The most famed of Meisters and Death Scythes historically have larger than average wings. It is assumed, therefore, that all Meisters and Weapons are graced with fortunate, easy, beloved lives, and this translates into either reverence or resentment.
This assumption is false, of course, and more than a little backwards. Meisters and Weapons, good Meisters and Weapons, have to understand their partners far too deeply for anything less than love, the purest and most soulful of love, to feed their wings.
When she enters the DWMA, Maka’s wings are average: not too big, but not too small. She hates her Papa for it, hates that she can’t have the same gloriously fluffy spread as Black☆Star, who claims godhood for his parents’ perfect love, while Papa can’t even love her or Mama, no matter how beautiful Mama’s wings are. It’s an insult every time she spies Papa through glass windows at another restaurant, another date, his wings as impressive and full as those of his partner of the day. (It takes her a long time to realize that her wings do not want for her Papa’s love.)
At meister-weapon mingle, Maka finds herself drawn to a white-haired boy with too sharp teeth and too small wings, frail feathers ruffling resentfully as he stands in the corner of the room. He’s a scythe, and she scythe-meister, and she hears in his music a passion which matches her own, so she shakes the hand of an underloved weapon and becomes his meister.
Days later, Maka accidentally knocks Ox Ford over the head with her wings, larger than she’s used to, and she would apologize if he weren’t so snippy about it, gosh, what’s his problem. (His problem is that his wings are only about half the size of Maka’s, while Kim Diehl’s are large enough to fold protectively around her, cape-like.) Weeks later, as Maka and Soul groom each other as part of post-mission cool down, she notices suddenly how pristine her partner’s feathers have become, how they flutter under her fingers, how the feathers cling more firmly to his wings. Months later, Soul remains Maka’s partner, and Maka remains Soul’s, and their wings have swollen beyond what either of them know how to deal with.
Black☆Star’s wings are larger than Maka’s, but only just, because while Spirit’s love does not quite make up for two parents’ worth, Maka is better at winning strangers’ admiration. It is Tsubaki’s offerings, the first of which takes the form of lonely applause, which make Black☆Star’s wings far greater than Maka’s, at least until the scythe meister finds her scythe.
Tsubaki’s wings swell, too, under Black☆Star’s unwavering support, though she molts, more than either of them expect, when Masamune dies. Black☆Star collects every fallen feather to create a shrine dedicated to the deceased Nakatsukasa.
They retreat from a defeated Mifune with all three pairs of wings that much heavier. Much, much later, Angela’s first hint at Mifune’s passing comes from her new guardians’ wings shedding a not insignificant number of feathers. These, too, are bundled and tied and kept.
At first, Liz and Patty keep one another’s wings brimming and intimidating.
The Thompson Angels terrorize New York City right up to the day Death the Kid finds them, his own shoulders unburdened with wings, though not for lack of love. They sneer and lord over the son of a god, disgusted by a boy they believe is human, and so unloved that his wings are not immediately visible, right up until the moment Liz gets behind him and screams in horror, because one so polished and yet so entirely unloved cannot possibly exist.
A Death God does not begin to earn his wings until he has connected his Lines of Sanzu.
Liz and Patty learn this, of course, as they are dragged to Death City, as they are put to work in a café, as they chase their warden and their customers out of their place of work, as their wings grow larger with Kid’s and Master’s and Tsugumi’s and the city’s affection.
When Lord Death passes, Liz and Patty are the ones who witness the proof of their love for their meister, glorious sable-feathered affairs which swath the new Lord Death like a cloak.
Crona’s wings are expansive but pitch. When the blood filters back into their body, it’s to reveal withered things, drooping and skeletal and fundamentally disturbing.
Maka is horrified. Soul is horrified. Everyone in Death City is horrified, really, but as Spartoi adopts the witch’s child, down sprouts carefully from neglect and decay until finally a few timid feathers begin to poke through freshly granted love.
Their wings only grow, even after they flee Death City and stain their new-granted feathers black and red with blood both theirs and not, and the idea that they are still loved only makes their betrayal cut deeper into their soul. Medusa’s “love” is the last straw: Crona thinks, among other things in their scrambled, tormented mind, that they would rather be wingless than have their mother’s wretched love.
