My Favorite Characters, Anzu and Drusilla, Part 1 of 2

I'm changing up the way I do my anime reviews just a little bit. That along with other personal issues has delayed my end of the Winter season review by about a week. But, it should make the process of digesting the reviews a bit better. For today, and tomorrow, I'll be doing a little more groundwork for a future story release.

I have focused a lot of time talking about Anzushiro. There is very good reason for that – she is hands down my number one favorite character of the story. In fact, to a certain degree the entire Book of the Shadows saga is told through her. In virtually every story she makes an appearance, almost always directly, or is at least mentioned by another character. She is integral to the story.

A major reason for that is she is the first to be identified as one of the Two-Six. It was in writing Anzu’s story that I developed the idea for the Two-Six (and its prior incarnations). It also has to do with the way in which I was able to use her in the First Moon Saga.

It’s worth noting that the Book of the Shadows series was born when I first saw the Dark Magician Girl on a webpage selling Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and then determined that I wanted to write a story with her and Wicked Lady/Rini as the stars. As I started writing I deviated from that a bit. In the original form, the story had Rini as Yugi’s love interest. However, I started thinking about what I would like to do with Rini’s character. At the time I thought about bringing the Sailor Moon story in more prominently. That was the original face of the initial Lynette story. It was to be a little closer to Sailor Moon with the whole Mistress 9 arc, Rini replacing Sailor Saturn’s role. But as I approached that point of the story, I decided I didn’t want to go down that road that way. It seemed too convoluted to add in at that point.

Anzu as she was introduced and developed in my story comes from the Dark Magician Girl as she appears in the original Yu-gi-oh series at the start of the Orichalcos story arc. At that time I visualized Anzu as an otherworldly princess coming to “this one” for help in solving a problem that affects both. As the Yu-gi-oh series continued, and as my own story developed, I was lucky enough that my ideas meshed with the development of the final story arc of the show where the Dark Magician Girl’s origins were explained.

But therein rests the uniqueness and special touch that allows the flexibility of Anzu. The personification of the Dark Magician Girl is a girl named Mana who was a young apprentice in magic. That reality was not known when I first began Anzu as a character in my own story. At the time, she was simply another Yu-gi-oh monster, given a brief but relatively important moment in the given story. Using her as a character therefore allowed me to place any moderately applicable identity on her I wanted. As her character developed later in the Yu-gi-oh series (albeit unexpectedly at the time) it became a matter of rolling those changes back into the story of the Anzu that I created.

This differentiates Anzu from the likes of most other characters of the story, who are the manifestation of their original source representation. Runa is as close to Runa Date of the Soul Taker series as possible. Yami is as close to Yami from Yu-gi-oh as possible. Anzu is not particularly close to Mana or the Dark Magician Girl through any deliberate actions because there was no desire for such to be the case. But there is still some limit what I can do with her because she is a character with a personality. Mana/Dark Magician Girl is a generally happy, energetic, personality. I can deviate from that a little bit occasionally, but all her personalities should, even if I go the route of a dark, brooding, or evil shade, would be energetic and happy tinted. She would not be the type to be angry all the time with herself or anyone else if she chooses to be evil. She would be more of a character like the Joker of the Batman series, less like Two-Face.

At any rate, I found Anzu to be a lot of fun to write about. She had so many paths, so many options. I know. You must be thinking, “That’s like saying your favorite type of cake is the one with sugar in it.” Saying that my favorite character is Anzu because I got to use a bunch of other characters when writing about her does come off as a cop-out. The reason I love Anzu goes beyond that, however.

There are about two kinds of heroes (my definition anyway). You have the classical hero and the children’s cartoon hero.

The classic heroes are the self-interested types. They are heroes, but only because they are viewed as such. Otherwise they are just uniquely gifted people. They are pursuing their own ends, their own ambitions, their own desires. These just happen to coincide with the good that everyone else is looking for. Most old story heroes are like this. Heracles, Odysseus, Beowulf… they do heroic type things, but it’s not of some selfless mission. It is because they are forced to, or because they are seeking vengeance, or they are seeking glory. In other words, doing the heroic thing is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

The children’s cartoon hero is completely selfless. These are the likes of Superman, or for an anime comparison, the PreCures. They usually are suddenly gifted great power without any real effort to get it, and resolve to use that power to help others. Now, you can get into the whole Friends episode about whether or not any deed is truly selfless, but the point is that these are as close to selfless heroes as you can get. They don’t care about fame, honor, or power. They just want to help others. They fight evil. They let their enemies survive not out of pity or for the challenge, but because they don’t want to kill anyone. And chances are they will reform you from evil to good, even if they have to be a bit rough with it (look up Nanoha and her method of making “friends”). As the title suggests, however, these types of heroes are usually relegated to children’s cartoons, because as we grow up for some reason as a society we in general have decided that people like Gandhi or Mother Theresa simply can’t exist. You can’t have a hero who isn’t out for vengeance and peace through non-violence, or forgiving. Our heroes, apparently, have to be as mean, ruthless, and violent as the bad guys… just be on our side.