Forum - View topicHow did you get into anime?
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Ambaneko
Posts: 3 |
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I was reading the article about how to make an anime fan, and that started me thinking about the first shows I watched. What were yours, and how/why?
I had seen Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle, so I sorta knew about the existence of anime. At a very down point in my life in the early 2000's, I was home in the middle of the afternoon with nothing much to do and I kept seeing something called Mirage of Blaze in the TV listings. Turned it on out of boredom/curiousity, and was intrigued. Didn't understand a thing that was going on, it was just a random episode towards the end of the series, but I wanted to know more! From there, I caught the first few episodes of Gunslinger Girl, Mai Hime and all of FLCL. Which blew my mind and I am firmly convinced is the best anime ever! Then I was hooked! Finished Gunslinger Girl, moved onto Speed Grapher, ended up buying FLCL, SG, and GG. Started streaming on Netflix and catching Adult Swim. Now I guess I'm a confirmed anime fan, and glad to be. As a relative newbie, I'll say it's kinda intimidating. There's so much to know, so much to see, it can be overwhelming. I usually lurk on forums because I don't feel I know enough to engage with you all. I will guess that I'm a lot older than most of you and sometimes I wonder if I can ever catch up! But I'm learning so that's good. Anyway, how did you get started? |
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Akane the Catgirl
Posts: 1091 Location: LA, Baby! |
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Hi there! I got your message! I guess it means I get to share my story, huh?
From when I was a little kid, I remember catching Spirited Away on Cartoon Network and a few of the Pokemon movies, but that was it. When I was in fourth grade, though, I bought my first manga at a book fair held at my sister's middle school open house. That was Tokyo Mew Mew, and I later bought the second volume. I never finished the series past that, and I no longer own either book. In late middle school and early high school, I discovered the wonderful world of YouTube. That was where I found myself exposed to a ton of anime from clips and AMVs. I believe Princess Tutu was my first anime, which I only passively liked the first time, and absolutely ADORED the second time. So that's my story of how I got into anime. I'm a little grumpy right now, since my computer got busted ten days ago and I've been forced on hiatus. (C'mon, I need to see the ends of NHK and Spice and Wolf!) 
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Night fox
 Posts: 561 Location: Sweden |
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I guess I should start at the beginning to explain where I'm coming from, and go slightly off track to boot!
Like many other kids, I grew up watching cartoons on satellite TV. I live in Sweden and anime hadn't yet been discovered here when I was a kid. There were mostly Disney titles like Gummi Bears, Duck Tales and TaleSpin to choose between, as well as Hanna-Barbera stuff like Tom & Jerry, Flintstones and Huckleberry Hound (at least that was the case when I was younger). On the comic book side, I mostly read The Phantom, various Marvel works and Agent X9 (which featured titles like Modesty Blaise and Spirit). At this point, while cartoons and comics were fun to watch/read, I wouldn't say that I had developed a genuine interest in these mediums yet. I think I actually have the written fantasy genre to thank for planting a seed of fascination for the world of magic and fantasy in me, which has only grown stronger over the years. I was probably around 12-13 when I first read The Scions of Shannara by Terry Brooks (I've read 12 of his books since, including the Demon series). Some other works I've enjoyed include the Rift War Saga (Raymond E. Feist), the Wheel of Time (Robert Jordan), the Discworld series (Terry Pratchett), and various works by David Eddings. This early fascination of magic and fantasy is likely what eventually got me hooked on anime. Prior to my dicovery of streaming anime, in late 2011, I rarely watched any anime at all. I do remember watching Sailor Moon, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! on early morning TV, and I'd seen a few movies like Akira and Spirited Away. My first real wow-moment was when I watched the Ninja Scroll series (on MTV I think), but that was many years ago and it seems it wasn't enough to make me get out of the couch and do a web-search on it. Like I said, I only actively started searching for anime in 2011, Death Note and Deadman Wonderland being two of the first series I ever streamed, and I've seen around 200 titles since then. I honestly can't recall what got me to look up these animes in the first place though. I probably just stumbled across them and decided to try them out for some reason. Lucky!
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1798 Location: South America |
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I began watching it when I watched Saint Seya when I was 5 years old, like many other Latin American kids. But by the time I was 12 I was buying magazines about it that already used the terms otaku and I was buying and reading manga as well (like Dragon Ball, Love Hina, etc). However, I was mostly a passive consumer of anime/manga as my sister was much more hardcore than I was during those early years. Eventually I even watched stuff like Saber Marionette J, Blue Seed, Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, Oh My Goddess, Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor, Agent Aika and Lain, getting a good notion of the medium by the time I was 14-15.
