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#we'd just watched fade to black and made plans to watch the bleach live action
bleachbleachbleach · 3 years
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Top 5 Bleach voices
When I first watched Bleach, “watching anime” meant loading three 7-minute segments in order to watch a single episode on YouTube--each of which you then had to buffer. And they’d have a combination of English or Spanish subtitles in like 320p and it was a whole affair. (This represents a level of dogged tenacity that I’m not sure I still have--oh, how weak we’ve grown, with our unlimited high-speed Internet and our streaming media!)
Under those circumstances, I feel like the question of “why this? why not just read the manga? why not continue memorizing the singular Inuyasha DVD we own?” looms large. The animation is what it is (and at 320p it is not a lot LOL) and imho the Bleach bgm is uniquely bad. But my answer is also very simple: I ABSOLUTELY ADORE ORIKASA FUMIKO’S RUKIA. SHE IS PERFECT.  A GODDESS. MY QUEEN. ADORATION AND ADULATION. 
My top five Bleach voices
1. Rukia (Orikasa Fumiko) -- My gosh, what do I even say. I literally watched this anime for her Rukia--what more is there TO say? But I guess a lot of what I love about Orikasa’s performance is how much of what I love about Rukia she’s able to carry into her voicework. Because you have this girl who can be archaic and otherworldy, but also codeswitch straight into Genial High School Classmate, but also be colloquial and masculine and rough around the edges. But ALSO be dancerly, but also a depressed tower queen, but also serious and firm, serious and deferent, but ALSO drama Rukia (I love drama Rukia ToT). Rukia stands out to me as a character who’s a lot of things all at once, flickering rapidly across all these pieces of her, and Orikasa nails all of it.
I love this scene because she’s Vanna Rukia but the second Rukia expects the camera to stop rolling her affect shifts entirely. Beautiful. 
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(Me after I end the Zoom meeting.)
****** Would also like to mention that Orikasa also plays Ashisogi Jizou, the chirpy butterfly version, AKA my favorite of the manifested zanpakutou. The idea of Rukia and Mayuri’s freakin’ sword being played by the same person is just U N H I N G E D to me.
2. Ikkaku (Hiyama Nobuyuki) -- Literally any time anyone in any other anime does a battle cry or an ORAORAORA I’m just like, “Well, he’s no Ikkaku.” This man has the best battle cries in the entire world. I would make his oraoraora my ringtone. (And then like, to also be able to do this???)
3. Ichigo (Morita Masakazu) -- I like Ichigo’s voice well enough, and he is remarkably good at breathing (I have a friend who once did all of the breathing fx for a stage play’s soundboard and let me tell you--underrated skillset), but the reason he’s on this list is because of the way he cried at the end of the Fullbring arc. Just deeply, soul-rendingly sad. Ichigo being sad doesn’t need a lot of help to make me feel sad for him, but Masakazu’s voicework in that scene took it to separate planet for me. It haunts me. (He also has a tiny but really good scene for this in Fade to Black.)
4. Urahara (Miki Shinichiro) -- Similar to Rukia, I feel like to do a good Urahara you have to have a really wide range of affects and be nimble about maneuvering across them, and Urahara has such a great voice for someone who’s ready to be deeply weird in an inscrutable but adorkable way and then suddenly be deeply weird in a fucked up way at, well, the drop of a hat.
5. Mayuri (Nakao Ryuusei) -- Opposite Urahara, to do Mayuri you need a voice that’s deeply weird in only a fucked up way. But at the same time, you can’t be generically villainous because you have to be extra af about it. But not JUST histrionic, because you also need to be coldly, clinically sinister. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk! But Nakao’s Mayuri is so, so distinctive.
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