Sad Boyz - Anime

Episode Date: April 1, 2018

Today on Sad Boyz we talk Anime! We were both introduced to anime in our formative years (via shonen fighting anime like one piece and dragon ball z) and it's left quite the lasting impression on us.   We discuss the prevalence of anime in the US and UK, why it's a hard sell for some and identity-definining for others, why it was appealing to us as kids, and its lasting influence on us in adulthood. We also recommend a few shows!   Also in this episode, we have a world shattering pen palz submission and Jordan's confusingly-named recurring segment gets a much needed facelift.   @sadboyzpod

So we have an audio submission today from Hero, and neither of us have heard it. Have heard any of it. I do want to say this is my favorite part of the show, and I am currently literally on the edge of my seat. Yeah, yeah. Let's go. All right, here we go. Hey, Jarvis and Justin. Mike.

Justin. Justin oh my god oh my god that is the oh i'm dead i'm a ghost what i passed away i've been replaced with Justin. Welcome to Sad Boys, a podcast about feelings and other things also. I'm Jarvis. And I'm Jordan.

All dogs are boys, all cats are girls code. Um, what? I'm trying to make these opening segments more educational, a lot of people don't know that. No, but that's, that's not true at all. Oh at all i see somebody's been paying attention to the liberal media oh not really getting the truth i i just feel like you just have to do one google search to answer like to prove yourself wrong you read google okay what what search engine do you use the only search engine you need me me? me, Jordan you? me, Jordan

my wisdom, intuition you just don't learn anything you just use your intuition why would I need to learn something when I already feel like I'm right about it I can't argue with that saving the earth, although don't need to because global warming is a myth anyway, the sad boys, these are all things we believe.

And please tweet at Jarvis about your beliefs. Today, we're talking about... That's fine. You're already getting replies. He's lying. In case that wasn't obvious. Today, we're talking about something that is very near and dear to our developments as people. Today's a really good day.

Today's a really good day. Today is a big day. Today we're talking about anime. Woo! Everyday anime. Every single day anime, which is the frequency you should also watch anime. Jarvis, I have two missions with this episode. Alright.

Let me run you through them. Alright, here we go. Give me a beat. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And here it comes. I'm coming in to the beat. And a one, two, three. And here I go. Here come the rap now. It's just around the corner. I'm not nervous at all i'm not trying to delay because i don't know how to rap all right that was fun uh okay thanks for the beat the two missions for today's episode are one i want to get people that already watch anime to watch more anime okay and i want to get people that don't watch anime currently to revise their life because they're making a lot of mistakes yeah and i just want to talk about um why anime even entered my life in the first place what did i find so appealing about this thing

and like where did the this like subculture of anime watching in the u.s even even come from i think it's like kind of a strange and interesting subset of of media yeah that exists sort of externally from other television and film yeah it's not tv or movies yeah anime you know yeah it's weird because people are like i don't like anime which i think of it as a genre sure so it's kind of like saying i don't like movies but i understand why people make that distinction and we'll be jumping into all that and more right after we talk about weeks jarvis yeah have one if so how was it yeah uh i did contrary to popular belief have a week this week um and my week was good uh very busy at um at work wait what was that oh my god it's the trash alarm. Oh. Trash update.

Trash update. We require a trash update. Oh, okay. The elder gods demand a trash update. So, trash, where we last left it, was in a can. Okay. Great. So, for long-time listeners of the show will recall a time when I had no way to throw away my trash. And then, more recently, we got trash bins in our apartment which is just a great way of

throwing away trash yeah i'm using trash bins right now it really affects it's very effective better than eating it it's better than blending it and drinking it it's just like a tool that is specifically for that purpose and it's just so nice when things work out that way life hack life hack um i've recently been learning to get into the habit of taking out my trash bins weekly great um and i'm not that good at it yet how long was it before until you had these cans remind me like from the very beginning or yeah how long has it been since you yourself were regularly taking out trash cans up until now what was that oh yeah yeah so like um three years oh my god yeah i don't blame you at all yeah because like we just didn't

have them and then i would um when we filled up trash bins that we were sharing we would take them out but uh that wasn't that frequent sure so now the kid has a whole other responsibility on a weekly basis yeah and that's fine you know like wednesday night take out the trash thursday morning bring in the bins but i forgot last week and bring in the bins to bring in the bins and my brand new trash bins that were pristine got graffitied all the way up like every every possible tag uh multiple conflicting tags i'm sure um what we threw some of those like politically i'm sure it's got to be or at least like dueling factions yeah um i can't read any of them except there was one that kind of freaked me out a little bit okay so as i was pushing in itunes review yeah it was weird two and a half

stars oh wow on me yeah um i was taking in my recycling bin uh like with my you know tail between my legs because i was like so sad that we had gotten all graffitied up yeah i saw on the top of one of the bins the phrase fuck yt people and i was like does that stand for youtube and if, what the hell? Oh, my God. Yeah. And so I still don't know what that is in reference to or if that person is actually talking about me specifically. Well, see, there's two scenarios.

One, they're saying something probably quite mean and offensive generally. Yeah. Or they're saying something that I frankly agree with directly to you fuck youtube people it's a pretty strong statement to say like fuck blank people yeah um almost always a bad idea almost always a bad idea so i and to choose something that is as vague as like a two-letter acronym yeah if you're gonna go for it go for it if you're to anonymously shout at a group of people, at least be clear. Yeah, like they didn't abbreviate people to like PPL or anything.

So they clearly had the time. This was just, maybe they were a little in pain. Yeah. And they knew that. I see, I see. And that mystery may never be solved. Wait, what if this was a considerate thing? What if they were like, fuck YouTube people.

Hottest people around. So sexy. Oh. Yo, you out there. what if this was a considerate thing what if they were like fuck youtube people hottest people around so sexy oh yo you out there like so you like you know uh a supermodel walks past your trash cans right as they are like too yeah yeah um and they go oh fuck youtube i didn't know who to fuck are there any available and then yeah yeah windows yeah yeah anybody here with subscribers yeah yeah no it makes perfect sense subscribers that I might be able to make out with? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it makes perfect sense now that you explained that to me. Speaking of YouTube, Jarev.

