My favorite Saint Seiya Guys
Yes, this is the post for this month.
As mentioned before in previous posts, I've watched a bunch of Saint Seiya this year! This is a show I loved during my childhood, and it was a pleasant surprise to rediscover that it is, in fact, really awesome, despite a recent pushback against it that's been prevalent for quite a few years now. You gotta be in the right wavelength to truly appreciate this series, I get it, but some people just hate fun, and I don't!! So I had a blast.
Masami Kurumada is an extremely creative artist, he comes up with these insane powers and concepts that the anime puts to motion with stellar craft (seriously, what a beautiful adaptation, iconic for good reason). A lot of it is legitimately stupid and feels like he's making it up as he goes (which I think he is!), but he imbues the whole thing with such confidence and sincerity you can't help but go along with it. I tend to joke that it's a show about going "Oh yeah, sure" every time someone explains something outrageous as if it was obvious, and then you just nod and go along.
And Saint Seiya is a show about Guys in many ways. Every arc is about our main group of Guys going against a sequence of Guys that they have to beat in order to move forward, and then there's a final Guy that's stronger than any of the previous ones. And it is so good. The focus of the show is in the moment-to-moment experience, the emotions you feel during every battle, the drama of the whole thing, that's more important than Lore™ consistency or whatever else. That's the mindset I think people miss when they criticize the "story" of the show. But anyway, this is not what this is about. Since the moment-to-moment is so important and it's always a sequence of battle after battle, each with its own drama and stakes, it's essential for this show to have striking Guys that will show up very little but leave quite an impression, and some of them are so iconic I was surprised to see that, yeah, they don't show up that much huh?
So since this show is like that and I've been rotating a lot of the Guys in my mind, I had the idea of making this list just for fun, cause I love thinking and talking about this show, and now that I've finished the Hades OVAs, which close the original run of the manga, it's the perfect time. So here we go.
1. The Bronze Boys
Hard to pick just one cause they're all so iconic.
Basically the premise of this show is that these… 10 (?) orphans were selected by this guy Kido Mitsumasa to receive really absurd training that almost kills them to become the Saints of Athena. These are warriors who fight in the name of the goddess Athena, reincarnated on Earth as Japanese girl Kido Saori, bearing armors called Cloths, each representing one constellation and granting them diverse powers. Their objective is protecting the Earth against whatever menace shows up, mostly other Greek Gods. It's building upon Greek Mythology in a way that doesn't really care about being accurate, but it's so distinct and striking it becomes its own very cool thing.
So, yeah, these 10 kids grow up to become the Bronze Saints, the weakest category among the group, and 5 of them literally don't matter (I don't even know if they're 5 cause they show up so little). The ones that do are our main characters, Pegasus Seiya, Dragon Shiryu, Andromeda Shun, Cygnus Hyoga, and Phoenix Ikki. I love them all, but if I have to highlight 2 it's Shun and Ikki, the brothers.
Shun is a very sweet, very cute and good boy who hates violence but is actually really strong. He fights with chains but is very powerful even without them, and a lot of his deal in the show is growing more confident and accepting he has to use his awesome powers to hurt people sometimes. Also he's constantly getting strangled and bleeds a lot… Yeah, there was something going on there with him. Did I mention this show is extremely gay and has a dedicated fujoshi fanbase? It's pretty cool. Shun and Hyoga are boyfriends to me.
And Ikki I gotta mention cause he's the emo kid who's never part of the team. He was initially a bad guy before realizing "friendship is good actually, I should fight for justice with these guys," and then he shows up only when strictly necessary to save everyone's lives and he's SO COOL it's unbelievable. I would have assumed I was immune to a quiet, lonely anime guy being cool but no, Ikki is just so cool. He might be cold outside but he's still got love in his heart… This show gets me pumped in a way few other shows like this are able to.
I'd like to talk about the other ones but I don't want this to be a super long post, so in short: Seiya is Main Guy, he gets beat up a lot but always stands up again; Shiryu is Martial Arts Guy who's calm and collected and becomes blind a couple times; Hyoga is Guy with Ice Powers, he's weird and always screaming dramatically about his mom. They're all good boys.
1.5. Made Up Guys
Okay, this will be a quick one: after our main characters defeat Ikki in the anime they go through a sequence of about 8 godawful filler episodes (really early on cause the adaptation started too soon) that's really bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, hard to go through. You can tell the screenwriters didn't know what to do cause most of the Guys they make up are extremely lame. In particular, there are Spider-Man D-tier villain rejects Dolphin, Jellyfish, and Sea Snake Guys, and also Docrates, who is the lamest villain and there's a scene he runs away from the police even though he's 10 meters tall and can break buildings with one blow. They are so lame and the episodes are so bad it's hard to even find them funny, but when I think back on them I can't help but smile a little. I'll never watch them again but it's something that I can laugh about now. Oh, Docrates, you suck so much.
2. Lizard Misty
Right after the filler stretch you go into one of the best Guys of all time, Lizard Misty. He's part of the Silver Saints, who are mostly forgettable even if the episodes themselves are good, it's a bit of a meme how useless they are. But Misty is like a light of hope after a dreadful stretch of episodes, so he hits harder than any other Silver boy. It was such a "we're so back" moment I almost wanted to cry.
And I think he's the first big example of enemy who shows up very little but is so striking you won't forget about him. Just picture literally Lady Oscar with a deep man's voice and extremely narcissistic personality, extremely entertaining to watch. Still one of my favorite moments in this show.
