Monty Oum

This past week, I found myself (yet again, for the first time since December) without a laptop. As most of my hobbies have to do with my laptop, this unfortunately left me with not very much to do in regard to my passions.

That’s why I thought I would challenge myself to look up what I could about one of my passions with only my phone. This proved difficult, but I decided to look into the fantastic creator Monty Oum. I was first introduced to Monty Oum’s work a few years ago when a friend pointed me towards Red vs. Blue, a web series that Oum did most of the actions scenes for in later seasons. With animation skills that are frankly amazing, he’s provided expertise on a number of projects, including some of the action scenes from Afro Samurai. He was actually hired by game designers because of his work in fan videos over the years, and is considered a pretty big authority when it comes to web-based series.

In addition to this, Monty is genuinely a pretty great guy. He makes most of his character designs with lots of pockets so that cosplayers won’t be out of luck when it comes to storing their wallets or phones (a pretty big issue for cosplayers). While American, he says that he is “Cambodian, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese”, making him a pretty diserve Asian-American. While I don’t think he does very much in the way of activism, he’s certainly a wonderful example of Asian-Americans influencing popular culture. Red vs. Blue and a newer project of his, RWBY, are both insanely popular. Additionally, he does the voice acting for one of the only obviously Asian characters in RWBY, Lie Ren.