Wikitubia:Interviews/ThePedanticRomantic

'''This interview was conducted on November 3, 2019, by JakCooperThePlumber. ThePedanticRomantic is an anime YouTuber who has more than 83,000 subscribers. '''

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Q1: How and when did you discover YouTube? Q2:  When and why did you decide to become a YouTuber yourself? Q3:  Can you remember what exactly the first YouTube video you ever watched was? Q4:  What was the first anime you ever watched? Q5:  What was the first manga you ever read? Q6:  What was the first video game you ever played? Q7:  What’s your favorite anime? Q8:  What’s your favorite manga? Q9:  What’s your favorite video game/video game series? Q10:  Are there any other artistic mediums you enjoy aside from anime, manga, and video games, (music, novels, movies, tv shows, cartoons, ect)? Q11:  What’s the oldest anime you’ve ever watched and when did it come out? Q12:  What’s the oldest manga you ever read, and when did it come out? Q13:  What’s the oldest video game you’ve ever played, and when did it come out? Q14:  Aside from Digi, what were some of your YouTube influences? Q15:  Do any of your family or real life friends watch your videos? If so, what do they think of them? Q16:  Do you have a favorite or least favorite video that you’ve uploaded, (and why)? Q17:  APPROXIMTELY how much anime do you own? Q18:  APPROXIMATELY how much manga do you own? Q19:  APPROXIMATELY how many video games do you own? Q20:  What advice would you give to anyone looking to get into anime/manga? Q21:  What advice would you give to anyone looking to get into media analysis on YouTube? Q22:  Will someone else talking about a topic ever prevent you from making a video on it? Q23:  What are some of your favorite YouTubers currently? Q24:  How do you get inspiration for a video? Q25:  Have you ever liked the story of an anime, manga, movie, tv show, or video game, ect., even if you didn’t agree with its message? Q26:  Currently, your channel has more than 83,000 subscribers. Did you ever think you would reach this level? Q27:  Currently, your most viewed video is “Sword Art Online Has A Chinese Knockoff That Does Things RIGHT.” Does this surprise you, and are you surprised that it has 1,712,804 views? Q28:  How long do you think YouTube will last? Q29:  What’s your opinion on the advertiser friendly content guidelines introduced in 2017? Q30:  Do you have, (or have ever had), a YouTube lifetime goal? Q31:  How long do you think you’ll be making videos? Q32:  Do you have any artistic aspirations aside from anime analysis/critique? Q33:  Have you ever done an interview like this before?
 * I only really got consistent computer access as I was turning 14, and I immediately found myself on Youtube listening to the godly .Hack//SIGN OST, which was what I used the website for pretty much exclusively for a few months, lol.
 * In the ensuing years I consumed ungodly amounts of youtube content, and always found myself really fascinated by the numbers behind it all.  Anytime I found a new channel I’d reflexively go look at their videos page to see how long they’d been making videos, when their videos started gaining traction, what their most popular vids had been, etc.  In spite of that I never had particularly serious youtubing ambitions myself because I couldn’t really envision what I would do on the platform. Eventually though, I found myself writing about anime for my college paper, and in the summer started a blog to polish up my abilities in that area further.  Confidence buoyed by a shoutout from anituber Digibro about my insightfulness as a commenter on his videos, I decided to use one of those posts as a video script, and the rest is history.
 * Not exactly, but it’d be one of the tracks from that SIGN OST, if I had to guess, most likely the show’s opening theme.
 * The first anime I ever watched would be something generic like Pokemon or Medabots or what have you.  If we’re talking the first anime I ever watched with a sense of it as something distinct Western cartoons, it’d probably be .Hack//SIGN, which had this air of “specialness” and difference from anything that had come before when I watched it at age 8 or however old I was.  By the time I watched Samurai 7 (Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai retold with mechs; it’s pretty great) on the Funimation Channel, I was cognizant of it as “anime” specifically.
 * Ahhhh, I’m not certain about it, but it might very well be Nausicaa’s manga, which I went out and got from the library after I first watched the film and that blew my mind.
 * I played a bunch of flash games on the computer, some educational games on there as well, and had those things from the mid 2000s that you plugged into your tv’s component cable slots.  I remember being especially into an old arcade game on one of them called “mappy.” I got into the console game pretty late, got a Gamecube when I was 9 years old for Christmas, and if I remember correctly I got Lego Star Wars with it, which is an all-time classic.