3. The Gold Boys
They're the strongest Saints, representing the 12 Zodiac constellations, which our main characters have to fight against in order to reach the top of the Sanctuary and beat the corrupt Pope. I won't elaborate any further.
This is where Saint Seiya goes off the rails. To keep a premise like "12 fights in a row with no breaks" you really gotta have some variety, and it delivers so well. They don't even fight all of them, some are good or change their minds about being Evil, some aren't even there to begin with, and the ones that do fight are so absurdly powerful it's always entertaining.
And I think all 12 work in some manner. I know people don't always like Cancer Deathmask (yes, he's called Cancer Deathmask), but I've found him such a tremendous cartoonish asshole it was amusing, and seeing him getting his ass kicked was fun. His power to send people to the underworld is also based on a play with the name of one of the stars in the Cancer constellation, to which I went "oh yeah sure," and I really appreciate all this weird shit the anime constantly pulls off. It's the kind of thing that makes you laugh but not at the show, it's part of going along with the fun.
As for the others, well I guess Leo Aeolia and Capricorn Shura were the dullest Gold Saints, but the latter at least has some insane Lore™ to him. (What do you mean Excalibur, King Arthur's sword, belonged to Athena? Was Arthur a Saint, is that the implication? Why is Excalibur inside his limbs? Why does the warrior of a Greek Goddess own Excalibur???) And I liked Shura a lot way back when I first saw the show so I'll admit some nostalgia here. I guess Taurus Aldebaran is a bit dull too, he's a tutorial boss basically, but I don't know, I like him. The important thing is all those guys are gay and there are so many ship variations it's insane.
But my favorite one is Virgo Shaka, the man closest to God, who uses powers based on Buddhism (this might sound stupid but I promise it's done in a way that's really out-there and impressive). And Shaka is soooooo cool, that's the only way I can describe him much like Ikki. It really helps that two of his episodes are directed by Yamauchi Shigeyasu and are pretty easily the best things in all of Saint Seiya. Yamauchi experimented in this show in such ways that you can see seeds of what would culminate into Casshern Sins later on, it's some of the best shounen stuff you'll ever see out there.
Final shoutouts to my other favorites: Aries Mu, who is so iconic; Scorpio Milo, who's voiced by Char Aznable and is also hugely iconic; and Pisces Afrodite, whose main gimmick is being really pretty like Misty, and he shows up possibly name-dropping the LGBT Japanese New Wave classic by Matsumoto Toshio, Funeral Parade of Roses. Seriously, he says "Bara no Souretsu" and it drove me insane to think maybe Kurumada added a nod to it on his manga. I gotta find out if that was intentional one day.
4. Poseidon and Siren Sorrento
I'm putting them together cause they're a little yaoi.
So after our Bronze Boys finish their ascent through the Sanctuary and beat the corrupt Pope, they have to actually do what their job as Athena's Saints was supposed to be and face another god. Turns out that's why we need these guys, all the other Greek Gods want to destroy Earth.
It's where you get Poseidon's arc, which was a pleasant surprise. People don't talk all that much about it for some reason (maybe cause it's short or "the middle one"), but it's consistently one of the best-looking portions of the show and extremely fun in general. It does have exactly the same structure as the Sanctuary Arc, but in a way where you can feel progression with the characters involved. Our main guys clearly have a generally easier time here, like they know what they're doing now, and you get to see them experimenting with new techniques and see more about their backgrounds etc, it adds a lot of fun stuff that we didn't see in the anime-original Asgard Arc, for example.
And obviously we have Poseidon, or rather Julian Solo, who he reincarnated as, as a very entertaining asshole. He doesn't show up that much, again, but he sucks so damn much I love watching him being a prick. His boyfriend is one of his Generals, Siren Sorrento, who is always playing a flute that kills people and when he can't play he beats people up with it. They're my favorites out of the 13-or-so new characters in this arc and I'm so happy to see them traveling the world together. Happiness for them.
5. The Rest
Cause I'm running out of things to say!
The Hades Chapter wasn't animated in the original anime, but later on as three series of OVAs, Sanctuary, Inferno, and Elysion. The first one is fantastic, directed by Yamauchi going all out, with some of the best CG integration I've ever seen in a show like this, just unbeatable vibes in that show all around. The other two are a bit disappointing cause it feels like they were made in a rush. I still like them well enough, but it's a pretty huge letdown directly after what's easily the best part of animated Saint Seiya. That aside, the whole arc in general has maybe a few too many characters that don't leave an impression, so I don't have that much to say about it for this post. I'd still like to shoutout Shion, Pandora, and Hades himself though, as well as Wyvern Rhadamanthys and Lira Orpheus (who is literally the Orpheus from Greek Mythology).
I didn't mention the Girls yet, but they are very important. Saori/Athena plays the role of damsel in distress for a considerable part of the show, but she has some really good moments. There is, for example, the Yamauchi-directed episode 30, one of the rare examples of episodes focused solely on her, which gives her some agency and really drives home the fact that she is a goddess and therefore possess immense power and imposes tremendous respect towards her Saints and everyone else too. People sometimes hate Saori, but I think she's pretty neat. The other girls are Marin and Shaina, women Saints who are always wearing masks because that's a weird rule Athena has. They're married if you ask me.
Lastly I need to shout out Kiki, Mu's apprentice and possibly adopted son. He's just a little guy, I love him. During Poseidon he's contantly running around and I was always "go Kiki you can do it." You gotta have a funny little guy sometimes.