Top Ten Anime Guys: Mihashi Ren

Chicken face!

Placed in 7th place is Nishiura’s ace pitcher Mihashi Ren! Otherwise known and Chicken face or Renren from my favorite anime of all-time (yes, really) Ookiku Furikabutte. For short, Oofuri.

I love all the characters in Oofuri. It took me ages to narrow it down and finally choose Mihashi over Abe or Tajima or Izumi or Mizutani or Haruna or Hanai or … well, you get the point right? It was really a fight between Mihashi and Tajima though. In the end, chicken face took the gold. When it comes to the character, I love Mihashi the most. And I love his seiyuu, Yonaga Tsubasa! He’s absolutely completely and totally adorable. I loved him even more after watching the Oofuri seiyuu event and, of course, it just added to my Mihashi-love. Then I started loving him even more than I already did after listening to the Oofuri DJCDs. Did I mention how cute Yonaga was? Adorable. He’s probably the seiyuu I love the most for everything he’s done out of BL. Honestly, I don’t think I ever even heard Yonaga in a BLCD. Which is a plus from You-kyan and Shimo-chan. Mihashi didn’t have a handicap like Abe and Tajima whom I already knew I’d like just for their seiyuus. Oh crap, since I don’t want this turning into a seiyuu-rant I’ll move on.

#7 Mihashi Ren

Should I guess that most people reading this blog already knows Mihashi? Hell, chicken face is the picture I’m using up on Anime Nano. But formalities are formalities …

Mihashi Ren is the pitcher and ace for the baseball team at Nishiura senior high. He most probably annoyed the heck out of people in episodes one and two. He fidgets and stutters but that just makes him the cute chicken we all love him to be. His brain divides people into two groups. Namely, “ii hito” and “kowaii hito”. Translation, nice people and scary people. Cuteness points? +50. He loves to pitch. Despite his fidgety and easily scared personality, Mihashi is quite stubborn. He lacks in confidence but as the series move on, he gains a lot of it. Of course, he still stays a fidgety chicken.

At first, it seems as if Mihashi is a hard person to handle. Most of everyone on the team, Abe especially, had problems handling him in the beginning. Well, in the end, Tajima’s ended up being the only one to properly comprehend Mihashi. Cuteness points +75 for TajimaxMihashi scenes.

During the first two episodes of the series, I thought Mihashi was just plain annoying to be honest. But, like a lot of people, he completely won me over in episode three during a certain scene with Abe. Need I name it? It’s at that scene that I realized that Mihashi was just lacking in confidence because of all that’s happened to him in middle school. That he was just extremely socially awkward in a weird way. Well, simply put, I realized the same things Abe did. Needless to say that then on, I thought Mihashi’s fidgetting to be cutest thing ever since teddy-bear Near (I was reading a DN fanfic called “Dropped” at the time).

Thing is, I tend to like characters with personalities you don’t see very often. We’ve seen loads of characters who lack in confidence but none of them are like the fidgety/chicken-like/stubborn Mihashi. When you make a character, you start off by giving them a major characteristic that people see on their first impression of the character. The badass, the shy one, the nerd, etc. But from there you have to develop the character so they aren’t bland and boring. It’s the same with Mihashi. My first impression of him was “lacks in confidence, is annoying” but from there you have to get the character somewhere. It’s the execution that matters with these things really. (It’s like all those high-school romance fanfics. Most of them suck because it’s just one cliche after another, but some can actually be good depending on its execution, right?)

As you can see, once again, this week’s character is another beyond cute one. Originally, this really was going to be a Tajima post but at some point I ran out of things to write and I ended up talking about Shimo-chan again. Of the many reasons for putting Mihashi here, his seiyuu was a big factor. Most of the characters in this ranking have seiyuus I knew extremely well before watching the anime their character was in. That’s a big handicap for those characters. Mihashi, as I said higher up, doesn’t have such a handicap. At the time I watched Oofuri, I was watching it because I heard Abe was voiced by You-kyan. I didn’t give a damn about Mihashi. As you can probably guess, I ended up loving Yonaga as much as other seiyuus in my favorite list. (I was happy when I learned he was voicing Jun in S.A because it meant I could hear his voice more)

Battery love for life! ❤

Anyways next week is a character I can’t seem to make a good short hint for. Let’s go with “male character voiced by a female” (Ha! Good luck guess this one because there are lot of possibilities! And just so you know, there are two of them in total in the entire rankings)