Yu Yu Hakasho, Thank You for the Gray

I’ve watched a lot of animes and Fruits Basket and Naruto will always have a very deep place in my heart. I’m currently on a Naruto kick so it’s hard to focus on writing this, but nothing can compete with my love for Yu Yu Hakasho. It’s an anime I have watched in full over nine times, and every single time it changes the way I think.

Yu Yu Hakasho follows the adventures of delinquent eighth grader, Yusuke Urameshi, and his strange party of enemies turned friends, as detective of the spirit world. There are several reasons I love the show: complex characters and relationships, interesting story lines, well woven comedy, and the most attention catching opening scene I’ve seen in any anime. But, with the exception of the last point, pleanty of other shows can boast of those as well, so here’s what really sets it apart. It’s very real. Yu Yu Hakasho is a shonen anime. It’s a fighting show, but the fights are real. Yusuke is a street fighter. Consistantly, his fighting style throughout the show remains as such---eratic, unpredictable, and unrefined. In fights, characters get injured, and their injuries carry over into the next fight. You watch them have to factor that into their battle and fight around it. You see them use nothing but willpower to keep standing and using their minds to come up with a tactic to win.

That realness doesn’t just apply to the fights, but to the characters themselves. Every character exsits in shades of gray. Nothing is black and white, same as real life. Yusuke is the most gray hero I’ve ever seen. He isn’t noble, kind, hardworking, or smart. If it weren’t for his humor and quick wit, he’d be straight up unlikable. But through the lengths he’ll go to protect his friends, he grows to a degree that, by the end of the series, you could almost think of him as noble. And that’s true for all of the characters in the show. All of them begin as someone atypical for the role of hero, and yet, they grow throughout the series in a way that’s not only very believable but also leaves no doubt in your mind that they deserve the title of hero. In fact, every arch of the series does it’s best to remind you that the world is not black and white, nothing is simple, and everything is gray.

And while Naruto has given me my favorite conception of energy or aura, and Fruits Basket showed me what true absolute kindness and acceptance looks like, nothing has given me a better concept of the world than Yu Yu Hakasho. People can change and grow, there’s more to a person than what they outwardly show, no one is fully “good” or “bad,” true power is that used to protect others, everyone has a back story. All of that came from Yu Yu Hakasho, and I wouldn’t be able to go through life without that.