Yo. You want to pimp out your new channel? What you did? What I did? You did a whole new channel up in the YouTube. Oh, yeah. I started a collaboration channel with my friend Mayuko and my friend Joma called 1024 Vlogs. You can see the first video up on that where we talk about our first impressions of one

another. And if you're interested in normal old YouTube stuff from me, we're celebrating 15,000 subscribers on the channel, which is pretty exciting. And you can reach me over there at youtube.com slash Jarvis Johnson, and you can find everything from there. Please fuck him. Well, based on the data i'm not gonna say that uh but leave that to the trash can jordan how was your week i'm so glad you asked because

i made you something what i've i made you a song wow jordan just uh opened up a laptop that was here all along that I did not see until this moment. And it's open to Logic Pro, which is a DAW, which stands for Digital Audio Workspace. Absolutely. It's the DAW that I use to write music. So for those who don't know, Jordan has a hobby of writing and producing music. Yeah. And something I've been working on lately, which is actually a shared creative endeavor for both of us, is spending less time on fidelity and just getting ideas concrete. Right.

And so I had this idea when I was trying to memorize a certain phrase that I always struggle to memorize for the show. Right, right. About my segment. I decided to write a theme for the segment oh and i'm going to uh play it for you now you'll listen on headphones but i assume we'll edit the the major version in here we go all right here we go it's jordan's bazaar challenging and or emotionally strenuous social interaction of the week probably pretty embarrassing so please

don't make fun of him for it this is actually pretty good thanks yeah this is uh i'm pushing into the acapella space this is step one in that moment i saw nine jordans superimposed onto the same frame and you'll notice what a lot of different vocal harmonies what a lot of very selfish musicians won't do is uh thank you at the end of their tracks i made sure to whisper a kindly thanks at the end uh to indicate that i do care that you listen to the song and that you won't make fun of me for it yeah no no i uh i'm honestly impressed that's right y'all it's jordan's bizarre challenging and or emotionally strenuous social interaction of the week i want you to know getting it again i want you to know that he read that from a piece of paper. Shut up!

I sang it a second ago, live. Right, yeah, live. Mini-me's. Mini-me's? With mini-me's. With Vern Troyer. Just one Vern. So, this week, I did not have the interaction, but I wanted to share an interaction. This is kind of like an extra Pen Pal segment.

Okay. This is a story told to me by a friend of mine called Elizabeth, also a friend of yours. Yes, yes, yes. Elizabeth is one of our all-time favorite people. Oh yeah, for sure.

And she told me an anecdote that I'm actually going to frame as our social anxiety millennial D&D game. Oh. So a while back, we played millennial D&D. Yes.

Where you have to deal with some kind of weird encounter and tell me how you would handle it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm going to be, you're going to present me with one of these situations. I'm going to present you with Elizabeth's tricky, sticky scenario. Okay. And you are going to see how you fare in that scenario.

All right. So Elizabeth boards a plane. The plane is basically a skyboat okay i'm not familiar uh she boards the sky boat and after they take off she realizes that while she is sitting in the middle seat and the other passenger in her row is sitting on the aisle seat nobody turned up for the window seat okay so she is now able to transition over to the window seat you rank yeah you i assume would do the same given the opportunity uh totally now especially because then you can leave space for both you and the person in the aisle to like lean into that middle

it's a mutually beneficial setup you're not taking anything from anyone yeah the only thing at play would potentially be well who takes the the window seat but you're nearer the window seat it makes sense yeah so i want to ask you what you do to move over to that seat it can be as simple as i just get up and yeah i think i would just like raise the the armrest and slide over okay so what you've just described is what a human being would do right okay now i'm gonna run you through what elizabeth's solution oh no this cracks me up every time i think about it oh no so elizabeth one of the sweetest human beings on the planet yeah sweetest maybe too sweet in this particular situation okay because she didn't want to move and potentially offend the man without first acknowledging him

so he sat there he's got headphones and he's just doing his thing. Right. Reading the safety card, watching that 17 minute long virgin safety video. Starring Todrick Hall. It's like a fully choreographed. Get ready to fly. That'll be my next theme song. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she's just sat there, he's watching that. And over the course of 15 minutes.

15 minutes. 15 minutes. Attempts to, they're in the air at this point okay attempts to get his attention no to indicate that nobody has sat in the no they're in the air so there's no one she doesn't want to move over without first saying huh looks like we lucked out and then moving so you know to to consciously acknowledge that this luck has been shared and that they're both going to benefit from the move so i like would understand now no offense to our our dear friend elizabeth former friend after this it would make sense to me to do that before takeoff because you don't know if that person's going to show up right sure but when

you've you're already 40 000 feet in the air there is no person that could possibly come that doesn't already like no one is gonna say oh yeah sorry i was just standing in the aisle this whole time and i was uh looking for my seat i'm here to claim it i'm also here now yeah and believe i'm in the future also to quote mike babiglia as well friend of the pod but for some reason of course very good friend of the pod emotional pervert of sorts um please tweet that on him um she elizabeth decides somewhat considerably to acknowledge it first i can understand the logic kind of yeah however and this is where we really take a turn she he doesn't hear her oh the first four or five times no the story ends with her moving without acknowledging okay thank god but

there are several attempts at just looks like we um dragon the eye so it's um it looks like there's no nobody um how what like what she like they're listening to music i presume at least one headphone in yeah right and so what why didn't she try to physically engage like by tapping on the shoulder elizabeth will be on an episode of sad okay i'm gonna drag her onto the show i will do you'll drag her like a united flight attendant sorry that is a great reference my dear um very topical i yeah i i i feel like we have to have elizabeth on and have an entire show dedicated to what the hell she was thinking in this scenario yeah i think maybe we're not actually on the episode yeah it's just elizabeth it's i feel like she would be she's the kind of person who if you said hey just recount this experience uh to a microphone for an hour she would not bat an eye oh and it would be much better than all of her it would be she wouldn't even say um or like have any pauses yeah to close out with love elizabeth

one of my favorite human beings of all time and please keep feeding me great stories she's the kindest person number one yeah she's fantastic and what i wanted to say was i am now officially opening up he's grabbing his notebook no i'm not this is unrelated this is for something else no he's reading it jordan's bizarre challenging and or emotionally strained social interaction of the week which was not on the page that was just a coincidence right um two submissions oh if you have a scenario that you went through that you thought was particularly strenuous emotionally upsetting whatever right would ping me hit us up on the sad boys dm yeah i will consider it for this segment because you know it's kind of a burden i'm becoming like so emotionally competent and like right right my life's going so well yeah yeah that uh i'm struggling for content so hit me up yeah i think one one fun thing about tabloids is that we like to experiment with our segments so you know let us know what you

really like um maybe let us know what you don't like i i'd like to know uh because we have a lot of the same messages and we're just like putting it in different containers most definitely i uh i for one love playing millennial dnd yeah baby yeah so okay uh speaking of dms speaking of segments we speaking of content now's the part of the show where we hear from you the listener me oh okay it's uh the pen pals with a z segment do you have a theme song for that uh yeah give me a beat pen pals okay all right yeah it's a good one good one um i'll uh jump i'll throw in seven other me's and verne troy at a health hour oh god so we have an audio submission today from hero and neither of us have heard it have heard any of it i do want to say

this is my favorite part of the show and i am currently literally on the edge of my seat yeah yeah let's go all right here we go hey jarvis and justin my name is hero this morning i was listening to uh black enough the episode that you did most recently. Erica Baker. And I could very much relate to it to a certain extent. I'm half Japanese, half white, and I was very much referred to as a banana, or some people would call me a Twinkie, because I have that white cream filling. Sure. As all white people do.

