Good evening, LiA readers and patrons!  Welcome to the AMA – here’s how it’s going to work:

The questions below were submitted by the Patreon and Paypal supporters – a very special thanks to all of you!  The second phase of the rewards program (the “From the Vault” series review) will be following up soon – I’ve been soliciting nominees from the supporters.

If you’re live and have more stuff you want to ask me, feel free to ask in the comment section below (including patrons who’ve already had their question posted).  I’ll be sticking around for as long as I can and I’ll answer the ones that catch my fancy the most.

UPDATE: That’s all for tonight this morning – thanks to everyone who participated!  And once more a special thanks to everyone who stepped up to help keep LiA going with their support – I’m more grateful than I can say.

Patron Questions:

Robert: What do you feel is the all-time greatest sports anime, and why?

Wow, this is a tough one to tackle.  If we were talking about manga my answer might be different – it would be hard to pick against Baby Steps, but I don’t think the anime was quite on the same level (though it was still great).  I’d also be tempted to name Cross Game here, but at heart that just doesn’t feel like a sports anime to me (though it technically is).  So – with honorable mentions to those shows as well as Major S1, Capeta and Ginga e Kickoff – I’m going to pick Hikaru no Go.  Even though the ending craters, this series at its best is so astonishingly good that it’s hard to match it.  So intense, so riveting, so emotional – it is, as I mentioned in the “Top 5 Shounen” post, like a meteor.

Ryan: Who is Guardian Enzo beyond anime? I don’t think you’ve ever talked about yourself beyond anime (maybe wine and literature?).

That’s obviously an extremely complicated question to answer even if I wanted to (which I kinda don’t, ROFL).  I do love books – and movies, and great TV (of which there’s a lot these days).  I have an unsettlingly large whiskey bunker – I love bourbon and single malts.  Love and fight for animals of all kinds, but cats are closest to my heart.  My first otaku passion (and con) was Doctor Who.  I fell in love with a girl named Juliet in Paris  but it wasn’t meant to be.  I love to eat way too much but can’t keep on weight living in Japan.  Have managed bookshops and cafes, worked in the coffee business for a long time, and love to teach both kids and adults.

Christian: What drives you to write? As far as I am aware, you write over 5000 words a week, all of them about anime. You write for other people, and it’s always critique/analysis. What enjoyment do you get from doing it? Why do you keep on? How do you feel your personal writing has developed over the years? How does your pastime, as a writer, affect your relationships with other people? 

That’s way more than one question…  What drives Masami in Koi wa Ameagari to write?  If you’re a writer you know – if you’re not, I don’t think I can explain it.  I have no talent for music or painting or sculpture, so writing is my sole creative outlet.  If I didn’t write something, all the time, I believe I’d go mad(der).  I don’t think it’s 5000 words a week anymore (thanks for your creative decline, anime) but yeah, it’s way too much – I know that.  But I do write other stuff that isn’t critique analysis – that’s just for other places.  As far as how I’ve developed as a writer, I’m the worst possible person to answer that but I know that specifically as an anime writer, I’ve totally lost the will to write about series I don’t like.  Since writing is intensely personal it probably helps me to understand myself better, which I would like to think makes me less judgmental with others.

Archivisth: Are there any shops in the Tokyo region (or the Kyoto/Osaka region) that specialize in anime analog media (VHS tapes and laserdiscs)?  

Sorry, but I’m going to have to refer you for a consultation with my colleague Google-sensei on that one – I don’t even have a Blu-ray player anymore, so I’m certainly not on the lookout for analog media.  But I’d be shocked if Den Den Town in Osaka didn’t have a few such places, and I know (though I couldn’t tell you names) that Akihabara certainly does.  I’ll say, too, that VHS was a huge part of my early development as an anime fan – renting them from the library was one of my first methods of pursuing the hobby.

Nadav: Are there shows that you blogged and felt strongly about, that you have since gone 180 degrees on? And if so, what made you change your mind, and how do you feel about your old opinion being captured on the internet for all eternity?

