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Soul Eater Chapter 82: Pay no attention to that retcon behind the curtain!
The color page for this chapter has Maka, Blair, and a pterodactyl wearing tennis shoes.
That much awesome packed into one page can only bode well for the rest of the chapter. Hopefully. But I am admittedly a bit confused as to why Maka is strapped to the bottom of the pterodactyl instead of, I dunno, riding it. Is she going to use the pterodactyl as a parachute? 'Cause that's what it looks like to me!
Moving on. I don't know what to say about the first page of this chapter, except that maybe after forcing all of us to stare into the abyss that was the Salvage arc for the past year, perhaps Ohkubo figured that it was about time that the abyss stared back.
Next, narration! Kishin Asura---.... A quivering mass of paranoia... The ultimate fear... When that horror was unleashed the world began to sink into madness.
Next, Justin doesn't look so good. "Oh-- My God..."
Next, Grandpa Goo Monster is making a one-panel cameo appearance just so that we don't forget that he's still in this manga. Is he still hanging out inside the Book of Eibon? Has he left to seek out more fertile trolling grounds? Pfffft, details. We probably won't find out until 2014 anyway.
Next, Index is also making a cameo appearance! And doing a rather good job at attempting to make his tiny little squiggle-head look ominous and foreboding, too.
Next, back in Nevada! Kid, Stein, and Spirit are with Big Daddy. "I am sorry that I caused you to worry, Father," Kid says.
"No problemo! Only thing that matters is that Kid is OK now," Daddy says."But no seriously now let's talk about how you just stood there and did nothing while that flying squirrel kid got away with the Book of Eibon and the Brew. Care to provide an explanation for that, young man?"
"I was le tired. And it's not like I was uninjured or anything I mean I totally had a wicked hangnail. Also his name is Gopher."
"And you also connected two whole Lines of Sanzu! It looks like you're starting to awaken your real shinigami powers already!"
Spirit is making ELLIPSES OF ANGST AND WOE.
"Thank you, Father," Kid says.
"So then... About that man called 'Noah'..."
"Yes... I was ultimately unable to discern anything about his true nature, right up until the very end... From the moment that I first saw his soul, I was never able to see his true self, although I sensed that there was something terrifying beneath his surface calm... He wanted everything, and all of his actions served for that purpose alone---... But that was it. There was nothing more to him than that single-minded purpose... He was empty... When humans desire something, they desire for a reason. They have a purpose or a plan for the things that they want... But the man called Noah had nothing. It's almost like you could say that he was nothing more than a machine programmed to collect."
Wait.
Wait.
Wait just a goddamn gingersnapping minute.
I have a terrible suspicion that I know exactly what Big Daddy is going to say next and goddammit Ohkubo don't do this to me---
"A soul made of greed..." Shinigami-sama says. "Greed is also one of the chapters inside of the Book of Eibon..."
"Father, do you know something about this?!"
"Yup... Maybe... Noah might've really been just a machine programmed to collect stuff after all..."
Oh fuck me with a mustard-coated soft pretzel. Ladies and gentlemen, this manga has officially been infected with Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle Syndrome.
TRC Syndrome is a common malady among long-running manga series. The root cause is when an author sets up an important plot point or story arc at some point in the series, devotes much foreshadowing and buildup toward a carefully-planned conclusion, and then midway through the story decides oh no wait I've GOT A BETTER IDEA and thus completely changes the Big Reveal and/or story conclusion that they had planned in the beginning. This, however, means that the author is now left with all of that now-rendered-completely-pointless foreshadowing and buildup in the earlier chapters that now the author must hand-wave or explain away. Thus comes the Talking Heads Fix. So two characters get together and have a long AS YOU KNOW BOB conversation in which they re-explain to the reader everything about what happened in those earlier chapters, but creatively revising certain events so that they fit with the NEW plot that the author has come up with, and desperately trying to convince us readers that this Big NEW Reveal the talking heads are feeding us doesn't directly contradict what we saw happening in those earlier chapters two years ago.
Ohkubo is using Kid as his mouthpiece to retcon Noah's origin. An empty collecting machine (that is about to be revealed to be nothing more than Index's puppet)? Yeah, sure. Going back and looking at the Baba Yaga arc it is painfully clear that this was not Ohkubo's original concept for Noah's character. Heck, even in his notes for the Soul Art artbook Ohkubo makes it painfully clear that this was never the original concept for Noah's character.
The Noah that we were first introduced to was a sneaky, manipulative, intelligent magician and inventor who most decidedly was NOT a simple, single-minded collecting machine. Noah helped Arachne for some mysterious purpose and got no immediately obvious reward for his efforts, either. He built a robot puppy, created Gopher's body, experimented with magic inventions, and considered Medusa his rival. He was picky about his collection - Mosquito and Liz and Patti weren't good enough to be included, after all - NOT single-minded about it. He wasn't a mindless robot: He was clever enough to successfully pose as Eibon, manipulative enough to weasel into Arachne's inner circle, and smart enough to form his own gang when the opportunity arose to lure in allies. Ohkubo (via Kid) can repeatedly state that there was nothing but purposeless, empty-minded greed going on inside Noah's head, but while that was certainly true during the end of the Salvage Arc it was most certainly not the case two years ago. If Noah's only purpose was to collect things, then why did he help Arachne build the Morality Manipulation Machine or cast her magic to become insanity itself? If Noah's only purpose was to collect things, then why did he create Morby or any of this other experiments? If Noah had no ultimate goal behind his collecting, then why did he take so many steps toward exclusively collecting the Great Old Ones, to the extent of choosily ignoring less-interesting possible additions to his collection and even going as far as to attempt to take Maka's soul more than once just so that he could use it to find Asura? Those are not the actions of a man driven by desire without purpose. Those are the actions of a man who has a plan, who wants the Great Old Ones for a reason, and who knows what he needs to do to get his hands on them.
