100 Characters For 100 Otaku (Part Six: 75-71)

The sixth post in “100 Characters For 100 Otaku.”

Have you been following “100 Characters For 100 Otaku?” It’s the post series where I go through my top 100 characters and tell you what I like about them, how they mirror the nature of otaku, how they reflect my own otakudom, and how they parallel the first episode of Crest of the Stars! Make sure you keep up, so that you may see how YOUR favorite characters could fall into all this mess! Today’s piece is 75 through 71, so let’s see what we’ve got!

Casshern Sins 7 – Walking Through the Empty Age

Casshern Sins is like a combination of Texhnolyze, Kino’s Journey, and Trigun in a brilliant and beautiful tone piece. At this point it’s primarily episodic, though there’s a plot always hanging in the background and leading everything along. In episode 7, Casshern meets a woman who used to work in a factory before the apocalypse and has now spent all of her time building a tower onto the factory. Her dream is to hang a bell on top of the tower that, when rung, will make all who hear it see that the world is beautiful even in the ruin. She tries to use Casshern’s body to make her bell but fails. She then builds a simpler bell (which is broken soon afterward) but she is dissatisfied with the sound it makes. However, Casshern is enthralled by the sound which he feels resonating from the woman’s heart. At the end of the episode, ringo shows up at the tower and listens in wonder at the woman’s bell of the heart.

Surprisingly Insightful – Anime Insider vol. 64, January 09

There were three initial factors that got me into anime – Ninja Scroll, Cowboy Bebop, and the very first volume of Anime Invasion, which has a list of everything deleted from the dubbed DBZ, a lost of all the Gundam shows, a Macross episode guide, and more. The magazine later changed it’s name to Anime Insider and over the years I grew to consider it a magazine for anime n00bs. However, when I picked up the latest volume, I was actually impressed by the content.