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#79: Tony Y (Manga Therapy)

Age: 34

Location: Brooklyn, New York

When did you discover anime? In 1994, I was over at a friend’s place and he had a VHS tape of Dragon Ball Z (Cantonese-dubbed). He told me that we should watch it. I said “sure” and it was one of the episodes from the Frieza arc. That’s how it all began.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? The fact that people actually died and bled during fights. I grew up on series like X-Men, Power Rangers, TMNT, Transformers, etc. where the bad guys all got away and good guys didn’t really die (well, Optimus Prime did die in the TF movie). Seeing how different it was from American cartoons got me interested. The character, Vegeta, fascinated me because I learned that he was a villain but turned reluctant hero (albeit slowly during the time). I didn’t think bad guys could change, so that drew me more into the world of anime.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? I can tell you from my experience that Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon were EVERYWHERE in Chinese-related neighborhoods in NYC. The Chinatowns in NY had merchandise related to both series.

What kind of stores did you go to for anime and how much did it cost? Did you watch anime in Chinese? There were a few stores in Chinatown. I remember fansubs/original JP VHS tapes were sold in big shops and small ones. I bought fansubs from a tiny kiosk in the basement of a little mall called Elizabeth Center in Chinatown. I got tapes of DBZ/DBGT that contained two to three episodes each and a couple of anime movies for $3-$5 each. There was another kiosk in Elizabeth Center that sold Chinese-dubbed episodes of anime. I got some Dragon Ball GT Chinese-dubs for about $3, but the thing was that each tape was one episode.

I also forgot to mention that I rented Chinese-dubbed episodes of GTO, Rurouni Kenshin, and Initial D from a small Japanese stationery store in Chinatown right near Elizabeth Center. I signed up for some program and I think it was $1-$2 per tape and each tape had multiple episodes. This was about 15-16 years ago. All those places are now gone though thanks to how things changed in the late 1990s to early 2000s.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? I never thought I was a part of the fandom at the time because I was only like 12-13 and there was no internet accessible to the public yet. No one I knew at school was into anime because of the lack of access to VHS fansubs around my area. You had to go to places like Chinatown to get them. You know how some of the elder statesmen proclaim how lucky today’s kids are. It was like that.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? Was IRC even around in 1994? I never connected with fans while getting deeper into anime. I kept to myself mostly.

Tell me about the first time you DID make an anime fan friend. My first actual anime friend was one of my little cousins actually! I used to hate him at first when I was a kid, but I invited him over to my place to play PlayStation games when he was about 9-10. I let him play all the PS Final Fantasy games. At the time, he started watching Dragon Ball Z when it appeared on Cartoon Network. Over time, he came over a lot to do homework, play games, have fun, and talk about geek stuff. He’s going to be 25 this year and we still keep in touch over anime/manga (he told me his boss at his current job is obsessed with watching anime and reading manga on Crunchyroll). I guess you can say that a relative was my first anime friend. 🙂

Do you remember your first convention? My first anime convention was in 2003. It was the Big Apple Anime Fest. I remember watching Initial D: 3rd Stage and attending a few panels by myself. I also met one of my best friends who I still talk to today. I also got some goodies there too, so it was a fun experience. Yet I didn’t go to a con again until 2008 for New York Anime Festival.

Why did you start blogging about anime? I blogged about anime because I wanted to share how anime/manga shaped my life and what lessons it’s taught me. I had some success blogging about Japanese music, so why not shift it to something I know more about? Granted, I wouldn’t say that I’m an expert on the subjects, but I take joy and pride in learning new ideas and talking about them with an audience that’s interested.

How did blogging about anime change the way you interacted in anime fandom? Blogging introduced me to the anime and manga industries. I’ve gotten to meet a variety of interesting people that I thought I would never get to meet.

However, I do feel that there’s too much going on in terms of conversations on anime and I can’t handle all of it. It feels like you have to know so much about this series and that one to the point that you have to prove something to someone or a group of people. Maybe I feel that some anime fans are chasing some kind of status that doesn’t mean much in the end. I tried to join an anime club back in college, but I went one day and never came back afterwards.

That’s probably why a relative was my first anime friend because I was a mentor to someone who didn’t know much. Also, I realized over time that anime fandom and manga fandom are two totally different types of groups. They don’t always intertwine. I’ve met manga bloggers who don’t watch much anime and I’m okay with those folks. These days, I follow mostly manga as I grew up reading a lot when I was a kid. I will still have conversations with anime fans, but I do wish I can talk about certain manga (i.e. My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, Complex Age, I Am A Hero, Vinland Saga, Golden Kamuy) regardless if they get anime adaptations. Books are powerful.

In your experience, what’s the biggest difference for you between anime fandom when you discovered it and fandom today? This is a very tough question for me to answer because I never hung around anime fandom as I never went into IRC to chat with other anime fans back in the day. Yet if I take the time when I first attended my first anime con in 2003 and compare it to 2017, I do suppose the biggest difference is acceptance.

I was teased for being so into anime when I was a senior in high school. Those same kids today probably won’t be teased as much. This generation and our generation as well are a lot more expressive about being anime fans because of Western culture’s continued mindset of encouraging the self. Granted, we still have a ways to go. I still get comments about anime being “sexual” because of nuances in Japanese culture.

Also I feel that with anime/manga being mostly relegated to the Internet, it creates an isolation effect on fans, which ties into what I just mentioned about Western culture’s influence. It’s depressing to hear things like anxiety/depression/suicide being associated with anime fandom. I’m glad that Crunchyroll wants to do events like CR Expo because right now, we need a united community of anime fans that will be there for each other despite whatever differences we have.

Tony can be reached on Twitter.

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#78: Chiaki

Age: 29

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

When did you discover anime? I don’t have a specific memory of when I first discovered anime. I would guess that the first ever anime I ever did watch was something like Folktales from Japan back in the early ’90s. It was either that or watching a copy of My Neighbor Totoro on an Beta tape.

I will say I have a distinct memory of getting manga though, which was when I was 5=five years old. My dad dressed up as Santa Claus for a house party and gave me my first ever comic book, which was the first volume of Dragon Ball, but I know I was aware of manga and anime before then.

I still have the beta tapes and the manga, actually.

Really? Could I have a photo? Sure.

The first photo is of the requested Beta and Super8 tapes along with the first manga I ever read. Clockwise from top left, Sunset on Third Street: Song of the Sunset by Ryohei Saigan, Nonsense Company by Sansei Sato (these manga were my dad’s), Beta tapes of Moomin and Folktales from Japan, a 8mm video of My Neighbor Totoro (the other tapes I had weren’t anime), and the first four volumes of Dragon Ball. This would be what I would have been watching or reading around 1992-1995.

The second photo  features what I would have been reading about 1995-2000ish when I started really getting into anime and manga. Clockwise from top left, I feature vol. 16 of Case Closed particularly because that was the first volume I ever bought (because I thought the cover looked cool); the first two volumes of Ah! My Goddess, which I instantly fell in love with the aesthetics; Evangelion, which I watched on PBS on Sundays in the San Francisco Bay Area; Slayers, which I think also aired on PBS; and the Pocket Monsters gag manga, which I read in elementary school because it was about the only age appropriate thing I was reading back then.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? For me, as a kid, it was entertainment. I grew up with the TV raising me for the most part. I liked anime because it was more fun than a lot of shows that were on TV. Growing up in America but in a Japanese speaking household, the tapes with anime and children’s programming tended to be a nice opportunity for me to enjoy something in Japanese so I was always on the lookout for that stuff.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? I remember going to Japan and seeing Dragon Ball Z‘s Cell saga was on TV? I remember this because I thought it was boring and I really wished I could watch something better… like City Hunter (which I caught reruns of). Sailor Moon was also on TV but that was for girls. (I know, right?)

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? I wasn’t really part of a fandom so much as I was taking part of my culture? I was the youngest person in my circle of Japanese expats living an hour east of San Francisco. The older kids had more manga than me and I would often go over to their place to read their collection. My parents typically only bought me one manga a year at the time, so I recall reading the same copy of the Pokemon gag comic over and over again.

Same with anime. I grew up really loving Ghibli movies because Nausicaa, Laputa, Porco Rosso, and Totoro were the only movies I had easy access to when I was really little.

You said, “I wasn’t really part of a fandom so much as I was taking part of my culture?” This is fascinating. What would you say is the difference between participating in anime fandom and participating in your heritage? I feel when anime and manga weren’t as popular in the United States, the charm for a lot of fans were how exotic the medium was. A lot of people said manga and anime were “different” or “more deep” than American works.

For me, though, it was more something I consumed because it was stuff I would have been reading and watching if I lived in Japan. I went to a Japanese hoshuko, a supplemental Saturday school for Japanese nationals living in America. My classmates and I lent each other manga and video games all the time. So this stuff wasn’t so exotic.

