Hellsing is one of my favorite horror anime. It's an awesome story with a really great cast. Who doesn't love strong, capable female characters, an awesomely powerful vampire and an old guy who fights with dental floss? The story takes place in merry old England, only it’s not so merry at the moment. England is being assaulted by waves of “fake” vampires. A good thing the royal family saw fit to install an official vampire hunting organization in days of yore. The organization is called Hellsing and is headed by the sole survivor of the Hellsing family, Integra.

Rumiko Takahashi is the goddess of writing off the wall romances. Seriously, half the stuff she comes up with shouldn’t work as well as it does. Bikini clad alien princesses and their chaotic entourages crashing earth and falling in love with people they really can do better than? Exposing the shocking truth that China is ridden with accursed springs and that forced marriages sometimes work if there are enough martial arts tournaments before the big day? Nuns plus boxing equal One True Love?

Sports anime seem to have a certain magnetism to them. They pull in not only fans of that particular sport, but also people who would never deign to see a real life game of said sport even if their lives depended on it. It’s really hard to put your finger on why sports anime appeal to these non-sports fans. Is it the characters? The often touching overcoming-the-odds story lines? The fact that the main team is always destined to win that final match, so there’s no risk of heartbreak?

From an artistic and epic story-telling perspective, Saiyuki doesn’t really have any redeeming qualities. It’s a story about a bunch of hot guys riding around in a jeep (which can turn into a dragon when it feels like it) who are going into the west, maybe to save the world, mostly because they have nothing better to do. I absolutely adore it. When someone describes something as being “character driven”, they should use Saiyuki as the primary example. I think the success of the story, and even how it survived past its first wobbly few chapters, is solely due to the dynamic characters.