One of the things that anime is surprisingly not very good at is creating a fully-realized fictional ‘world.’ When you open up a fantasy book (and fantasy is of course the best genre for fictional worlds) you are often confronted with a ‘world map’ right off the bat. You will be given details about all sorts of countries and locations and customs, etc., to bring this world to life as you read. The reason that this doesn’t really happen in anime is for the same reason it does happen a whole lot in JRPGs – time.
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Kazuya Nakai is a more recent addition to my list of fandoms, but a strong one nonetheless. Like most voice actors, I would have heard him in some roles before I knew who he was or really listened to voices at all, such as his roles as Karasu in Noein and as Mugen in Samurai Champloo (though in both cases I noted the character having a great voice, and the latter I want to rewatch for this reason) as well as his roll as Shizuka Doumeki in XxXHolic. My fandom of Nakai largely came to be when he was brought to my attention by No Name, who is also a big fan. Thanks to No Name I knew him as the ‘guy who played Zoro in One Piece,’ though I didn’t really come to know his voice until his awesome role as Date Masamune in Sengoku Basara. There are some seriously, seriously long-ass manga out there, and a lot of them are really great. There are some like Golgo 13 and Detective Conan that have been doing the same thing for decades and are still going strong, which is cool. There are also those with a continuing story that keep on truckin’, and some serious long-runners that ended somewhere along the line like the Dragonball saga. I want to talk about three long-running manga series that are very influential to me and what makes them so. Bleach was brought to the US a little bit too late for me. I was just starting to fall out of interest in anime and start getting into video games when they started publishing Bleach, but I did manage to get the first two volumes of the series. I never managed to watch Bleach when it started airing on Cartoon Network, and by the time I got back into anime, I just wasn’t interested in the shounen action genre anymore. Bleach gradually gained this association with Naruto and the fanboys of both series that made me instinctively avoid it. Mind you I had a lot more experience with Naruto – I read it long enough to see it turn to shit, and I’d seen enough of the anime to hate it. But not Bleach – that dislike was purely fabrication. Can you believe it’s been two whole weeks since “100 Characters For 100 Otaku” began? Neither can I! But it’s still a’runnin and heading on towards the finale! We’ve still got a good week more before that, though, so keep on stickin’ around! Today we have numbers 35 down through 31 to play with, so let’s get into it! It’s “100 Characters for 100 Otaku” part eight! Back in the comments to part one, Ghostlightning predicted that the series would end after the eighth part. Little does he know that the ninth one is already written and queued up! But that’s tomorrow’s news – today, we’ve got numbers 65 down through 61 to play with. So let’s have some fun! |
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