You know about the cream filling. So disgusting. I mean, not that she said it, but like Twinkie's disgusting. That metaphor. And that would always throw me off quite a bit. And I think as a child, as a young person, when I was in middle school and I was referred to that way, I didn't know how to take it. And sometimes

it was directed at me as a compliment. Being told like, oh, well, you're not one of those Asians. And Jarvis was mentioning this very much where like, I felt a level of acceptance in the white community that I was in versus the Japanese community. Cause in my Japanese community, I was made fun of for being half, for having an ax or for not speaking Japanese as eloquently as the others um and not being a true japanese person versus in the white community i was told like oh you're not one of those asians like what the fuck does that mean but either way i wanted to be a part of a community to some extent and i

felt like by distancing myself from my japanese culture like being like fucking i hate anime and i don't like math we didn't listen to this. And she like brought up anime. Yeah. Oh, my God. Goosebumps on every part of my body. Goosebumps on my pupils. This is like the stars are aligning here. Could not have asked for a better pen pal.

I ended up stepping away from a lot of things that I was more interested in the beginning of my life. Anyways. So I'm going to pause this really quick. Because Hiro brings up like a really interesting point that that we didn't get a chance to talk about in that episode black enough is the compliment yeah you know like when you're not directly like discriminated against or or treated differently or you're treated differently with like a positive outcome sure like that is still bad as though referencing this is justin by the way as though referencing the idea of you being uh and half is like, well, one of them's got to be bad.

But I'm here to tell you, I like that half. Yeah. So you are approved. Or it's like when you have the black friend and it's like, you're one of the good ones. Yeah. Don't worry. It hurt my soul, but resonated so well when she said it would be framed as a compliment. I was like, oh, yeah.

My head went up. I was like, OK okay is that things about to get wholesome it was like because i was hated elsewhere yeah and they were like oh we hate most asians but this is okay right right so it's like it's in a way okaying that is kind of like throwing your community under the bus yeah implicitly right and and no judgment for that i certainly did the same thing uh one interesting thing that she brought up that i just don't think we didn't really get to talk about last time because we didn't have that perspective yeah yeah yeah but uh language as a validating uh that metric right absolutely yeah you're not as good at speaking japanese therefore you are default white right and that's the thing that we uh talked about a little bit with accents.

You know, because like in America, like being told that you talk white or in the black community being told that you talk white is the closest equivalent to like the language thing where, oh, you're not speaking the way we speak. And so you are an outsider. And that's such a hurtful, like alienating feeling. a bit and bring out some discussion that was brought up in your previous episodes of depression, of social anxiety, of bullying, and also of being black enough, of being Asian enough, of cultural differences. Because there's an article that discusses how there's, quote unquote, some type of crisis of touch in our society lately. Obviously, there's quote unquote some type of crisis of touch in our society lately obviously there's this absolutely amazing movement and call out of sexual harassment of you know of the objectification of women by men in not just the professional setting but all but particularly within the professional

world where you know i've experienced it certainly I'm only 23 years old, but pretty much at every job I had. And even like when I was in an SAT prep setting, I had older men feeling entitled to just reach out and touch me in ways that they were comfortable with, but I was not. So now there's this take back, um, and empowering movement of being like, you don't fucking owe anybody touch. You don't have to hug anybody. If somebody touches you, you can tell them to back the fuck off. So right now there's this jump from maybe people feeling more comfortable with touch and us having a different set of boundaries that have been immediately withdrawn. And so there's a lot of panic around how can you touch people?

And of course that has negative impacts because as human beings, we do need touch. Being touched releases a level of oxytocin, which helps us balance our hormones, which contributes to happiness. And I have a lot more to say on this, but I know the pen pal segment is probably not supposed to be this long. But to hear about your ideas on touch, on the conversations revolving around touch and where you think it stems from and where do you think it is right now and where do you envision it going in the future?

And yeah, stay sad, comma, boys. Okay, straight up, right out the gate, Hero, you should be hosting this show and not us. Yeah, you're our hero. That was fantastic. Secondly. Sad sad sad hero it's an amazing topic and i want to dive into it with some people of authority yeah maybe uh and thank you so much for sharing your personal experience but yeah i definitely want to have uh at least a female presence on the show when we talk about it in detail especially especially in that context what i will say though is that going back to the black

enough episode and before that the where are you You Really From episode with Mayuko, we briefly alluded to touch, right? Like, so touching your hair, right? Like, that is someone feeling entitled to your body. Yeah. And my curiosity is greater than your personal space. Yeah. Therefore, gimme, gimme, gimme. Outweighs your safety. Yeah. Therefore, I want right now, give me, give me, outweighs your safety.

Yeah, exactly. And, and I think that, um, just in my personal experience, like we talked about how we felt defeated enough to just allow people to, to touch us.

Right. True. And if that is our experience as like men, uh, and as kids, and we didn't feel like we had the power to say no for for whatever reason imagine how much worse that is in a workplace setting or in a setting where the the power imbalance is is completely out of whack in a space where you are consciously actively told what you owe yeah a

workplace or any kind of place where there is an element of commitment is all about ownership and owing right like you do this job because you owe us that work because we gave you money you do this task because you owe me that because i'm your manager like that kind of environment to be crystal fucking clear in every part of the spectrum, be it something as small as a kid wanting to touch our hair, all the way up to the genesis of the Me Too movement, you don't owe another human anything ever. And I think Hero gets at a really interesting point, which is because we should be respecting each other's space and each other's bodies, how does that interplay with the human need for touch? And in my unprofessional opinion, it comes down to consent and it comes down to respecting someone's space.