 * Always so hard to answer this one; the rankings of my top few are constantly in flux.  As boring as it is; I usually answer with Evangelion. The most important anime of all time is about depressed 14 year olds, and I watched it as a depressed 15 year old, how couldn’t I love it?  In all seriousness, I’ve got that emotional connection to it, I’m UTTERLY in love with everything Anno does as a director generally, and the series has such an overwhelming amount of passion for everything that makes anime anime that for me, invested as deeply in the medium as I am, it’s a transcendent experience.  My cooler-sounding answer for this is Haibane Renmei.  I’m an unrepentant slut for anything Yoshitoshi ABe, and for me Haibane is the best of the bunch.  I ended up reading Haruki Murakami’s entire bibliography just because of this series lol.
 * I’ve actually read a comparatively tiny amount of manga relative to the time I’ve invested into anime, so my favorite doesn’t come with much experience.  Akira’s manga is stellar, and obligatory “Hourou Musuko made me cry and I love it here,” but given how the vast majority of manga I’ve read has been of the doujin variety, it wouldn’t surprise me if the manga I’ve actually enjoyed the most is one of those lmao.
 * Hm, the SoulsBorneKiro series is “beeeeeeetter,” but Pokemon is so important and defining to me as a person that I think it has to win here.  It’s legitimately one of the things I have the very most love for on this earth, and it can’t fail to make me happy (even without a National Dex :P).
 * Yeah!  I’m pretty into art generally, so, I’ve read hundreds of books in my life, I made a big list of great live action films and have been watching one of those every week this year, and even if there’s way to fucking much for me to even try keeping up with it, I’m a really big fan of music as well (I played trumpet for like 8 years).
 * Oh no, please don’t shame me here I’m woefully under-watched on the older classics.  In reading about and researching the medium I’ve watched a bunch of the “first” bits of Japanese animation, little 7 second pieces from 1913 and what have you, but if we’re talking anime anime, post-Astro Boy, it’d be 3000 Leagues In Search Of Mother, an Isao Takahata World Masterpiece Theater series from 1976.  It was fantastic by the way, so totally give it a look if you’re interested, but be prepared for a LOT of suffering along the journey.  The anime that’s most likely to dethrone that for oldest anime I’ve watched is Rose of Versailles; I’m dying to get to that one.
 * That’d be an older Katushiro Otomo (Akira dude) manga, Domu: A Child’s Dream, from 1980.  Really cool short little trip of a manga; it’s playing with the concept of psychic powers like Akira does, but takes it in its own direction.
 * I’ve played some pong, and other assorted old arcade games.  For something a little more complex it might be 1987’s Megami Tensei; I’m a little fuzzy on this tho orz.
 * God there’s so many; I really try to synthesize elements of the style of everyone I like into my own creative voice.  I love the way Movies With Mikey builds to these really affecting and important-feeling conclusions on the emotional cores of the works he’s discussing, Pause and Select really showed me the light when it came to citations and academic research on the subjects you’re discussing, and The Canipa Effect broadened my perspective on industry knowledge, sakuga, etc.  My (boi)wife Zeria has helped shift my ideas of what goals I have for my analyses, and most specifically helped accelerate my tiredness with “reader-response” style criticism and desire to move beyond it.
 * My aforementioned wife watches them; I’ve got one fan there.  I’ve met a bunch of my “internet friends” in real life, so I don’t know if they qualify, but yeah, a number of them watch my videos, and, if they do dislike them, well they’ve kept that secret from me thus far, haha.
 * The video that’s the most regrettable is my one on Goblin Slayer.  It got dragged and dunked on pretty widely; and for a lot of people it’s the video that they’re aware of me for and which defines me in their heads.  It’s something that genuinely makes me pretty disappointed, because it just isn’t a video that’s indicative of who I am or what my content tends to be.  I was doing a challenge-y thing that month where I made a video every other day, mostly because taking time to put together well-made, thoughtful videos had resulted in infrequent uploads that tanked my channel’s algorythmic standing.  So, this video, which established a lens that a lot of people view me through, was made totally off the cuff, didn’t have time to be revised and cleaned up, and the inflammatory that made it so memetic wasn’t even one I came up with; my wife suggested it and I went “yeah sure; I’ll go with that.”  This isn’t to say that I shouldn’t be held responsible for the video, or any other given video that similar excuses could apply to.  As I’m on the record saying; I think the arguments are poorly-made and as such it’s understandable why the video upset people. But it’s a fact that the video doesn’t give you a good idea of who I am or what my thoughts are, and tragically it’s exactly this video that gave people their idea of me.  It feels so odd for something that I spent so little time on, and put so little of myself into to shape the collective online conception of me as a person, but that’s how the internet works sometimes.
