Author: Lauren

Age: 30

Location: Minneapolis

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. When I was eight, Roujin Z was on HBO. I didn’t know what it was, but me and my cousins liked it. I’ve seen Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z before on syndication, but Pokemon was the first animation I knew came from Japan.

How did you find out? I think it was because near the end of one episode in the dub they were at a party in kimonos and put two and two together. Or maybe I heard it school? Either way, I was into it! I didn’t hear the term “anime” until early 2000 though.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? It looked different than all the cartoons I was watching. I would try to draw characters that looked like anime all the time. The floodgates of fangirling didn’t open until I’d seen Digimon and Toonami.

Sounds like Digimon was your first real fangirling obsession. What about Digimon resonated with you so deeply?  My first was actually Sailor Moon. I loved it and got my hands on whatever info and VHS I could. (Remember those Beckett anime guides? Lol!)

Digimon was the anime that made me push my fandom harder. I went to the library to look up Digimon stuff all the time and I found fansites. (My favorite was the now defunct and replaced Lelola. Finding fansites deepened my awareness of other anime. Also, I have a special love for Digimon since I would try to draw my own digimon and digivice like Takato in Tamers, and it was like it was just for me since i didn’t know anyone else that liked Digimon. Now I know a lot of people who do! Every year at Otakon a bunch of fans have a get together and for the past few years me and my friend Simon would do a Digimon fan panel. Hopefully, we will again!

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Even in the hood, DBZ was the big thing. I liked Sailor Moon more though. I’ve seen so many anime be the TOP THING, but Sailor Moon and DBZ are still staples.

Interested by your words, “even in the hood.” Was income or demographic related to your early anime fandom experience in any way, either as a divide or a unifying thing? DBZ was popular among young black males growing up. There was always someone who grew up with it on local TV and people who watched the Toonami broadcast. I went to school in DC and there was guys tracing the artwork or sharing the computer to read about the episodes that didn’t come out here yet. Income wasn’t related to my early fandom as it was ALMOST NON EXISTENT! HEHE. So using the school computers to find out more or just watching anime on Toonami and other channels was the only way. It wasn’t a unifying thing until I switched schools where there was a HUGE student anime fan community. Unless it was DBZ, it seemed to get judged, so I carefully hid my preference for Sailor Moon.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? In the early 2000’s I thought we were blessed to have anime mixed with afternoon and Saturday morning cartoons and cable to handle the rest. Money was the thing I needed to get more and I had no money. So, me and friends at school would borrow each others’ tapes and I’d watch them a bunch so I could remember it well. If I wanted anime music, I’d put my cassette recorder next to the TV speaker or record from a friends CD. Of course going to Blockbuster was necessary and I bought the cheap VHS tapes since DVD was getting big. Also, spending lunch at school looking at Animerica and joining my school club at Katsucon 2002. I didn’t have a computer yet, so any online aspect I missed out on except the occasional look at Anime Turnpike in the school library.

Can you tell me about Katsucon 2002? What was it like going with the school club, also? What did Katsucon have back then? Katsucon 2002 was also known as Katsucon 8: The Classics. We’ve been planning in my club for a few weeks and I saved my meager allowance and skipped buying lunch to go. It was an art club, but was also the stealth anime, manga, and gaming club. To save extra money I even walked two miles to school to meet up with everyone.

While I went with a group, I mostly walked around without a clue what to do. I was gawking at every costume (and learned it was called cosplay.) and staring at the art in the art show. I remember a lot of Tenchi, Outlaw Star, and DBZ cosplay. Also, cosplay for this little known manga at the time called Bleach. I remember wanting that Ryo-Ohki backpack badly and not having enough. I remember reading all the covers of the VHS tapes and DVDs to try to take note of shows I wanted to watch. The best thing was watching Wings of Honneamise and being amazed! Then I sat in line for something called a “masquerade.” I didn’t know what it was at time, but it was popular and my school’s drama club was taking part in it. Sadly, our chaperone had enough of this nerdy madness and I had to leave.

