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Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Ayumi Fujimura and Tetsuo Goto:

Tetsuo Goto is a man, and we have to give the boys' team some love.  So a male seiyuu is getting some recognition for a change.  Like Kenjiro Tsuda, he has a distinctly funny voice that is great for comic relief and silly side characters.  Martin from Squid Girl and Hanyabal from One Piece fit into that category.  For some reason he's also the quite serious sword Derflinger in Zero no Tsukaima, but at least in this case he's inside a comic relief series from the beginning, so it still matches up.

Meanwhile, Ayumi Fujimura is more of the real deal.  She plays a million roles and her voice is extremely versatile, slipping into a variety of different ages and types.  While I've heard her voice in many roles, none of them really jumped out at me except for when she played Neferpitou in Hunter x Hunter (2011).  Her Neferpitou, complete with nyaa'ing every other word, is one of the most marvelous voice actress performances you'll ever come across.  Only Yui Horie's Nekomonogatari performance can beat it, and that's because we're talking Yui Horie here.  Of course no one can beat her.  That's like losing to Pele at soccer.

I love evocative, distinctive voices.  Tetsuo Goto is distinctive, whereas Ayumi Fujimura's Neferpitou is evocative.  She's like a black widow, scary but charming all at once.  It gives you chills to look at her but you just can't look away.  Neferpitou may be a boy for all I know but I really don't care.  She's got the voice of a woman and the figure of a woman and that's enough for me.  It gets kind of tiresome when anime keeps insisting these people are 'male' when they're so evidently not male by any stretch of the imagination.  A woman is as a woman appears, regardless of what the genome says.  If a transgender can really, truly pull off the look and voice of a woman to the point that no one can distinguish her from a woman, then 'she' is the proper pronoun in that circumstance.  It's only when fakers claim they are women despite not looking or sounding remotely like a woman that disgusted rejection is the proper reply.

One neat piece of trivia -- Fumiko Orikasa is Chun Li, so it's only fitting that Ayumi Fujiwara provides the voice for Street Fighter's Ibuki.  Street Fighter knows how to pick 'em.

This brings my seiyuu list up to 111 deserving honorees.  I wonder who I'll credit next?

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