General Discussion

I'll be tying off the Watch & Learn Funimation sampling catch-up next week and, for whatever reason, it feels like a good enough milestone to take a moment or two to reflect. Between my columns here, the content I make for Whiskey at large and my other endeavors, I'm juggling a lot and, as such, I don't really get enough time to respond to talkbacks on most of the material I produce on this site. However, it's important to interact with users - - you lunatics make the site, after all - - so I figured that doing a special W&L as a mailbag/Q&A/AMA to specifically focus on doing just that would be an efficient compromise.

So ask me about whatever (within reason) in this thread - - my opinions about specific topics, previous columns you still want to discuss, random miscellania, et cetera - - and if I get enough appropriate Q's, I'll address them in the aforementioned special W&L. If I get more than enough, maybe this'll become a semi-regular thing like Ramblin' Rorie at Screened.

Fire away.

Out of every anime you've seen and talked about in your Watch and Learn articles, which ones did you like, but would not recommend to anyone that's new to anime (and why)?

I think my first question would be how do you believe your perception of anime has changed since you began the Watch & Learn series as well as being the principle Whiskey Media staff member at Anime Vice? When you began, you seemed only rudimentarily familiar with the medium but you were eager to learn. Over time, you watched a considerable number of shows, although still only in bits and pieces. For better or worse, that format is the basis of the W&L series. You've seen enough either way to have gained a better perspective than when you started. My concern would be the noticeable fatigue your reflections have displayed over the last few months. Perhaps I am being hypersensitive, but the enthusiasm seems to have ebbed away over the course of your tenure at Anime Vice. Is that because you've developed a suppositional distaste for many genres within anime and you're tired of having to sit through another half-hour of something you have little interest in and then write about it? Burnout is not uncommon when someone consumes too much of any product at a cumbersome pace. I don't mean for this to come across as an attack on your work, although I can certainly see how it might read that way. I am just curious to know how you think you've changed, if at all, since starting this project.

My second question would follow the first. Based off what you've experienced since beginning the Watch & Learn series, what assumptions do you bring when you start a show? Impressions can change over the course of a viewing, but our initial reactions are built on the foundation of what we've previously encountered. So, when you sit down to watch a show, what are your expectations and misgivings? Anime certainly has a lot of clichés and well-worn storylines. This can induce some tedium early in a series. Given the knowledge you now have to draw on, does your outlook for an anime form very early or even before you begin a show? Have your tastes been altered at all through your exposure to anime?

Well Tom, what do you think of the Jump big three (Naruto, Bleach and One Piece), and how would you compare it to the series that you have watched over the past few years? what do the shows you've watched have that The Shounen Jump shows don't?