30DAC – Day 10: Favorite Fighter Anime

I’m taking the meaning of this prompt as like brawl fighting, tournaments a theme etc. I was torn between two shows for this. Yu Yu Hakusho and Dragonball.

While I do truly love Dragonball, I can’t deny that Yu Yu Hakusho just has slightly more to offer in terms of interesting characters and cool powers. I didn’t include DBZ in this because, while I do like that show too, it gets monotonous after time, and the battles are drawn out too much.

Yu Yu Hakusho centers around a boy named Yusuke Urameshi who died while trying to save a kid from getting hit by a car. He’s brought back to life by a shinigami named Botan and Koenma, ruler of the spirit world, though technically a prince, under the condition that he become a spirit detective, a person with immense spiritual powers who solves cases for the spirit world typically involving demons.

He is quickly joined by his best friend/rival Kuwabara, who had heightened spirit awareness far before Yusuke, Hiei, a fire apparition and Kurama, a reincarnated fox demon.

While the animation isn’t fantastic, the fights are incredible and many of them are very memorable. My personal favorite is the Dark Tournament arc because not only do we showcase the main group’s powers, but we also get introduced to all sorts of different demons and abilities that constantly change up the battle. There’s a couple other tournament arcs, but I find the Dark Tournament more diverse and interesting.

Plus, it introduced us to Jin and he’s just awesome.

The characters are really memorable, even if Hiei really gives off a Vegeta vibe, only without the rivalry with the main character, and the storylines, while not being insanely original, are also memorable and well-written.

It’s just an overall great fighting anime that I’d be glad to recommend to anyone.

30DAC – Day 9: Favorite Anime Villain

This one was difficult not because I had too many choices but because I feel like my pool of villains that I like is surprisingly low. If a villain is good at their job, then you’re basically supposed to hate them. If you have a villain that is too sympathetic, it’s difficult to leave them with the moniker of ‘villain’. And then you have my pool of possible candidates, which mostly amounts to bad guys who eventually went good, so that kinda blew up in my face. I needed a villain who was evil, yet likable, funny, yet not stupid. And then I remembered Danganronpa the Animation and the delightfully evil little teddy bear known as Monobear.

A little background on the anime/game that he originates from, Danganronpa is about twelve students who are all exceptional at something. They get recruited into a supposedly prestigious academy called Hope’s Peak, but it turns out that the school is merely a front for a deadly survival ‘game’. The goal of the game is to get away with murder. If you do, you’re allowed to ‘graduate’ and leave the school. If you don’t or end up choosing the wrong suspect as a group during a murder investigation, you get killed.

The host of this little game and the principal of the school is a psychotic robotic teddy bear that is half white and ‘good’ while the other half is black and seemingly evil. Monobear brings a lot of twisted humor to the table in this show. He gets really irritated when a murder has not occurred in an extended period of time and he loves to taunt the crap out of the students with incentives to murder their classmates.

He also DRINKS IN SCHOOL! The fiend!

He’s also perfectly fine with killing people when prompted. In fact, he seems to enjoy it quite a bit while creating ironic deaths for the students who lose the game. If you attack him, you’ll also be horrifically murdered in some way.

Monobear is not just villainous and crazy, but he’s also the funniest character on the show. And he’s such a cuddly psychopath. Just look at him do his wittle dance.

*enter CanCan music here*

This one can be seen as cheating a little bit because Monobear is not the one actually pulling the strings. Another person is controlling him, but I see Monobear and this specific person as two completely different entities. Plus, it is hinted that Monobear just might be sentient, so who knows.

Monobear is insane, hilarious and as evil as villains get, as he deserves the title of my favorite anime villain.

Besides, if I didn’t give him the spot, he’d just keep beating up fish.

The salmon run was quite odd this year.