Eventually, driven by other interests, I stopped watching anime and reading manga by the time I was 16-17, when I was in high school up to when I was 23, when I discovered Miyazaki's films through Spirited Away. His films are characterized by great emotional power and so left a deep impression on me, as a result I decided to seek out anime and manga by myself. After a few months after first watching Spirited Away I binge watched several series and several dozen movies so I could already call myself a serious fan of animation again. It was also fascinating to see how my perception of some titles changed from an adult perspective if compared to a pre-teen or teenager perspective. These days now I am mostly reading manga though, as I think most of the masterpieces of anime/manga are in manga medium, since there is so much more manga. Though I still reserve a substantial fraction of my free time for animation as well. |
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nobahn
 Subscriber Posts: 5151 |
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Not that I am complaining, but it seems like this topic comes up at least bi-annually -- but I digress. For me, my gateway drug was Robotech.
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16963 |
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Only bi-annually? I swear it feels like more often then that.  I was going to be lazy and just copy a previous post of mine from one of the last threads to ask this but I can't find them heh.
For me there's when I started watching anime and when I realized what anime was. See I watched anime series before I realized they were anime. So going by that I got into it watching old shows like Starblazers, Robotech, Astro Boy, and Voltron. I got into them rather randomly. No one introduced them to me per se. I think, if I remember right, I saw Voltron and Starblazers at a friend's house and had my parents find them for me on tv so I could watch more at home. I think. Long time ago. Anyways, I got into anime knowing it WAS anime a few years later. I was at a friend's house and he asked me if I wanted to watch some anime. I thought it was an actual show I had never heard of lol. So we watched some anime. I remember Dirty Pair and Robotech he showed me as well. I forget what else. My interests were peaked at that point. So that was when I knew what anime actually was, and that I had been watching it already. Shortly after that the movies/OVA's that got me hooked were Vampire Hunter D, Project A-ko, and Akira. A-Ko and Vampire Hunter D actually premiered on tv back then so I stayed up late to watch them. Saw my first panty shot in Vampire Hunter D at the beginning heh. All downhill for me from there lol. So while I had been watching anime I can credit my old friend as the person who GOT ME into anime per se by explaining what anime was to me. He also got me into manga and one particular series that turned me from a casual fan to real anime/manga hobbyist. That was Oh My Goddess. Been reading the manga for 20 years now. That's a whole different discussion though. After I saw Vampire Hunter D, Akira, and Project A-Ko I sought out all the anime I could get. Fortunately back in those days OVA's were the rage and huge. It was easy (if you could find them) to get into anime as OVA's were not that long so no need to buy handfuls of vhs tapes for continuous shows. That came later with the rise of Dragonball and DBZ. So that's how I got into anime. 30 years later I'm still a fan and enjoy it as much as ever. Though I do have less time for it now so my backlog continues to grow. |
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1798 Location: South America |
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The thing about knowing what "anime is" is one of the reasons why I dislike the use of the term "anime". Yes, it can provide a little bit of information but mostly disinformation: if you tell someone who is not into anime that you watch anime they will either have no idea of what you are watching or have a very misconceived idea. I prefer to use the term animation. Anyway, nearly the totality of animation in the world that is not made for small children is Japanese. Manga is the same, I prefer the term graphic novel or graphic fiction, most graphic fiction in the world is Japanese anyway. While the term comic book is too associated with that American superhero stuff.
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 10033 Location: Virginia |
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This topic does pop up regularly and garners the usual group of suspects when it does.
Unlike a lot of people here I did not have a "soft" introduction to anime. That is one where you don't know the show is from Japan. By the time anime first showed up on Saturday morning cartoons I was too old for that. As a result I did not see Robotech or other anime on TV. Come to think of it I still haven't seen either Robotech or Macross though I do have both versions of the first portion. I should get around to one of them at least. In the mid 1990s I was looking for computer wall paper in CompuServ's graphics forum and found a file labeled "anime10". When I unzipped it I found 10 graphics that were supposed to be from "anime" the person who uploaded it said they wanted to prove that anime wasn't all sex and violence. The funny thing was that the graphics of Urd were sexy and the one of Iria showed her with a big gun prepared to be as violent as necessary. I had no idea what "anime" was but the graphics made good wall paper, especially Urd with the moon behind her.