And that doesn't take away the capacity for touch. But maybe we just keep our hands to ourselves in situations where that hasn't been explicitly allowed, which I think is an okay price to pay. Another thing, and I'm just now fueling the fire for an eventual touch episode that we do, is how touch plays into gender roles. Because I think that men touching is a thing that is not... Like when I was a kid uh the concept of men touching was like oh no that's that's taboo that means still sits with me as a silent taboo yeah and it's like

i um i love like we when we met up we hugged right and it's great yeah and it's like that's that touch means a lot to me and we're fighting a lot of battles on the on the touch front um and it's uh it's just gonna have to be something that we we continue uh to think about yeah tldr let's keep touch invitational let's make sure that there i think consent is always such a tricky it's a very important term but it's such a tricky term semantically because a lot of people get confused by it for some ungodly reason uh but let's let's rephrase it as invitational yeah uh you may interact with somebody to any degree if they're if it doesn't infringe on their liberty their personal liberty right same goes for any kind of communication if you want to start a

conversation with somebody and you don't know them and you try to start it in the street yeah it is completely within their liberty to just walk away. Yeah, because you don't owe them anything. You don't owe them anything. Yeah. Yeah, perfect takeaway. Thank you, hero. Sad hero. Our hero.

Sad hero. My hero. Cool name. Cool letter. Cool pen pal. Cool topic. And speaking of cool topics. And spookily prescient mention of anime.

Holy shit. Yeah, speaking of that, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to be discussing our topic, which is anime. Weeb boys. Get out of my way. I've got to catch that train. Carolyn, Carolyn, don't go. Angelo, Is that you?

I couldn't let you leave without just telling you something, Carolyn. I love you. I love you more than the stars in the sky. Wow, Angelo. I'm flattered. Please, you can't leave without telling me how I can stay in touch with you. Can I send you a letter? Send you an email? Well, I'm really just on Twitter. That's great. Tell me your handle. I'll follow you. You can follow me. I'll be able to

DM you. It's at sadboyspod. Okay, I'm just gonna write... Sorry, did you say it was at sadboyspod? Yeah, my DMs are open. Right, but it's not your account, right? That's like the show with the two guys? I... We... They let me share it because I can't afford a Twitter

of my own right you know that twitter twitter's free like you can just make an account it's a costly time to explain me and look it literally make it cost no money you can just get it free you can just get it free it's a free service and we're back hi how was your break jordan that was really nice we did some stretching yeah you did a very elaborate stretch that was was thoroughly impressed by. I did, yeah. I'm all stretched out. And as you said to me, Jarvis, that stretch was inspired by an anime. It was. I did a stretch that I learned from Goku himself. Today, our topic is anime.

Hey, Jarvis, what's anime? Anime. My name's Craig, by the way. Anime is a style of hand-drawn and computer animation originating in and commonly associated with Japan. The word anime is the Japanese term for animation, which means all forms of animated media. Why are you looking at your laptop? You should know what that is. No, I just happened to know that definition right off the top of my head because I'm a huge fan.

That was really impressive. I'm a huge fan of me. I'm a really big fan of the show. My name's Craig, as I mentioned. All right. Could you please leave? Okay. Where's Justin?

Can I hang out for the rest of the day? Justin? The sexy one oh hey what's up hey man that guy's weird i don't like him at all yeah me either uh very critical about reading from a laptop uh so i thought it would be cool if we started with our first exposure to anime jordan where were you when were you when was i when when you were first exposed to anime so um this is not necessarily the anime that i connected with first uh or stuck with consistently right but i believe the first ever anime i saw um was one piece oh uh the most popular anime in the world by a pretty significant

margin yeah it's pretty ridiculous um it is a pirate themed uh romp right yeah it's been going for a very long time more volumes in the the original manga than any other manga ever yeah the the core conceit of one piece is that there is this treasure called one piece one piece and it's being hunted for by pirates across the globe yeah it's set in a semi steampunk pseudo futuristic pirate universe filled with magic and all sorts of things but also very cartoonish yes it's it's definitely a japanese interpretation of western iconography yeah oh that's what pirate ships look like i don't think so i actually think there's a giant bear on the front of almost every one of them and the main the main character ate a gum gum fruit. The goma goma fruit, yes.

And gains the ability to stretch his arms and legs and himself. Yes, he gained the ability to stretch his limbs, later discovering that he has a number of brothers that also have abilities gained from those fruits and a number of enemies and nemeses and allies and all sorts that gain fruit abilities. It's a cool show. It's a shounen fighting anime, tried and true, heavily inspired by its forebearers like your Dragon Balls. Sure. gain fruit abilities it's a cool show it's a shonen fighting anime tried and true heavily

inspired by its forebearers like your dragon balls sure and the reason that it was so interesting at the time was because one i really connected with the art style it's very vibrant probably one of the more accessible early animes of that era we're talking late 90s at this point yeah um early 2000s possibly you know early 2000s in america i think but the reason it was so accessible at the time was yeah vibrant exciting interesting at the time i think i was fairly into pirates as a conceit and just seeing a cartoon version of that was exciting uh but i remember the version i watched being the sub not the dub oh and i uh for context subtitled versus dubbed with american voice actors which is a common dialogue in anime communities because

there are purists who say you should never listen to american voice actors dub over anime and there are others who just want to enjoy the stuff in their native tongue and not read the subtitles for whatever reason which i think is a i think they're both perfectly fine ways to enjoy the medium yeah you as to reiterate last segment you don't owe anybody anything and be the person you are yeah you are not bad because you're being the thing you are yeah unless it's infringing on other people being the thing they are right um but yeah the reason I bring up the sub element was that I feel like that was the first memory I have of watching or absorbing any kind of content not from my default pop space yeah yeah used to american pop culture and a portion of english pop culture but japanese popular culture what

right they're making stuff as well get out of here yeah um and ever since then while i never really fell in love with one piece i very quickly segued over to i need to find other stuff like this yeah i knew that it was japanese yeah and i knew that it was a cartoon yeah and then i just and this was back in the day you know pre-streaming right because we're a thousand years old yeah and i think that the like there is this strange allure of of japan in the like zeitgeist in the states at this point i think popular media has portrayed japan as like technologically advanced really like cool and futuristic and also having this mystique to it which sort of brings me brings me to the crutch which sort of brings me to the uh crux of why i wanted to talk about anime today it's not