It actually felt a little jarring sometimes because I didn’t see myself as an “otaku” growing up. If anything, I was taught being an otaku isn’t something to brag about, so I often felt a little attacked when someone asked if I am one. When Hayao Miyazaki got the Berkeley Japan Prize in 2009, I was on assignment to cover the award ceremony for the English section of my paper. I was with another reporter from the Japanese section of the paper and she casually asked me, a pony-tailed guy covering an anime director, “so are you one of those anime otaku?” and I must have given the most distressed face she had ever seen because she immediately tried to console me that “otaku are totally hip these days.” (My long hair was more out of me being a closeted trans woman than being a nerd)

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? Again, at the time it was going over to my friends’ places and borrowing their comics. One friend had all of Dragon Ball, another had Dragon Quest and Slam Dunk.

I was actually not on the Internet until about 1998 and I didn’t really discover the “anime fandom” until I found those “web rings” and “shrines” people had for certain characters. I think I Yahoo searched for anime and eventually stumbled upon them.

God, wow, that actually happened.

I did become part of the American anime fandom after joining a webcomic forum back in 2003 or so? I’d peg that as my first time I really started talking to people and interacting with them over anime and manga.

On finding web rings and shrines, you wrote, “God, wow, that actually happened.” Could you elaborate? What was so weird and hard to believe about early web fandom? When you think about these characters that people made shrines for, you realize a lot of the shows they came from were only around for one or two seasons, yet they were powerful enough to get someone to make a website. Like, Outlaw Star aired for six months in Japan in 1998 and yet there I was 4-5 years later, finding myself at the cg shrines (http://ironmouse.za.org/dragon/index.html) to look at Aisha Clan Clan art.

I guess I feel it seems a little corny looking back at it too, and the fact I was into it myself is a thing I’m a little embarrassed to admit. Like, wow, people really liked these characters enough to put in the effort to make a website dedicated to them.

Do you remember your first convention? The first anime convention I ever went to was Fanime 2005. I went on Monday, the last day of the con and I wore a business suit to be a “random 4Kids henchman,” I pointed at people in lieu of having a gun. It was weird and Fanime was much smaller then. I saw some cosplayers, thought dealers hall was full of rare and amazing merchandise and most of the people there were incredibly thirsty.

“Thirsty.” Once again, could you elaborate? I do recall going to things like the yaoi bingo at the behest of friends. The annual tradition is run by YaoiCon and features things like two guys in lingerie giving each other lap dances on stage. I hear they’re still doing it now, but I feel it’s become less central to what I see promoted during the con. And then there was that “dating for otaku” panel featuring a panel of three women giving sex advice in lingerie. Overall, the late night programming was much more raunchy than what I hear about in recent years. I also felt there were more skeevy people back then in general. Personally, I’m kinda glad the culture of “glomping” has since fallen out of favor and that Fanime instituted “Cosplay is not Consent” policies like several other cons have done.

This might be partly because the con itself has grown to attract a larger, more general audience over the years, as well as my own change in how I spend my time at Fanime. (I lately spend my late nights at Fanime in my hotel room with friends instead of attending 18+ panels).

What was it like to meet American anime fans who are not Japanese? Was it weird? Did it feel like they were encroaching on your culture? I didn’t think they were encroaching on my culture. If anything, I feel excited and happy when someone says they enjoy something I thought was great or fun. I’ll still roll my eyes when someone tries to argue that anime as a medium is somehow philosophically or artistically superior to Western animation, but that perspective is no longer that popular.

If anything, when I was a freshman in high school, my school’s anime club (mostly run by white kids), introduced me to stuff like Trigun, Hellsing, Interstella 555, and Samurai X. I was grateful for that.

Even before that, I felt like I had some bragging rights when Pokemon became big in the late ’90s. I knew about the games, anime and manga a good year or two before it came to America.

What was the first fandom you got really invested in? How did you express your fandom? I’m more of a lone wolf and I have trouble getting excited about things with people. I can read about people giving effusive praise for a series and think, “oh, I want to read that series too,” but I have a hard time geeking out about things with other people.

The first fandom I did take part in is the Pokemon fandom. I played through Pokemon Red, Gold, Sapphire and Leaf Green versions religiously when they came out. With friends, I traded Pokemon cards, battled with them and spent time watching the anime when we went over to each others’ houses after school. Online, I got involved in writing fanfiction and chat role-plays around 2003 through 2006. 

I started to drift away around the fourth generation of Pokemon because I didn’t own a Nintendo DS and the monster designs weren’t as appealing to me.

Did you stay a fan the whole time up until today? If yes, what kept your interest? If no, what got you back into anime again? I’d like to say I’ve been a fan without pause since I was little. I’ve never looked at anime as a medium and earnestly said “this is stupid.” I’ve also never quit collecting manga. I don’t recall if I mentioned in the initial response, but I have more than 1,300 volumes of manga, including 92 volumes of Case Closed. I’m still buying manga today, though my taste in what I read has radically changed over the years.

I will note, however, that I stopped watching anime after graduating college in 2010. I just didn’t have time to sit and watch shows and my work was taking me away from pop culture (I stopped watching American shows too so it’s not just anime). I kept active on Twitter to keep up with friends and I kept up with anime gossip there, but I actually didn’t watch anything except Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine in 2012. I literally didn’t watch anything after that until around summer of 2016 when I saw a screen cap of Felix Argyle from Re:Zero. I then marathoned Re:Zero because I have a thing for gender-ambiguous characters and cat people. While I was on the Crunchyroll website, I figured I should check out some of the other shows and also watched Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju too. Since then, I felt I should start watching more anime again.

Here’s a screencap of my inventory Google Sheet of my manga:

For you, what’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today? I think it’s the ubiquity of its aesthetics in America. For sure, it’s easier than ever to read and watch anime and manga in America, but I think what’s cooler is that it plays a huge role in media made in America.

For example, I watched Doraemon and Rocko’s Modern Life when I was little. Rocko is undeniably American and Doraemon is undeniably Japanese. Its setting, situations and aesthetics have almost no crossover whatsoever. Yet here we are in 2017, the kids that grew up watching Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, Digimon, Tenchi Muyo, Gundam Wing are now making the cartoons kids watch on TV in America. Anime and manga is now an undeniable inspiration for Western cartoons and comics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvks9zNnNHc). So, I guess to put it another way, the anime fandom is much more broader and undeniably intertwined with mainstream American pop culture now.

Chiaki can be reached on Twitter. 

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#77: Jay

Age: 22

Location: Phillippines

When did you discover anime? My anime experience stemmed from shows such as Slam Dunk and Yu Yu Hakusho in the turn of the millennium; but I was only hooked hard into anime after watching Mai-HiME.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? Slam Dunk and Yu Yu Hakusho were among the series that kept me glued to the screen every afternoon. Mai-HiME kept me glued as well, but to a point that I kept (day)dreaming of Mai in slice-of-life situations.

Sounds like you really got hooked on Mai-HiME. What was it about the show that hooked you, and how did you express your interest in it? I remember writing a poem about Arika Yumemiya and Nina Wang (Mai-Otome) and a slice-of-life story starring Mai (I forgot this one). I even tried to draw a comic strip (I almost forgot this, too). As for forums, the most memorable Mai-HiME-related forum I got into was the Mai-Universe forum at Gaia Online.

I was writing slice-of-life fanfics on paper as I keep daydreaming, like, what if Mai resembles the average Filipina who loves to cook and likes to sing? Those kinds of daydreams lightened my heart. I aimed for a lighthearted slice-of-life where I’d see a Mai Tokiha that is ready to cheer me up.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? It gave me a window of opportunity to connect with fellow fans, and in turn it led to me blogging about the community.

Tell me about how you went from watching anime to blogging about fandom. How did that opportunity arise? The ZEN Otaku Honbu forums was my gateway anime forum where I learned about local anime events. I already had a website and a blog at that time, so I took the opportunity to share my experience about it. The fondest memory that I had was when I was detailing my route and sharing how much it will cost to get to venues such as the SMX Convention Center in Pasay or at Megatrade Hall in Mandaluyong, two of the most common destinations for anime- and otaku- related events.

We were paying to get inside events to cover it at first, but we got the opportunity to actually be a media partner for an event called “Otomonogatari” in 2012, where local cover bands gather to hold one night of music.

The rest was history—we applied for media partnerships for major and community events, were accepted, and we covered it either on our website or on video. That’s what I’ve been doing frequently with my friends while I was in college, but I still find time to do it while I have a job.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? Yes. I was almost finishing high school when I was taught about 4chan. We connected through Facebook as it is a common point, though forums were still the hype back then.

Today 4chan kind of has a reputation. But it sounds like you spent a lot of time there early in your anime fandom. What was it like? It was there that I learned memes, just like most of us who dabbled on either 4chan or Reddit or so. Nowadays, you can see memes on Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter, but nothing beat the likes of 4chan. I laughed at the anime memes there (especially the “Consider the Following” meme).

