Oh Friend, You Simply Must Know about Sasuke

I interviewed my friend Matt for this assignment. He has seen a relatively small amount of anime overall, and, while he has seen a little bit of Naruto, he has only seen something like the first five episodes. In contrast, I have seen over a hundred episodes, but only enjoy the series a little bit. For those who do not know, Naruto is an anime about ninjas. It pertains mostly to ninjas fighting for the most part, but there is a lot of talking and story to it. It is all pretty interesting but tends to get dragged out sometimes. Anyway, onto commenting about the interview.

Matt is a self identified gamer, computer technician, overall technology savvy, and a college student. Apparently Matt’s journey into becoming a gamer started in second grade for him. A friend of his who lived down the street showed him their Super Nintendo Entertainment System. He loved it so much that he somehow convinced his father to get him one of his own and has pretty much played video games ever since. Strangely enough, I know that I have gotten people into video games pretty much the same way in which he was gotten into it. Matt got into being a computer technician because a few years ago he was going to replace his laptop, and he was unsure of how to do that. A friend of his recommended that he build his own laptop, and he embarked upon the task of building his own computer. Ever since then he has been maintaining his computer and really exploring the limits of it. Every so often he will mess up his computer really badly and then somehow figure out a way to fix the problem. Figuring out how to fix that problem usually gives him quite a thrill. His overall technology abilities mostly stem from how good he is with computers. However, his interests go further into other things like being able to hook up speakers, set the clock on a vcr, figure out just about any wiring system etc. It is a very neat part of him which actually makes him very good at fixing things.

As for him being a college student, he means that in the sense that a part of a community at a university in which is within close proximity to many people. Also involved is going to classes that are quite challenging to him, more so than he has experienced before and also really being in charge of how he lives his life. It is a more recent part of his culture that developed which he seems to enjoy quite a bit. When I asked Matt about what he would call the different chapters of his life, he did not quite seem to know how to answer this. He went into explaining the different phases of his life to me, and then gave two different labels to the chapters of his life. The first set of labels was pre-tenth grade, high school, and college. The second set of labels he gave were childhood, high school, and college. This interesting in that despite being eighteen years old, he describes his life in three phases, with the bulk of it being his childhood. I figured he could have come up with a couple more titles for his chapters, but he probably was thinking solely of the big picture and the biggest changes in his life that he can remember. Those changes mostly pertain to him coming out of his shell so to speak and making friends, with him becoming most open with the most friends in his college phase.

Then I started asking Matt about what he thought about people who watched anime. For the most part, he does not typically differentiate them from normal people because he figured normal people watched anime. When I made a distinction of hardcore anime watchers and people who just watch it casually, he then formed some opinions. He thought the hardcore anime watchers tended to be some pretty dorky and outgoing people. This answer kind of surprised me because I have always thought that the more hardcore anime watchers tended to be less outgoing and keep more to themselves. However, he sees it differently than I do. I think he may have formed this opinion based on people who go to anime conventions such as Otakon, which is a huge anime convention that takes place once a year at the Baltimore Convention Center. People dress up in costumes and are usually very out there with what they do. He has been to this convention once and seemed to have enjoyed it quite extensively. When asked what he thought of the anime community as a whole, he got a picture of a bunch of people who love anime meeting somewhere and doing what they love, which is watching anime. He might have envisioned this from what I have told him about the anime club on campus.

I then asked him what he thought about the Naruto series. It has been so long since he has seen it that he really does not remember much about it. He started watching it because a friend recommended it to him, but he cannot remember why he stopped watching it. He has agreed to watch a few episodes soon so that he can get a better idea about the series. He is unaware of the existence of ‘Narutards’, a term used for people that are really obsessed with the series, usually to the point of it being rather ridiculous. When I explained to him what they were, he could not help but sing his head low and pretend like they do not exist. Unbeknownst to him, they make up a good bit of the population that enjoys this series. People love ninjas, and they love things pertaining to them. Matt did make a comment that he knew that a lot of people though that the manga (Japanese comic) of this series was better than the anime, which goes an old argument very much like book versus movie arguments.

For the most part, the interview went very well. I plan on having him watch some more of the series so that he can understand why people rave about it so much. Sadly the series has a lot of slow parts, but they should not be too bad for what I will show him.

Interview, in a nutshell

I plan on interviewing one of my friends that I have known for a few years. He does not really have much experience in terms of watching anime like I do, but he is aware of the show I am doing for my topic. I am thinking of asking the following 5 questions:

1) How would you identify yourself in terms of your culture?

2) If you wrote an autobiography about yourself, what would the titles of the chapters be, and why would the titles be what they are?

3) What do you think of people who watch anime a lot, so called Otakus?

4) What do you think of anime in general?

5) What do you think of the people are big fans of Naruto?