Soul Eater 72: Genderbending in Eibon’s Inferno

No, I’m not breaking out of my hiatus.  This blog is still very much asleep.  However, it isn’t dead.  And as its death would be the only thing keeping me from commenting on gender-bending Ookubo madness, here comes this post.

Soul Feeder, let's say.

Let me get the esoteric stuff out of the way first.

It seems the seven chapters of the Eibon book will match the seven deadly sins of tradition, and this in Pope Gregory I’s order: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride.  The whole scheme is pretty cool but it’s got one little drawback IMO: by following this traditional order Ookubo has to put LUST first.  But Lust is precisely the most powerful sin in Shibusen, and it’d have made more sense to place it deeper within the book.  Maka and Soul dealing with their issues for one…

If you look closely, the two walls of text that the Index unfurls are actually the same single page from two angles: specifically an excerpt going from the end of Chapter 5 to the beginning of Chapter 6 of Alice in Wonderland.  The section is all about transformation: Alice nibbles from the mushroom and becomes really huge.  A bird flies by and accuses her of being a serpent.  Then she finds a house with a footman and tries to get inside.  He tells her:

“There might be some sense in your knocking,’ the Footman went on without attending to her, ‘if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were inside, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.'”

And that’s where the excerpt ends.  Make your own judgments as to any connections with the situation within the Book of Eibon…

And that’s that!  Now for the gender-bending!  IMHO the Golden Rule of Gender-Bending is this: the more masculine a character is, the more feminine the transformation will be, and viceversa.  As a corollary androgynous or asexual characters won’t be changing very much.  Here you see how Maka just gets a bad haircut, and Black Star looks totally voluptuous with his partner Tsubaki looking like the manliest dude ever.  And I must add that Patty looks totally rad, though I wouldn’t want to run into her/him in a dark alley.

Will genderbending flip Technician/Weapon relations as well??

The succubus doesn’t disappoint (but we already knew Ookubo was great at the succubine, e.g. Medusa), and I wonder whether next chapter we’ll see this succubus actually trying to seduce the characters or just being the matchmaker and prodder for the Shibusen students themselves (god knows these kids need some pushing).

I can’t put too much stock on the ending of the chapter, though it is very interesting.  Of late we’ve had a few ending pics that are totally crazy but don’t seem to connect to the next chapter.  That said, sometimes they do (I’m thinking of Medusa and the clown guillotine).  So now we hear of 8 warlords: Eibon, Ashura, Shinigami, the one with Kid inside the book, three that were swallowed by Ashura, and a mysterious one knowing to Kid himself.  It makes one wonder just what is up with this Noah that he can trap and contain such things in his collection.  Someone, IDK if as a joke or seriously, suggested number eight is Excalibur.  I think this is actually very possible!  Plus Angela is the third Gorgon sister…But I digress.

Her time will come, i'm sure...

A word about Eruka.  I do pity her.  Out of the frying pan and into the fire.  First she’s Medusa’s slave and now she’s become Shibusen’s pawn.  She uses a hexagram for her magic whereas unless I’m totally mistaken Medusa is fond of pentagrams.  I don’t claim to know what any of this means, but it’s obvious Eruka is a Goody Two-Shoes witch, and that she wishes she were back with Mabaa and all her witchy sisters.

Finally, let me give Ookubo an ultimatum: I want to see Medusa again before three more chapters have elapsed!!!

~ by Haloed Bane on March 29, 2010.