Do you remember your first convention? Anime Overload Festival 2009. It was my first time visiting south of Metro Manila, and if I had a decent camera back then, I’m sure I’d be getting photos of cosplayers.

In your opinion, what’s the biggest difference between anime fandom then and now? 

  1. Yaoi fans were not as expressive way back then. There were events related to Yaoi before, yes, but it was only around the 2010’s when I realized that the Yaoi fandom got expressive. From Tumblr, then to Free! and eventually to Yuri!!! on Ice.
  2. Idol anime such as Love Live! and THE IDOLM@STER gave birth to the concept of “Primus.” It’s a bit hard to explain this in a nutshell, but I can describe Primus as someone who loves a specific anime idol character so much that he/she tries his/her best to get all the stuff of the said character, which then increases how the fan loves that character so much, therefore having the bragging rights to be called “____ Primus.” I think it’s staying in the community for good.
  3. In relation to #2. I am happy that more anime-related movies are coming to the country at present. We’ve also had the opportunity to screen μ’s Final Love Live, Aqours’ First Love Live! and other live events.
  4. In my circle of friends online, I can see some of them saving up money to go to lives in Japan or other parts of the world. Some of them even went to Anime Expo’s Anisong World Matsuri.
  5. May I also include “memes” in this list?

Jay can be reached on Twitter. 

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#76: Filip V

Age:  33

Location: Belgium

When did you discover anime? As a six or seven-year-old kid in the early ’90s, with not much on Belgian television for kids, I watched the French “Club Dorothée.” It had a great line-up of great ’80s anime classics, like: Saint Seiya, Captain Tsubasa, High School! Kimengumi, Ranma 1/2, and even Dragon Ball Z. I didn’t understand anything of it (I don’t speak French), but I enjoyed watching it anyway.

With local TV-channels broadening their scope for kids and Club Dorothée stopped, I sadly enough forgot about anime even existing after a while. But later on, in the early 2000s, the Anime Boom that was happening in the US also blew over to Belgium and I was re-introduced to anime, with ’90s and early ’00s classics like Gundam Wing, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Rurouni Kenshin and once again: DBZ.

From there, with broadband internet finally being a thing in Belgium, I started my anime journey.

For your reintroduction, what was the TV block that was a part of? Was it in English or another language? Two TV channels had an anime block, airing on weekdays between 16-18 o’clock [4-6 PM] (if I remember correctly). Both channels relatively new, with a similar target demographic of kids, teens and young adults.

– “VT4” had a block with Pokémon (Dutch), Medabots (Dutch), Gatchaman (English) and Yu-Gi-Oh (English)

– “Kanaal 2” had a block with Digimon (Dutch), Crayon Shin-chan (Dutch), Gundam Wing (English) and Dragon Ball Z (Ocean Dub)

Due to those shows being aired on a (almost) daily basis, a lot of them had a lot of re-runs. I think I saw Gundam Wing like three or four times before it was swapped with another show.

I know VT4 had reruns of some of their weekday shows on the weekends (no, really!) + a few more, like Sailor Moon and Rurouni Kenshin (English).

In terms of dubs, think of it as follows: If the target demographic was young kids, the anime would be dubbed in Dutch. If not, it was English with Dutch subtitles. That’s basically what happens to Flemish/Dutch television overall.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? The expressive animation, storytelling and action that was unheard of in most kids cartoons from the ’80s.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Saint Seiya, or as it was named in French: “Les chevaliers du zodiaque” (the knights of the zodiac).

What did your family think of your interest in anime? My parents knew that I was a fan of animated series overall but couldn’t tell the difference with me watching classic cartoons, “those yellow guys” (The Simpsons), or anime. Trying to explain the difference was like trying to talk to a wall. They accepted it as typical concerned parents who would rather have their kid spend more time studying instead of watching TV. My sister is seven years older than me and was more of a non-presence at home (either studying, spending time with her BF of going out), so I doubt she ever formed an opinion of my “watching habits”.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? No clue! Without internet available, I really had no idea what the fandom was like. And I only heard later on from other Belgian people my age that they discovered anime in exactly the same way as I did.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? No, so I didn’t talk to other fans for a while. Most kids from my town were either not interested in cartoons/anime, or only in the hype show of the moment: Transformers, TMNT, Power Rangers, etc. And those that were interested in more niche things just didn’t want to admit it, out of fear of being bullied.

Heck, when I was twelve and I said in class that I still enjoyed watching the Disney Afternoon block; a lot of kids just laughed at me and I even got reprimanded by teachers for “still watching cartoons at my age.”

Tell me about what it was like once you finally got broadband internet. How did you use it as an anime fan? A lot of the shows I watched were on endless reruns while waiting for new seasons, so first thing I did when I had internet was trying to find more of my favorite shows: Yu-Gi-Oh and Dragon Ball Z. I would download episodes and visit fan-sites to find out more info about the shows in general. Boy can you imagine my shock when I found out there was a better dub of DBZ, not to mention when finding out that Gundam Wing was just one of many Gundam series? Jaw-dropping moments.

I was a regular visitor (and later even a moderator) on a few anime forums that were focused on DBZ, like the “DeadZone Forums” and the Dutch “DBZ-Media.nl” (both now gone) where I got influenced to watch more and more anime and where I got the knack for writing fan fiction (first obviously DBZ related, then my own stories later on).

You said it was hard to make anime fan friends at first. Tell me about the first time you made friends with other fans. The first anime friends I made were on previously mentioned forums, especially the Dutch anime forum. It felt good to know that there were more people that spoke my language that were fans of anime. But while there were a few forum meet-ups in real life, they remained “far-off people”.

Real anime friends I started to make when I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh in real life in Ghent. Most players got into the game due to (one of) the anime series and most of them ended up being anime fans in general.  That was the first time I started being friends with people that had the same interests as me and didn’t live on the other side of the country (in a matter of speaking).

Do you remember your first convention? Yes, that was back in 2006: F.A.C.T.S. in Ghent, Belgium. Back then, I didn’t even knew it was called a “convention”. It was a one-day “event” that happened and was advised to me by a friend.

There was a good amount of people, and I was surprised to see some people being dressed up in military outfits, storm troopers and even Xenomorphs. And I was most interested in the Guests: Anthony Daniels, and some of the cast of Allo Allo (Guy Siner, Richard Gibson and Kim Hartman).

I enjoyed it so much, I returned there pretty much every single year. And I’ve seen the yearly con grow and expand so much over the years: From small one-day event to the (self-proclaimed) “biggest con” in the BeNeLux.

When did you start blogging about anime, and why? That was back in 2012. I had been playing Yu-Gi-Oh for a few years now and was following other Yu-Gi-Oh related blogs at the time. And while I quit writing fanfiction at the time, there remained the “need to write stuff”. It’s hard to describe this feeling, but you’ll probably understand since you’re a writer yourself.

So I ended up creating a blog myself. And while it did start out solely focused on Yu-Gi-Oh, I slowly also started to write about anime in general.

[You can read Filip’s blog here.]

Are your fanfics still online somewhere? Sadly enough, no. Since it was posted on forums that have been long gone, they’re no longer visible. One of the fanfics I co-wrote with others (based on Slayers/Record of Lodoss War and the Shining Force Games) had been archived by one of the co-writers shortly before it was shut down. He shared it with us afterwards so that we had some sort of “memory” to it. But the DBZ one is completely gone.

My main story was “Futuroscope”, about a kid who incidentally wished himself to the far future, where the earth is being attacked by aliens and he has to help defend the earth. Think of it as DBZ meets Stargate in a Futurama-type setting.

Sadly enough, also taken down when the forum it was posted on was shut down. I still have the drafts locally, but I need to rewrite the earliest chapters before I ever dare to publicize them again in any form.

In your experience, what’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and now? I think the biggest difference is that today, fans have an appreciation for anime aimed at young kids. When I joined the anime community in the early 2000s, there was a hatred towards “kiddy anime” like Pokémon, Digimon, Beyblade, and many others. It got dismissed by most, and people that enjoyed watching those shows were often hated upon. Think of it as “hardcore gamers” hating on “casual gamers.”

But today, most people in the anime community and a lot of anime YouTubers have admitted that they got into anime thanks to those “kiddy anime.” Look around on the internet and you’ll see many people praise the shows that were hated on in the past, like Digimon or Pokémon. And I think the people that were part of the community back in those days have started to accept that this has been a good thing for the anime community in general.

Filip can be found on Twitter. 

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#75: Joe

Age: 30

Location: Oklahoma City, OK

When did you discover anime? I was 12 when I bought my first anime DVD. I had been aware of it for a while before that, thanks to friends at school that had HBO, and I had seen some stuff on Sci-Fi on Saturday mornings, but there was something extra special about spending my own money on my own interests, so I would say that is when I truly discovered anime.

