Character · Soul Eater
Franken Stein
The teacher with a bolt through his skull, which he turns while he thinks.
In Otakana the clue reads: Teacher with a screw through his head
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Soul Eater
- Letters
- 5 · Hard
Franken Stein is the finest meister the academy ever produced and its least reassuring member of staff. He rolls into rooms on an office chair and tips it over on arrival, smokes constantly, and dissects anything that has stopped moving. His students are afraid of him for reasons the show declines to soften. He is also, when it matters, the most dangerous person in the building.
The screw in his head is not decoration. Stein turns it while working through a problem and it clicks, and the sound tells you how near the edge of himself he currently is. Madness runs through this series as an infection rather than a figure of speech, and Stein is the adult most exposed to it, because he was already halfway there.
He was once partnered with Spirit Albarn, Maka's father, who still flinches at the memory of waking up mid-dissection. That history explains why Death keeps him on the payroll: better teaching than loose. Ohkubo names characters by stating the joke out loud, and a man built out of spare parts of himself is called Franken Stein.
Spelling STEIN
STEIN is five letters and the vowel order is the trap: E before I, as in the German name it was cut from. His full name is written as two words, Franken Stein, so the game takes the second half. Said aloud, English instincts push towards STIEN or STINE, and neither of those fills the row.