necessarily that i just want to say hey anime is pretty cool let's talk about anime certainly a part of it but the main reason i wanted to bring it up is that one of the things that i find the most appealing about anime and really any like foreign culture export but anime in particular because it's the production method is so unique and right it's brought from a lot of very unique stories often influenced by other uh works that i've never even heard of right right you're getting like the story and influences seven degrees away and that's like much more interesting yeah yeah but the reason that i find that so valuable is that i've watched animes uh or anime feature films or red manga that is so fundamentally different from a storytelling perspective yeah from especially the feature

films like the filmic language of Japanese storytelling, particularly through animation, is so different that it makes you reframe your understanding of what storytelling is. Yes. And you know me, I'm a dork for that kind of stuff, right? Yeah, you absolutely are. Watching like Akira is a great example. Akira was really, for people who aren't familiar, the film that cemented anime in the west yeah it's a mature thriller horror action drama uh set in like neo tokyo in the near future really exciting highly recommend checking it out but an interesting thing about akira is that structurally it is all over the place right like

if you were to pitch that script and it wasn't an adaptation you'd be like what that like there's like we get to the end of a second act and then a different second act starts that's like unrelated. Yeah. And then there's two third acts. It's just like all over the place. Right, right. It doesn't fit the traditional molds. And because that tradition is largely coming from the States.

That's exactly right. And the contemporaries that were in the purview of like it all kind of goes back to to europe and like the like uh shakespearean like three act and five acts sure i mean storytelling at least as the way that we understand it and the way that we teach it and propagate it as an idea is based almost exclusively out of theater convention at this point like theater theater convention was established from folk tale storytelling yeah and then that evolved that theater productions evolved into recorded storytelling which is obviously less mutable that you can't change the elements and that's the fun thing about anime is that it's

the same from the other side of the globe with a bunch of other right it doesn't share like the common ancestor is very far up for the most part like the family trees are are pretty are pretty separate yeah there are probably people listening who have never watched anime or at least watched some but never felt all that committed to it right or maybe watch one that didn't connect with them and the reason i want to encourage people to really look into it and try and find something that appeals to them we'll throw some recommendations at the end is because if you can find something that resonates with you you're going to have an experience unlike anything you could absorb from Western culture. It'd be like, hey, you can go and hang out with a far-flung cousin from a family you never met and you might not get along all that well, but it's going to be memorable.

It's going to be an experience you couldn't have gotten from talking to your own brother, talking to your own sister. It is, by design, stimulating. Check that shit it reminds me of traveling to another country where you have your own set of experiences and norms that you expect right from your background but in this new context there's a whole new set of norms and conventions and in in it's it's it could be as simple as like we in spain do a lot of eating and socializing outside and it's like oh cool interesting like that's just not that normal for you is very different like that would be rare for me so like my exposure to it is understandably less right that's kind of why i have a problem with um

people who write off anime because while it does once you get down to it there are tropes and like it clearly does exist within this contextual like family tree of influences and not all of it's great but there's so much to be gained from attaching yourself and embedding yourself in an unknown context definitely i mean i think you brought up the example earlier that's a little bit like saying I don't like watching movies, right? Right. And I would say it's very accurate,

but in another way, it's almost like saying I don't like video games or podcasts because those are both mediums that kind of have a step of entry. Right. Like a lot of people just don't have a point in their life

where they would know when to play a podcast. And that's very common. Yeah. Oh, I guess I could play it when I'm in in the car but that's usually when i listen to music yeah i go to the gym but i get distracted by the show like it's just finding your preference and the same thing happens with video games i adore video games i think they're like the most exciting interesting and compelling emerging art form not even emerging at this point but art form active in the 21st century but i completely get why a bunch of people don't play them yeah because if i had to like learn how to watch movies yeah i had to uh get muscle memory

for how to keep my eyes open while watching phantom yeah like it would be such a bigger ass yeah and in some ways anime has the same issues because a lot of people will watch particularly serialized television right which anime is for the most part um to unwind or to engage with familiar uh motifs and anime is if you're watching a good one you're not going to get familiar motifs at least not your first time yeah yeah totally but they have their genres they have their sub genres and motifs and one of them is shonen anime yeah which i think is a perfect segue to talk about what your first experience was yeah yeah so my first experience i this is so vivid this memory oh yeah it's like one of my more vivid memories from my childhood growing up uh i didn't have um very many cable channels like

we didn't have a cable box with any of the cool channels on it and so i remember coming home from school one day and i it was a normal day by all accounts but when i got into um the family room that had the tv in it there was a surprise which was that we got a cable box for the first time so i would be able to watch cartoon network which was at the time a special channel sure that like you couldn't get access or that i didn't normally have access to is this Can people understand what we're saying? Yeah. A lot of our listeners, I'm sure, are of a similar age and can reference,

but if you're like 15, you just didn't have other things you could watch. You got the things on the channels you had, of which there were six, and then a couple of your friends had this magical box which gave them 700. But there was no YouTube, or at least not like youtube or streaming channels where you could watch pretty much any show and there was there was the internet but internet speeds were so low you could get an image of the show you like and so you get home cables up ready to rock i i i

have this like little box i type in 43 which was cartoon network classic because before that uh like disney channel was like 42 and uh when i would go up it would skip 43 because i didn't previously have it but i knew that it was cartoon network and that i couldn't uh watch it so it was like getting the keys in like legend of zelda to like the dungeon door like the like you were like i can finally go back and put in the thing to go you're picking up the controller it's gonna do 43 and so when i typed in 43 and went to the channel i saw this guy in in orange clothes walking on what looked like a giant stone snake and this was dragon ball z goku on snake way in the middle of an episode and i was like what is that i'm getting goosebumps just thinking about this yeah uh i'm like what is this it was just like because of the lack of access to that channel cartoon network yeah i um

was mystified that i was watching anything yeah so like whatever had been there i would have just stared aimlessly at um god what a show to land on though yeah yeah i mean i've no doubt that you would gravitate there anyway it's a fantastic show but to see and to see goku for it to be like such a crystallizing moment yeah yeah no it's weird like i i don't know why i remember that so clearly probably because it meant so much to me in the moment because i was like i'm watching cartoon network i'm watching the show and it was just like the most escapist like yeah i just had this boring day at school and now i could just like dissolve into this world right another thing worth noting um sorry to interrupt but i think you mentioned this actually

just before we started recording um as a result of it being the only method of absorbing this content you have no preconceptions about who is what what is happening what is where it would be like walking into a movie theater the day of release to watch a movie you don't know the name of yeah and then like somebody pops up on the screen like oh i see what's happening like for example um first time i ever saw dragon ball was very briefly after i saw one piece i saw one piece because we had the exact same experience we got a cable thing first time yeah yeah it's like maybe six years old yeah and then uh i flicked over to a channel found dragon ball and it was piccolo okay now piccolo is not the main character of Dragon Ball. In fact, he was a protagonist early on in Dragon Ball.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I, for weeks, was convinced that he was the good guy. Wow. I was convinced. I was like, oh, sorry, the main guy. I was convinced he was the protagonist of the show. It's Piccolo. He's like the cool one.

