One of the joys of watching dubbed anime is that, from what I can tell, there is actually a fairly small pool of professional voice actors who handle it (compared to something like Hollywood). Which means you often run into the same performer over and over, often doing fairly similar voices across very different shows.

By the way, I watch both subbed and dubbed, with very little rhyme or reason for which one I choose. Subbed is generally my preference, but if I start out with one I’ll usually stick with it for that series.

Anyway, all this leads up to what I found to be a hilarious experience. As I’ve said before, one of my favorite series at the moment is the epic coming-of-age superhero story My Hero Academia, which so far I’ve only watched in the dubbed version. I’ve also gone through a few runs of Fruits Basket, which is best described as a low-fantasy romantic comedy with edges of grim psychological realism (I’ll probably give my thoughts on that series before long (Update: here they are )). I first watched it in the subbed version, then read the Manga a couple times, and just recently decided to try the dubbed version.

Much to my delighted surprise, one of the male leads of that show has the same English voice actor as the main villain of MHA. Not only that, but he uses almost exactly the same voice for both of them; this soft, raspy near-whisper. I can’t tell you how funny and oddly charming it is to hear a voice I’m used to associating with a psychotic, nihilistic, corpse-faced mass-murderer coming out of a kind, sensitive, psychologically-wounded teenager (who occasionally turns into a rat. Low-fantasy, remember). It’s like stumbling onto an alternate universe where the same character turned out infinitely better.

I call this effect ‘Anime Double-Take’; when a voice you’ve long associated with one character suddenly comes out of a completely different character.