Overview
Botan is a guide to the Spirit World and close friend to Yusuke Urameshi. In the anime, Botan is voiced by Sanae Miyuki in Japanese and Cynthia Cranz in English.
Appearance
Botan has long blue hair and pink eyes. She is usually clad in a light-pink kimono when on duty, but she has been known to wear human clothes. When she's masquerading as the Urameshi team's trainer during the Dark tournament, she dresses formally with a long-sleeve yellow shirt, brown slacks, and matching shoes. Early in the series, she disquises herself in the uniform for Sarayashiki Jr. High girls, a blue blouse with a yellow scarf.
Personality
Genuinely helpful and well-meaning, she can be somewhat clumsy and short-sighted. She's also bubbly and cautiously-optimistic, but can be a bit of a scaredy-cat. She sometimes tends to be a motormouth. She used to view Yusuke as an interesting subject to study until she develops a bond with him, and becomes a valuable ally and close friend.
Synopsis
Botan is the Grim Reaper, or guide to the underworld. She is charged with ferrying souls of the deceased to the Spirit World to face their final judgment. She also acts as Yusuke's assistant and trainer as he starts out his tenure as underworld detective.
She teaches him how to use various detective tools, communicates messages from Koenma, and often guides him to different destinations pertaining to his cases.
She even joins him in the field on occasion, such as when she, Yusuke, and Kuwabara fought the Apparition Gang and their elite Triad, protecting Keikof rom insect-crazed humans during the Maze Castle incident, acting as team trainer in the Dark Tournament, and other various tasks.
In the manga, Botan did not help out Yusuke as often as she did in the anime such as the removal of her helping Yusuke against Gouki, and that she did not accompany Yusuke and Kuwabara during the battle against the Apparition Gang.
Trivia
- Her name means "peony".
- Botan’s birthday is on July 11.
- Botan's ability to stay in the physical realm is changed ever so slightly in the anime, when compared to the manga. In the anime, she mentions she has a "human body", implying it's a container which allows her soul to interact, yet when called back to the Spirit Realm, she simply changes her clothes and flies back. In the manga, however, the container body is left behind, immobile while her spirit flies back, only reanimating once she comes back.
- Her appearance is fairly similar to Tana from Fire Emblem: the Sacred Stones
- She is called Charlene in the Filipino dub of the anime.
- Coincidentally, Botan is pronounced the same way as "Boatman" minus the "m." Notice the oar she rides on.
- Because those of the Reikai age slowly, and as evidenced by her comment during the meeting between the group -minus Hiei- and Koenma, about Sensui, Botan is a new and young grim reaper. She was just starting out a few years before the show began, during Yusuke's early childhood.
- Botan is the first person from Spirit World to accompany a spirit detective:
- Kuroko Sanada went on cases solo.
- Shinobu Sensui was accompanied by Itsuki, sometime after he was given the title by Koenma. Koenma was also aware of the partnership.
- Botan was ranked as the seventh most popular female anime character in 1993 Animage Anime Grand Prix, the eighth in 1994, and the eleventh in 1995.
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