He's kind of edgy. He's fun. Vegeta's his best friend. Goku's his son. Like, I the cool one. He's kind of edgy. He's fun. Vegeta's his best friend. Goku's his son. Like, I don't know what I was thinking. Yeah. And so one thing to note is that I didn't know anything about the origin of the show or where it was from. I was just so mystified by the world and eventually the characters and i jumped in to a part of the show that like i

didn't have context for and and that's actually true of um dragon ball z as a whole actually like there's no place to start sure because dragon ball z is actually a continuation of dragon ball um which is all based on the same manga series. There's actually no delineation in the manga, but the show takes this tonal shift and becomes more action-oriented. And is where the vast majority of Western viewers jumped in. Because that was the first thing that clicked with Western audiences. There had been a few efforts before to put on the earlier series

that were unsuccessful. But Dragon Ball Z, first episode, a bunch of characters you don't know efforts before to put on the earlier series um that were unsuccessful but dragon ball z first episode a bunch of characters you don't know that all know each other and are talking about the times that like you referencing things that will never be explained yeah and then and then it's this big reveal that the main character has a son which you have no investment in because you don't know who this person is and then his son gets stolen and like despite that uh so really that show you could just drop in anywhere and you kind of had to fend for yourself but i learned i learned about the characters i i loved the characters i started like going online googling uh for images of the show going to fan sites printing out images of the show, going to fan sites,

printing out images of those characters and putting them in a little book that I used to keep around because getting an image to load on the internet wasn't something that you could do very easily or quickly. So you printed it out so that you had it. It was more efficient. Yeah, it was more efficient.

You had easier access. To carry a file cabinet around with you than to actually open exactly exactly and so um as my love for dragon ball z grew and just my complete obsession with it i i learned that it was from japan and i i learned that it was one um of what is called a shonen anime which is it just means boy like young boy and it's an entire

genre of anime that is predominantly targeted towards those like kids and it has its own tropes and stuff so One Piece is actually a it came along a bit later and was influenced by dragon ball sure uh and so it has like very similar tropes and takes a lot from

um um dragon ball but that and the and then toonami which was the the housing block the hot spot exposed me to things like sailor moon and and gundam wing yeah which are different shows but they're in the same like overarching genre of show um because that that block was very targeted for the after-school kid that i was which interestingly enough sort of generated into the interpretation of what anime was in the west like if you reference anime anime functionally speaking is as diverse as western television there are so many subgenres absolutely yeah but in the same way that if you were to say like superhero movie in the west you're probably going to assume that it's an action flick for the most part or if you say k-pop you think of

gangnam style because it was the one thing that like penetrated really deeply here. But yeah, but at the same time, you know, there are I would say Logan is an action film, but it's a much more morose, slow paced, emotionally strenuous social interaction of the week superhero film. In the same way, there are so many interesting subgenres to investigate inside of anime. And I'm educating myself right now yeah i'd say i trended towards certain comfort zones and right only in the last year or so of like consciously tried to watch more niche subsets of anime yeah the reason i mentioned that is like this was our experience right and it resonated with us thus allowing us to fall in love with this thing yeah but if you didn't fall in love with that thing you flicked over the channel and you didn't feel like you were the intended you flicked over the channel and you didn't

feel like you were the intended audience or you watched it too late or anything like that that doesn't mean anime is out the window yeah you know you you go to a boring czechoslovakian play and that doesn't mean that like european art is out the window yeah because these are kids cartoons right like and that was a zing on the czechoslovakians they have terrible plays. This would be like seeing Looney Tunes and going, hmm. Pixar? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This whole Pixar thing isn't for me because it shares a common ancestor with something that's for kids. Sure.

So we mentioned that Dragon Ball is a shounen anime, and there's also manga, which we haven't really talked about to this point i guess i referenced the dragon ball was based on a manga but manga is just japanese comics for the most part and a lot of anime is adapted from from manga so i learned about dragon ball learned it was adapted from manga found out that there was this um magazine in japan called shonen jump uh which was like a weekly magazine. It's a serial. It's where One Piece and Dragon Ball and all these things became the things that they are today from their popularity. They just keep popularity numbers week over week,

and if particular series are doing well, then there will be more of them, and if not, then they kind of disappear. And I found out that there was going to be an American version of Shonen Jump produced. It was a monthly anthology. And so I got that from the very first month month immediately after the single tier you cried yeah yeah and i got um and i i got i ended up getting that magazine for like the next 10 years from or yeah and uh uh and it introduced me to all of the other stuff it was like oh here's where

yugioh came from oh here's where one piece came from i like before one piece was even adapted to anime i had like i was already jaded i was like oh i've i mean i've read the manga it's uh nice triposers yeah yeah and um and then that kind of just like kept giving me enough to want to understand what else was out there and then i got into other genres i don't even think today i watch that much anime but i can speak the language of it and i can understand it and i've already paid that cost of learning about it so when something new and interesting comes along like when your name like i hear about your name and i'm like oh i've got to go watch that because it's it's a big effing moment it's the zeitgeist moment. It's the zeitgeist moment in anime, yeah. And so I wanted to ask you, Jordan,

because I wasn't alone in this craze. Why do you think anime blew up in... I don't even know what it was like in the UK, but in the West, it definitely blew up. I would say it's pretty comparable, weirdly. At least in my interpretation there's very little difference. Any people that are into it any people that were really obsessed with it

later coined weeaboos which is a fun little term for people that co-opt Japanese culture which I promise we're not trying to do which is like, like your cartoons, they're neat. I'm going to get some very angry tweets for calling them cartoons from weeaboos. Yeah but that's a weird thing too,

is that like anime is such a thing that people assign their identities to being fans of shows and being fans of anime as a whole. Right, well, here's the weird thing about anime, and I think is the reason that to this day I value it so much, despite also not watching it nearly as much as I watch Western television movies. Right, right. Is that anime was one of the first genres or subgroupings that I felt that I belonged to. I felt like I had ownership over that.

I felt like I had a degree of authority within. And there were a lot of contributing factors to that. One was that I just went head over heels, right? Like I fell in love with a bunch of shows very early and as a result felt informed enough to be talking about it. I was getting manga when I was quite young. Like you, it dropped out after a while, but mostly just kind of like storage space. Manga is not the most practical thing to collect.