What was that first DVD? The first anime DVD I bought was Akira. I suppose that’s potentially cliche, but that was the one film I’d heard about from people at school that was supposed to just blow your mind. I wanted to know what they were talking about. The edition I bought was one of the special editions, in a steel book and everything, so it was on the pricier side for the time. If my memory serves, it was around $25 or so.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? It looked so much different than what I could find elsewhere. It was telling stories that I couldn’t find anywhere else at the time either. There was a sense of getting away with something as well, as what I was finding to watch was clearly intended for an older audience.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Dragon Ball Z was all the rage, but pretty much anything that was aired on Toonami was the talk at school for a while.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? Since it was not quite the commodity it seems to be today, it was fun to feel like you were a part of some small group. People would look at you like you were weird, but I was rather used to that.

I never had access to the internet at home, so I had to buy my collection over time at high prices. The nice thing about this was that I really knew what I was getting since I had time to look into them, but it sucked because I just wanted to see everything that I could.

Joe’s anime collection.

Tell me about your collection! Here’s a photo of my collection, as I still have all of it. It might not look all that impressive, since I had to condense it all into DVD binders so I could actually store it all. I’m not sure how many individual titles I have anymore, but disc-wise it’s well over 1,000. It’s very heavy.

You said being part of anime fandom meant people thought you were weird, but you were used to it. Were you “weird” before anime? I always felt weird, and to a certain extent I still do. My parents were both school teachers, and I went to the school at which my mom taught. As a result, all the other kids felt I was the perfect target for whatever they felt needed to be said. I tried to roll with this by wearing strange clothes or things like that. I also did fairly well in school, which resulted in mixed responses from others. Growing up in Oklahoma, doing anything outside of going to church and hunting in the fall resulted in all the weird looks. I think all of this combined resulted in my desire to escape into worlds different than this one.

Since anime was an unusual interest at the time, how did you meet friends who also liked anime? I had one friend in elementary school, and we are still very close. As soon as I bought something I liked, I’d share it with him. In this way we’d kind of build our understanding of what was out there and just go from there. Once into junior high, talking about one’s enjoyment of DBZ was more acceptable, so I made a few more friends that way.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? As I said above, I’m sure there were communities online, but I didn’t have access to them. I tended to just keep my fandom to myself, talking with the few friends I had that were interested in anime when I could. Our tastes were similar so that was nice.

When did you finally get internet? Did it change how you consumed/thought about anime at all? Not to make my family sound too much like a bunch of luddites, but I didn’t get my own personal internet connection until college. This did effect my consumption of media in general, and anime specifically, because I’ve been about five to seven years behind, or at least it feels that way. As evidenced by my collection, I’ve never had success with streaming services like Crunchyroll or Funimation’s service. It doesn’t feel right to me. I desire a sense of ownership over the shows I watch, a sense that I have helped continue the release of shows I like.

For you personally, what’s the biggest shift between anime fandom then and now? The biggest difference to me, and it makes me feel really old to say this, is fan theories. The ability for people to watch shows as they air means they can also fill the internet with theories. This is still so foreign to me. It doesn’t feel like I’m watching anime unless I’m marathoning the entire series in one go. There has never been room for theories in my experience. I enjoy digging into the creators and directors much more.

Joe can be reached on Twitter. 

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#74: Kory

Age: 27

Location: Iowa

When did you discover anime? As I’m sure like a million other respondents also said, I saw it on Toonami and Fox Kids back in the ’90s watching stuff Pokemon and YuGiOh! I wasn’t sure what it was at the time, besides cartoons that I liked. I recall a buddy of mine saying Gohan and Videl had a kid named Pan and I had NO IDEA how he obtained this magical information, but it was because it had already happened in Japan.

I first became aware that these were anime in the later 90s or early 2000s, especially with the Toonami block of the era. Dragon Ball Z, YuYu Hakusho, and other anime really got me interested and, more importantly, clamoring for their nostalgia come 2007 or so, when I delved back into anime of that time.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? I just wanted to watch cool cartoons, man. And these were cool cartoons.

Though the intellectual answer is that they’re Asian and I’m Asian and I was craving representation beyond the… yellow power ranger.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? I dunno if I was ever part of an anime fandom until Twitter. There were anime clubs in high school and college, but I never joined them. My fandom was isolated and sad.

What was that like? Did you have friends you just didn’t talk about anime with? Did you have other hobbies that took priority? High school was a little weird for me. In elementary and junior high, I was a pretty big nerd; I played YuGiOh! and watched all the anime that was interesting to me on TV.

But around high school, I got super into sports. Probably because the White Sox and Bears were doing really well at the time, which helps enthusiasm. Anime and stuff was part of my past at that time, and I had no interest in revisiting it.

It wasn’t until I met some other friends in high school, who were also into this kind of stuff back when, that I wanted to get back into it. I voraciously rewatched all the “classics” of my youth, like Pokémon, Dragon Ball Z, and Yu Yu Hakusho. I talked about it with my friend group, and some individual members of the anime club, but I didn’t see a need to join the club proper. I also wasn’t watching club anime yet, so there’s no influence on wanting to do the thing I saw upon rewatching all these series. I just wanted to shoot Spirit Guns.

Tell me about when you did meet other anime fans. I kinda covered this above, but I didn’t really know these other dudes I was talking to were anime fans.  We were just friends and reminiscing about various things, playing games together or walking around school shooting the shit when anime came up as the cartoons we used to watch. I don’t remember if we knew it was anime at the time, but we did know we liked it.

Actually, this is an unrelated story and going to be a huge digression, but I met this girl from the anime club (though I had no idea she was in it) and we kind of became friends because we both liked anime. She’s the one that got me into shojo manga through Arina Tanimura, Otomen, and many other manga (and thus further into manga over anime). I only found out later that my parents knew her parents because we were both adopted Koreans with heart conditions. Our parents met each other in some group that taught how to take care of your kid with a heart condition, but they moved away. It was very coincidental that we met 15-odd years later in high school.

Was the internet a part of fandom at the time? I mean, almost definitely, but I didn’t participate in internet fandom at all.

Tell me about when you did finally log on. Like probably a lot of other folks, the internet allowed me to revisit these old shows I used to know. First, because we could google vague terms (cartoon shot spirit energy from finger show, or whatever) and actually find the shows we could never remember. But more importantly, we could pirate them… which we did, because we didn’t know any better. Pirating led me to spending thousands on anime and manga, and their tangential merchandise, which may have never happened without the internet. Not that that forgives it.

Do you remember your first convention? What was it, and what was it like?
Yes, AnimeIowa 2009. My friend forced me into going to the con with her, her friend, her sister, and my buddy because I had never gone to an anime con before and I was the biggest anime fan of the bunch. The con is only ~3,000 people, so it was small and chill and almost no one of note was there. I didn’t know anime cons did cool things like panels without voice actors and teach you things or whatever.

How did you qualify as the “biggest” fan of the bunch? I was the dude who knew all the shows, and at the time I was super into dubs. So I could hear a voice and spout off whoever was speaking in most dubs at the time. Everyone else knew anime, and liked a lot of their own respective shows, but haven’t dug much deeper than “anime is cool.”

In your experience, what’s the biggest difference between anime fandom then and now? Twitter, at least for me. Twitter obviously existed in the early years of my fandom, but Twitter as well was in its infancy. In high school and college, having never joined an anime club, anime was always a niche thing that not too many people were into. I ran into a few that liked it in various classes, but it was never more than that. With Twitter, I can talk to a bunch of folks about shows we all love. Or hate, I guess.

Kory can be reached on Twitter. 

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#73: Steve B

VHS tapes from Steve’s collection.

Age: 37

Location: Midwest United States

When did you discover anime? In 1993, an older friend took me to see a screening of Akira in town. He then introduced me to his large pirated tape collection. Once it started to appear in Blockbuster and other rental places we would rent as many as we could and spend the entire weekend copying them onto 6-hour VHS tapes. A few years later a man, who would become a good friend, opened a store specializing in anime and other Japanese imports. Through him I got involved in the fansub tape trading circles.

At the time, how and why did people justify tape-copying? Were there any other ways to get anime? There was no justification for copying tapes we rented; everyone understood it as piracy.  I guess as long as it was for private home use and no one was trying to pass them off for sale as the real thing no one thought it was a crime to worry about.  I started to think about that too and how the world of tapes (audio and video) in the ’80s really changed the perception of and made piracy a mass market thing.  Up until the early ’90s a lot of VHS tapes were still being priced for the rental market.  When a release was first available it could cost upwards of a hundred dollars to buy the VHS.  Then after a while it would drop down to standard mass sale pricing.

Aside from the outright pirate copying of tapes we rented from video stores, fansubs were an entirely different thing.  All of the fansubs we had were things that weren’t licensed in the United States.  Its the old idea of no harm due to none of the distribution companies in America losing money. A lot of the stuff was recorded directly off of TV in Japan, commercials and all. We made the excuse that if we were in Japan we would be watching it on TV for free anyways. I still have ‘nightmares’ about the mid ’90s Japanese Ronald McDonald. Some brand recognition was born out of it though, I’ve had a fondness for Glico products for decades now!