Move forward to August of 1997. My wife pulled me into a comic shop that was advertising Star Trek figurines. I wasn't interested in those having never seen the show. While I was looking around I saw a spinner rack of VHS tapes. One of those had a graphic I recognized from those "anime" graphics. I thought they looked interesting and picked up the first tape of the Oh My Goddess! OVA (subtitled) and the first tape of the Ranma 1/2 TV series (dubbed). When I went to check out the clerk asked me if I liked anime. When I asked him what that was he said "what you are buying". I told him I hadn't seen them yet and would have to answer that later. It turned out I did like anime and was even more delighted when I found they also carried manga. I've been at it since then. It has been seriously expensive but worth it. (I think) TLDR: a blind buy of two anime VHS tapes. |
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Ghost_Wheel
 Posts: 203 |
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Basically I watched a lot of the terrible anime kid shows when I was young, Digimon, Medabots, Shaman King, Yugioh etc. I realized there was a difference between that and some of the western stuff I'd seen like Disney's Hercules and Mulan, older stuff like Pinnochio, or some of the early pixar movies, but I never realized it was a region thing in addition to all that.
Then in college I'm sitting on my bed, playing Pokemon Ruby again and I look over to see some ridiculously lewd animated garbage playing on my roomates screen (I would later find out this was a shower scene from High School of the Dead). Naturally I was very afraid when he tried to get me into anime, but I eventually broke down and started watching Code Geass with him, and it turned out to be a lot like the stuff I watched as a kid. Other people close by came into the collective, and we burned through some of the serious classics like Cowboy Bebop, FMA: Brotherhood, and FLCL while catching Madoka as it aired. Then I started living with Galap, and that year kick started me into being a fan. It was a new world, we were taking chances, and in the process I found that anime could have some of the weirdest, most daring stuff of any medium, and that the art of animation was something special. Stuff like Now and Then, Here and There and Birdy the Mighty: Decode really struck me on both levels, and inspired us to look deeper. |
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Bianca-Sama
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When I was in the Pre-K, I would stay up all night to watch the late night anime shows. That lasted until I was in the 6th grade where my mom allowed me to have access to the computer xD from then I started watching all of my shows online. *I'm 18 now btw*
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Lili-Hime
 Posts: 569 |
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As a little one I was really into Disney and fantasy type books. So one day my little brother brought home a game called Phantasy Star (3rd one i think) for the family Genesis. Since I was like 9 at the time I was pretty amazed by it. I adored the art style but I had no idea there was more stuff like it. We played that and the other Phantasy Star games, and I kind of forgot about it... until a few years later when I went to Blockbuster for the first time and noticed a 'Japanimation' section. A few tape covers looked a lot like Phantasy Star! I took home The Heroic Legend of Arislan OVA, because bishounens and fantasy.
A few short months later I caught Sailor Moon on TV one morning I was sick home from school. I fell in love instantly, and taped every episode. No kidding by the time I was 14 I'd covered my room wall to wall in Sailor Moon wallscrolls and posters. Somewhere in here I found Mixxzine and that got me into Magic Knight Rayearth, and before I knew it I was trading tapes online to get that (and unedited Sailor Moon). TL;DR standard mid 90's Sailor Moon fangirl |
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Cuddle Hugsie
Posts: 2 |
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Hi, I joined this forum to see and learn from this site because I became curious about anime discussions. My daughter is multimedia arts student and there came a time that she drew one of her fave characters like Sailor Moon Crystal, Love Stage, Hanayamata, Glasslip and Barakamon.
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ikillchicken
 Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
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I'm sure I've shared the short version of this story before. Here's the long version though. It all started way back when I was ten years old! That would be about 1998. I was into a few western cartoons prior to that point. (Beast Wars and Batman: TAS primarily as well as Gargoyles and a bit of X-Men). But around then most of those shows had ended and I wasn't actually watching a lot of cartoons on TV. Mostly I was into gaming (I'd gotten an N64 the previous Christmas) and that ate up most of my time. Anyway, my best friend then was a kid named Andrew who lived next-door to my Grandma. One day he called me up and told me there was this cartoon show on YTV, the big Canadian kids network, that I should check out. I'm not sure why actually. He never did that any other time. But anyway, I was intrigued so I put it on. The show was Pokemon and I quite liked it and got super into it (as well as the games and the TCG).