 * Hmm, probably 50 or so, a mix of stuff I’ve picked up at comic shops, and a handful of purchases I made when Sentai or Rightstuf were having sales.  It’s a mix of interesting stuff that was really cheap, and great anime I love that was on sale for relatively cheap.
 * I only own maybe 20 assorted volumes, just random things I’ve picked over the years.
 * I own very few video games physically, I left my collection with the rest of the fam when I moved out since I have 3 younger siblings who’d make use of them.  The only one I brought was my copy of Nier, both because I love the game and because I walked like a mile through a DOWNPOUR of rain to go pick that fucker up from one of two Gamestops in my state that had a copy of it.  Like hell was I leaving that one behind.  I married into a moderate games fortune tho.  I never got to play ps4 games or Switch games until I started dating someone who owned the consoles; that’s a great strat lemme tell ya.
 * I’ll focus on anime since that’s where I’ve got far more knowledge.  I think that learning about the industry, even just a relatively small baseline amount, will really enhance things for you.  Specifically, the fact that studios play far less a role than staff in shaping an anime and its quality is an important idea that’ll help you find things that you’ll enjoy.  If you loved Serial Experiments Lain you can go look at its writer, Chiaki Konaka, and see other original series he wrote, like the also-stellar Texhnolyze and Digimon Tamers, or its character designer, who was a part of Texhnolyze, Haibane Renmei, and Niea_7, all fantastic shows with similar feels.  If you were a fan of Lain for it’s wild directing you can check out other works that Ryuutarou Nakamura handled and get other greats like Kino’s Journey and Ghost Hound.  All this takes is looking at staff listings on MyAnimeList or ANN’s database; it really doesn’t take any sort of special skill or intelligence.  In conjunction with this: also focus less on the seasonal grind, and look towards anime’s outstanding backlog. I KNOW how tempting it can be to fall into following 25 seasonals and watching at best 1 backlog series, but it just isn’t worth it.  I’ve been there, and it’s fun to be part of the conversation. But if you’re keeping up with even 12 shows you’re gonna have maybe 4 or 5 that are in an 8-10/10 range for you, and some that are like a 6 for you, but that you watch all the way through because it’s fun enough, easy to watch, and your friends are talking about it.  I get that it’s incredibly easy to be paralyzed by the prospect of choosing from literal hundreds of potential anime that you’d like to get around to, but I promise you that it’ll be worth it to bite that bullet and go for some of the classics.  The sheer volume of wild, fascinating, experimental, beautiful stuff that’s been made in this medium is astounding, and why I love it so much, but if you limit yourself to consuming only what’s being made in the present, you’re cutting yourself off from so much of that variety.  By all means you do you, and stick to that seasonal grind if that’s really what you’re here for. But if you have a real passion for anime as a whole, as a medium, as a culture, I really think you’ll benefit from expanding your horizons.
