Age: 28
Location: Brooklyn, New York
When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. When I was in first grade, I used to get up early on Saturday mornings just to maximize the amount of time I could play video games on the weekend. I was all set to jump into a new session of Super Mario RPG when, flipping through the channels, I stopped on a cartoon I’d never seen before that was utterly unlike anything else I’d ever seen, a cartoon that turned out to be Dragon Ball.
I don’t remember what it was that caught me beyond the novelty—though I could bet money the expressive character designs and exotic look did a lot to pull me in—but I was pretty much hooked from there: waking up at 6 AM to catch the newest adventure of Goku and co. was now part of the weekend ritual. I remember being devastated when it ended and remember desperately trying to find ANYTHING like it, but that was basically impossible without the internet.
So I was all primed and ready when Dragon Ball Z started airing on Cartoon Network three years later. From there? It was a pretty typical story.
What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? I don’t remember exactly, but I have the distinct feeling that the serialized—as opposed to episodic—nature of the storytelling, the expressive character designs, the playfully built mythology and the sheer wackiness of it all had a lot to do with that.
What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Probably Speed Racer; that was the only point of comparison my folks and their friends had for Dragon Ball. Anime just wasn’t really heard of beyond that.
What did your parents and friends think of your new interest in Dragon Ball? My parents were more baffled that I was up at 6AM on a Saturday than anything, while my friends didn’t really think much of it other than that it looked odd. I tried to show it to one or two at sleep-overs, but between being woken up much earlier than they were used to and their general disinterest, I don’t think I managed to do more than annoy them.
What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time?
I wasn’t aware of a fandom at all, honestly. I had one friend in my class who was also a big fan—we’d spend our recesses making up our own little fanfiction comics—but that was it.
Tell me about that friend in your class. Which shows did they like? Could you tell me more about the comics, if that’s not too embarrassing? Are they still an anime fan/in touch with you? Most of our cartoon diet at that time was what any other kid had in their daily diet: like most of our peers we were watching all the same stuff on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, your Rugrats and your Rocko’s Modern Life and your Ren and Stimpy. The furthest our interest in anime extended beyond Dragon Ball was to Speed Racer, which would just show up on Cartoon Network at random times we could never quite predict, but we weren’t following it the same way we did Dragon Ball (couldn’t, really), so while our parents’ reaction to the cartoon and our own recognition that this and Speed Racer were somehow not like everything else we were watching let us know that we’d stumbled onto something “other,” we just didn’t have the context to understand why it was different. Which coupled with a lack internet and real information network to keep us in the dark.
And the comics were about exactly what you might expect from a buncha first-graders with rudimentary drawing abilities. We basically just had Goku reunite with the crew and go on more adventures and tangling with the same characters again and again. We weren’t very creative, sadly. (Though I do think there was a bird man who could also ride the Flying Nimbus in there? For some reason the bird man couldn’t fly under his own power. I don’t think we ever knew why). I remember we were both REALLY depressed after the end of those thirteen episodes, especially because the American narrator said something about how Goku never saw the others again, so we were kinda desperate to change that. Looking back this is, really oddly, probably the first time I came up against the idea of loneliness as a kid. Odd.
But no, that friendship didn’t really last long. Sidney and I stopped hanging out about two years later and while I was in the same schools as her all throughout high school, I’d be surprised if she remembered even a word of this beyond 5th or 6th grade.
Do you remember your first anime-related purchase? How much did it cost? Sure. It wasn’t for another three years, because I just never saw any anime merchandise before that, but once Dragon Ball Z premiered my friend and I were trying desperately to get any look forward into the future of the series, so we were all buying VHS’s without really considering its connection to what we were seeing on Toonami. I’d grabbed The Tree of Might thinking it was somehow this big deal, because, well, I didn’t know any better. It was about $20—a month’s allowance—and boy, looking back, I wish I’d known so much better.
The first important purchase I ever made was of the first VHS of The Slayers, which introduced me to the idea that maybe, just maybe, this whole anime thing was a LOT bigger than I’d first realized.
When you got the internet, did you participate in online fandom early on? What was it like? Yup! I found the internet in 3rd grade and was pretty active sucking up any information I could about older Dragon Ball episodes and even had this awful webpage that did some weird conflating between Dragon Ball and Final Fantasy and the Redwall series (Christ, I was an embarrassing kid). From there it wasn’t long before I was finding chat rooms so that when Dragon Ball Z hit I was ready to start migrating into a lot of chat rooms. I remember Steve’s Dragon Ball Z page being a big one, and remember getting REALLY into the chat rooms there.
It was really odd. Judging by language and attitude and topics of conversation, I’m pretty sure I was the youngest person in these areas, a fact that only became more pronounced every day and which in turn made it a little bit creepier every day, too. There was a lot of aggression, there: these stupid play fights we’d do act out in the chatroom would always turn into real-life pissing contests. A LOTTA tough guy talk, a lotta trash talking, a whole buncha people trying to prove that, well, they were as cool and manly as the characters on the show (I think it was telling that EVERYBODY there had a Cell, Piccolo or Vegeta avatar or screen name). There was never serious talk about the show, never any real discussion about plot or theme or other anime. Just a lotta posturing, especially whenever somebody with a slightly feminine handle or avatar came into the room. I left after about a month and, quite frankly, felt pretty good about that departure.
How has anime fandom changed as you’ve gotten older? I’ve never really been big into any fandoms. While I had about three friends throughout high school who were big fans of anime and one college (we literally became friends because he heard me talking about Zeta Gundam on my radio show and called in to say that I was mistaken, Yazan Gable was in fact the best pilot in the series), most of my life I’ve gone without a larger network. Right now I can think of literally two people I can say anything about anime two without earning a cocked eyebrow. My own per love for the medium has deepened over time—probably the biggest change in the last few years is that I’ve started contributing articles and reviews to Unwinnable and Otaku USA—but I’ve never really found myself comfortable with communities at large. I tried anime clubs in college and was in one when I first moved here to NYC, but I got bored of them fast. I find a lot of the fandom is more celebratory than I’m comfortable with: I’m one of these incessantly critical people who finds dressing up as characters and paying $60 to spend a weekend hundreds of other people in celebration of a shared hobby to be REALLY squicky.
I’ve never considered anime a part of my identity the way a lot of fans do. I love it, don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t be writing about it if I didn’t. And I find the community of writers that’ve sprung up on the internet to be a real blessing for my own tastes and my own work. Honestly, this has been my favorite thing about the last decade of the anime fandom! I just find that it’s not such a defining part of my identity that I have a need to share this with others. And I don’t begrudge the fandom what it is. I’m just really selective about the folks I spend my time with and there other things in relationships I value more than whether or not they share my love of anime. I try to introduce them to certain series that I think they’ve got to see or a movie that might appeal to their sensibilities, but I mostly keep it to myself.
Austin can be reached on Twitter and Bandcamp. He also has a webcomic.