The first trip I took to Japan, May of 1998, I dropped close to $150 on VHS tapes. The first two tapes of the Nuku Nuku TV series and a strange Eva tape called Genesis 0:0 In The Beginning. I still have them, too.

The best fansub memory is getting a copy of Princess Mononoke in ’98. The first version we got our hands on was copied onto too short of a tape and it cut out right as San and Ashitaka were trying to give the forest god his head back.  When it hit the theaters in town in ’99 everyone from the anime store (of which the fansub copies of the tape were procured from) all went to see it. The fansubs of Evangelion Death and Rebirth were particularly memorable too, as Rebirth ends right as Asuka is about to fight the mass production units… talk about a cliff hanger.

The ‘End of Evangelion’ fansub Steve mentions in this interview.

I’d love to hear more about fansub tape-trading circles. How long did it take for an exchange to happen? How did you meet people to trade with? Being a teenager in the mid ’90s of course I’m out and about town more on my own, hanging out at coffee shops, record stores, underground parties and all-ages dance clubs. So meeting new people would always bring up the topic of anime among them. You make friends with people, compare what shows you have and what other people have. We would either swap tapes for a while to watch and/or copy them or make copies to hand of to other people. At my friends store some of us would pitch in a $20 here and there to help him get tapes from the various fansub groups.  I never bought directly from a fansub group so I can’t speak on that experience. It would usually be a few months from when something was broadcast and it got into our hands.  Sometimes a year.  At this point we weren’t too aware of what was being aired in Japan and when unless we looked at Japanese issues of Newtype magazine.

Once the millennium turned and fansubs started to become a digital thing my friend who ran the store was on top of all the groups releases.  He would pull them as soon as possible, put them to VHS and have them at the store as quick as he could.  There was always a whiteboard at the store with the release dates of videos. One side was commercial the other side was fansub. I started watching Naruto in 2003 through his store and by the time it started to hit the States on Cartoon Network I was so far ahead, keeping up with the Japanese release schedule at this point, I decided there wasn’t any point in stopping.  I think I finally got annoyed enough with the show about episode 140 or so of Shippudden. So yeah, I suffered through the legendary 80-some odd episodes of Naruto filler… waiting each week to see if we would actually have new story, falling into the rampant internet hype and rumor mill.

My friend’s store closed down in 2004 and I took it upon myself to be the source for hot new anime with all of my friends, hosting intimate weekly viewings at my house and filling DVDs and external hard drives with the latest shows I had pulled.  I did some dabbling in hard encoding as well when Sgt. Frog started to air.  No one was picking it up and I was enjoying it.  So I started working on my own translations, using my own knowledge a friend who was way more fluent than I and whatever translation files I could find on the net.  I was also re-encoding files at this time too. MKVs started to show up and my system had a hard time handling them.  I had a few programs that would convert the files to AVI files and allow me to rework or add in my own sub files.  This was all in 2004 through 2006.  I stopped because it was time consuming and my computer wasn’t powerful enough.  It would take hours to re-encode a 24 minute episode.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? As I think pretty much everyone can relate to, it was different. I was used to Disney and Hannah Barbara. Obviously I had watched localized anime since I could remember, Robotech, Battle of the Planets, the weirdly hypnotic Grimms Fairy Tale Classics on Nickelodeon. But of course the stuff aimed at adults, which was the most available in the beginning of the ’90s was way different and more gritty. The ’80s had a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment in America so it seemed a lot of the Japanese origins were hidden on purpose.

Why do you think this was? What kind of stuff was hidden, for example? The ’80s was a pretty down period economically and Japan was doing really well.  At that time I was living in a small rural Wisconsin town and everyone was pretty much anti anything foreign.  But the Japanese were buying up a lot of land and buying into a lot of companies in America at that time.  Hell there is even a weird artifact movie/TV show about that called Gung Ho.

A great example of really hiding the Japanese origin, as we kindly call it, localizing, from that time period would be Robotech.  You would only really see the Japanese names scroll by really fast in the end credits… if at all.  I’m sure producers and advertisers and whoever else in boardrooms was nervous that if something was widely known to be foreign to the public would reject it outright for whatever reason.  I think its still somewhat true today and probably universal in most countries really.  Look at The Office… NBC was pretty quiet about that being a direct copy of a British show.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? I don’t think there really was one, this was right before anime became a hot thing and was known more widespread in the mid ’90s. We watched whatever we could get our hands on.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? It was exciting, it was subversive in many ways, and it was exclusive. We could only get tapes and manga from the local hole-in-the-wall comic book stores.

Could you tell me about one of these stores that you went to a bunch? What was it like? How much did tapes and manga cost? I worked a telemarketing job in a trendy university part of town, having lived in the suburbs. In the same building was a comic book store that myself and a friend I worked with would go to every payday.  I remember paying $25 for the Streamline subtitled copy of Akira.  The only reason it was $25 instead of $40 was because I was buying the copy the store rented out.  But it wasn’t unusual to pay $30 to $40 dollars for a tape.  Black Magic M-66 was $35 I think, Appleseed was about the same.  Back then Gen Con was still in Milwaukee and at the end of the ’90s you saw a more visible anime presence in the dealer room.  I would go crazy when ADV would sell off stock for dirt cheap.  I was scooping up copies of anime I had been watching to death on pirated cassettes for $10.  Here is Greenwood, Patlabor, Dominion Tank Police.

One thing I regret never getting around to buying though was a collectors DVD set of Lain that came in a metal lunch box. I think that thing ran like $120 or so. The first purchase I made from my friends anime store (prior to me knowing him) was the first season box set of Ranma 1/2 for $200. I had to special order it and put half the money down before hand, that was in late 96 I believe. I still have almost all of my commercial VHS tapes, I tossed the hentai ones I had collected before I got married 8-). Just under 60 of them in my collection. I make sure I always have a working VCR.

Before I moved into the house I bought I made sure I got rid of the nearly 200 pirated/fansub tapes I had in my collection. I had decided it was time to get rid of them and bundled them up in a few yard bags and tossed them in some random business dumpster in the dark of night.

I wasn’t buying manga at this time. The same friend I worked with ended up getting a job at a different comic book store and he ordered a lot of stuff that I would borrow and read at the time. But I didn’t start buying manga myself until about 5 years ago. Pretty much the manga that was available was through Dark Horse at this time and it was typical American comic book release pricing and schedule. One 20ish page book for around $3 every month or two months or so. Tankoubon weren’t a thing and neither was right hand reading.  Everything was transposed and flipped for left hand reading. The first manga I ever saw, but didn’t know it was manga, was Lone Wolf and Cub in ’93. A friend of mine had it and I was blown away by the violence. AT this time I was reading X-Men comics pretty heavy and the commercial comic industry was pretty tame at that point, just mildly racy.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? If yes, how? If no, how did you connect with other fans? Not yet, I got into it right around the time AOL exploded and everyone got sucked into the web. There were BBS communities obviously but I was unaware of them at the time and didn’t actually get involved in online anime groups until later in the ’90s when I started to live in IRC.

When did that happen? I got into IRC once I was no longer able to go on AOL due to the prohibitive monthly membership fee. I got access through an older friends university log in to the school remote network and logged into IRC from there, as a replacement for AOL chat groups. It was really just a place to meet people and discuss anime and role play, typical chat room stuff. I ended up being friends with a girl in the main chat room I hung out with that lived in the area, which opened up access to different anime. She was the one who introduced me to Gundam through copies she had of Gundam X and 0083, this was in 99 and I was already out of school and living on my own with roommates. So at this point anime was on TV 24/7…and video games. Beyond this the internet was used to hit up Anime Turnpike to look at fan art and learn about other series’. But it wasn’t a big part of my existence at that point. Being a broke ‘should be in college’ kid internet access wasn’t always reliable and I liked to party too much with my IRL friends and roommates.

Do you remember your first convention?  I actually didn’t hit any anime conventions until I was an adult and went to it for my children to experience it. As a teenager and young adult the only con I ever went to was Gen-Con, which had a good industry and grassroots anime presence. It was primarily a tabletop gaming con. I watched a lot of anime at the con, the fansub of Escaflowne being quite memorable due to the excellent soundtrack on a massive surround system.

You mentioned taking your kids to anime cons. Do they like anime? What do they watch and when did you introduce them? Does your partner like anime? My kids love anime.  I’ve raised them on it.  My 13-year-old daughter told me a few months ago when she borrowed some Chi’s Sweet Home manga from the library that one of the earliest cartoons she remembers watching is the fansubs of the original Chi series.  I tried to find a lot of anime for them where they were younger, always looking for NHK programs, whether they were in English or not.  I had a lot of episodes of Pythagoras Switch and Nanami-chan.  All the old Pokemon too.  Of course all the Studio Ghibli stuff.  I try to take them to as much anime when it hits the theaters as possible.  The last one we went to was a late night subbed showing of Your Name.