But I guess at some point Ohkubo decided that regardless of what his original storyline for Noah was supposed to look like, oh no wait he's GOT A BETTER IDEA so now we're about to have this Noah-is-a-puppet-of-Index plot firecracker blow up in our faces. And Ohkubo is going to devote three pages of this manga to Kid and Big Daddy taking turns trading the Captain Exposition Hat back and forth and repeatedly telling each other (that is, telling us the readers) that actually Noah was totally like a mindless machine without a plan all along (except for how he totally wasn't). This instead of, I dunno, having Kid or Shini display anything beyond the barest minimum amount of emotion during their reunion with each other. Ugh, this whole scene is even more hollow than when Liz and Patti were all like "oh hey Kid" two chapters ago.
To make a brief comparison: When Stein came back after being gone for a year he got multiple panels of hugging and emotional reunions. But I guess that nobody really cares about Kid that much. Seriously, Liz and Patti and now Big Daddy himself only offer the barest minimal amount of "hey glad you're not dead" reactions to Kid's return. Black Star gave the biggest emotional display when he was reuinted with Kid, and y'all are free to draw your own conclusions about that.
So here Kid is finally being reunited with Big Daddy after having been abducted and tortured and driven mad and (I guess, just barely) having slightly somewhat finally developed as a character. From the opening lines of dialogue we can tell that this is definitely their first time seeing each other since Kid's return. And so what do we get? Instead of any sort of believable display of emotion or any sort of sign of development of Kid and Daddy's relationship whatsoever, instead we get three pages of AS YOU KNOW BOB dialogue desperately trying to explain away the obvious fact that Ohkubo decided to completely change the Noah-plot halfway through its run.
In short, this is the classic TRC Syndrome symptom: replacing what should be emotional character moments with pages and pages of expository dialogue while two characters try to info-dump at each other the retconned details about past events that the author suddenly needs us readers to believe.
Now all we need is for Soul to turn out to be his own time-traveling grandpa and this really will be just like reading Tsubasa all over again. Ugh squared.
But moving on. Speaking of emotions, Gopher is a sad little rodent. "Noah-sama..." he sniffles.
Meanwhile, Index dons the Captain Exposition Hat. "Noah accomplished my purpose for him... With his 'greed' he was driven to obtain the Brew..."
If I remember correctly Noah wasn't even looking for the Brew and then all of a sudden it just kind of fell into Noah's lap because Kid was acting like a complete idiot, but whatevers.
"Eibon-sama sealed himself away..." Index goes on. "But I am not like him. I want to teach..."
An apple falls from the tree beneath which Gopher is sitting. Gopher picks up the apple. OH REAL SUBTLE SYMBOLISM THERE, OHKUBO. REAL SUBTLE.
"When humans first obtained knowledge, they lost paradise..." Index goes on. "However... If humans could obtain even more knowledge, what would become of them then...? And if they could know everything that there is to know in this world, what then...?"
(Who is he talking to? No, seriously?)
Back in Nevada! "Humans must not learn more knowledge than is necessary to them," Stein says. Wait, this is coming from a professor?! From Stein of all people? From Mr. I-want-to-cut-off-Spirit's-toes-and-sew-them-back-on-his-feet-again-just-to-see-if-I-can?! "If one could actually know everything that there is to know in the world, he would never be able to think anything new ever again. It would be the same as ceasing to live at all..."
"The Book of Eibon contains within it the possibility of knowing all of that knowledge," Shinigami-sama says. "Didn't you feel anything unusual when you held the book, Stein?"
Wait, when did Stein ever touch the real Book of Eibon?
"I felt as though my thoughts stopped completely..." Okay but when did this happen?!
"When faced with the sum of all knowledge, humans completely lose their ability to think," Shini says.
"Is that the madness of 'knowledge'...?" Kid asks.
I dunno, why don't we ask Index? Because he is apparently still talking to himself. "The insanity of 'knowledge'. The insanity of 'power'. And... The insanity of 'fear'. But then what, exactly, is 'insanity' itself...? Insanity is born because order exists. Or perhaps it is the other way around? Could it be that order was born because insanity exists? Ah, either way, it matters not. It is the same riddle as that of the chicken and the egg... I must not allow the release of Eibon-sama's knowledge to be restricted by those rules of order... I must give the humans new knowledge... They must be made to understand Eibon-sama's greatness."
The Book of Eibon trembles. "Image of 'wrath'..." Index says.
And then the book opens.
"Noah-sama..." Gopher gasps.
And then he does a double-take. Wait, this can't be Noah-sama. Noah-sama liked plaid shirts around his waist, snazzy caps, fuzzy jackets, and misapplied belts. This person is dressed like a stylish hipster douchebag. "Who are you?!" Gopher demands to know.
"Shut UP!!" Noah snarls, grabbing Gopher by the throat. "Shut your mouth and follow me."
Oh my god. Gopher's face. "You... You're so wild, Noah-sama..."
