According to Beethoveen, music is a means of raising one's soul a step closer to the heavens.

Certainly, music plays a large role for most of us and even where anime is concerned. It is usually the pretty pictures and animation that first draws in the viewers of many anime series, and perhaps, that's no different in the case of Fushigi Yuugi. But, would someone want to watch a beautiful anime with a great plotline if the music sounded terrible?

Fushigi Yuugi is soaked through with background music to compliment each scene, in addition to the closing and opening themes. There are even character vocals sung by the original Japanese voice actors, some of which appear in the series as well. Certainly, the 2nd OVA episodes would not have been the same without their background music.

With that in mind, how does music play into your Fushigi Yuugi watching experience? Does it make it more attractive? Is it irritating? Do you think Nakago would be as scary without his theme music? But really...how many times do we need to play Hotohori's theme?

Nevermind the English dubbed voices, the sometimes less-than-perfect subtitles, or even the Japanese dialogue... could you watch FY without the words and simply listen to the music?

Now, how about music and FY, not music in FY. A popular type of fanfiction in FY is the writing of videoclips, songfics or filks. A videoclip is like a music video with the lyrics of a song set to certain scenes from FY while songfics work like normal fics but are set to song lyrics. Filks involve re-writing the lyrics of a song to have FY-related words, examples of these are some of the fanclub theme songs. Have you found that watching FY has enhanced your appreciation of the lyrics of some songs?

In a nutshell, what does music and or in FY mean to you?

Please think about writing an article for next month's issue regarding the subject Music and/in FY. Simply check the Submissions page and submit your article!