Most Memorable Character: Takeo Gouda
If you looked at a list of all the anime broadcast in Japan this past year, titles only, which character would pop into your mind and refuse to go away? For this one, we asked our reviewers to choose their top choice. While there wasn’t really much of a consensus, the strongest support went to The Big Man of My Love Story!! Takeo Gouda.
JT: Takeo Gouda, My Love Story!!
The shojo genre has long been a genre dominated by predatory pretty boys as the romantic leads so the idea of instead going with a giant manly-man (who’s usually a side character if they appear at all in this genre) and an extremely gentle hearted one at that is certainly quite the twist. Doubly so when he’s the actual protagonist of the series as opposed to our heroine Yamato. While this could have just been a blatant attempt to subvert the usual genre tropes and nothing more, Takeo proved that he was more than worthy to carry the mantle as the lead. He’s a character with a heart as big as himself, and he’s the kind of brash, awkward guy that you can’t help but cheer for, even when he technically gets his happy ending no less than 4 episodes into the series run. As a bit of a big guy myself it’s nice to see a protagonist that doesn’t have to adhere to the usual standards of attractiveness and I’m hoping to see other series take a cue from him in the future.
GLP: Takeo Gouda, My Love Story!!
Very rarely do you see an anime character that you’d define as “pure” and is also a dude. Takeo takes the trope of a giant with a heart of gold to the next level, taking what’s become such a textbook character archetype and fleshing him out into the star of a very atypical shojo series. His absolute sincerity not only to his girlfriend, but to everyone around him is more infectious than obnoxious because his character is written in such a way that you hope he exists just so it’s not weird when you admit you wish you had someone like him to look up to when growing up.
GBS: Takeo Gouda, My Love Story!!
There were a lot of memorable characters this year, from the mischievous slacker Umaru to Anna and her cookies, the cast of Food Wars! to the adorably snarky Kuon, but one man, literally, stands above them all: the gentle giant Takeo Gouda. He’s very much a character from some other kind of story, probably some shounen action show as he can leap from burning buildings and stop giant steel girders from crushing people, but he worked amazingly well in the world of shoujo romance. Not your average shoujo protagonist at all and yet his purity, noted above, does fit the genre.
AA: Umaru Doma, Himouto Umaru-chan
As the IGN Anime podcast says so elegantly: She is the trash monster in all of us. People may complain about her, but her code switching between outside and inside portrays a sense of how a lot of otaku really are in life. With that said, the fact that she nags, complains, and whines her way into what she wants reminds us that, yes, we would love to do that in our lives as well. It’s like looking into the abyss and seeing ourselves in the mirror if we had money.
KS: Saitama, One-Punch Man
If there’s one thing that defines One Punch Man, it’s the juxtaposition of a world bursting with enough detail to overwhelm you and the extraordinarily simple design of its protagonist. It’s paradoxically that very bland face that makes Saitama so memorable, and he follows it up by blowing away any of the most intricately articulated enemies in his past with across-the-board comical nonchalance. Despite how effective this gag always is, it turns out there’s a lot more to Saitama, and he actually has some genuinely powerful moments of self-sacrifice that makes him a hero in a different way than expected.
BCT: Anna Nishikinomiya, Shimoneta: A Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn’t Exist
Nope, Anna, and her cookies, refuse to go away, alright. There was not a character more impossible to ignore and to watch in amazement as her very literally dangerous naïveté in all things sexual and romantic was exploited to more and more extreme ends for our heroes. Anna is, unfortunately, also memorable this year because of the death of veteran voice actor Miyu Matsuki, whose verve and voice made Anna—and all of her many, multifaceted, roles—much more than they would have been otherwise.
DJH: Aoi Miyamori, Shirobako
Aoi Miyamori is pretty much a symbol for each and every one of us. We’ve all been in a position where it feels like we’re struggling to find out what we want to do with our lives while everyone around us seems like they’ve already have it figured out. Add this symbolism to her undeniable cuteness and all of those over-the-top expressions we get to see throughout Shirobako and you have a character that is truly unforgettable. Aoi wasn’t my favorite character of the series though, that medal goes to Shizuka. But Aoi was just too important and too real to overlook as far as anime characters go. There’s a little bit of each of us inside of her…in a totally not perverted way.
G.B. Smith
Greg Smith has been writing anime reviews and a review column on anime dubbed into English for several years, first at AnimeOnDVD and now for The Fandom Post. His occasional column on English anime dubs, Press Audio, appears whenever he comes across a dub worthy of a closer look. He is also the deputy editor for our seasonal and year end retrospectives.