Meanwhile, back in Nevada, Stein has a shiny new cadaver to play with! Yay! "Tezca Tlipoca..." Shinigami-sama says.
"I'm opening it," Stein says. And a moment later, "Who? Who is this...?"
"What's going on here...?" Spirit asks. Well I think it should be obvious, but let's give Spirit some leeway here, he's not very brightand he's probably been drinking. "Does this mean that Tezca Tlipoca isn't dead?"
"No..." Stein says. "I'm certain that in that moment---..."
If the implication is that In that moment SOMEBODY sure as hell had his intestines ripped out by worms then that suddenly makes the question of who exactly is in the body bag very, very important.
"Tezca is a demon mirror..." Stein says. "His speciality is magic that both reflects images and projects illusions... He may have shown us an elaborate deception..."
"And why would Tezca have any reason to deceive you all?" Kid shoots back. "He's a deathscythe, after all..."
"He may have been brainwashed by insanity the same way that Justin was..." Spirit suggests ominously.
Kid is at least as smart as the entire SE fandom in seeing right through this bullshit. "Are you trying to suggest that all deathscythes are that weak?" Kid snaps at Spirit. "I may not know Tezca-san very well, but I know that there's no way he could have betrayed us!"
Meanwhile, somewhere else! Tezca, sans headpiece, is smoking. I hope that he's smoking a joint and I hope that he has some powerfully good stuff rolled up in that joint, because if he's going where Justin is then he's gonna need it. "Deceiving everyone like that was a crappy thing t'do to them, but... Once I've reflected someone in my mirror once, I can follow that person forever. Justin knew about my power so I hadta make it look like I bit the dust, or else Justin would've never made a move."
Wait, who is he talking to?
Between Index and Tezca, this chapter sure has a lot of awkwardly unnatural monologues, doesn't it.
"So that's why... I used a dummy to fake my death, even though it meant goin' as far as deceiving Enrique and disobeying Shinigami-sama's orders... But if I hadn't done it then there'd be no way to follow Justin's trail now."
So Enrique wasn't in on the fake death after all. And now this means that the reason that Enrique was only shown appearing in one panel with the group of adults that were approaching Noah's lair in chapter 73 and then was completely absent during the actual battle itself is NOT because Enrique was hiding with the real Tezca behind the sidelines of the battle, but rather simply because Ohkubo just plain FORGOT THAT HE WAS THERE. Or less charitably, Ohkubo remembered that Enrique was there but was too lazy to add him to the fight scenes. As if that entire battle wasn't a poorly-coreographed, poorly-drawn mess in the first place, but now we find out that Ohkubo just plain forgot to add an entire character to the battle?!
Man, I know that I've been complaining about people's lack of reaction to Kid's abduction and subsequent return, but THIS just blows that right out of the water. Tezca appeared to be gruesomely murdered right in front of his partner's eyes and Ohkubo couldn't even be arsed to show us Enrique's reaction at all! Because Ohkubo apparently forgot all about how Enrique was even supposed to be there with Tezca in the first place!
That is some powerfully lazy and powerfully poorly-thought-out manga writing, right there.
Anyway, now Tezca is picking something up off the ground. "From now on I can't be too conspicuous, so..."
SO HE PUTS A GIANT SQUIRREL MASK ON HIS HEAD. "Better disguise myself!!"
Meanwhile, in Moscow! "You're not good enough for a black blood experiment," Crona tells a couple of cannon-fodder Shibusen grunts as zie wipes the floor with them. "I must obey Medusa-sama's commands... I must destroy a deathscythe..."
"Keep advancing and soon you will reach Shibusen's Eastern Europe Division..." Medusa tells Crona. "We must continue to develop the strength of your black blood. And then I will have my own kishin after all... Are you listening, Crona? The purpose of this training exercise is to increase the strength of your black blood. Use your blood itself to attack the enemies."
"Understood," Crona says.
Meanwhile, two dudes have rushed to the scene of the bloodshed. "Where are they, Fukohadoru?!" the Big Guy asks. Fukohadoru is obviously some sort of katakana pun, but I have no idea what it could possibly be so I'm gonna go ahead and say that it's punny for "Fuckhard" right now.
"Right around here." Fuckhard shines his flashlight at Crona.
Big Guy orally molests some ellipses. "So it's this waify kid...?"
"Yes. If I am not mistaken."
"Hey, Crona!" Ragnarok says. "Check out that big guy! Ain't we seen him in a picture or somethin' before?"
"Yes. He is our target," Crona says. "One of the deathscythes. His name is Tsar." Crona pops out hir third arm. "Madness Fusion. Beginning the experiment now. Bloody Needle...."
I don't think I've ever actually seen Ohkubo use ellipses in a bubble where somebody is CALLING OUT THEIR ATTACK MOVE before. Jesus. This is beyond grammatically vile.
Fuckhard gets ready to attack. Crona drops hir defenses and just stands there waiting for it. "Remember not to use me!" Ragnarok tells Crona. Because I guess the purpose of this experiment is to see whether Crona's black blood is strong enough to resist attacks, uh?
Aaaaand here comes Fuckhard. "COMMAND COSSACK!" he says. Dancing as he attacks! It's just like West Side Story!
So three kicks in the face later, Crona isn't even hurt. "We expected as much from a deathscythe's partner..." Ragnarok says.
And then Crona looks up and realizes that Tsar is popping off his own head. Crona is like "!!" and makes kung-fu hands.
