Edwardsdv's Top 50 Anime Characters

Written in the "Top 50 Anime Anime/Manga/VN/LN Characters Fatal 4-Way: Angelo vs. edwards vs. Mac vs. Zea" topic made in February 2011.

 50. Hideyoshi Toyotomi (Sengoku Basara 2)

http://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-10/art/sb2-toyotomi-hideyoshi2.jpg

Starting this list off with quite possibly its most manly resident. At the end of Sengoku Basara I wondered to myself how they could possibly top the shotgun-in-one-hand- giant-claymore-in-the-other Devil King, Oda Nobunaga. Sure enough, the season opens with this pretty typical battle between Shingens Forces and Kenshin’s with the young bucks battling it out else where when Hideyoshi descends on the scene like a badass. From the moment he appears on screen he has such a presence that just makes you feel that there is no way any of these other guys can even touch him at this point. Yet if its just badass presence that I were looking for Hideyoshi would probably not be on this list. He takes it that step further by having an awesome patriotic goal: Unify Japan and make it the strongest nation and then “ crack open the world.”

Quite the goal. He ends up gaining allies not through intimidation but through the appeal of his vision for Japan and those who oppose him, primarily our protagonists from season 1 look as though they might actually be in the wrong. His discussions wit several of the other characters such as Motochika, Motonori, and Keiji Maeda make him a much fuller and interesting character than his predecessor. Throw in that he manages to have one of the best fight scenes ever with Masamune in the finale where he just uses his giants fists to fight a man with 6 swords, crushing most of them and you end up with one of the best characters in anime.

I mean look at him, the guys so manly he even makes HeroicKrauss swoon.

49.Nozomu Itoshiki ( Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei)

http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb282/diananosakka/1199043053688.jpg

Following up one of the manliest men ever, is one of the least manly people of all time. Nozomu, known by the monikers of Pink Supervisor and Zetsubou-Sensei is one of the funniest characters I have had the pleasure of watching. SZS is largely an ensemble show with Nozomu serving as the straight man for much of the series. When he isn’t trying to “grow taller” he is a high school teacher teaching a class that, presumably, has only a single male and a cadre of girl students who are in love with him. I know, it sounds just like SantaRPGs naughtiest dreams, but stay with me here.

What makes him so great is thee way he comes into the class every episode and flips the role of the teacher on its head, seeking to break the hopes and dreams of all of his students and alerting them as to how awful the world is. His episodic rants about things like future careers and changes and even “impurities” are some of the funniest parts of each episode and you can feel them all coming straight from the mouth of the most self-loathing person imaginable. Not exactly a deep character, but that’s not what I watch comedy for. Instead he is just hysterical and the engine that really makes this fantastically funny series go

48. Yuri Mihalkov (Planetes)

http://cdn.myanimelist.net/images/characters/9/54294.jpg
 * SPOILERS THIS WRITEUP RELIES ON SPOILERS*

Planetes, for those of you not in the know is a pretty fantastic show held back by lackluster characters driving the plot, but to compensate some absolutely amazing side-characters. Perhaps the besto these side characters is Yuri. Planetes follows the Debris division of a major corporation in space. Their jobs are to collect space trash and dispose of it, to prevent it from being a hazard in a future world where space tracel is commonplace and the moon is colonized. He is one of the 4 main members of the debris division and starts the show of f very terse and doesn’t really engage anyone. However, as his story unfolds it becomes clear the debris collection means a lot more to Yuri than the others. As WishMeLuck915, age 15, might say, it is "hauntingly beautiful".

His wife was killed during a space passenger flight when a small bolt busted through the window. Yuri survived because he happened to be in the bathroom at the time and was one of the very few survivors. He joined the debris division because his wife was never found and he was hoping to recover a memento from her. Yuris journey and development where he searches for the compass and ultimately gets over the loss of his wife is my favorite part of the series and is one of the more touching moments in anime. Oh yeah and he takes care of like a hundred animals on the space station which is pretty cool.

Favorite Moment: When he literally almost gets himself killed trying to retrieve a piece of space debris that he thinks might have belonged to his wife.