Interesting – I’m reminded of Roger Ebert’s view on Blue Velvet, which he gave 1/2 star to on his initial review, then later admitted he had been totally off-base.  I have to be honest though and say, there really aren’t any that I can think of.  I mean, it wouldn’t be one I blogged and didn’t like initially because frankly I’d have dropped it, and I almost never re-watch stuff unless I loved it the first time.  So more likely would be something I really liked when I covered it but changed my mind on later.  There’s stuff I covered to the end which I ended up hating (like Blood-C) but I was openly hating it by the time the series ended.

Alex: (I’ll let the 3 questions thing go just this once twice)

1.) You covered Samurai Flamenco until episode 12 if I recall correctly. Did you watch it to the end and if so, what were your thoughts on some of the plot twists in the later arcs and the conclusion in general?

No I did not, and that’s largely because I thought the series completely jumped the shark with some of the plot twists around the midway point.

2.) Is there a series which you dismissed early on, but much later on thought, hey, that was quite a clever/nice/great series after all?

I guess you’d have to define “much later”.  Certainly I deeply undersold both Hyouka and Zetsuen no Tempest for the first 4-5 episodes or so, but after that they pretty much won me over.  Sanzoku no Musume Ronja is one I definitely wish I’d never dropped, because it got really good, but the CGI really put me off more than it should have.  Kind of the same with Kingdom, which I dropped because of horrendous production values (which is a shame because the manga remains insanely popular) even though I knew it was really well-written, and it ended up being kind of great.  Inu x Boku SS and Gi(a)rlish Number were both sort of in the “dismissed early on” category, but I’d come around on both by the time they ended.

3.) And a rather personal one: Did you ever watch an otherwise mediocre series just because you were shipping some characters in it and wanted to see how it pans out?

Hmmm.  Nagi no Asukara and Hanasaku Iroha both fit this category for me, though it’s more in the class of “wanted to see how it pans out” rather than shipping specific characters (hmmm, do those shows have anything in common?).  Ah – Haganai, that one for sure!  Also Oreimo.

Frances:

1. Since you are living in Japan now, is there anything you miss about America?

Sure.  Trader Joe’s, for one.  Bottomless cups of coffee, and cheap diner-style breakfasts like pancakes and french toast (just not the same here, especially outside Tokyo).  Chicago-style pizza (see above).  Obviously friends & family.

2. Which are some of the anime that first inspire you to write?

Interesting question.  The first animated series that ever inspired me to write seriously about it was ReBoot, actually (thus the name).  Anime-wise probably Seirei no Moribito, which remains my favorite series of all-time.   When I first started the site, Sarai-ya Goyou was the best show airing, probably, along with FMA: Brotherhood.  But I certainly felt compelled to post about FLCL and Neon Genesis Evangelion, both of which were hugely influential on me.

3. Which are some of your favorite character-pairings in anime (not restricted to romantic relationships)?

Balsa and Chagum from Moribito has to be my favorite non-romantic love story in anime.  What else…  Jim and Gene from Outlaw Star.   Kou and Aoba from Cross Game.  Gon and Killua.  All Might and Deku.  Sugimoto and Asirpa from Golden Kamuy.  Makoto and Mako-chan from Minami-ke.  Hikaru and Sai from Hikaru no Go.  I could go on and on here…

Nick: Do you think that anime and other otaku hobbies encourage more obsessive attachment to characters than other forms of media? If so, what is it about the medium that does that and if not why does anime get that stigma attached to it?

That’s a very interesting question, but a difficult one to answer.  Not exclusively so, certainly – but they may be part of a pool of media that do (like sci-fi/fantasy, for example).  Working at bookstores for many years I saw this sort of obsessiveness attached to many different subjects.  Why with anime, et al, specifically?  I would suspect that the answer would have to be at least somewhat different for fans in Japan and in the West – but to an extent, I wonder if the same sense of being socially outcast for being dai-fans of otaku pursuits has something to do with it – an “us (or me) against the world” mentality.  There’s a chicken and the egg component to that – does being an otaku lead to one being socially ostracized, or do socially ostracized people tend to become otaku?