Yeah, I have hundreds of pounds of paper. But yeah, for the same reason that I imagine you did, I felt like that was a community that I was, I was, I was validated in joining. I felt like a nerd from day dot. Yeah. I was out the womb felt like a nerd.

And as a result, this finally felt like something that wasn't dominated by, by other groups amongst my community. I felt like everybody else I knew that was into anime was also a huge dork. Yeah. Which I think is what leads to some of the less savory parts of that community.

Yeah. The same reason that the gaming community, as much as i love it has some really really dark sides and it's because when you self-identify as the other right it makes you all the more combative when other people try and become involved in your community yeah yeah exactly um in in my community it wasn't actually associated with like nerddom until uh i think maybe middle school or high school like when i was in elementary school and even to this day like in the black community a lot of people are like big fans of anime and it's like not it's like a trope almost like i know so many black people who are like really into like naruto

and shit that's a lot of like uh it's kind of reflective of and i don't know if these two things are related at all but i have to assume that there's some kind of cultural uh domino effect but obviously famously um chinese cinema not japanese cinema chinese cinema was incredibly prevalent in black neighborhoods amongst the 70s through 90s right oh fascinating because in low-income neighborhoods chinese theaters were far more affordable and far more common so those would be the ones that were attended they would exclusively show uh like uh hong kong exports and chinese yeah yeah yeah which is why like the wu-tang yeah and like why there are so many references like it's almost like if i were to talk about how much i love hong kong cinema like in san francisco today it would make me look like oh it's kind of a nerd for that thing that's

cool i respect it but that's very niche amongst a lot of black communities and you can speak to this better than i can at least in america being into martial arts movies coolest shit you can do everybody loves martial arts it was like it was this escapism that uh that we just couldn't have with the traditional cartoon like there just wasn't a world like in in in the the special thing about um about anime and specifically shonen anime is that it was introducing kids to to narrative arcs in a way that like we're not like in a bugs bunny cartoon it's like this 11 minute thing and there is a conflict and it's fun and we laugh and we move on yeah it's resolved and the next episode could happen before that

but dragon ball z we had cliffhangers we're like what's gonna happen on the next episode of dragon ball z um and and like that we were just placed into that world for the first time and we were like wow what happens next what is gonna happen next and we didn't have the means to answer those questions uh very well at least and it just spawned it was like it was like harry potter later was for me where it's like i feel like i'm in this world yeah and and i don't know where it ends and it didn't matter that dragon balls he had actually ended in uh 96 uh but like it just we got we got it later mainly because there was literally no way of finding that out yeah it's like i i could just i could just on the internet find out um tiny little snippets of like

the future and it was just like mystical it was like we found out there's this guy named brawley and who knows where he comes up in the show and he's just really strong and powerful and in i credit my exposure to dragon ball z and and i will just say dragon ball z with with making me aware of my own creativity i i learned to draw so that i could draw dragon ball z characters i learned to write a 10 out of 10 goku yeah to this day i learned to write narratively with these fan fiction scripts essentially that i would i would write scripts and print them out for my friends and they were just like our we lived in the Dragon Ball world and there we had our own little characters

and that was the first time I ever like wrote a character that had a name and like a backstory and like all of this stuff was because of the immersion and the connection i felt to to this this art and it just so happens that it comes you know from japan and there's like all this like uh uh other stuff associated with it yeah and to this day like i i feel this weird um not imposter syndrome but like i want to poo-poo like liking anime because it's it speaks to a certain type of person sometimes. And I, I want to say like, Oh, Hey, I'm like a fan of this stuff, but I'm not like, you know, the stereotype that you're thinking of. It's like, like, like you said, we, we watch Western media the most, but having, you know, this little tiny slice of our interest that is devoted to a different culture's art is, I think, for the better. It's weird that we've built the taboo, but I think the taboo is probably because of the weeaboo stereotype that has made spaces like that weird.

Yeah, I mean, it's what makes gaming a nightmare. It's what makes gaming a nightmare it's what makes skating a nightmare it's like these are environments that in order to get into them you must be validated according to the more uh evangelical of the group right yeah and so it just becomes the extreme yeah and we were fortunate enough uh to basically receive the gateway drug of dragon ball and one piece and stuff like that yeah because effectively what it's doing is saying hey kid you like it when it's like not real human beings it's like human beings made out of ink yeah we love that shit yeah well i don't know why the kids are swearing that's very yeah um and then suddenly uh japan goes well we've got that but with like character development like what's character development yeah exactly it introduced us to character development and i just uh to this day there are certain like uh narrative components

or tropes most common in anime like uh the the power-up break is like a really common thing yeah somebody is they've been pushed to their limit and i'm gonna try harder than ever and like that single tear rolls down their eye and they save their family and to this day if that is even slightly reflected in like an ongoing series or anything like that or somebody goes and trains for a few months and comes back oh my god i get chills just thinking about that light me on fire and throw me off the golden gate if you show me gohan super saiyan 2 transformation sequence i will cry a tear that is something that i i also i don't think we get commonly enough in western media is one of the things that i want to motivate people to check out outside of shonen it's also really common like yeah horror anime yeah there's just so many

there's so many sub genres that are that are great but dive in but speaking of many sub genres yeah how about we close out with some recommendations absolutely uh i'm sorry oh no please uh to kick off how about we each recommend a show or movie to somebody that doesn't currently watch anime? Okay. And then we can recommend some stuff to people that maybe watch it here and there, but want to expand their views, try something new. Yeah. So if I were recommending something, Cowboy Bebop is a classic. Oh, yeah.

Great gateway drug. Great gateway drug. Kind of like the adult version of the gateway drug. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you like Firefly and shit? I forgot, yeah. I had to get that gateway from Adult Swim. Great gateway drug. Kind of like the adult version of the gateway drug. Yeah. Do you like Firefly and shit? I forgot. Yeah. I had to get that gateway from Adult Swim.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Like I didn't just go immediately from Dragon Ball to Cowboy Bebop. I had to be like, oh, Adult Swim. Now I'm watching like Family Guy. And now I'm watching. Oh, what's this?

