stein is a witch: second edition

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! in honor of this, most sacred of months, i am rereleasing an updated version of the only truly good fantheory i ever produced. now with even more tangents and unnecessary detail!

THE TL;DR VERSION:

soul eater plays loose and fast with its worldbuilding and isn’t always totally consistent with how things work, but am i gonna handwave any of that? hahahahahahaha nOPE. one of those inconsistencies? probably the most egregious? stein uses magic within the first few chapters of the series, possibly more than once, and WE ALL KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

THE LONG VERSION is below the cut, with extended explanation, stupidly complicated analysis based on at least three different assumptions i’m making, and HEY even a good breakdown of how the witch gene actually works! it’s all here, and it’s all (technically speaking) not canon. but it could be!

quick but important note: the argument that only women can be witches doesn’t hold water here — this theory assumes that stein is a trans man. witchery is a genetic trait (all shown children of witches are witches themselves; in all shown cases of a witch having a sister the sister was a witch as well), and as such relies on chromosomes rather than on gender identity. for example, crona, who is agender and heavily implied to be dfab, can and does have a witch soul due to their mother being a witch literally and figuratively. the factually accurate statement is ‘only dfab people can be witches / all witches are dfab.’ ANYWAY!!!

the strongest evidence towards stein being a witch actually comes from the very first few chapters/episodes of soul eater — the remedial lesson mini-arc, and death the kid’s prologue. in the former, stein is introduced to the viewer as the man who brought sid back to the land of the living, the supposed villain of this first arc. although it’s later revealed that the part about stein being some sort of mastermind was a crock of shit, the part about him bringing sid back from the dead sure as hell wasn’t.

in kid’s prologue, the villain of the week is a witch running a necromancy pyramid scheme, using her magic to resurrect legions of mummies and, ultimately, the deceased pharaoh for whom the pyramid was built. AND HERE’S WHY THAT’S INTERESTING: if you set aside stein’s reanimation of sid, this is the only example within the series of someone waking the dead, and it’s achieved through a witch’s magic.

this is the literal first thing we learn about stein: he brought a guy back from the dead. and here’s the thing: if stein is human, that feat is, for him, impossible.

sure, you can argue that he used his soul stitching abilities (more on this later, btw) to reattach sid’s soul to his body, but that isn’t actually possible — following his resurrection, sid is still in possession of both his original body and soul. the immediate reaction is 'fucking duh, that’s how coming back from the dead works,’ but stick with me, folks.

when people die in soul eater, there are two things that can happen. either they revert to being nothing more than a soul (in maka’s prologue, this is what happens to the woman who’s killed offscreen by jack the ripper), or their soul vanishes and only their bloody corpse is left behind (see: [MANGA SPOILERS REDACTED]’s death for an example of this). it’s usually the former.

we know that the latter couldn’t have happened to sid, as he’s still in possession of his soul — he’s still clearly the same person, and has retained all his memories — but the former doesn’t work either. stein couldn’t have just shoved sid’s soul into someone else’s body, because that’s still sid’s original body walking around. evidence: as a zombie, sid still has the intricate tattoos that he was shown to have in life, proving it to be the same body. to bring sid back to life as he did, stein must have used magic, and to have used magic, he would have to be a witch.

( “but david, free and noah both use magic and THEY’RE not witches” free was a magical being to begin with as a werewof but his magic is not his own, it was obtained by stealing part of a witch’s body and implanting it within himself. noah is only able to use magic due to his ownership of a magical artifact. neither of these examples discredit the point that i’m making )

if you accept that stein must have used magic to resurrect sid, the question then becomes “how didn’t anyone notice that he’s a witch?” WELL

stein’s entire claim to fame is his extraordinary ability to manipulate his own soul, both in terms of altering his wavelength and changing its physical form. it’s that unprecedented control over his wavelength that earned him the dubious honor of being 'dwma’s greatest meister’ — he’s able to match his wavelength to and resonate with any weapon within seconds — it’s not that far-fetched to think that he could alter any 'witch wavelength’ he gave off as well.*

there is a LOT of stuff that stein does with his soul that would make a LOT more sense as magic than as him using his own wavelength — like making his soul manifest in a physical form (the giant voodoo doll thing he uses to block crona’s bloody needle in their fight in front of the church, and the soul stitching he uses on medusa). the voodoo doll DOES surround his body when used, but in the case of his fight with medusa, he’s not even touching the stitches he uses to pin her down — he makes them appear on medusa when he’s nowhere near her!

that all seems much more plausible if you assume that stein is somehow neutralizing the witch wavelength he gives off and passing magic off as soul manipulation, i think?



( is the phantasmal screw in stein’s soul how he forces his wavelength onto the same frequency as a human’s? it’s shown as a different color than the rest of his soul in the anime, doesn’t that imply that it’s a foreign object rather than an innate part? is the physical screw through stein’s head connected to the one through his soul? probably. i think about these things a lot AND NOW YOU CAN TOO )

AND THERE’S MORE: stein absolutely had medusa’s number regarding her being a witch, and sure, he’s a smart guy who almost certainly would have worked it out regardless of his own situation, the sheer speed with which he did so lines up nicely with the idea that he was able to recognize her use of soul protect (an ability canonically held by witches; see eruka and mizune’s confrontation with medusa).

TL;DR: STEIN IS A WITCH, NEVER ASK ME FOR ANYTHING EVER AGAIN