 * This is always a tough one, because I’ve got to figure out whether to advise people from the “here’s how to succeed” perspective, or the “here’s how to be fulfilled by your work on here and be a good person doing it” perspective, which are very often in direct conflict.  If you just wanna succeed, follow the Digibro formula; it’s what I did, and I was perfect proof for how clearly and straightforwardly it works.  Put out constant videos making basic analytical points about the handful of most popular anime from a given season, using eye-catching thumbnails.  The easiest way to get one such thumbnail is to use a close-up image of a really expressive cute anime girl face, specifically expressive eyes, since humans are drawn to those.  If you wanna flex your graphic design go for it, but that’s really all you need.  Additionally, confrontational titles are especially effective, the promise of controversy, and eliciting anger are two of the best ways to get people to click on something.  You’ve gotta manage those carefully though. Just making “My Hero Academia Is Dogshit” might get you views, but if that’s your unironic take then most of those viewers are gonna get made at you and click out.  Their dislikes still help you, the individual video might do well, but a tiny portion of those viewers are going to be retained (i.e. subscribe), and many of them will remember you and be averse to your content moving forward.  So the best way to do things is to come up with a title that will make your target audience angry in a way that makes them want to click on it out of a “what the fuck is this bitch on about?” way, only to be pleasantly surprised when you’re making the point they agree with.  You’ve gotta be careful not to be too obvious about this though or people will be upset with you for how clearly you’re exploiting them. Making “My Hero Academia Sucks!” and then having your thesis be “....because it’s so good that I’m dying from anticipation for the next season!” or whatever is gonna be asinine and unhelpful to you.  Aside from that, just upload frequently, ideally twice a week, but if you’re serious about trying to be a success at least once a week or as close to that as you can get.  This is both because youtube’s algorithm will tank your channel if you aren’t uploading frequently, and because, especially early on, youtube is very much a game of chance, so you need to give yourself as many chances as possible.  Once you have a little viewer base established for yourself it’s way easier to grow, the rich get richer, so start building up your sub count by getting 5 new people every video who find you through that vid’s r/anime post, hoping for one of those videos to eventually blow up.   Now, it’s a select few people who can actually stand to continue following that formula for a year, two years, three.  After a while I couldn’t keep making straightforward seasonal analyses; so I switched to less topical, far more interesting videos that got far less views.  Mother’s Basement shows no signs of needing to stop making them himself. Have realistic expectations going into things, and specifically, have an idea of what you want to get out of it.  If you want a career, can you keep up that formula? If you don’t necessarily have that as your end goal, do you want to grow more slowly off of entirely niche audience, or do you wanna easymode your way up to a moderate viewerbase before shifting to your real passion subjects and just cover those?  I can’t say any given path is wrong or right, since it’ll depend on your individual attitude, tolerances, and objectives, but there ya go, do with this info what you will.
 * Not unless my thoughts on that topic were simple and straightforward enough to make (or basically make) the point for me.
 * Superbunnyhop is almost always near the top of my list at any given point in time.  He does fascinating, valuable, capital-J “Journalism,” and it’s tremendous work.  I’m really into cooking, and Bon Appetit does great food content so they’re up there for me.  Philosophy Tube is pretty breathtaking.  To pack that much well-utilized production value, that much style, that much enriching informational knowledge, into packages which on top of all that have narratives that are engaging as they are is absurd.  Like, his “Men. Abuse. Trauma” vid, which isn’t gonna be too controversial I hope because it isn’t particularly political in any direction. It’s practically arthouse in how it meanderingly and hesitantly gets around to actually telling his story of abuse, implicitly conveying how hard this stuff can be to talk about.  The fact that the entire, carefully scripted 20 minute video is delivered into the camera in a single take is absurd, and once again has relevance to the story being told. Olly is saying some of the most compelling points and ideas being said on the platform, while saying what he’s saying in perhaps THE most compelling way of anyone on the platform.  Man, I’m sorry, I really don’t have much else right now though.  Usually I’ve got a channel or two that I’m really feeling at the time; they’re either new to me, or I’ve followed them for a while but for some reason I’m just particularly into their stuff at the moment, but I don’t think I’ve got anything eliciting that “wow, they’re really onto something” feeling at the moment, aside from these guys who are always gonna be at the top.