This show is dark and interesting. Cowboy Bebop. Amazing show. Amazing narrative. 24 episodes. You can get in and get out This show's dark and interesting. Cowboy Bebop, amazing show, amazing narrative, 24 episodes. You can get in and get out. Yeah, nice and dense. Nice and dense. It's not like one of these,

like the shonen shows are like built to last forever. So I don't really ever recommend those to anyone. But that's the classic. And then for people who are already into anime, I would say I really like Steins Gate. You've been telling me about Steins Gate. I think Steins Gate is a super cool show. And it's a time travel story that is just incredibly tight. I'm a sucker for time travel i i also thought about

when trunks came back from his future to uh kill uh frieza again uh spoilers um fucking amazing so here's one neat thing about like a lot of anime adaptations and why steins gate shows like steins gate or uh i can't even think of another, just shows that you wouldn't expect to see the amount of detail in something like time travel or a conceit around magic or power. All of these world-building elements tend to have a lot of resources put into them that you wouldn't see in a lot of Western productions. And the main reason for that is that a mangaka, somebody that produces manga as a solo entity,

Yeah, the author. the main author, in the same way that people write novels they're thinking about it all of the time yeah the reason that the the like power system inside of dragon ball is so robust is because it was thought about day and night by a single individual yeah but horrible example no offense because uh akira toriyama is comically bad at remembering his own things uh and so there isn't really a good power system um and also like the other thing about that is that that was a serial where he had like he was

working with like three editors over 20 years and producing weekly stories and like what does that do to a person so here's a better example uh which is my recommendation to both people that have never watched anime though this is more of a push for the people that have watched it and looking for something to light their fire. They may have already seen it. It's a show called Hunter x Hunter. Oh, yeah. Two versions of the show.

I'd watch the later version. There's an original version that didn't end, really. And then there's a later version that's just fantastic. The reason I recommend checking it out is that it is, functionally speaking, basically a deconstruction of anime. It's a lot of tropes taken to their logical conclusion and then thrown away. Okay. of anime it's a lot of tropes taken to their logical conclusion and then thrown away okay it also has one of the most robust and interestingly applied episode to episode magic energy key system oh cool yeah and that's the kind of thing where in a western production you just can't get that

past a producer yeah if you weren't adapting something and you were just like i want to have like this system where we spend basically 20 hours or so offhandedly explaining the logistics of it. Yeah. So the episodes later on make total logistical sense. Yeah. This is not like Gandalf just doing something that you didn't know he was capable of. Right. Everything somebody does in Hunter X Hunter in the latter part of the show fits within the practical universe that those skills.

It's just the shit. So Hunter X Hunter is a good sh x hunter is a good uh shonen like like a young adult shonen what's what's a what's a show maybe a a more tight smaller shorter show i would recommend more approachable show i would give a well this is a weird one i would give a big shout out to watching the pro rated versions uh which are available on just like densely collected shorter versions are about an hour 20 minutes a piece uh jojo's bizarre adventure oh yeah re-edits um and then if you enjoy them jump into the main series the reason i mentioned that is the first series of or first season of jojo's is it's okay it's like it's gorgeous and fun and vibrant and you'll get the tone which which is the main thing that JoJo's brings to the table.

But it's also a little overlong. So burn through those. If you enjoy them, you can dive straight in. If you've never ever watched anime and you just want something to really get a taste for, I say go with Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. It's a good one. It's one of my favorites. It's on Netflix right now. You can pull it up straight away.

The reason I recommend that is because Fullmetal alchemist brotherhood is a really fun uh eastern culture interprets western culture yeah yeah same reason i love dark souls and like a bunch of other uh eastern interpretate eastern interpreted western tropes yeah because uh it's based basically although they never say explicitly in germany kind of during world war ii oh yeah but it's germ in World War II where there's magical alchemic powers that people have. It's just worth checking out. The art style is gorgeous

and the character arcs are heart-wrenching. Okay, I feel like I have to give one more because it's my favorite anime probably for a lot of reasons, but I cannot go into them here. It's a very divisive show. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Sure.

It's a very divisive show. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Sure. It's a psychological thriller anime that is like shaped like a monster of the week type show until like shit hits the fan. And boy does it. And boy does it. And then it just becomes about the end of the world and the meaning of life. And it's just like the show is wild.

The creator like essentially goes on, has a psychological breakdown like's just like the show is wild uh the creator like essentially goes on has a psychological breakdown like uh leading up to the show and this is like him understanding his own like brain it's it's it's a wild show uh and and it it's a lover i love it or hate it type thing but i love it um and i just i felt the need to say it i don't know if we have time for this but I have one more go ahead six hours long I tell you what I'm just going to tweet out a bunch of additional recommendations if you want to check out shows that aren't necessarily dramas or

thrillers, horrors, action etc etc, there's a great show called Food Wars there's also a great basketball show that I can't remember the name of, there's so much to check out get a Crunchyroll free subscription, check out the most popular shows, the show that I can't remember the name of. There's so much to check out. Get a Crunchyroll free subscription. Check out the most popular shows. The show that I want to recommend for anybody that's into psychological body horror type stuff is Parasite colon The Maxim. Not a super popular show, but pretty short and pretty satisfying.

Not a lot of filler in there. Recommend checking it out mainly because it's just a really great example of uh japanese horror tropes being shown through animation check it out have a good time oh my gosh so uh we could keep going we can keep going but we won't i'm i'm cutting us off here uh this has been sad boys uh your homework uh should you choose to accept it is just to tell us your favorite anime maybe share some of your anime stories. Maybe we'll include those in the next, some of those in the next pen pals. Most definitely. And hey, if you want to say anything else,

you can also send that in. Yeah, anything. Maybe we'll do it for pen pals. Anything. We read everything. If you want to get more of us in your life, Jarvis, where should you go? Well, we're at sadboyspod on Twitter.

And if you want to just talk to me, because, you know, why would you? I'm on Twitter at Jarvis on YouTube, youtube.com slash Jarvis Johnson. And if you want to spend some time with Justin. Oh, also Sad Boys Pod at gmail.com. You can email us any pen palettes requests. Get in there. And if you want to talk to Jordan slash Justin, you can reach me at Jordan Adika, A-D-I-K-A on Twitter.

One word. Or you can reach me on Instagram under the same name. And presumably some other stuff in the future. The project that I mentioned last time is continuing to develop. Great. News coming at some point in the next month or two. Awesome. Unconfirmed, but I'm very excited to share it all with you.

Yeah, speak to you soon. Awesome. And as is customary on Sad Boys boys we like to end with a particular phrase sure do jordan will you do the honors okay let me warm up all right let me do my goku stretch all right here we go ah oh oh we lost oh god man down oh god um oh we love you and we're sorry boom boom And we're sorry. Boom! Boom! The DOS boys.