There’s a lot of things I would have taken advantage of if I was more informed about anime and the fandom. Like meeting Noburo Ishiguro, going to Steve Bennet’s cel painting workshop, or going to the fanzine panel. I am typing this while looking at the booklet. Yes, I have the booklet. I keep every badge and booklet of every con I go to in a collection.

When did you begin participating in online fandom, and what was it like then? I didn’t really participate at first. I mostly just read fansites. Then around 2005 I joined the ANN forums. I was there everyday and even became good friends with a bunch of people there long ago. I was once known for asking a lot of questions all the time. After a lot of fansites just died on me, ANN became my main place for info and fandom.

I didn’t create online until 2007 when I did The Otagal Podcast. I was inspired by Geeknights and Anime World Order and wanted to try it. It was my first try at reviewing anime. It’s very cringe to listen to now, but I had listeners. I did it for 3 years, but then I podfaded.

Then my fandom went into a live direction with doing panels for years until returning to anime online with my show The Idols of Anime.

You met your partner through fandom, right? What was that like? I met my fiance through a very different fandom, hehe. We DID get together at an anime con. It was wonderful, but I’m the anime one while he’s the comic one.

Today you participate a lot in fandom, from paneling at conventions to running a YouTube channel. How did you make that leap into creating? The thing that made me get into creating was wanting to be something more than just a fan. I started out as an attendee and wanted more so I became a volunteer. Then I wanted more so I became a panelist. Then more so I became a podcaster, a youtuber, a staffer, and soon to be a guest at a con! When I saw others do things with their fandom like make podcasts or videos or fanart I wanted to join them. Their excitement became my excitement.

I have tons of friends that are doing amazing things in fandom. (Like you, hehe!) It makes me want to work harder and have fun harder too!

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom when you first discovered it and anime fandom today? The biggest contrast is sheer size! Katsucon 2002 was about 3000 people. Now it’s close to 18,000? There’s more cons now than ever and they have some big numbers. Also a change is what’s being cosplayed more. I remember seeing strictly anime cosplay, but as I write this, I’m at a con and see the top spots go to Overwatch and Steven Universe. There’s still tons of anime cosplay, but now people cosplay whatever they want without worry and that’s awesome.

In 2002, people still came to buy and watch anime, but now we can go to Crunchyroll and the like anytime. Info about series wasn’t a widely available back then. Manga hasn’t taken over the bookstores yet and Suncoast was still around at the mall.

What’s always changing is the big thing everyone is obsessing over. Remember the Haruhi dance done at cons ten years ago? Was just talking about how that didn’t seem long ago, but was. SAO will become a memory.

Really, fandom culture will always be fandom culture, but with different tools, new anime and new settings. The attitude and love will always be there.

Viga can be reached on Twitter and YouTube. 

Age: 24

Location: San Antonio, Texas

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. My first experience was actually with manga. A friend of mine in middle school was reading Fruits Basket and thought I would enjoy it. I made note of it and a few months later made time to read a volume (I don’t think it was volume one). I believe this was around 8th grade. I was fascinated with the differences in the education system and culture and was hooked. I started reading tons of series and one of them lead me to watching my first anime. I think it was Ouran High School Host Club but I’m not 100% positive. (Technically my first anime was Sailor Moon or Pokemon but they did not register as anime at the time I was watching.) I went to high school and started watching more series with new friends such as Samurai Champloo.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? The difference of culture between Japan and America fascinated me and lead me to focus on study international business law for a class in my senior year of high school. (I went to a business high school intending to pursue business law as a career which quickly shifted as I began reading more manga and watching more series of anime.) I have always been a very avid reader so manga played a larger part of the start of my fandom experience than anime. As I began to read more, my interests in the world at a global level began to grow because it made me view things through a different cultural lens.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? When I actually started getting into watching more anime in high school, the most popular title on campus with my friends was Hetalia. Season One had just finished airing and I was told it was something I had to watch and would enjoy. So I did and they were right. Naruto, Bleach, and Fullmetal Alchemist were also all popular at the time. (Of those three, the only one I watched was Fullmetal Alchemist).