 * Three primary ways.  The most straightforward is I’ll watch an anime and there’ll be something about it that I think would be interesting to talk about, say, the way the new Code Geass film builds upon and criticizes the political ideas the original series put forth.  A lot of the time when I’m researching anime (usually just by falling down wikipedia rabbit holes on a given subject), I’ll stumble upon something that catches my interest, and upon digging into it I find a really compelling story to tell. This happened for my video on the studio 3hz, where when looking at their catalogue I noticed that almost all the series they’d produced were interesting and ambitious original series, which is very much a rarity, so I started looking around and found info that helped complete that picture, like an interview where its founders said that their goal in creating the studio was to help produce exactly that, exciting original series by promising creators.  The third way is that sometimes a flash of inspiration just hits me. Typically this doesn’t come out of literally nowhere; it isn’t a divine message or anything, but I’ll just be aimlessly and offhandedly thinking about something and I’ll get the idea. I think my Scars of My Hero Academia video was one such instance. I just had the series on the mind, and then went “wait a minute, there are a lot of scars in this series, huh?  What does the fact they keep coming up mean?”  If you’re looking for how to get inspiration for videos, I’d say that all three of these mostly result from just engaging with the medium as much and as enthusiastically as I do.  Obviously there’s an extent to which this is natural to me that can’t be recreated; some people will get ideas for things more, have more analytical points and concepts get elicited when they consume media.  However, I think that’s a much smaller factor than the other stuff. I seek out and read articles on anime, interviews with staff, not because I’m trying to get ideas, but because I’m into anime enough that I’ll naturally go do so out of personal interest.  Tons of my ideas have come about because I was reading an article, some guy got mentioned briefly and sounded interesting, and so I went and googled him and read a bunch about him and there was a story to tell there. If you don’t have this natural inquisitiveness about the medium I wouldn’t say that you can’t become an anituber, but you’re gonna need to go about your creative process differently that I’ve done so.
 * Yeah, 100%.  People often see that I’m a leftist and go “ah, well you must not like this anime because you think it’s p r o b l e m a t i c,” and I’ll admit that that tendency to say “it’s wrong to enjoy shows with bad morals/politics,” in some leftist spaces is VERY tiresome and reductive.  I see art as having value beyond just being a propaganda piece, and liking something that’s bad as art just because it says the right things politically is silly, just as disliking something that’s good art of saying “the wrong things” is.
 * So, on the one hand, having been this successful is entirely surreal, and there’s no way I ever could’ve envisioned this happening.  On the other though, I sort of bet on achieving this, so in a sense I was at the very least hoping to get here.  In that summer where I started making videos, it became clear that my family was really gonna need my help around the house (I had three younger siblings and a single dad was taking care of all of us).  Between that, the fact that I was gonna need to take out a little bit of a loan to cover my tuition, and some other factors, I pitched my dad the idea of taking a gap year, and trying to get this Youtube thing to work out.  So, there were very real stakes riding on it, and, miraculously, I managed to make it work.
 * Holy shit is it that high now?  Lol  It doesn’t surprise me but it is a bit disappointing.  The thumbnail I made for this one is fantastic; I was super proud of it at the time.  The image of China is just framed really well between Asuna’s hands; it’s super eye-catching, and that combined with the eternally-relevant subject matter (SAO) and confrontational title make it something that’s obviously primed for success.  It also makes this video a prime example of the depressing shallowness that the platform also has.  The content of the video is a simple seasonal impressions of this random anime, just my thoughts on how the series is after 2 or 3 episodes.  There’s no particular insight there, no great point. It has utility as an alright consumer review/recommendation and basically nothing else.   And yet it’s far and away my most successful video.  LIKE HOLY SHIT, EVENTUALLY 2 MILLION PEOPLE WILL HAVE SEEN SOMETHING I MADE; THOUGHTS I ARTICULATED.  It certainly speaks to the luck-based nature of Youtube, how you should just put out as much content as you can of an acceptable baseline level because eventually something will blow up.  But because the video’s content itself is so average, so interchangeable, so relatively unimportant; it really illustrates the extreme degree to which by far the most reliable formula for getting a video to do well is a visually-catchy thumbnail, a slightly-brash, confrontational title, and the promise of the mention of an extremely relevant, trendy topic.  I’m sorry if I’m sounding like a downer, especially in an interview for the youtuber wiki, for people who presumably have positive feelings towards the platform, lol.  This reality is just something I’ve really been grappling with recently, and that video is pretty emblematic of it.
 * In some form?  Probably for a good long while.  It’s probably more of a question of “how long I think youtube will last in anything resembling its current form?”  Certainly the direction they’ve been bare-facedly barrelling towards is one that’s a lot cleaner and more corporate.  The “Youtube Originals,” the attempted restriction of channel verification to pre-existing established media companies and personalities, etc.
