Uchida Maaya's little noises and some lines are extremely effective, but I'm not sure yet -- as I wasn't after
Sankarea. But gosh, is she pretty. I think the apparent embarrassment was a combination of things: not used to that kind of outfit, coming out first in front of the assembled otaku, being the star, just an act, etc. I'd love to connect people with the full range of her photos from 2010 or so, but the best page I know of is on a porn site (though her photos are not porn at all, and just include some sexy bikini and sleepwear shots). Feed her name 内田真礼 into Google Images and quite a few of them show up. When I put the images together with how she sounds in public (as much as I've heard), I think there is a nice wild/weird side there that has yet to emerge fully in public.
Uesaka Sumire is a revelation to me. I didn't follow either of her main previous shows (
Listen to me Girls, and
Sengoku Collection), but she has something, for sure. At first, I was put off by the similarity of the voice she's using here to Arai Satomi's funny style. But it has differences, and she uses it so well. "Creates a character" is the kind of praise I want to give any seiyuu. I think her timid speaking voice makes her even more
chuuni, breaking forth from that timidity into her pro-Soviet fantasy and her role here. Asked in an interview what time she would like to live in, if she had a time machine, she said Russia in 1917. As I believe
houkoholic has mentioned before, she majors in Russian and loves all things Russian. There are bits of Russian in many of her
blog posts.
I found an interesting page purporting to
show Sumipe's home: which looks like a semi-mansion, a big house in Japan's equivalent of the London "stockbroker belt." Must be her parents' home. Wealth allows fantasy? She is from somewhere in or around Kamakura, and went to the junior and senior high schools attached to Kamakura Women's University. Wikipedia says she was scouted by the Spacecraft agency at the age of eight, when she was coming home from English lessons, and appeared in a commercial for Vidal Sassoon.
She also appears to be similar to Dekomori in being smart: she won an award in July as one of the 139 top students at her 10,000-student university, the famous Sophia University in Tokyo. More pics of her
here.
I, too, am impressed by Shinka's seiyuu, Akasaki Chinatsu: her voice, her comedy. And I think I hear and like her singing voice in the ED.