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Sunday, August 5, 2018

Rumi Okubo:

The latest addition to my 'anime voices' hall of fame is Rumi Okubo.  She's the seiyuu behind Alstolfo from Fate/Apocrypha and Cure Muse from Suite Precure.

She's also played dozens of other roles, but none of them much mattered.  She shines brightest in Fate/Apocrypha and that's why she belongs among the world's elite.  Why is her voice so good?  I think it's because she manages to come off as carefree and yet when the words reach our ears they cause us all sorts of emotions.  It's a weird disconnect, a discordance, that makes her so unique.  How can she care so little and make us care so much?  Sort of like how she's playing a high-pitched boy who looks like a girl, her performance is a continuous intrigue of contradictions.

Even in Suite Precure she plays two contradictory roles.  As Cure Muse, she was cool, mysterious, and mature -- and yet when the truth is revealed that she's just a little girl who misses her parents, suddenly a completely different voice appropriate to her age emerges.  Of all things, she only looked adult via her alter ego by wearing super tall boots.  Rumi Okubo is the perfect conveyor of ambiguity.

This marks the 82nd female seiyuu worthy of honor and the 126th seiyuu in all.  Hopefully someday the list will reach 200, but until then these are the only names and voices worth memorizing.

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