Kung-fu hands turn out to be unsurprisingly ineffective against a cannonball blast! Fortunately Ragnarok protects Crona. "Bloody Coat!"
Tsar pulls back his head. "Demon Cannonball Tsar Pushka," he introduces himself. "I'll make you pay back the debt for this destruction with your death."
"The black blood armor was crushed during the fight against Black Star," Medusa comments. "Beginning this fight in a defensive position was a good choice," she praises Crona.
But then Crona whips out a knife and cuts hir wrist, because I guess that the time for being on the defensive is over. "My blood is black," Crona says, as kishin eyes erupt from hir wrist.
Aaaaaand that's it for this month! So, in short: There was a lot of good in this chapter. Two new plots starting at once, Tezca's return (which should surprise exactly nobody), Crona's return, Tezca's epic disguise, and Gopher being gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide. But then we have the bad: A stupidly obvious retcon about Noah, a chapter that was 75% pure exposition, and a plot that essentially boils down to "knowing stuff is bad for you."
No seriously I am not going to get on board with this new "KNOWLEDGE IS EVIL" plot because my god is that stupid. It's not even philosophically interesting the way that Ohkubo's treatment of power-insanity and order-insanity have been so far. This is just. plain. stupid. Stein and Shini's cautioning about the dangers of humans knowing too much reads like it was written while Ohkubo was channeling the spirits of Pastor Terry Jones, Fred Phelps, Andrew Schlafly, Judson Phillips, and those book-burning dudes from Farenheit 451. It's like trying to make NBC's "The More You Know" campaign sound like the most insidiously evil thing ever:
NO DON'T LISTEN TO NBC
KNOWING TOO MUCH IS BAD FOR YOU
THE MORE YOU KNOW THE MORE LIKELY IT IS THAT YOUR BRAIN WILL STOP WORKING AND THEN YOU DIE
Also clearly Index is the most evil creature ever because he wants to, you know, teach people things.
There's a nugget of a possibly interesting conflict here. The danger is not that human knowledge of the divine is bad, but there could be a convincing argument made that a higher being imparting too much knowledge at once upon humanity would be a bad thing. What would be the point if God just dropped by one day and said "Hey humanity, you wanna know how the universe began, what dark matter is, the truth about quantum physics, and the meaning of life itself? Well pull up a chair and I'll tell you." If you're of the mind (as I am) that humanity betters itself through scientific inquiry and the evolution of knowledge, then yeah, that would be a bad thing. Scientific inquiry drives the development of technology, the improvement of our worldview, and the advancement of our cultures. Knowledge is something that the human race earns for itself, not something imparted magically from a higher being. Also from a pure educational perspective just telling your students stuff - or even just having them read it in a book - is one of the worst ways to get them to learn anything. Kids learn better and retain their newfound knowledge more meaningfully if they can experiment and discover their way to knowledge on their own.
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digimondreamer pointed out in the comments that the way that the anime series treated the 'insanity of knowledge' was much more compelling too, as the conflict there was that wanting knowledge at any cost could lead to one abandoning ethics and morals. Which was the danger that Stein and Eibon both dealt with in the anime: Not knowing too much, but being willing to do evil things in order to gain knowledge.
But the way that Ohkubo is approaching the "insanity of knowledge" in this chapter is come on, pretty asinine. And therefore uncompelling. In a fantasy world, sure, there are things that humans aren't meant to know and dangers when mere mortal minds are faced with total knowledge. But that's a fantasy problem, not a problem in reality. In real life there's no such thing as total knowledge and there will never be "knowledge that humans weren't meant to know." In reality there is no such thing as having too much knowledge. This bullshit about "and then your brain stops working!" is clearly that, made-up fantasy bullshit.
And that's exactly what makes this "conflict" so much less interesting (and so much more shallow) than the way that Ohkubo previously treated the "insanity of order" and the "insanity of power." Those two issues were clearly, well, real issues: Yes, in the real world power corrupts and yes, in the real world having 'absolute order' as a goal in any context is never going to be a good idea. But instead of casting the "insanity of knowledge" in the same terms of universal human conflict that Ohkubo presented power and order in - that is, presenting a conflict about the dangers of pursuing knowledge at the cost of ethics, or even a more philosophical conflict about the value of knowledge imparted versus knowledge earned - oh not, instead Ohkubo is presenting us with this fantasy-world conflict about how "total knowledge" is dangerous and how humanity isn't meant to know all of the knowledge of the gods. So epic eyeroll at all of this.
I keep reading people saying that this chapter made up for the failures of the Salvage arc. How?! So it turns out that Tezca wasn't randomly pwned after all, okay. But a) we all already knew that, and b) that doesn't change the fact that the way that the rest of the adults were destroyed by Noah made no sense, and c) it's even worse now that we know that there was no reason for Enrique to have been missing from that battle other than because Ohkubo forgot that he was supposed to be there. So it turns out that there was an explanation for how Noah consistently failed to actually do anything as a villain, okay. This doesn't change the fact that he still started out as a very different character with great promise and then that promise piddled away into him being retconned as a "collecting machine." And none of the preceeding makes up for the epic genderfailures (Patti is built up as a badass meister and then does nothing! Liz cries about how much she misses Kid and then does nothing to save him! Marie and Nygus lie around like helpless damsels while only Sid and Stein can fight back!), the epic dues ex machina that solved Kid's little insanity problem, or the inexplicable way that Gopher escaped the final battle.
I am not happy about where this new arc is going, but we'll see.
