Bakuman - Episode 15

Last week's episode of Bakuman finally saw our two major rivals come face to face thanks to an impromptu visit to the Jack offices from Eiji Nizuma, who sticks around to give some more rather "unique" advice to our pair of protagonists at the start of episode fifteen.

With Akito and Moritaka both determined to go down the path of creating mainstream manga to achieve their dream as artists quicker, Hattori finally relents on his position that this isn't the best way forward for them by at least outlining the basics of what they need to achieve and strive for in a battle manga.  It's at this point that Nizuma interjects with his own thoughts, namely that he basically makes up all of his series as he goes along without so much as a name to outline what he's doing - instead, he lets his characters "come alive" in his head and effectively leaves them to do their own thing.  These words seem to do a surprisingly good job of firing up Mashiro, as the various parties go their own separate ways.

 

This leaves much of the rest of this week's episode in the hands of Azuki, as she continues to struggle and find herself rejected at auditions for voice acting parts.  Still, despite this she keeps on trying, despite reservations about her talents that she relays to Miyoshi when the latter visits to stay over for a night.  Of course, hard work and determination is the order of the day here, as Azuki realises when she hears Miyoshi talking about Akito and Moritaka's struggles, and it's this hard work that finally lands her a small yet significant debut voice acting role.

The focus on Azuki certainly prevented this from being one of those episode of Bakuman that manages to grab your attention and put you through the rinser - to be honest, it's hard to imagine Miho becoming a voice actress at all given her character, while her own specific struggles aren't really fleshed out enough to make them as interesting or nerve-racking as those of our main protagonists.  Still, this was a decent enough episode that keeps things ticking over for another instalment and I found watching it pleasant enough, so I can't really slag it off for focusing too much on Azuki on this particular occasion.