My kids like the con experience too. Sadly the local con doesn’t have much.  Hopefully next year I can put the funds and time together to hit ACEN for a proper con experience. My daughter has been feverishly drawing and working on  her own manga-type style. Most of the manga I buy nowadays, I buy with the intention of letting them read it as well. There are always shows on Crunchyroll and Netflix/Hulu that we watch on a weekly basis as well.  My son goes along for the ride, enjoying it, but my daughter consumes a lot of it. Between manga she buys or gets from the library and the shows she watches on her own on CR… like Fairy Tail. I can’t stand it personally but she loves it.  Her group of friends are also into anime at various levels so she has that part of her life to nerd out in on her own.

My wife on the other hand… tolerates it to an extent.  When we were dating she watched some anime with me but she got tired of it eventually and now I try not to watch it around her!  She has her own nerding that she does that I’m not into so we are nerds of different flavors.  She runs a store at our nearby Renaissance faire so she’s neck deep into that passion.

Steve can be reached on Twitter.

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#72: Siddharth G

Age: 21

Location: Minnesota

When did you discover anime? I initially wasn’t aware of anime as a concept, but I had singled out Toonami programming as “action cartoons” as a kid, and I wasn’t interested in those for the longest time. While I had gotten into some shows like Pokemon, Hamtaro, YuGiOh!, Mega Man, and Kirby, I don’t think those shows opened the door to the rest of anime in the same way that Dragon Ball did.

My introduction to Dragon Ball was strange, since I actually got into it, as unbelievable as it may sound, through Dragon Ball GT. I was at a party of one of my dad’s friends in the June of 2004, and being bored, I decided to watch whatever I could find on tv. The only channel with anything on that remotely interested me was Cartoon Network, and Toonami came on. I didn’t intend to watch DBGT, but since that was all that was on I watched it anyway. The episode in question was #40 – “Piccolo’s Decision” – the episode where Piccolo sacrifices himself alongside the earth to save Goku and destroy the Black Star Dragon Balls. I knew nothing about the series, but the relationships between Piccolo, Goku, and Gohan seemed like a big deal, as did Piccolo’s sacrifice, and in the span of that episode he appealed to me a lot as a character.

I attempted to watch more GT off and on for a couple weeks after that, but wasn’t really grabbed by it. That is until early January 2005 when I randomly caught the end of episode #61, when the 4-Star Dragon Ball manifests from Goku’s forehead. I don’t know why exactly that piqued my interest, but I tuned in the next week for episode #62, when Nova Shenron is revived and teams up with Goku to fight Omega Shenron, only to sacrifice himself in vain. This episode struck me because it told a redemption story of a formerly evil villain now fighting alongside a hero to fight a greater foe that I really hadn’t seen before, as well as connecting him to Goku through the legacy and connection they share through the four star Dragon Ball. The apologetic tone Nova has before he crumbles to death was a tragic turn I wasn’t expecting. The situation in the show in general seemed really dire, and that made me want to see how the fight with Omega Shenron would end.

Episode #63 really blew me away with the sense of stakes. Goku pulls power from the entire universe, all the people who he’s helped in the series prior, in this one last ditch attempt to defeat Omega Shenron that nearly kills him. Again, I was blown away by the sense of scale, the larger than life stakes, and the legacy presented of the show – how big this moment felt as a culmination of everything Goku had gone through until this point. I wasn’t expecting the show to end the next week, and it hit me hard. I actually, literally cried for days after watching the ending. A show I had just fallen in love with was now over – I felt I had missed my chance to watch it and now never would.

Then I was sadly looking at the Cartoon Network schedule one night trying to see if they’d be playing any reruns, and I learned that there WERE still new episodes — the LOST EPISODES! That reinvigorated me, and from there I began a year-long binge of anything and everything Dragon Ball. It also made watching Toonami every week a necessity to me, and I slowly was introduced to more anime through what was introduced to the block that year – namely Zatch Bell, One Piece, Naruto, and Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo. By the end of 2005, or maybe early 2006, I had developed an awareness of anime as a concept through looking up information on what was airing on Toonami online and discovering there were hundreds of more shows in their vein. From then on I actively sought out more anime to watch and enjoy.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? The sense of scope in their worlds, the complexity of the action choreography, the more detailed character designs, and the long-form serialized storytelling. No American shows were doing what Dragon Ball did—devoting multiple episodes to a single fight—and that kind of storytelling really made anime stories feel grander in scope than other cartoons on tv at the time.

Sounds like you were really into Dragon Ball. How did you express your fandom? I drew Dragon Ball fan-art almost every day for a year after I got into it. I essentially learned how to draw by trying to replicate images from the manga. I even made my own fan-comics, usually about Cell and Buu, who were my favorite characters to draw because of how unique their designs were. Artistically I’d say I was even more inspired by Dr. Slump though. Toriyama’s art was at its peak in that series, and even as a kid I could recognize his genius and tried to copy his mecha and character design sensibilities. It also inspired two characters who I’d use in my own comics as a kid, one of them basically being Dr. Mashirito except taller and skinnier, and another being King Nikochan but with a flatter design and minimalist facial features. I still make use of these characters in projects I do to this day, though their designs are a lot more distinct now. Aside from art projects I’d also write fan-fiction and what-if stories about characters I liked, mainly underutilized ones like Zarbon and Captain Ginyu. I also tried planning out how a faithful-to-the-manga Dragon Ball anime would be paced like years before Dragon Ball Kai came out. My version was shorter.

What was the first anime-related purchase you made, and how much did it cost? My first manga and first anime purchases occurred in March 2005 and were both related to each other. The first manga I bought was Dragon Ball Z volume 18 at Barnes&Noble, which cost $9.99. This was the latest volume at the time, and it was also the volume where Gohan transforms into Super Saiyan 2 to fight Cell, which I hadn’t seen yet but knew was a big moment in the series from it being referenced so heavily in the Buu saga anime episodes I’d already seen. I remember being confused how to read it at first, turning the pages right to left but reading them left to right, but eventually I figured out that I needed to read the pages right to left too.

A week or so later my family dragged me along to Best Buy to pick up something, and I found my way to the DVD section and saw they had anime DVDs there. There was a lot of stuff I was interested in, like a Dragon Ball boxset that had a Goku action figure included with it, but I was mainly debating whether to get a Dragon Ball Z dvd or a Hamtaro dvd, which was a tough decision because Hamtaro was off tv by this point and I hadn’t seen it in a long time. Eventually, I decided to buy the DBZ dvd “Cell Games – Awakening,” because that contained the episode of the anime where Gohan transforms into SSJ2 and having read the scene in the manga I wanted to see the animated version. I remember being shocked at how expensive the dvd was, around $29.99, which might be an overestimate but it definitely cost more than $20 and buying it used up all my allowance for two months. The episodes included on that disc were great, and I also got to experience the Japanese version of the show for the first time since it was included, and was how I found out that DBZ was originally a Japanese show in the first place. But in retrospect, considering how easy and cheap it is to watch DBZ now, I really wish I’d picked up that Hamtaro DVD after all.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? To be honest, I didn’t get into the larger anime fandom until around 2012. For the longest time, I was pretty alone in my interest in anime. People would know Dragon Ball and Naruto, sometimes even One Piece, but I didn’t know anyone else who was really interested in watching anime until the later years of high school. That’s when someone started an anime club at my school, which showed pretty mainstream-y stuff like Black Butler, Hetalia, Ouran High School Host Club, etc.

I also started meeting people, who weren’t necessarily anime fans, who had watched stuff like Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood and Soul Eater. I started really getting into the community after the Toonami 2012 April Fools Stunt, mainly ToonZone and Animation Revelation, and talking with other serious anime fans on there helped me deepen my anime knowledge and I started watching and reading more anime and manga in the next year or two than I had ever in the seven or eight years prior.

Could you tell me more about your high school anime club? My high-school anime club was started in my junior year by two sophomore girls. I remember flyers promoting it using art from Ouran High School Host Club and Fullmetal Alchemist and being excited at the prospect at finally meeting and making friends with fellow anime fans. It didn’t pan out that way. Most of the club was segmented into their own factions most of the time and did other things while whatever anime of the day was playing. My tastes didn’t really align much with anybody else’s, so I couldn’t really find common ground to talk with many people. A lot of them would also play annoying pranks and generally act mean-spirited towards me, making fun of my artwork during the art contests or outright lying to me to make me do something embarrassing, so I stopped visiting the club before too long. I briefly returned the week after the Toonami April Fools stunt because I was hoping to find other people there who had watched it and wanted to discuss what happened, but nobody there even knew what Toonami was. That was the last time I visited the club. My younger brother would later visit it when he attended high school, and according to him the club became really unfocused and unpleasant after the original founders graduated, and without strong leadership or a sense of camaraderie, the club was eventually disbanded.