BTW I am going to be recapping Soul Eater Not! in a separate post later because it is FULL OF AWESOME and totally amazing and exactly everything that I hoped it would be. But I wanted to get this steaming turd of a chapter out of the way before I could move on to the actual GOOD MANGA this month.
That much awesome packed into one page can only bode well for the rest of the chapter. Hopefully. But I am admittedly a bit confused as to why Maka is strapped to the bottom of the pterodactyl instead of, I dunno, riding it. Is she going to use the pterodactyl as a parachute? 'Cause that's what it looks like to me!
Moving on. I don't know what to say about the first page of this chapter, except that maybe after forcing all of us to stare into the abyss that was the Salvage arc for the past year, perhaps Ohkubo figured that it was about time that the abyss stared back.
Next, narration! Kishin Asura---.... A quivering mass of paranoia... The ultimate fear... When that horror was unleashed the world began to sink into madness.
Next, Justin doesn't look so good. "Oh-- My God..."
Next, Grandpa Goo Monster is making a one-panel cameo appearance just so that we don't forget that he's still in this manga. Is he still hanging out inside the Book of Eibon? Has he left to seek out more fertile trolling grounds? Pfffft, details. We probably won't find out until 2014 anyway.
Next, Index is also making a cameo appearance! And doing a rather good job at attempting to make his tiny little squiggle-head look ominous and foreboding, too.
Next, back in Nevada! Kid, Stein, and Spirit are with Big Daddy. "I am sorry that I caused you to worry, Father," Kid says.
"No problemo! Only thing that matters is that Kid is OK now," Daddy says.
"And you also connected two whole Lines of Sanzu! It looks like you're starting to awaken your real shinigami powers already!"
Spirit is making ELLIPSES OF ANGST AND WOE.
"Thank you, Father," Kid says.
"So then... About that man called 'Noah'..."
"Yes... I was ultimately unable to discern anything about his true nature, right up until the very end... From the moment that I first saw his soul, I was never able to see his true self, although I sensed that there was something terrifying beneath his surface calm... He wanted everything, and all of his actions served for that purpose alone---... But that was it. There was nothing more to him than that single-minded purpose... He was empty... When humans desire something, they desire for a reason. They have a purpose or a plan for the things that they want... But the man called Noah had nothing. It's almost like you could say that he was nothing more than a machine programmed to collect."
Wait.
Wait.
Wait just a goddamn gingersnapping minute.
I have a terrible suspicion that I know exactly what Big Daddy is going to say next and goddammit Ohkubo don't do this to me---
"A soul made of greed..." Shinigami-sama says. "Greed is also one of the chapters inside of the Book of Eibon..."
"Father, do you know something about this?!"
"Yup... Maybe... Noah might've really been just a machine programmed to collect stuff after all..."
Oh fuck me with a mustard-coated soft pretzel. Ladies and gentlemen, this manga has officially been infected with Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle Syndrome.
TRC Syndrome is a common malady among long-running manga series. The root cause is when an author sets up an important plot point or story arc at some point in the series, devotes much foreshadowing and buildup toward a carefully-planned conclusion, and then midway through the story decides oh no wait I've GOT A BETTER IDEA and thus completely changes the Big Reveal and/or story conclusion that they had planned in the beginning. This, however, means that the author is now left with all of that now-rendered-completely-pointless foreshadowing and buildup in the earlier chapters that now the author must hand-wave or explain away. Thus comes the Talking Heads Fix. So two characters get together and have a long AS YOU KNOW BOB conversation in which they re-explain to the reader everything about what happened in those earlier chapters, but creatively revising certain events so that they fit with the NEW plot that the author has come up with, and desperately trying to convince us readers that this Big NEW Reveal the talking heads are feeding us doesn't directly contradict what we saw happening in those earlier chapters two years ago.
Ohkubo is using Kid as his mouthpiece to retcon Noah's origin. An empty collecting machine (that is about to be revealed to be nothing more than Index's puppet)? Yeah, sure. Going back and looking at the Baba Yaga arc it is painfully clear that this was not Ohkubo's original concept for Noah's character. Heck, even in his notes for the Soul Art artbook Ohkubo makes it painfully clear that this was never the original concept for Noah's character.
The Noah that we were first introduced to was a sneaky, manipulative, intelligent magician and inventor who most decidedly was NOT a simple, single-minded collecting machine. Noah helped Arachne for some mysterious purpose and got no immediately obvious reward for his efforts, either. He built a robot puppy, created Gopher's body, experimented with magic inventions, and considered Medusa his rival. He was picky about his collection - Mosquito and Liz and Patti weren't good enough to be included, after all - NOT single-minded about it. He wasn't a mindless robot: He was clever enough to successfully pose as Eibon, manipulative enough to weasel into Arachne's inner circle, and smart enough to form his own gang when the opportunity arose to lure in allies. Ohkubo (via Kid) can repeatedly state that there was nothing but purposeless, empty-minded greed going on inside Noah's head, but while that was certainly true during the end of the Salvage Arc it was most certainly not the case two years ago. If Noah's only purpose was to collect things, then why did he help Arachne build the Morality Manipulation Machine or cast her magic to become insanity itself? If Noah's only purpose was to collect things, then why did he create Morby or any of this other experiments? If Noah had no ultimate goal behind his collecting, then why did he take so many steps toward exclusively collecting the Great Old Ones, to the extent of choosily ignoring less-interesting possible additions to his collection and even going as far as to attempt to take Maka's soul more than once just so that he could use it to find Asura? Those are not the actions of a man driven by desire without purpose. Those are the actions of a man who has a plan, who wants the Great Old Ones for a reason, and who knows what he needs to do to get his hands on them.
