We've written a bit about Soul Eater here, both Atsushi Okubo's long-running manga series and the animated version that's just started airing in Japan. What we haven't written, though, is a basic introduction to the series, its world, and its characters, which would help just a little bit to put those earlier reviews in perspective.

Doing everything backwards is still an improvement on not doing anything at all, so for newcomers to the world of Soul Eater , here's a basic field guide to the armament, equipment, and personnel of Shinigami Weapons Development.

"Shibusen" is one of those Japanese acronyms created by stringing syllables from several bigger words together. Just as "daikaku Bunkakyukai" (or "Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture") gets wrapped up in a nutshell to become Genshiken, so does "nigamiki Shokuninmongakkou" become "Shibusen" for short.The long-form version of the name means something like "Death God Weapons Craftsmanship Institute." "Senmongakkou" more specifically refers to a vocational school, an institution students attend to learn a practical trade, and that's what Shibusen is for. Located in the aptly-named Death City, it's where apprentice craftsmen learn to make weapons for the God of Death.Shinigami-sama, to use his proper name, already has a scythe for reaping souls with, but apparently scythes wear out from time to time, so he needs a steady supply of new ones. Crafting a Death Scythe takes time and effort, though, on the part of both the weapon-smith and the weapon himself (or herself, as the case may be).Youngsters attending Shibusen have a mix of book-learning and practical duties. Soul Eater tends to focus on the extra-curricular side of things, since it's obviously not much fun to watch our heroes snooze through their lecture courses. Bringing a weapon into being in the laboratory, anyway, is barely half of the job, which is why the kids can't just hang around school all the time.At any given time, apprentice weapons technicians are usually at work on just one weapon. (This isn't a hard and fast rule, however, as we'll see a little bit further down.) A would-be Death Scythe takes a lot of care to craft, and more to the point, it takes a lot of use. It has to get used to reaping souls before Shinigami-sama can put it to work.It has to reap a certain kind of soul, though. A Death Scythe's diet primarily consists of "kishin," which literally means "fierce god." In the context of Soul Eater's fictional world, a kishin is a human soul gone bad, filled with enough hatred and power to evolve into a deadly monstrous form. Scythe-crafters perform a useful service by catching evil souls before they turn into full-fledged kishin, and by feeding those souls to their scythes, they gradually evolve them towards completion.The basic math goes like so: 99 kishin souls and one witch's soul. Of course, the witch's soul is the kicker. Witches are among the major antagonists in Soul Eater -- the most powerful among their number can go toe-to-toe with Shinigami-sama and his deadly chop, or close enough to it in any case.Once a scythe has eaten its requisite diet of those 100 souls, no more and no less, it's officially a Death Scythe. If it looks like a witch and casts spells like a witch, though, it still isn't always a witch, which gets a certain rookie weapon-smith in trouble right away.