is this just me?
I must confess to an overwhelming fascination with voice actors in anime and other animated things. After I get into an animated show, one of the fandom-immersion rituals I go through is to look up the cast list and cross-reference the voice actors. And then I'll have completely irrational love for so-and-so character because he or she "is the same person" as so-and-so other character I loved before. E.g.: Suddenly I have a soft spot for Treize because of the mere fact that he is played by the same guy who played Sesshoumaru, and Quatre because he is played by Kurt from X-Men: Evo. Characters start taking on whole new levels of meaning, like the fact that Heero is also Warren Worthington on X:Evo, and the whole soldier-Angel-Wing Zero-superhero imagery starts screwing with my perception of both characters. This is completely irrational. It's the actor, not the character. But I can't seem to help it. Is that just me, or does anyone else become unduly intrigued by V.A.s and other roles they've been cast in?
I think part of my interest stems from the simple fact that I'll hear a familiar voice and it'll bug me to death until I look it up. Like Godwin in Last Exile: I could not sleep until I had confirmed that he was Jet Black from Bebop. That's fine. But the rest of it, I can't account for.
Oh, and is there some defining factor that separates the two distinct circles of anime-dub that I've noticed -- the Gundam/InuYasha/Ranma/etc circle which overlaps with American cartoons like X:Evo and various Cartoon Network daytime stuff (Krypto, Winx Club, etc), and the Trigun/Bebop/Wolf's Rain/Witch Hunter Robin/Last Exile/etc circle which inevitably has Johnny Bosch the Oblivious Happy-Go-Lucky Guy (excepting Wolf's Rain), Crispin Freeman the Brooder in Black, Joshua Seth the Wild Card, Wendee Lee the Strong Woman, etc etc? Is there a difference in companies or is it some obscure artistic/aesthetic thing? It's probably something obvious that I've been oblivious to, but I'm curious nonetheless.
I think part of my interest stems from the simple fact that I'll hear a familiar voice and it'll bug me to death until I look it up. Like Godwin in Last Exile: I could not sleep until I had confirmed that he was Jet Black from Bebop. That's fine. But the rest of it, I can't account for.
Oh, and is there some defining factor that separates the two distinct circles of anime-dub that I've noticed -- the Gundam/InuYasha/Ranma/etc circle which overlaps with American cartoons like X:Evo and various Cartoon Network daytime stuff (Krypto, Winx Club, etc), and the Trigun/Bebop/Wolf's Rain/Witch Hunter Robin/Last Exile/etc circle which inevitably has Johnny Bosch the Oblivious Happy-Go-Lucky Guy (excepting Wolf's Rain), Crispin Freeman the Brooder in Black, Joshua Seth the Wild Card, Wendee Lee the Strong Woman, etc etc? Is there a difference in companies or is it some obscure artistic/aesthetic thing? It's probably something obvious that I've been oblivious to, but I'm curious nonetheless.