Thursday, October 16, 2025

Ichigo > Ayumi:

Chapter 5 Part 1 of Heaven Burns Red does a great job characterizing Ichigo, and it makes her a lot more likable than she was before.  Replaying this portion of the story reminded me how much I admired Ichigo, so in to the wonderful character hall of fame she goes.  She gets the excellent song from the same portion of the game, Valkyrie's Epic, as her personal theme.

To make room I cut Ayumi, also known as Cure Echo.  She's a minor character who only shows up in a few Precure movies, not even a season.  Compared to Ichigo who gets hours and hours of content exclusively about her and hundreds or thousands of spoken lines, it's no contest.  Ayumi is certainly pretty, but Ichigo in her idol outfit isn't bad either.  Portamento was moved over to be Yukari's theme (Rosario Vampire's Yukari), and the 4-star song Luca lost all representation for now.  But it's okay if a 4-star song isn't represented so long as the song has no franchise connection to the character.

As an interesting side note, this means there are 32 wonderful characters from Heaven Burns Red, one more than the previous record holder for a franchise with a continuous plot -- Fairy Tail at 31.  Fairy Tail certainly has better romances than HBR, but in other ways HBR is better than FT.  For instance drama -- bad things happen in HBR, while FT is all happy-go-lucky.  HBR also has a more realistic, down-to-Earth feel.  In Fairy Tail magic can generally solve anything, but in HBR only grit gets you through each and every day.  It's a desperate battle to survive, for the seraphs and for humanity as a whole.  As someone who loves both franchises with all my heart, I'll leave it at this -- whichever franchise actually reaches its conclusion will be the better one in the end.

I had to edit '100 Waifus' again, but it was only cutting a single 'i' from the spelling of Tenshinhan, which is the correct spelling of 'Tien.'  America misspelled his name from the beginning in their localization and I learned that incorrect name from an early age so I had never bothered to check it.  Now it's corrected.  An edit of that size doesn't count, so the book was still finished with the 50th edition.

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