As it happened though, Pokemon aired right before another show on YTV: Dragonball Z. I didn't really know anything about it but since I would tune in every day after school for Pokemon I pretty quickly wound up sticking around for DBZ too. That was the show that really did it. As big as I was into Pokemon, I actually grew out of it relatively quickly. (I think I only made it through the Indigo League and Orange Islands). Dragonball Z though I got into through its entire run. That really got me watching more stuff in general that I discovered on YTV. Digimon was one big thing for me. So was Gundam Wing. I'm not sure if that just aired around the same time as one of my other shows. I don't think so. I guess I just saw the ads for it on YTV. It was pretty great though at least to me when I was a pre-teen. And it was the first real serious anime that I watched, although I still didn't know "anime" was a real distinct category at this point. At best I think I was just vaguely aware that these were Japanese shows. Anyway, I actually went through a bit of a lull after that. It was at this point (about 2000) that I fell out of Pokemon. I'm not exactly sure why. It probably didn't help that for various reasons I'd fallen out of touch with most of my childhood friends who were into that stuff and my more recent middle school friends completely weren't. Probably because it was a Christian school and a lot of that stuff was a little taboo. Although also for whatever reason it just seemed like around grade 6 somebody flipped a switch and all that stuff went from being the best thing even to lame stuff for babies (which I didn't really get). Anyhow, I still kept up with DBZ and the various new seasons of Digimon as they came out but those were both cases of diminishing returns. At this point I was probably quite close to just falling out of anime entirely and growing up to become a normal, functional member of society. But two things changed that... Firstly, I got into Yugioh. I was always more about the card game that the show but I watched that too at least for a little while. The real reason this was important though is that it prompted the next big thing: I kinda changed social circles. My middle school friends I alluded to earlier...well they were nice enough kids. But honestly they were kinda boring. They were huge dorks (like me) but they were more just bland dorks than the kind of real weirdo hobbyist nerds that are into anime. Once I started high school though, I met a lot of new and different people. One kid in my math class, Anthony, was also into Yugioh. It was actually only a passing thing for him as I recall but we became friends and in turn that led me to start hanging out with a whole new crowd. Now, I'm not exactly sure if they were into anime right from the start or what. In any case though, when Inuyasha started airing on YTV in late 2003 they got into it and then, during one particular sleep-over I got into it too. That was the point where my interest really took off. Now, initially I was mostly just watching other stuff on YTV's Bionix block which aired a variety of teen-oriented anime following the success of Inuyasha. It was pretty limited actually. Nothing like the big American anime blocks around that time. In fact unless I'm forgetting something there was only Gundam SEED as well as Fullmetal Alchemist (which I was never as into as most), S1 of Ghost in the Shell SAC (which I'm sure I didn't really "get" at the time) plus Hack//Sign, Eureka Seven, and Witch Hunter Robin. But then, in grade 11 or so, one of my friends who was more computer savvy discovered digital fansubs at which point he started downloading anything and everything, burning it to DVD, and passing it around the group. Aaaaand that's pretty much it. I was completely hooked at that point. I guess I can add that I got my own personal computer when I graduated in 2006 and started downloading stuff myself (and eventually buying). But yeah, that's the whole story. **(I'm also sure I watched Samurai Pizza Cats somewhere in there although I honestly can't remember how that fit in in the slightest. It was on in the early mornings rather than after school. Frankly, that whole show feels like a bizarre dream to me.)** |
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar Posts: 16963 |
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While not anime did you ever watch Swat Kats? |
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ikillchicken
Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
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You know it's funny. The more I think about it the more stuff I remember that I didn't mention in my last post. It's mostly random minor stuff. ie. I watched Monster Rancher when it was on. That would have been '99 to early 2000, right at the peak for me. I followed Shaman King for at least a season since it was on the same Saturday morning block as Digimon (probably Tamers given the timing) although I think I lost track of it really quick. I also watched Power Stone or at least a few episodes of it. As I recall, they never seemed to air the rest or at least I couldn't find it. I also saw an episode or two of the heavily edited Escaflowne. The big one though that I actually remember being quite into was Cardcaptors! That also must have been about 2000 because I'm sure it was post-Pokemon but I was definitely still in middle school. Man, I can't believe I forgot that one. I was so into that show that I bought a bunch of blank white card stock and made my own deck of Clow Cards. I remember because it bugged the absolute shit out of me that there were a few cards that they never actually showed out of the complete 52 card set! (Yeah, I was a weird kid).
No, I'm afraid not. By the look of it, it only aired in Canada on Teletoon which was not a part of the basic cable package like YTV and thus not something I had access to until...I'm gonna guess the early 2000s? |
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