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Sunday, September 10, 2017

Yuka Iguchi:

The latest addition to my great voices hall of fame is Yuka Iguchi.  She's a famous seiyuu who's played tons of characters in many of my favorite shows, so what took so long?  As admirably as she performed, there was never a Gate moment like Rina Hidaka's, where she just put everything on the line and really tugged at my emotions.  But eventually an accumulation of inoffensive performances adds up to something just as reputable.  I see Yuka Iguchi everywhere, to the point that I remember her name better than many of the seiyuu already on my list.  If I'm going to remember her name anyway, I may as well have her actually memorialized like all the others.

Yuka Iguchi is also a tremendously good singer (like many voice actors).  She's already honored in my good music hall of fame, so it makes little sense to keep avoiding her on my seiyuu list.

Just how many famous roles has Yuka performed?  How about Index from Index, Mea Kurosaki from To Love Ru Darkness, Norie Okazaki from Tamayura, Yu Sonoda from Sakura Trick, Tsukihi Araragi from Bakemonogatari, Maho Misawa from Ro-Kyu-Bu!, Maria Takayama from Haganai, etc, etc, etc.

My favorite performance by Yuka Iguchi is Chelia Blendy from Fairy Tail, Wendy's sky godslayer friend, but that's just because everything Fairy Tail related is perfect.

This marks my 78th female seiyuu and 122nd overall to enter my voices hall of fame.

Previously my Good Music permapost only called out by name composers/singers who had 8+ songs in my hall of fame, (73 people in all), but I felt too many quality people were being left out like that, like for instance ClariS, FLOW, Do as Infinity, or Angela.  So I extended the credits I gave by name all the way down to anyone who was responsible for 2+ songs in my good music hall of fame.  This allowed Yuka Iguchi to get on the list alongside 193 others, for a grand total of 194 honorees.

I have no regrets.  Yusuke Honma, for instance, is only responsible for 2 songs on my list, but I consider him to be one of the best composers around.  If I didn't extend my list all the way down to 2, no one would have ever noticed him or known how much respect I have for him.  More information is always better.

Someday I might extend my list all the way down to people responsible for just one song, but there's reason to believe that one song is just a fluke, so for now I've opted to leave them out.

All in all my halls of fame are looking at 193 anime, 99 manga, 194 composers/singers, 50 video game franchises, 197 movies, 10 tv shows, 50 visual novel companies, 100 authors, and 122 seiyuu all receiving special honors.  There's a lot of overlap between these honorees, but let's just ignore that fact for now and add it all up -- 1015 entries in all.

That's a tremendous amount of talent out there in the world.  If you want to know what real enrichment, what real vibrancy means, it's these 1015 honorees in my halls of fame.  They're all the enrichment we'll ever need.

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