Soul Eater: On Happiness & Imagination
- Maka & The Kishin
The final scenes from the fantastic Soul Eater (2008) anime leaves the series with a swift about-face turn, as Maka Albarn (protag) and the Kishin (antag) face off in their last battle. As they discuss strategy, philosophy gets folded into the mix, with the Kishin describing all emotions as stemming from imagination. The antithesis of no imagination is an all consuming madness; you may shut out fear, jealousy and other unenvious traits through madness, but are consumed by it nevertheless. What resonated with me specifically about this conversation and the show at large is this idea of imagination being at the core of the human psyche.
Maka discusses her bravery and her ordinariness; how someone so average or non-powerful can use imagined courage to overcome. It is in this bravery, this wavering but steady zeal even in face of fear and death, that Maka realizes what happiness can be. She is ordinary. This ordinariness means she has friends, and insecurities, and friends who help her through her insecurities. It means she has more everything than the Kishin, the embodiment of madness consuming all else, and it is her final ace in the hole. The Kishin realizes this, says some final words, and accepts his fate.
2. Imagination
Broadly, imagination can be used to describe our emotions. It is in our imagination that we come up with the words to associate our stomach dropping with fear, butterflies with anxious happiness, tingles and head fuzzies with coziness. It should also be noted that imagination could, in ill hands, be used to explain away mental illness (toxic positivity is very much a thing that relates to this potential drawback). However, the angle I see Soul Eater’s philosophy being meant to go is this: humans are human because of our imagination. We can’t and shouldn’t succumb to madness, the void that rests at imagination’s end.
We will always be afraid of the big bads we can conjure up in our brains, and darker genres of media often rely on this to create effective work. The Kishin in Soul Eater in large part represents this unknown. Maka is, in effect, the banishment of madness, if not fear outright. She becomes the quintessence of strength through imagination. She wins by coming to an understanding of her smallness. Her smallness is her happiness, and it helps her save her world and her friends, who ground her in her smallness.
Put to other uses, imagination in combination with (un)knowability helps explain many of the emotions we as humans experience. Fear is largely our unknowns manifesting in nefarious ways in our imaginations; envy reaches to know someone, but is shot down and skewed into negativity by not knowing, exacerbated by the imagined person’s better life. Anger is in large part a reaction to what we do know, and exhibiting rage because of it; curiosity is wanting to know what we don’t, and imagining the possibilities therein.
3. Happiness
The emotion that generally escapes this equation, however, is happiness. Happiness is fluid and always out of reach. Intangible, yet we know it when we feel it. The things that make one person happy can make another outright miserable, and while this can be true for any other emotion, we generally feel envy, temptation, rage, and other things in more concrete, easily definable ways.
Happiness as a concept and emotion intentionally evades simple definition. There are levels to happiness much like other feelings, but happiness sticks with us in ways different than the rest. Nostalgia, for example, is the wearing away of truth and knowingness to get to the (re)imagined, ideal, gooey happiness at the center of a memory. Contentedness is happiness on airplane mode; ecstasy is all-encompassing happiness, both in the corporeal and intangible. There are seemingly more ways to describe the human psyche’s ties to happiness that I can roll off the top of my head than most other emotions, largely because happiness is what most of us seek. We want to continually experience the happiest moments of our lives because of the inherent positivity associated with the emotion.
This constant joy is an impossibility, as we all know. There are too many unknowns, too many imagined realities, too many things we can never completely compartmentalize into our mind’s inner workings to always be operating from a place of happiness. The concept of happiness being the journey and not a destination ultimately reads inaccurately as well. It’s true that we can never arrive at a permanent state of happiness, no matter how hard we might wish for it. However, the journey one faces will be riddled with other emotions, and we find moments of joviality within, but it is not a journey to or for happiness.
We don’t really know why we experience life, or why we’ve been put here to do what we do; even science is a consistency in theory, and not a permanent yes/no answer to the questions we seek to make sense of. Happiness as it relates to imagination also follows this consistency; I can say eating a slice of pineapple & ham pizza makes me happy because it has consistently proven to be true in my life. I can imagine my next slice will bring me happiness as well. This isn’t to say it always will, however, as I could start hating the combination, its individual parts, or pizza in its entirety. I could also just continue to enjoy what I enjoy, and have it bring me small doses of happiness in near perpetuity.
Happiness, then, is imagining, finding what brings the emotion out, and careful repetition. We can wear ourselves out easily because we remember x brings us happiness, without lending ourselves room for change, the embrace of the unknown. We have to be careful in what we allow to make us happy, lest we succumb to lowered standards of joy or diminishing returns in repetitive pleasure seeking. Happiness evades us impishly as it graces us with its presence when it decides to.
Maka received happiness in the moment she understood just how small she was. The Kishin could never understand that smallness, that desire to remain human and unique in the way our flaws and strengths individually combine. We can’t be continually happy because it would replace the importance of a variegated life, and simultaneously dim the brilliance of a happy moment. Without the randomness of human experience, imagination would cease to exist. Though we wouldn’t experience depressing lows, we also wouldn’t experience the highs of love, bliss, true affection. It would, in effect, be the same as the Kishin maddening himself to banish everything and everyone else out.
It is in the space between the binary of imagination and madness, imagined realities turning into actual ones, where we experience loss, sadness, boredom, trepidation, and happiness’ many siblings. The other children of imagination allow each happy moment to shine as hard as it can, when it can. Allowing the unknown and the imagined to sink into who we are and how we decide to go about life creates space for happiness. Humanity would be wise to always keep the door of our imagination open for when happiness decides to visit.