Ironically, I think this is becoming less of a factor as anime becomes more popular worldwide.  It’s never been more mainstream than it is right now.  I guess in the end I would generalize and say I think the reason for the strong attachment you describe is less inherent to the characters themselves (as much as I love anime, I don’t buy that the characters as a whole are that much more skillfully crafted than with most other mediums) and more due to the circumstances of the fans – especially in Japan.  There, otaku (sorry, but this is verifiably the case) have tended to be folks with weaker social attachments to real people than average.  In the West, I suspect another factor is the euphoric sense of being in on a really cool thing muggles don’t know about, like being part of a secret society.

Arabesque:  How do you feel about writing for a medium like manga compared to anime? Aside from the different elements that make up each one, do you feel that there is one carries itself better with presenting intent and the core message than the other, after the many years that you had been writing on both?

I consider myself a dilettante when it comes to covering manga to be honest – I’ve only blogged a few over the years, relatively speaking.  I think one could attack the question two ways – comparing manga and anime versions of the same series, and looking at the media in general.  I certainly think manga is, as a whole, a more diverse, intellectually ambitious and adventurous medium than anime.  It’s not a coincidence that the vast majority of all series I’ve ranked at year-end have been adapted from manga (and almost all the others originals or novel adaptations).  And there are more manga than I can count that deserve anime adaptations and never get them, in favor of the generic feed corn that makes up the majority of any anime schedule in these days.  But it’s also worth remembering that there are more manga than anime in syndication/on air at any given time, by an order of magnitude.  There are a lot of crappy manga too – it’s just that there are so many and so varied outlets that your odds of finding great series are much better.

My visceral sense in blogging manga as opposed to anime is that anime, as a rule, feels more anxious to make an impact.  It tends to play as more hurried, even if the pacing of an adaptation is roughly the same.  Anime episodes feel like sprints most of the time; manga chapters like chunks of a marathon.  There are obviously exceptions in both directions but as a general rule, that’s the sense I get.  With manga there’s nothing between you and the creator (apart from a few assistants and editors) – even translated, manga is “raw”.  You’re seeing the mangaka on the page, for better or worse.  With anime you’re seeing a literal production, a gestalt of directors and writers and animators and adaptors and background artists, each interjecting their own creative personality onto the final whole.  In the very rare cases when an anime gets that totally in synch, the experience can transcend that of almost any manga one, IMHO.  But more often there’s some dissonance amongst all those disparate elements, which makes reading a manga a more seamless and harmonious experience.

Michael: I know you have previously stated you watch soccer and follow Leicester City. I was curious – what are your thoughts on MLS; do you think the league will ever attract the same quality as the Premier League? Asking as a big MLS fan (and Columbus Crew supporter).

A soccer question, excellent!  I like MLS and I do think it has a chance to continue to grow, both in terms of financial clout and on-field quality.  But same quality as Premier League is probably a stretch.  Right now I’d probably rank MLS just below the Championship (England level 2).  There are many, many leagues in-between EPL and MLS – the EPL is probably the deepest league in the world in terms of talent.  I’m a big favor of the professional soccer system in the U.S. going to a promotion/relegation system (like pretty much every major soccer-playing nation uses), but the powers that be in the incredibly corrupt U.S. Soccer Federation are dead-set against it so it probably won’t happen.  Until it does, I don’t think MLS will improve that much in terms of quality, and catching up to the top European leagues is so far in the distant future as to be pretty much inconceivable for me.  A good goal would be to try and catch up to Mexico, which would still take a number of years but with the right sort of leadership (i.e. not what we currently have) it’s within the realm of possibility.

Congrats on keeping the Crew in Columbus, anyway!  You must be pumped to see Berhalter in charge of the USMNT now.

Orin: What is the first anime that you really loved?

In a very paleo-sense, maybe Star Blazers – which is what Space Battleship Yamato was called when it was one free TV at 6:30 in the morning before school.  But I didn’t even know what “anime” was then.  The first one I loved once I knew what the deal was might just have been Outlaw Star, though Rurouni Kenshin would have been in that mix somewhere too.  And Fruits Basket and NGE not long after that.  I have a very soft spot in my heart for the video rental store in Japantown San Francisco and the San Mateo branch library where I used to rent/borrow anime like those, starting with VHS tapes.