But I guess at some point Ohkubo decided that regardless of what his original storyline for Noah was supposed to look like, oh no wait he's GOT A BETTER IDEA so now we're about to have this Noah-is-a-puppet-of-Index plot firecracker blow up in our faces. And Ohkubo is going to devote three pages of this manga to Kid and Big Daddy taking turns trading the Captain Exposition Hat back and forth and repeatedly telling each other (that is, telling us the readers) that actually Noah was totally like a mindless machine without a plan all along (except for how he totally wasn't). This instead of, I dunno, having Kid or Shini display anything beyond the barest minimum amount of emotion during their reunion with each other. Ugh, this whole scene is even more hollow than when Liz and Patti were all like "oh hey Kid" two chapters ago.
To make a brief comparison: When Stein came back after being gone for a year he got multiple panels of hugging and emotional reunions. But I guess that nobody really cares about Kid that much. Seriously, Liz and Patti and now Big Daddy himself only offer the barest minimal amount of "hey glad you're not dead" reactions to Kid's return. Black Star gave the biggest emotional display when he was reuinted with Kid, and y'all are free to draw your own conclusions about that.
So here Kid is finally being reunited with Big Daddy after having been abducted and tortured and driven mad and (I guess, just barely) having slightly somewhat finally developed as a character. From the opening lines of dialogue we can tell that this is definitely their first time seeing each other since Kid's return. And so what do we get? Instead of any sort of believable display of emotion or any sort of sign of development of Kid and Daddy's relationship whatsoever, instead we get three pages of AS YOU KNOW BOB dialogue desperately trying to explain away the obvious fact that Ohkubo decided to completely change the Noah-plot halfway through its run.
In short, this is the classic TRC Syndrome symptom: replacing what should be emotional character moments with pages and pages of expository dialogue while two characters try to info-dump at each other the retconned details about past events that the author suddenly needs us readers to believe.
Now all we need is for Soul to turn out to be his own time-traveling grandpa and this really will be just like reading Tsubasa all over again. Ugh squared.
But moving on. Speaking of emotions, Gopher is a sad little rodent. "Noah-sama..." he sniffles.
Meanwhile, Index dons the Captain Exposition Hat. "Noah accomplished my purpose for him... With his 'greed' he was driven to obtain the Brew..."
If I remember correctly Noah wasn't even looking for the Brew and then all of a sudden it just kind of fell into Noah's lap because Kid was acting like a complete idiot, but whatevers.
"Eibon-sama sealed himself away..." Index goes on. "But I am not like him. I want to teach..."
An apple falls from the tree beneath which Gopher is sitting. Gopher picks up the apple. OH REAL SUBTLE SYMBOLISM THERE, OHKUBO. REAL SUBTLE.
"When humans first obtained knowledge, they lost paradise..." Index goes on. "However... If humans could obtain even more knowledge, what would become of them then...? And if they could know everything that there is to know in this world, what then...?"
(Who is he talking to? No, seriously?)
Back in Nevada! "Humans must not learn more knowledge than is necessary to them," Stein says. Wait, this is coming from a professor?! From Stein of all people? From Mr. I-want-to-cut-off-Spirit's-toes-and-sew-them-back-on-his-feet-again-just-to-see-if-I-can?! "If one could actually know everything that there is to know in the world, he would never be able to think anything new ever again. It would be the same as ceasing to live at all..."
"The Book of Eibon contains within it the possibility of knowing all of that knowledge," Shinigami-sama says. "Didn't you feel anything unusual when you held the book, Stein?"
Wait, when did Stein ever touch the real Book of Eibon?
"I felt as though my thoughts stopped completely..." Okay but when did this happen?!
"When faced with the sum of all knowledge, humans completely lose their ability to think," Shini says.
"Is that the madness of 'knowledge'...?" Kid asks.
I dunno, why don't we ask Index? Because he is apparently still talking to himself. "The insanity of 'knowledge'. The insanity of 'power'. And... The insanity of 'fear'. But then what, exactly, is 'insanity' itself...? Insanity is born because order exists. Or perhaps it is the other way around? Could it be that order was born because insanity exists? Ah, either way, it matters not. It is the same riddle as that of the chicken and the egg... I must not allow the release of Eibon-sama's knowledge to be restricted by those rules of order... I must give the humans new knowledge... They must be made to understand Eibon-sama's greatness."
The Book of Eibon trembles. "Image of 'wrath'..." Index says.
And then the book opens.
"Noah-sama..." Gopher gasps.
And then he does a double-take. Wait, this can't be Noah-sama. Noah-sama liked plaid shirts around his waist, snazzy caps, fuzzy jackets, and misapplied belts. This person is dressed like a stylish hipster douchebag. "Who are you?!" Gopher demands to know.
"Shut UP!!" Noah snarls, grabbing Gopher by the throat. "Shut your mouth and follow me."
Oh my god. Gopher's face. "You... You're so wild, Noah-sama..."
Meanwhile, back in Nevada, Stein has a shiny new cadaver to play with! Yay! "Tezca Tlipoca..." Shinigami-sama says.
"I'm opening it," Stein says. And a moment later, "Who? Who is this...?"
