Retroversy

American Independence Day? No, no, the true reason for celebrating the 4th of July is the fact that it’s the birthday of one of the greatest to ever do it. There are very few voice actors in the anime industry who are universally and exclusively associated with a single performance so iconic it completely overshadows everything they’ve ever done, but Satomi Arai is one of them.

Mind you, this is a compliment. Whenever Arai shows up in anything, she is either voicing Kuroko Shirai, or a character clearly based on Kuroko Shirai, the latter usually only existing as a homage to her iconic performance in A Certain Scientific Railgun — and, to a lesser extent, the series it spun off from, A Certain Magical Index, in which she only has a handful of (albeit memorable) appearances. Arai’s voice is so inseparably tied to not just the character, but the entire archetype said character has gone on to inspire, that she exists essentially in a niche of her own and this is striking, seeing as a) Kuroko isn’t even the star of the series she is from and b) Kuroko is, on paper, an absolutely atrocious character.

Kuroko Shirai should not work. The character is a ridiculous chimera of preposterous tropes that are only remotely justifiable if your brain has been poisoned by anime bullshit for literal decades. For the uninitiated, Kuroko’s entire thing is that she has a massive crush on the main character of A Certain Scientific Railgun, her friend and roommate Mikoto Misaka. Not the kind of innocent anime crush, though. Kuroko wants to have mad, raunchy, steamy lesbian sex with Mikoto, consent be damned. She’ll present herself to Mikoto in lacy lingerie at inappropriate times. She’ll use her teleportation powers to grope Mikoto in the shower. One of the persistent running gags in the series is Kuroko trying to drug Mikoto with shady aphrodisiacs she ordered off the dark web.

Oh right, have I mentioned that Kuroko and her crush are both middle schoolers?

It is, no matter how you look at it, it is absolutely pernicious, bottom of the barrel stuff, a portrayal so steeped in the bizarre, parallel reality logic most of anime fandom seems to run on, it may legitimately be impossible to explain to anyone not knee-deep in the trenches — not to mention responsible for years and years of lesbians in (non-yuri) anime being depicted exclusively as raving sex pests.

And yet, Kuroko Shirai is a girl near and dear to my heart, a character for whom I am, much against what common sense dictates, willing to look past so much of that toxicity. Part of the reason why is the fact that Kuroko is such an obvious buffoon that seeing her perform literal sex crimes is about as laughably pathetic as seeing Benny Hill chase after a girl. There is a metatextuality to her ridiculousness — not just this cartoon 13-year-old trying to act like a voluptuous femme fatale being stupid, but the fact that the people who came up with this thought something like that could actually be legitimately arousing as well. A clown in a tiny bikini isn’t funny or sexy — to most people, I am well aware of what website I’m writing this on — but the sheer audacity of parading around a clown in a tiny bikini and smugly proclaiming that clearly everyone thinks this is both hilarious and smoking hot sure is.

In the end, however, most of my tolerance for Kuroko comes down to Satomi Arai’s incredible performance. Alternating between the instantly memorable slimy, raspy coos of the sophisticated aristocrat Kuroko likes to present herself at, only to devolve into hoarse, scenery milking screams the second her mask slips and the shenanigans begin, Arai shows that she understood the assignment perfectly. A preposterous character deserves a preposterous performance, and Arai’s interpretation of Kuroko as essentially a dirty old man in the body of a smug sapphic schoolgirl is nothing short of brilliant.

Happy birthday, Satomi Arai. I wish I could be as good at one highly specific thing as you are.