Marco Fuentes Arellano

Marco Fuentes has been watching anime since 1997, when a cousin handed him a bootleg VHS of *Dragon Ball Z* at a family gathering in Guadalajara. He was eleven years old and had never seen anything like it. From that afternoon forward, every Saturday morning cartoon he had known felt inadequate. He spent the next decade tracking down fansubs through early internet forums and buying dubbed VHS tapes at Tepito market whenever his allowance permitted.

Today his MyAnimeList profile sits at 620 completed series, and he knows exactly which titles pushed him past each hundred-entry milestone. His area of expertise is late-90s and early-2000s shonen — not just the titans like *Naruto* and *One Piece*, but the second and third tier titles that defined that era's visual grammar: *Rurouni Kenshin*, *Yu Yu Hakusho*, *Hunter x Hunter* (1999), *Shaman King*. He writes about how those series built their action choreography under severe budget constraints, and what directors sacrificed versus what they solved.

Before joining Otakiva, Marco ran a long-form blog called *El Filo del Sable* from 2010 to 2019, where he published in-depth episode-by-episode retrospectives. His *Rurouni Kenshin* Tsuiokuhen review series remains one of the most-shared Spanish-language pieces on the OVA. He also contributed to the now-defunct Mexican anime magazine *Katana* between 2014 and 2017.

His personal top five: *Hunter x Hunter* (2011), *Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood*, *Rurouni Kenshin: Trust & Betrayal*, *Hajime no Ippo*, and *Planetes*.

Based in Colonia Roma, Ciudad de México. Reach him at [email protected].