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? It wasn’t until I went to undergrad that I started interacting more with the fandom community. I joined my first anime club and got to know more fans. Our president at the time was from what she considered an older generation or the golden generation of fans. She prided herself on having been around fandom for a while. Her meetings were lecture-styled and provided an interesting perspective from a fan who had been around much longer. Unfortunately, she had an elitist tone and it was off-putting for a lot of people.

That same year I got to know some other people previously from the club and got to experience lots of different types of fans. Some were casual fans that lived by, “yeah it’s a thing I sometimes enjoy but if I didn’t have it it would be fine,” and others threw themselves wholeheartedly into their passions, creating elaborate cosplay costumes and attending conventions.

This was the first time I attended a convention. It was out of the city in Dallas, Texas and called Yule-Con. (I believe that it may have been the last year it was held). I meet fanfic writers and artists and enjoyed the convention. At the end of the year the president graduated and I became VP and Risk Manger of the organization and my soon-to-be roommate became president. That summer we attended A-kon in Dallas (my second convention). My now former president mentioned that she would one day like to see our college host an anime convention and I tucked that away to think on. At this point both conventions I had been to had been treated like shopping trips.

Once college started back up, we started running our meetings more like discussions than lectures and made sure the atmosphere was never one of discomfort or superiority. (Neither my roommate nor I were overly fond of the way the previous president had imposed or flaunted her superiority and we wanted our members to be comfortable sharing what they liked with us). Towards the end of the semester the convention was brought back up as a goal and I looked at my roommate and shrugged telling her if she wanted to do it we could make it happen now not one day in the future. So we asked our club members if that would be something they would be interested in hosting (most of them had never been to a convention) and when they said yes we got to work. We made reservations on campus and did a few hours of research to figure out where fandom people hung out in the city. We went out and met people (most slightly older than us) and started talking to them. The community was very relaxed, friendly and open to helping us host our first convention.

We held our first convention after planning for a bit less than a year and had about 200 people show up. The next year we did it again and had around 400 people show up. The weather was awful that day with severe rain and the community was used to college conventions being held outside so our attendance wasn’t as high as it could have been. Those that did come loved it both years and our school loved the event as well. We graduated that year and sadly the convention did not happen again after we had left. (Side note: we only spent money operating the con the first year, probably between $1,000-$1,500. It made enough to sustain itself the second year and had enough to pay for the third year, which unfortunately never happened.)

My former roommate, best friend, and I continued to go to conventions in San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. We just attended Sakura-Con in Seattle last weekend and what I can say is that every city has a unique feel to fandom. San Antonio is open about where to find fandoms and fandom related things both big and small; Dallas and some of the people from there (the president before us was from the area) held a feel of elitism in some aspects; Houston was harder to find fandom things in outside of the larger events.

We didn’t get to experience much of Seattle’s scene since we were only there a handful of days but we did notice a huge difference in the Lolita scene there (not anime I know but a small portion of the community still). The Lolitas from the Seattle area were much more open and friendly to experimenting with the fashion, making things yourself and not having to have name brand clothes to fit in. As opposed to the Lolita community we found in Texas, which is difficult to become involved in if you don’t have the money or figure to fit into a brand name or nearly brand name cord [Lolita speak for “coordinated outfit.”]

Fandom is very much what you make of it. My experience started off small where I would watch some shows illegally and read many things illegally (translations where slow to come out). Now we have so many ways to legally watch shows as they come out (paid or unpaid for a week delay) and translations and dubs are coming out at rapid speeds. Fandom access is definitely increasing and more fandom specific spaces are being created such as Ao3 [Archive of our Own, a fan-run, non-profit fanfiction archive.] Technology allows us to follow and filter through massive amounts of data easily to create our desired experience. At this point my biggest issue is I can’t actively visit an cafes [restaurants with anime themes] without a plane ticket to Japan. I use a forwarding service to order most of the products I want including Blu Rays for Yuri!!! on Ice and ACCA from Animate [Japan’s largest anime retail chain] for all the lovely exclusives. (Which, in retrospect, if I wasn’t spending thousands of dollars on merch, I’d have enough to spend a few weeks in Japan.)