Even though I don’t have many fond memories of the club, it did introduce me to a couple shows like Black Butler and a few Ghibli movies like Princess Mononoke that I really liked, so I did get something out of it. It’s just a shame I couldn’t make any friends there like I wanted to.

Can you tell me about the first time you made friends with another fan? It was a long and strange journey to make friends who liked anime. Most didn’t even know what it was, and I had to try and introduce it to them. In elementary school I could easily talk about Pokemon and YuGiOh! and other shows that aired on Kids WB!, but no one had seen any of the stuff on Toonami, not even Dragon Ball. I would bring Dragon Ball books to school occasionally and sometimes I would describe to people what I was reading. I distinctly remember explaining the fight between Mr. Satan and Android 18 to a classmate and making him laugh so hard that he spat all over my book. Later on when I had my friends or cousins over to my house I’d show them Dragon Ball episodes and movies, but I never could convert anyone into being more than a casual fan of just that series and not anime as a whole. One of the cousins I introduced to Dragon Ball did get into anime more deeply a few years later, but I stopped visiting him regularly by that point.

In middle school I never talked about anime with anyone my age, but I showed my English teacher the “Holmes Freak Murder Case” two-parter of Case Closed once and she liked it. I also managed to show another episode of the series during an art class, specifically episode 60 “Illustrated Murder,” using some flimsy justification that it was relevant to “art.” I never gave up trying to introduce people to anime I liked, but looking back the only people who were ever willing to give it a chance were adults, and even then Case Closed was the only show they’d enjoy.

I was still trying to get people into anime in high school. When we had to give a PowerPoint presentation in my Intro to Business class, I gave a 10-minute presentation about One Piece. It actually went over pretty well and got a few people into it, though none of them became my friends. I would often reference Dragon Ball in class projects and show clips to people whenever I had the chance. In ski club I kept trying to pitch anime movies for us to watch on bus trips, but they would laugh off every suggestion, and the one time I managed to get them to play the Trigun movie the chaperone interrupted and replaced it because he hated anime. So with every success came a set-back.

But because I never hid my interest in anime people knew I liked it, and would ask me questions sometimes. At first they only asked me about Dragon Ball and Naruto, but eventually they began to talk to me about other shows too. My anime fandom became a huge part of my identity in high school, but rather than ostracize me, it made me stand out and interesting to people. I think the culmination of it all was when I gave a very anime-heavy presentation in my IB Theory of Knowledge class that used clips from Dragon Ball, One Piece, Trigun, and Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo to illustrate animation’s various merits as an art form. The examples I showed, particularly Wolfwood’s death scene in Trigun and the “dysfunctional wooden spoon family drama” from Bobobo episode 6, were well-received even though few had seen these shows before. The presentation was such a huge hit that people became so interested in discussing animation as art and asked me so many questions about it that I managed to talk for the entire hour-long runtime of the class.

Eventually, whether it was thanks to my references and recommendations, or because anime was easier to find and consume than ever before, by the time I was a senior most people in my class were watching anime to some degree. I made friends with two guys in my classes who I’d often collaborate with on school projects, and we’d talk about all sorts of shows ranging from the in-vogue hits like Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Soul Eater to classics like Cowboy Bebop and Lupin the Third. We’d also reference anime heavily in our class presentations, like quoting verbatim Wolfwood’s dying words, or making an elaborate fourth-wall breaking parody of the End of Evangelion in Shakespearean dialect. My love for anime ending up becoming the basis for a lot of my friendships in high school, and that has held true for most of the friendships I’ve made throughout college, both on and off the net.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? I mainly read discussions on Toonzone and other Dragon Ball and Toonami fansites in the early days. I didn’t join the forums myself until 2007, but I didn’t really have any meaningful conversations except those about Dragon Ball and the Toonami block itself.

Do you remember your first convention? My first convention was pretty recent. It was the 2015 New York Comic Con. I didn’t go for just for anime content—I just wanted to attend NYCC while I was still in New York for college, having missed out on it during the previous two years. I was blown away by the sheer amount of people there and how crowded it was. Masashi Kishimoto was invited to Comic Con that year and while I was thinking of attending I didn’t realize that not only did I need to reserve a spot beforehand, but I had to wait for over an hour in a massive line. I learned from my mistake when Yusei Matsui came over last year. The only other anime-specific memory I can remember is attending the Yokai Watch dub premiere screening, which was a disaster. The episode froze up mid-way through and they couldn’t fix it, disappointing all the kids and making their parents very upset. The room they were showing it in was a comfy place to relax for 20 minutes though.

For you, what’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today? I see the biggest difference in how I’ve gone from having no friends who are into anime to all my friends being into anime. It’s so much easier to meet new fans and make friends than it was ten years ago. Anime being more easily accessible and the ability to connect with people on social media has definitely helped the community expand. I never had a sense of there being an anime community where I lived for years, and now I regularly attend local theatrical screenings of anime films and conventions and see that there are thousands if not tens of thousands of fans living close by. Anime might not yet be “mainstream,” but when Your Name gets played for five weeks straight at an AMC theater in a small suburban town, I think it’s a sign people have become more welcoming of it. So I’d say the anime fandom is way bigger and way more accessible now, and not seen as such a strange a thing to be into as it was even a decade ago.

Siddarth can be reached on Twitter. 

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#71: Sara

Age: 22

Location: Folsom, CA, USA

When did you discover anime? The first anime I ever remember watching was Inuyasha on Adult Swim; I was probably in 6th grade at the time.

I can’t remember the first time I saw it exactly, although I think it was just an accidental glimpse of part of an episode, but I clearly remember spending the night at one of my friends’ houses hoping that we would stay up late enough to catch episodes of the show and being very disappointed when said friend wasn’t interested in watching it. I also tried to sneakily watch episodes on one of the many, many illegal streaming aggregator sites with my terrible dial-up AOL internet when my parents weren’t home. My interest ebbed and flowed all throughout high school until around my senior year and my first years of college—I met friends who were also interested in anime, became a little obsessed with BL manga (which I read voraciously through less than ethical means) and developed an academic, as well as fannish, interest in the medium.

How did your interest in anime lead to an interest in BL manga? Kind of hilariously, I…honestly can’t remember the first time I discovered BL manga. It may have had something to do with Hetalia. Slash shipping was obviously huge in that fandom, and this was ~2010 when “yaoi” was understood as encompassing pretty much any m/m ship from an anime/animated Japanese pop culture in general. (I was never really involved in video game fandoms but I feel very sure that m/m Final Fantasy ships also got ‘yaoi’d.) From there I think it’s very easy to stumble onto BL manga, especially when you’re a very ignorant teenager spending a lot of time on scanlation aggregator sites, some of which often host dojinshi as well as manga (they’re really unconscionable on so many levels.) Actually, when I first made my current tumblr account around 2011/2012, I modeled myself as a romance manga review blog—my url was ‘closetfangirlreviews.’ Looking through my archives, I think I reviewed… two BL manga before diving headfirst down the fandom rabbit hole and realizing I didn’t have the self-discipline to keep up a review blog.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? I’m honestly not sure! Inuyasha just seemed very cool—it wasn’t a story I had encountered before—and a little illicit due to its time slot. It was also something that, for better or worse, I could access for free online. The specific stories definitely engaged me, and considering some of my first interests (Inuyasha, Fruits Basket, Ouran High School Host Club) I may have been drawn to romances with female leads, but I don’t remember that being a conscious draw.

I thought Fruits Basket may have also been my first manga, but I realized later that I’m pretty sure the first book I bought myself was Volume 1 of the manga First Love Sisters, which I furtively hid in the bottom of my nightstand drawer. (I was in middle school and, uh, in denial about some things.)

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? I had no idea what was popular when I first got into anime. It was probably in the late ’00s, so Sailor Moon and DBZ may have still been popular, but I was pretty isolated from anime fandom at large. The friends I had who were interested in anime were all really excited about Hetalia, if I remember correctly, and I was pretty involved in that fandom for a few years despite never watching more than one or two episodes of the actual anime.

This is so interesting! How did you stay involved in the fandom beyond actually watching the show? Fanfic, fanart, something else? Oh yeah, this has been a huge thing in my experience in anime fandom! I think Hetalia and Katekyo Hitman Reborn were the worst offenders, but I also participated in Kuroko no Basket, Yowamushi Pedal, and I think Haikyuu!! fandom for a while before actually reading them, and for a while after falling behind. I think my experiences with Hetalia taught me to have a very, uh, lassiez-faire? Attitude toward canon. But to actually answer your question, definitely fanart and fic, but also headcanons/meta—I was more of a fandom consumer than a creator, but I had (and still have, tbh) a huge appetite for fanfiction and quite a few online friends who wrote fic, so we were all very inclined toward focusing on character analysis and relationship dynamics and, in Hetalia, real-world history, so most of our discussion about the fandom revolved around that, with canon taking a backseat. This was all online, specifically on tumblr, though–I believe my irl friends did actually watch and enjoy the anime.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? Again, I was pretty isolated from anime fandom at large, but among my very small anime-inclined IRL friend group and my social circles online (primarily tumblr) there was a lot going on! My IRL friends would goof around, singing “Caramelldansen” and doing the accompanying dance, do impressions of Hetalia characters, and I think even did cosplay, whereas the fans I hung around online were mostly fanfic writers—I read so many Hetalia AUs I wouldn’t even know where to start describing them! Although I primarily hung around on tumblr, Livejournal and FFN [Fanfiction.net] were still fairly active, and ao3 [Archive of our Own] was active, but more exclusive than it is now.

