28 August 2014: Catching up with Detective Conan
It helps that Sera has awesome hair.
I'm finally caught up with Detective Conan again. (Well, I'm "caught up" if you disregard the hundreds of episodes I've missed from several years back.) I'm rather pleased that Sera is appearing more often. In the current episodes, Sera is growing more prominent as the mysterious and previously vaguely threatening girl detective of the group. Naturally, this is likely leading up to some revelation about her mysterious background (alternatively, an effort to drag it out indefinitely), but it's a good excuse to have another detective on the show so Conan doesn't have to solve every single convoluted murder in Creation by himself. Contrary to some unconvincing red herrings when she was first introduced, it's pretty much guaranteed that Sera will not have any sinister motives, even if it turns out she has ties to nefarious unpleasant types. She is far too likeable as a character and too embedded with the group already for the show to suddenly transform her into a credible villain—not even a halfhearted one. It ain't Urobuchi Gen writing this story, you know.
Great hiding place, Conan.
Giving Sera more screen time also provides an excuse to work in another Detective Conan staple: teenage girls beating Hell out of deadbeats. Just as Ran practices karate and Kazuha practices aikido, Sera practices jeet kune do, much to the misfortune of many a criminal. Sera also gets into a lot of fights because she's one of those anime girls who constantly gets mistaken for being a boy by other anime characters, even if anime viewers themselves would never develop this misconception. She also gets into a lot of fights because Beika is an exceptionally dangerous city.
One of these is not like the others.
Incidentally, Sera is voiced by a Gainax alumna. Recall that Hayashibara Megumi and Miyamura Yuko (Rei and Asuka from Evangelion) are also regulars on Detective Conan. Sera's seiyuu is Hidaka Noriko (Jean from Fushigi no Umi no Nadia and Noriko from Top wo Nerae! Gunbster). There are surely a lot of other Gainax alumnae who have appeared on the show at some point (there are more than 700 episodes, after all), but Hayashibara, Miyamura, and Hidaka are the ones I know of with prominent characters.
