Sore ga Seiyuu Episode 5: Event

This episode is all about best girl strawberry princess Ichigo. In this episode we also learned something else about the voice acting industry which are events.

Ichigo is a little down on her luck as she was fired from her part-time job due to not prioritizing them instead of her voice acting career. So now with barely any money, Ichigo’s electricity and gas are shut off. But thankfully she lands a tiny role as a robot bug thing in a popular video game series. The other voice actors get piles of scripts, while Ichigo only gets one that’s only a few pages. Because really…her character is a bug that says “Poro!” here and there. It’s not the best, but as a new voice actress, beggars can’t be choosers. And Ichigo is fired up. Until she hears about the event and the voice of the leading lady.

Unlike the dazzling sparkly Tamura Yukari, our guest this week is Yui Horie, who’s clearly not a morning person. She can go from sloppy “I need my coffee” Hoi Yurie (as Ichigo named this side of her)

to the super moe princess Yui Horie. Honestly it’s amazing. And so is her roster of characters, which is a long list. It’s too damn long, seriously…just look her up and wow.

Ichigo had the pleasure to share her dressing room with Yui Horie. The whole time, Ichigo was getting more and more nervous and scared as the event approached. Knowing how popular the game series is, she knew the audience was going to be in the thousands but she pretended to act as though it wasn’t a big deal. But it was really getting to her, even causing a nightmare where she was ignored and made a fool of herself on stage. Ichigo’s father texted her to see if she was doing fine. She was about to answer that she wasn’t but changed her mind in the end because she didn’t want to bother him. Her relationship with her dad is really sweet. From the sounds of it, Ichigo doesn’t have a mother, or her parents simply divorced as her father is living alone. And Ichigo is his pride and joy and he really loves her. Which is a fantastic thing to see as we always see terrible father/children relationships in anime. So what they have is cute.

The event arrives and Ichigo has trouble remembering her directions for the event. We learn a bit about events, such as even though the event is late at night, the crew have to come early in the morning to prepare. Rehearsals and stuff are done on the day of the event, which I think is a little crazy and hectic, and I can understand why Ichigo was so flustered and confused. I had thought these events would have more rehearsal time, but it’s all done in such a rush. But, these things always go so smoothly because there are always voice veterans that have done this hundreds of times.

In the end, even though she wasn’t totally composed on stage (even with her ringlets), Ichigo got inspiration from Yui Horie’s performance and became her usual pumped-up self. And Earphones finally got their song, which we should hear in the next episode!