 * Oof, this one is long enough ago now, and there have been enough minor adpocalypses since then, that I honestly don’t remember too many of the specifics to comment very precisely.  I do remember being vaguely disappointed that it happened before I was making any meaningful money, but also looking on the positive side of things and going “well at least I won’t miss the money anyway, since I never got to experience the golden years.”  It is interesting to me that this event, the biggest adpocalypse alongside the one that happened after Pewds dropped a hard N-bomb if I’m remembering correctly? was a product of ads appearing alongside extremist content, mostly of the ISIS and other assorted radical Islamic-variety.  It complicates the narrative that the root cause of these events is “SJW hate mobs,” contextualizing them as being more of a choice made by companies in order to minimize the amount of controversy they’re in proximity to.  This doesn’t mean that it wasn’t mostly “sjws” (sjws being in this case, anyone who’s upset enough by a celebrity dropping hard n-bombs to say “hey maybe this shouldn’t happen”) whose conversation created the controversy which companies then caused that adpocalypse trying to avoid of course.  It just means that, in a world where “sjws” got demonized for their anger over n-bombs that helped cause the Pewdiepie adpocalypse, but “terrorism justice warriors” didn’t really get that same treatment for fueling the 2017 one, getting angry about the extremist Islamic preacher is seen as on some level valid, in a way that getting angry at Pewds’ n-bomb isn’t.  (pls don’t get too mad at me over this one fellas, lol.  All of this thought was directly off the top of my head because, as I said, I didn’t have any thoughts on this event going into the question here).
 * I think the only goal I’ve ever had with Youtube was to be able to support myself in some fashion with it.  That’s in part for the obvious reason of “If i’m able to do this ‘full time’ I can invest more into it and be my best youtubing self,” but also for more immediately pressing reasons.  As I explained in my earlier backstory, there were other causes behind it, but I did effectively “drop out of college to do youtube.” That added some stakes to being able to succeed in it, not that I had to be set for life because of Youtube, but I had to at least get far enough to make it worthwhile.  And about a year into things I started needing to support myself in one way or another, and youtube was by far the best option for that. I’ve never really had the luxury of looking too far forward with this...
 * ...until now that is, where I’m living with my partner, life is pretty stable, I’m engaged, and I’m thinking about the future.  I don’t really know how much longer I’ll be making videos.  As has probably shone through throughout this interview, I’ve got a lot of reservations about the platform, disillusionment with the things it requires of those working on it, and I don’t like being constrained by that.  Straddling this line between corporate and creative as you have to do at the youtube lower-midtier is really rough. It’s very possible that I find a breakthrough of some sort, either creatively in a way that puts me at peace with the content I’m making, or in terms of success, getting me big enough to not have to care as much about the whims and demands of the platform.  But it’s also possible that I can’t resolve my creative crises, my frustrations with the ways I’m forced to play to the culture of the website and the kind of things it wants out of its creators, and that I step away.  I’d say that, even if that did happen; it’d be very likely that I still make content of some sort.  It’d just be that Youtube would become a hobby, a creative pursuit, and I only make videos I’m interested in, in the way I’m interested in making them, with no concern about their performance because I’m “doing” something else in life and don’t need to get anything specific out of my work on here.  I’m in a very reflective, transitionary period right now, so we’ll really have to wait and see.
 * I think that, in a youtube context, I’ve already also reached out into political commentary, just on subjects I’m more familiar with, meaning, political topics that are related to anime fandom/subcultures, and I’m excited to explore that realm further.  Do culinary pursuits count as artistic aspirations?  I’m really really into cooking, specifically I’m focusing on mastering Italian and Indian cuisines at the moment; that’s really fulfilling.  Fashion’s another “does this count?” one. Fashion design is art, but I’m just getting into putting together outfits and aesthetics. There’s an artistic element there at the least, even if it isn’t capital-a art.  I’m fairly decent at it I think; feel free to buy me clothes to use me as your dress-up doll and play out your femboy/dickgirl fantasies; whatever floats your boat.  Otherwise there’s nothing concrete.  Every time I think of a book I really love or start reading one I think “oooohh, maaaaaan, I should write a novel,” but we’ll see if I get to that.  I could see myself getting into drawing, once again, we’ll see. I’ve got creative energy, and especially if Youtube isn’t a means of satisfying that anymore that might get directed elsewhere, but it’s all theoretical for now.
 * Hmmm, I’ve done one or two interviews for people’s school projects I think, and I did a reddit AMA, but not really anything with the prestige of being “for publication” in the way that this is, haha.