If you’re a fan of shonen, then there’s a character you’re probably familiar with regardless of the show you’re watching. Outside of the battleground where the courageous protagonist is duking it out against the rival of the day, there’s someone reliably wringing her hands or clutching at her skirts as she watches on in concern. Her face might be different, but you can’t fail to recognize her all the same.
Shonen heroines spend a fair majority of their time getting sidelined by the rest of the action, occasionally allowed an emotional moment where they patch up the injured protagonist or a single episode to flesh out their character throughout a sixty episode arc. Hiroyuki Takei's Shaman King strove to break these predictable trends with its heroine Anna Kyoyama, making for a fittingly well-rounded character.
Shonen heroines tend to end up playing support roles for their main characters, with personalities built to match. Anna Kyoyama is a sharp juxtaposition to their archetypal bright smiles and sunny attitudes, with a cold demeanor to match her troubled past. She doesn’t hesitate to flex her own supernatural chops, determined and courageous in the face of danger with a powerful skill set of her own.
She can summon powerful Oni using her own negative emotions and her ability to reflect back curses upon its summoner puts her toe-to-toe with some of the fiercest competition -- even Hao himself. And, though it's less supernatural, her "Phantom Left Hand Slap" is feared by friends and enemies alike. Rather than act as Yoh's cheerleader, Anna takes an active interest in his competitions, putting him through her own grueling training sessions to hone his abilities in preparation for future battles.
Rather than bog her character down with a will-they-won’t-they romantic angle, Anna is allowed to explore alternate avenues to establish her character. She’s already engaged to Yoh, so she doesn’t need to chase after him or make any revelations about her feelings. This pre-established relationship helps to ground the reality of the characters in their world, one where there are facts of life beyond their paranormal tournament. Neither Anna nor Yoh’s lives began with the start of the series, they lived and made choices that affect the setting from the prologue to the end.
This helps to make it a much more fleshed-out world, as real-life functions much in the same way. The people we meet as we go about our lives are never blank slates, they’ve all met people who’ve helped to shape them into the person whose path you happened to cross.
Yoh’s even at a disadvantage when it comes to his fiancée, who oversees his training and remains leagues stronger than him for a considerable stretch of the series, but even this fact ties into both of their motivations in regards to the Shaman Fight. Writing Yoh and Anna this way improves them as characters and as a couple, giving viewers insight as to how they grow and operate together and especially apart.
Too often battle series fall into a rut where, in a predominantly male, increasingly powerful cast, the heroines are pushed to the side in order to make way for bigger fights and deadlier, more dramatic conflicts. The trouble that inevitably creates is that the characters become more and more obsolete both as people in the story and as partners for the characters. It’s difficult for an audience to get behind a relationship that’s only been chronicled through a handful of episodes, especially if it's within a far larger story that’d rather spend more time exploring the bonds of the hero's more powerful co-stars.
Anna’s a great example for future shonen series to take notes from, as her early established romantic attachment and overwhelming strength allowed for her to stay relevant and entertaining to watch throughout the course of the show, while also freeing her up to be explored as a full-fledged character, not a romantic angle for the protagonist to pursue.