"What's going on here...?" Spirit asks. Well I think it should be obvious, but let's give Spirit some leeway here, he's not very bright
"No..." Stein says. "I'm certain that in that moment---..."
If the implication is that In that moment SOMEBODY sure as hell had his intestines ripped out by worms then that suddenly makes the question of who exactly is in the body bag very, very important.
"Tezca is a demon mirror..." Stein says. "His speciality is magic that both reflects images and projects illusions... He may have shown us an elaborate deception..."
"And why would Tezca have any reason to deceive you all?" Kid shoots back. "He's a deathscythe, after all..."
"He may have been brainwashed by insanity the same way that Justin was..." Spirit suggests ominously.
Kid is at least as smart as the entire SE fandom in seeing right through this bullshit. "Are you trying to suggest that all deathscythes are that weak?" Kid snaps at Spirit. "I may not know Tezca-san very well, but I know that there's no way he could have betrayed us!"
Meanwhile, somewhere else! Tezca, sans headpiece, is smoking. I hope that he's smoking a joint and I hope that he has some powerfully good stuff rolled up in that joint, because if he's going where Justin is then he's gonna need it. "Deceiving everyone like that was a crappy thing t'do to them, but... Once I've reflected someone in my mirror once, I can follow that person forever. Justin knew about my power so I hadta make it look like I bit the dust, or else Justin would've never made a move."
Wait, who is he talking to?
Between Index and Tezca, this chapter sure has a lot of awkwardly unnatural monologues, doesn't it.
"So that's why... I used a dummy to fake my death, even though it meant goin' as far as deceiving Enrique and disobeying Shinigami-sama's orders... But if I hadn't done it then there'd be no way to follow Justin's trail now."
So Enrique wasn't in on the fake death after all. And now this means that the reason that Enrique was only shown appearing in one panel with the group of adults that were approaching Noah's lair in chapter 73 and then was completely absent during the actual battle itself is NOT because Enrique was hiding with the real Tezca behind the sidelines of the battle, but rather simply because Ohkubo just plain FORGOT THAT HE WAS THERE. Or less charitably, Ohkubo remembered that Enrique was there but was too lazy to add him to the fight scenes. As if that entire battle wasn't a poorly-coreographed, poorly-drawn mess in the first place, but now we find out that Ohkubo just plain forgot to add an entire character to the battle?!
Man, I know that I've been complaining about people's lack of reaction to Kid's abduction and subsequent return, but THIS just blows that right out of the water. Tezca appeared to be gruesomely murdered right in front of his partner's eyes and Ohkubo couldn't even be arsed to show us Enrique's reaction at all! Because Ohkubo apparently forgot all about how Enrique was even supposed to be there with Tezca in the first place!
That is some powerfully lazy and powerfully poorly-thought-out manga writing, right there.
Anyway, now Tezca is picking something up off the ground. "From now on I can't be too conspicuous, so..."
SO HE PUTS A GIANT SQUIRREL MASK ON HIS HEAD. "Better disguise myself!!"
Meanwhile, in Moscow! "You're not good enough for a black blood experiment," Crona tells a couple of cannon-fodder Shibusen grunts as zie wipes the floor with them. "I must obey Medusa-sama's commands... I must destroy a deathscythe..."
"Keep advancing and soon you will reach Shibusen's Eastern Europe Division..." Medusa tells Crona. "We must continue to develop the strength of your black blood. And then I will have my own kishin after all... Are you listening, Crona? The purpose of this training exercise is to increase the strength of your black blood. Use your blood itself to attack the enemies."
"Understood," Crona says.
Meanwhile, two dudes have rushed to the scene of the bloodshed. "Where are they, Fukohadoru?!" the Big Guy asks. Fukohadoru is obviously some sort of katakana pun, but I have no idea what it could possibly be so I'm gonna go ahead and say that it's punny for "Fuckhard" right now.
"Right around here." Fuckhard shines his flashlight at Crona.
Big Guy orally molests some ellipses. "So it's this waify kid...?"
"Yes. If I am not mistaken."
"Hey, Crona!" Ragnarok says. "Check out that big guy! Ain't we seen him in a picture or somethin' before?"
"Yes. He is our target," Crona says. "One of the deathscythes. His name is Tsar." Crona pops out hir third arm. "Madness Fusion. Beginning the experiment now. Bloody Needle...."
I don't think I've ever actually seen Ohkubo use ellipses in a bubble where somebody is CALLING OUT THEIR ATTACK MOVE before. Jesus. This is beyond grammatically vile.
Fuckhard gets ready to attack. Crona drops hir defenses and just stands there waiting for it. "Remember not to use me!" Ragnarok tells Crona. Because I guess the purpose of this experiment is to see whether Crona's black blood is strong enough to resist attacks, uh?
Aaaaand here comes Fuckhard. "COMMAND COSSACK!" he says. Dancing as he attacks! It's just like West Side Story!
So three kicks in the face later, Crona isn't even hurt. "We expected as much from a deathscythe's partner..." Ragnarok says.
And then Crona looks up and realizes that Tsar is popping off his own head. Crona is like "!!" and makes kung-fu hands.
Kung-fu hands turn out to be unsurprisingly ineffective against a cannonball blast! Fortunately Ragnarok protects Crona. "Bloody Coat!"
Tsar pulls back his head. "Demon Cannonball Tsar Pushka," he introduces himself. "I'll make you pay back the debt for this destruction with your death."