You seem to have had a lot of IRL anime-fan friends. Did you meet them because of anime? Or were they into anime already and got you into it? Oh I wouldn’t say a lot, I had like, six friends total and three of them were into anime in some capacity—although I did admittedly go to a couple meetings of my high school anime club. They got me into Hetalia (and then moved on to Homestuck fairly quickly) but I was so excited by the idea of nations as people and all the amazing fic I found that I just got hooked on that fandom. The anime club may have introduced me to some series, too (Ouran?) but I don’t have very strong memories of it.

Did you write fanfic yourself? I have posted one fanfic in my entire time in fandom (which technically was supposed to be chapter 1 of an ongoing fic, but the rest of the fic just…never happened.) It was a genderswapped Hetalia high school AU with Spain/South Italy and FWB!Spain/France. It didn’t get much response, although I do think my friends read it and liked it; it wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t terrible, and looking back it was kind of delightful that those were my, uh, artistic priorities. I’ve drafted a few other half-finished fics, one for My Hero Academia and one for Yuri!!! on Ice most recently, but I’ve never published anything else.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? Yes, the internet was a huge part of my fandom experience. There was an anime club at my high school that I had some friends in and sometimes spent time at, but I primarily got to know other fans through the internet.

Do you still know the friends you made when you were getting into anime? I do still know quite a few of my online friends! I actually met my best friend of six years on tumblr because of their France/Canada ficlets. I’m only super close with them out of all the people I talked to during that period, but several of us do still follow each other on twitter.

Do you remember your first convention? I still haven’t been to an anime convention, actually! In high school I was too geographically isolated and in college I was too broke. Hopefully I’ll get to go to one in the next couple years.

For you, what’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today? I think there are still a lot of similarities depending on where you look, and many of the differences in my fandom experience now as opposed to when I was in high school are just the result of being older and knowing different people. That said, I do think something that’s changed is that fandom is kind of undergoing a crisis of ethics right now–there’s a lot of conversation happening about artists’ rights (both fanartists and anime creators), social justice, callout culture, how minors/teenagers should be treated and what they should be exposed to in fandom, etc. These conversations can be incredibly frustrating and exhausting, and there are definitely times where I get defensive of my tastes and want to be like ‘please shut up and leave me alone,’ but ultimately I think talking about this issues (as well as how to talk about these issues) is better than engaging with fandom uncritically and letting the ethics and sexual politics of what we create and enjoy as fans go unquestioned.

Sara can be reached on Twitter here and Tumblr here. 

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#70: Gregory F

Age: 26

Location: New York

When did you discover anime? I had my first brush with anime (other than whatever was on Saturday morning TV) in the 7th grade. It was about 2002 and I was a bit of an outsider at my school for standing out too much. (Partially because I was too smart for my own good and partially because I didn’t belong to the predominant demographic of students.) As a result, I often got in to fights with people and was bullied.

That eventually lead me to a small group of seemingly neutral people (since every day was a “battle”) who were really chill. Somehow we became friends and I found out they were into this thing called “anime” and the girls of the group really liked something called “yaoi“. Eventually they tried to indoctrinate me with Ranma 1/2 but I was a little weirded out. To be fair though, I was literally 12 and my reaction was “what is this?” Eventually we become pretty good friends and they managed to get me interested in anime with Yu Yu Hakusho.

What was the predominant demographic that you didn’t fit into? And does that mean that where you’re from, anime was for outsiders? My school was in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood where most people were from the same country. If I wanted to fit in, I either had to have that shared cultural / national identity or get really in to sports. Unfortunately neither option was feasible so I encountered quite a bit of friction. I’m only half-Hispanic (but not from that country in particular) and was the first mixed-race person most of those kids had ever met. On top of that, I’ve never been interested in sports and used to be fairly clumsy. As the saying goes, “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down”.

I wouldn’t say anime was for outsiders. At the time anime wasn’t really taken in to account in the social pecking order.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? At first I was actually a bit put off because my first exposure was at the hands of die-hard fujoshi. (As the second guy in their group… the look in their eyes signaled they had dark plans.) But over time as I was exposed to different genres and different stories I started to become enamored with how exciting the plots and fights could be. Also it was so different from the cartoons I was used to seeing on TV.

Do you still know any of those fans? Do you still hang out with fans who have a sub-interest, the way fujoshi do? I lost touch with that group after I graduated middle school unfortunately. Right now I hang out with fans of all sorts and most people have a number of interests. The most common ones I see are magical girls, sports and yuri though.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? It might have been YuGiOh! I remember a lot of the kids would duel each other after school around that time.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? I wasn’t really a part of the fandom then, I wound up getting in to it two or three years down the line. But at the time it was really really niche. Even the term “anime” wasn’t something most of my classmates were familiar with. And since I only had a group of three people to judge the fandom from at the time, I found it a bit jarring.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? It might have been but I was too young to know. I mean… I was still getting AOL dial-up CDs in the mail.

What was your first anime purchase? My first purchase was the premium edition of Toradora Vol 2 on DVD. (I wanted to buy both volumes as a reward for getting my first real professional job but Vol 1 was sold out at the time.)

Do you remember your first convention? My first convention was New York Anime Fest (NYAF) 2009, in my freshman year of college. A friend had scored some free one-day tickets and so we went as a group for a few of hours.

It was probably one of the most significant events in my anime fandom (career?). Before then it hadn’t dawned on me the how massive the breadth and scope of anime truly was, not to mention just how many fandoms overlapped, intersected and fell under the umbrella of the anime fandom. It was also my first exposure to cosplay, stage events and convention centers in general.

It was a loud and fast blur but exhilarating. Seeing so many different people come together and be excited about the same thing while simultaneously expressing that excitement in so many different ways left me with a feeling I can’t forget. The icing on the cake though was that thing everyone was so excited about, anime, was something that I could relate to for a change. Before that the only similar unified enthusiasm I had seen for something was about sports, but I never could get in to that.

NYAF would wind up changing my destiny. It was the event that made me realize that conventions were something I wanted to be a part of some how.

Change your destiny? I wasn’t really sure how to get involved with conventions at that point. I just knew that I wanted to go to more of them. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that there were people who made conventions run, but as chance would have it, schoolwork would steer me towards convention staffing.

My final project for one of the classes I was taking that year was to build a website from scratch. I decided to build a blog about anime, music and games called leetNEET. On a whim I decided to actually host it online where one of my closest friends used to keep finding new ways to break the site. We’d go back and forth between me adding new features and him breaking things. Eventually the site became pretty decent in terms of functionality but lacking any content.

The following fall, I attended NYAF again having more time to look around and talk to people. It dawned on me that there were people who blogged about anime and conventions walking around with press badges. Since I was already a a broke college student by this point, I decided that if I wanted to go to more conventions I could try and do the same thing. (Similar to how Destructoid was originally founded so that they could get in to E3.)

I gathered a bunch of my friends from high school and some my new friends from college to take a stab at it. Somehow that actually worked out… I received my first press pass in 2010! Meanwhile, as I met more and more people at my school I fell in with the anime club crowd. There I learned that they had been running a small anime convention every year during spring break. I started both attending and covering that convention for my blog. Knowing a lot of the people on staff gave me the freedom I needed to get great coverage but as a result I’d also get dragged in to help resolve convention issues as they arose. By the next year I was a de facto volunteer and also writing their press releases for them

Then one day, I happened to be bumming around campus when one of the anime club’s members (who also was writing for my site at the time) passed by on his way to a con planning meeting. He told me to tag along and by the end of that meeting I was appointed to be a department head. It was then that I really got my first taste of what makes conventions tick and I was hooked.

Unfortunately, as of 2013 and 2015 respectively, both leetNEET and that convention no longer exist. I’d return to staffing conventions again eventually but in the interim I formed a panel group (Hen Tie Cake) with some of my convention friends and now we host panels and game shows at several conventions a year.

I’m still involved in staffing cons today. I’m currently on staff at both AnimeNEXT and Otakon.

For you, what’s the biggest difference between your anime fandom then and now? The biggest difference between when I first got in to anime and now is that before I used to be a passive consumer of both anime and fandom. Now, I’m in the thick of it. I attend way too many conventions. I talk to strangers about anime in real life as a panelist and online via twitter. On very rare occasions I’ll even still write about anime. I’m definitely way more involved and engaged now.

Greg can be reached on Twitter.