4) Favorite female character(s)?
Yu Yu Hakusho has a very strong female cast, and I love so many of them for so many different reasons. Even Togashi's most stereotypical ladies have nuances to them that make them that much more atypical, that much more multi-dimensional, that much more real, than a cookie cutter trope. In 30 days of yu yu I talked at length about Genkai. And I still agree with pretty much everything I wrote before. So I'm going to take this opportunity to talk about a really badass female character who is rarely discussed.
Yusuke’s human ancestor/Raizen's lover the kudakusushi is only really ever identified as "onna" (woman), and Raizen never reveals her name - if he ever even knew it, since he seemed so impressed and cowed by her. She only appears in one scene, a flashback, but what a presence and figure she cuts. And what an awesome (in the truest sense of the word) ripple effect her existence has made all the way through 700 years.
I really like both the idea of the character and also the execution of the character. In a number of ways she tips both the manic pixie dream girl and the Japanese yamato nadeshiko tropes on their heads. Raizen is carefree and high on doing whatever the hell he wants to do, which is basically just eating humans for fun and fighting and causing trouble, then he meets the woman of his dreams that he never could have imagined: a corpse-eating Buddhist shaman whose body is a complete wasteland of poison and disease so that she can make antidotes to save others. And she's like "Who the hell are you? You're garbage. You wanna eat me? Go ahead. You'll die and you'll still be garbage." and Raizen is like, "Whoa. Holy shit. You are totally right. I am complete garbage and a waste of existence." And is motivated into ascetic reform for the rest of his life to try to become worthy of her.
We know Raizen was completely in love. But there's little to no indication of how tied she was to him - her story completely separates from his after their one meeting, and there's a strong sense that her character is very much independent from him, which is something pretty amazingly hard to pull off considering she only appears in the narrative because of that single night he has with her. But it's made very clear that Raizen was the one who chases her, that he begs her for that one night, that they never speak of a future nor meet again. Raizen dreams of a reunion in reincarnation before he dies, but this never happens. There is absolutely no sign that on her side, she was nostalgic about him at all; the story hints at the opposite, in fact: that she may have fully severed attachments to the material world.
Also another thing that I found very compelling is that in the manga, in the Taiwanese edition in any case, Raizen describes her as (paraphrased): "A physically weak, pale, gaunt, ugly woman with the scent of a sorcerer, but I loved the look in her eyes. She was the first person to ever stare at me with such a glare of contempt." LMAO. (I don’t have the original Japanese to compare it to, but IIRC the official English manga translation is extremely watered down on Raizen’s description of her.) But that’s why the first time I ever saw her appear in the anime, where her design is a very conventional Japanese beauty, I was like, "...HUH??" (In the manga, she's not really drawn that ugly either, but it's harder to tell. Her face is usually partly obscured in shadow.)Â
In summary, a very, very badass lady. I like her lots.
16) Favorite member of the Sensui 7?
Mitarai Kiyoshi! Again, I still agree with pretty much everything I said in 30 days from a story perspective, so let’s talk about his character design lol. I really like his design! I personally find it so freaking hard to come up with interesting short hairstyles for male characters, and his is a really good one of a style that I have never really seen much anywhere else. I like the colour palette the anime gave him too, lots of yellows with a splash of blue. Also his seiyuu is MATSUMOTO RICAAAAAA
His territory power is pretty cool too, although it’s a good thing he’s not anemic. His first appearance, the rainy night battle with Kuwabara, is a really fantastic one. It’s one of those fights I don’t mention very often BUT I SHOULD because it’s SO WELL-DONE. It opens with this little sequence of Kuwabara and his friends walking in the rain after having their time of their life at a concert and talking about heading out for some karaoke - when Sawamura suddenly disappears. The setup reminds me of rainy night ghost stories, and has a great mood to it. The comic panels for the entire fight have this very memorable, overriding sense of a constant background of rain and night, like a deluge, and the water effects are all rendered so well. There’s a lot of great texture and layering going on too, and the bulk and sense of volume/density of water of Mitarai’s creatures really come through. Whoops, this turned into a comics drawing ramble. BUT YES, MITARAI! I LIKE HIM! lol
20) When was the first time you ever seen this series?
I touch on this a little in 30 days of yu yu - it would've been elementary school, around when the series first came out. We followed along overseas, and my dad would pick up stuff for my sister and me whenever he happened to be travelling around Asia. My sister read me the volumes, we'd get CDs and anime artbooks and things like that. Growing up, my impression of the series was the manga first and foremost, then the Japanese seiyuu because of the image songs and audio dramas. I knew the anime and the movies primarily through screencaps from magazines and the anime compilation books, and Eizou Hakusho on VHS.
It was only in late high school or university that we picked up a bootleg copy of the entire series and I watched it end to end in Japanese for the very first time. Well, almost end to end. We had to take breaks because it was too much. As mentioned in 30 days, the English subtitles were hilariously awful, and "Rei gun" was rendered as "Magic Ball". I was busting a gut and have no idea how my sister and I made it through an episode (or maybe even several) before we gave up and switched to Chinese subtitles. I was never so grateful in my life that Yusuke only has four shots available lmao
@cjjoughin​ Thank you so much for asking!! :D!