"The black blood armor was crushed during the fight against Black Star," Medusa comments. "Beginning this fight in a defensive position was a good choice," she praises Crona.
But then Crona whips out a knife and cuts hir wrist, because I guess that the time for being on the defensive is over. "My blood is black," Crona says, as kishin eyes erupt from hir wrist.
Aaaaaand that's it for this month! So, in short: There was a lot of good in this chapter. Two new plots starting at once, Tezca's return (which should surprise exactly nobody), Crona's return, Tezca's epic disguise, and Gopher being gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide. But then we have the bad: A stupidly obvious retcon about Noah, a chapter that was 75% pure exposition, and a plot that essentially boils down to "knowing stuff is bad for you."
No seriously I am not going to get on board with this new "KNOWLEDGE IS EVIL" plot because my god is that stupid. It's not even philosophically interesting the way that Ohkubo's treatment of power-insanity and order-insanity have been so far. This is just. plain. stupid. Stein and Shini's cautioning about the dangers of humans knowing too much reads like it was written while Ohkubo was channeling the spirits of Pastor Terry Jones, Fred Phelps, Andrew Schlafly, Judson Phillips, and those book-burning dudes from Farenheit 451. It's like trying to make NBC's "The More You Know" campaign sound like the most insidiously evil thing ever:
NO DON'T LISTEN TO NBC
KNOWING TOO MUCH IS BAD FOR YOU
THE MORE YOU KNOW THE MORE LIKELY IT IS THAT YOUR BRAIN WILL STOP WORKING AND THEN YOU DIE
Also clearly Index is the most evil creature ever because he wants to, you know, teach people things.
There's a nugget of a possibly interesting conflict here. The danger is not that human knowledge of the divine is bad, but there could be a convincing argument made that a higher being imparting too much knowledge at once upon humanity would be a bad thing. What would be the point if God just dropped by one day and said "Hey humanity, you wanna know how the universe began, what dark matter is, the truth about quantum physics, and the meaning of life itself? Well pull up a chair and I'll tell you." If you're of the mind (as I am) that humanity betters itself through scientific inquiry and the evolution of knowledge, then yeah, that would be a bad thing. Scientific inquiry drives the development of technology, the improvement of our worldview, and the advancement of our cultures. Knowledge is something that the human race earns for itself, not something imparted magically from a higher being. Also from a pure educational perspective just telling your students stuff - or even just having them read it in a book - is one of the worst ways to get them to learn anything. Kids learn better and retain their newfound knowledge more meaningfully if they can experiment and discover their way to knowledge on their own.
ETA:
digimondreamer pointed out in the comments that the way that the anime series treated the 'insanity of knowledge' was much more compelling too, as the conflict there was that wanting knowledge at any cost could lead to one abandoning ethics and morals. Which was the danger that Stein and Eibon both dealt with in the anime: Not knowing too much, but being willing to do evil things in order to gain knowledge. But the way that Ohkubo is approaching the "insanity of knowledge" in this chapter is come on, pretty asinine. And therefore uncompelling. In a fantasy world, sure, there are things that humans aren't meant to know and dangers when mere mortal minds are faced with total knowledge. But that's a fantasy problem, not a problem in reality. In real life there's no such thing as total knowledge and there will never be "knowledge that humans weren't meant to know." In reality there is no such thing as having too much knowledge. This bullshit about "and then your brain stops working!" is clearly that, made-up fantasy bullshit.
And that's exactly what makes this "conflict" so much less interesting (and so much more shallow) than the way that Ohkubo previously treated the "insanity of order" and the "insanity of power." Those two issues were clearly, well, real issues: Yes, in the real world power corrupts and yes, in the real world having 'absolute order' as a goal in any context is never going to be a good idea. But instead of casting the "insanity of knowledge" in the same terms of universal human conflict that Ohkubo presented power and order in - that is, presenting a conflict about the dangers of pursuing knowledge at the cost of ethics, or even a more philosophical conflict about the value of knowledge imparted versus knowledge earned - oh not, instead Ohkubo is presenting us with this fantasy-world conflict about how "total knowledge" is dangerous and how humanity isn't meant to know all of the knowledge of the gods. So epic eyeroll at all of this.
I keep reading people saying that this chapter made up for the failures of the Salvage arc. How?! So it turns out that Tezca wasn't randomly pwned after all, okay. But a) we all already knew that, and b) that doesn't change the fact that the way that the rest of the adults were destroyed by Noah made no sense, and c) it's even worse now that we know that there was no reason for Enrique to have been missing from that battle other than because Ohkubo forgot that he was supposed to be there. So it turns out that there was an explanation for how Noah consistently failed to actually do anything as a villain, okay. This doesn't change the fact that he still started out as a very different character with great promise and then that promise piddled away into him being retconned as a "collecting machine." And none of the preceeding makes up for the epic genderfailures (Patti is built up as a badass meister and then does nothing! Liz cries about how much she misses Kid and then does nothing to save him! Marie and Nygus lie around like helpless damsels while only Sid and Stein can fight back!), the epic dues ex machina that solved Kid's little insanity problem, or the inexplicable way that Gopher escaped the final battle.
I am not happy about where this new arc is going, but we'll see.
BTW I am going to be recapping Soul Eater Not! in a separate post later because it is FULL OF AWESOME and totally amazing and exactly everything that I hoped it would be. But I wanted to get this steaming turd of a chapter out of the way before I could move on to the actual GOOD MANGA this month.
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