Haruka Tomatsu

Tomatsu has been working since at least 2008, when To Love Ru and Inazuma Eleven both put her on the schedule, and she has been a lead almost continuously since. She records for MusicRay'n, sings as well as acts, and collected institutional approval early: Rookie of the Year at the 3rd Seiyu Awards, then the Synergy Award at the 9th.

She is a heroine specialist, which sounds like faint praise and is not. Asuna in Sword Art Online is the load-bearing performance of a franchise that would sag badly without her, and she has carried it through the television run, Ordinal Scale, and both Progressive films. Zero Two in Darling in the Franxx is a harder assignment, a character assembled almost entirely out of provocation, and Tomatsu finds the child underneath without blunting the edge. Kyoko Hori in Horimiya is the relaxed setting, comedy timing at conversational volume.

Her finest acting is in a smaller show. Naruko Anjo in Anohana spends the whole story loudly not saying the one thing she needs to say, and Tomatsu plays the gap between the two so precisely that it does much of the series' emotional work by itself.

A quieter register exists as well: Iris Cannary across Violet Evergarden and its films, Shizuku Mizutani in My Little Monster, Megumi Shimizu in Shiki. So do the villains, Mary Sioux in Saga of Tanya the Evil among them. Nearly two hundred credits in, she is still cast at the front.