowly – I thought the boy-with-sloth discovery felt a bit rushed.

I love the fact that “I dumped the sloth on Eternal Feather who happened to be passing by” is a perfectly reasonable and complete explanation in Meme’s mind.

So many parts of this segment had me busting out in laughter anyway. I love the author’s vision of Las Vegas, basically a rustic town with a dark, shady looking casino that lets in middle schoolers to gamble. Also, a single win on a slot machine is enough to clean out the casino, or at least gets close to it. Must get info about the US from the same source that taught Tsukushi Tsutsukakushi that incestuous underage gay marriage was legal in Massachusetts. I sure hope that kid who has issues with how “healthy” Meme is comes back. I don’t know what his deal is with the sloth, and he was kind of a jerk to Meme, but his words clearly touched her, and I want to see her come back to show off to him once she achieves her fitness goals (of course, since Meme is a cute anime girl with cute flaws of cuteness, she’ll likely never be happy with her body fitness level, because girls insecure about their body image are cute).

Soul Eater Fat!

The rest of the episode didn’t really need to happen. We didn’t need yet another demonstration of just how extraordinary Anya and Meme are compared to normal people. Thankfully, the 2nd half was fairly short, and episode 10 started to bring the story pieces together for an exciting start to the show’s finish.

I was skeptical at first when the show decided to kill off Tsugumi’s dog just to give her an excuse to get angry at Meme for her forgetfulness. Come on, I don’t even remember seeing the dog before, including in the 1st episode before Tsugumi came to DWMA. There should have been some sort of setup showing Tsugumi’s attachment to her dog. But then the show followed the thread of Meme’s memory issues all the way to the end where it collided with the main villain, Shaula.

Meme’s sleep sneaking skills put Solid Snake’s to shame!

I love this twist of events. For the entire show, Meme was made fun of for her forgetfulness. It was funny, an endearing attribute that made her more moe. Then in episode 9 we saw that her memory problem was pathological, with severe and immediate real world consequences in her life. And in the latest episode, we found out that Meme was actually a sleeper agent of sorts the entire time, having been brainwashed before the show’s beginning and suffering memory loss due to it. What an exciting and unexpected turn of events!

And the hits just kept on coming. More solid fight scenes in the 2nd half of the episode as Sid, Akane, and Clay took over against Shaula who used both Meme and Tsugumi against them. A reveal of Anya’s identity and Akane and Clay’s position as her bodyguards. Sid appearing to get killed by Shaula (if I recall correctly, Sid dies during a major arc in the main Soul Eater which results in him becoming a zombie, so I think he’s safe for now). Things that actually matter are happening, and I’m excited to find out how everything plays out. As long as the action remains high quality and we don’t get any more of the crap we saw in episode 7, this show is set up to finish high.

Great gratuitous spinning by Meme before elbowing Anya in the stomach. When it tries, this Cute Girls Doing Cute Things show has fighting than most action shows.