choosing & sakata gintoki

The character I will be focusing my blog on this semester is Sakata Gintoki from Gintama!

Gintoki (also known as "Gin") is the protagonist of Gintama - a comedy anime that aired on and off from 2006-2021, adapted from a manga series of the same title and plot that ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2003-2019. (For the purposes of this assignment, I'll be talking about the show, since I've never read the manga, but the two are essentially the same.) Despite its status as a gag comedy, there are several "serious arcs" within the 369 episodes (+ 2 OVA's and 3 movies) of Gintama that string together a running plot with intense themes and characters.

Gintoki is a drinker, gambler, and samurai, loves crude jokes, never pays his rent, and is the creator & owner of Odd Jobs (Yorozuya), where you watch him meet, employ, and subsequently not pay two teenagers (Shimura Shinpachi and Kagura). 

As the series progresses, you learn more about the political issues and history behind the country & world Gintama takes place in (explaining this would take an entire blog post by itself), and receive glimpses of Gin's past - his involvement in a 10-year-long war called the Joui War, his old comrades and teacher, and the events that led him to eventually create Yorozuya (and later employ Shinpachi and Kagura - a part of Gin's character development that you don't recognize as important until much later). 

Gintoki is easily one of the most fascinating and deceptively well-written protagonists of any piece of media I've ever consumed (especially for a gag comedy), and I'm extremely excited to analyze him for this class this semester!