My fandom experience is rather short lived as I only dabbled a little in high school and didn’t actively get involved until college. So if you count active involvement it’s been about 6 years, about 11 years since I first started reading manga, and 9 since I started fanning over things with groups of people.

Your early fandom experience was influenced by an anime club president who was a bit of a gatekeeper. In which ways did this inspire you to treat other fans better when you were in her position? Could you name some of the ways you worked to keep your club intentionally welcoming? I was raised to treat everyone equally, listen fairly to what they say, and judge based on their actions, not what they liked and disliked. Seeing people shut down because they were told they had bad taste didn’t sit very well with me or my now best friend so we decided that we would make sure nobody felt bad about what series they liked even if we didn’t care for them ourselves.

We made sure to let everyone have a chance to speak and let the club members decide some of the topics they wanted covered. We also made sure to ask them if they wanted parties for holidays and what kind of foods they wanted. We had some vegan club members so I made sure there were things they could eat and would bake a lot of things from scratch or adapt box mixes to leave out ingredients they couldn’t eat.

We would let them vote on what series they wanted to watch and ask their opinions about things and even held a couple of Socratic style discussions where we provided materials before the meeting for them to look over and form opinions about so we could discuss the effects it had on fandom. (One of these was the Aurora Colorado Batman movies shooting) we always made sure to have an open door policy if they needed to talk to us about anything at almost anytime (the biggest exception being when we were in class).

We made sure they could use us as both a resource and a support system and would invite club members to have dinner with us occasionally when we cooked. There would be nights when I made dinner for about 10 people or so depending on who was available and wanted to come.

Amazing to hear about the format of your college anime club (mine just watched anime, no discussion at all)! Can you tell me more about that and whether your alma mater still does it that way? I haven’t been back in about two years and leadership has changed. I think discussion-wise they are still doing things the same way but I think the way the club is managed has changed to reflect the current leadership. One of the club members at least ended up leaving due to the effects of the new leadership because she didn’t feel as welcome. The person we left in charge had a very different style than we did and I believe she should have graduated this year. I didn’t end undergrad on the best of terms with her because of a personal matter and the way she treated my best friend, the club member that ended up leaving the organization and myself after we were already making the transitional process.

I think it’s fascinating that you found different regional “pockets” of fandom with different vibes. Do you think the internet has made fandom more homogenous, why or why not? I think the internet has made it easier to find people with the same tastes and opinions but it hasn’t made it homogenous. People will always have different opinions based on their own experiences. What the internet has done is made it easier for people to attack things they don’t like or agree with. Your experiences very much depend on how you navigate your own online browsing. Some people have very diverse social media profiles while others fall into a very homogenous pool. It’s very easy to filter your online experience to be what you want it to be. Things like this depend on the person, the platform the use and how they control their viewing experiences.

How did you discover Lolita subculture? Was it related to your interest in anime? It was definitely connected to anime and manga. I probably read something or saw something and started looking into the fashion. I haven’t invested yet because it costs a fair amount to buy most of the dresses and it’s difficult to find things that will fit properly over the internet. Most likely I will need to buy things in person or make them myself and that’s a little advanced for where my skills currently sit.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today? I think there is a much bigger push to support things legally now. Crunchyroll and Funimation have worked really hard to make a large number of series available to people outside of Japan. You can find things easier now than you used to be able to and they are working to bring things even quicker. We still have problems getting more of the anime movies brought over but series aren’t as hard to find. You don’t have to settle for what’s airing on tv because now we have 20+ series being done every season. Streaming has made life easier in a lot of ways and also helps support creators.

Britanee can be reached on Twitter. 

Age: 33

Location: Iowa

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. Weirdly enough, anime can be found scattered throughout my childhood. I can remember singing along to the theme song for Maya the Honey Bee on Nick Jr. I can remember getting completely absorbed by Sailor Moon during junior high. I watched Pokemon not because of the games (which I somehow was completely unaware of), but because I thought Pikachu was cute and Team Rocket was funny. Despite that, I wasn’t aware that these shows were part of some larger thing—I just though they were just another sort of cartoon.

I wasn’t really aware of anime as this separate, larger thing until 2010, when I was well into my 20s. For that, I have Jacob Chapman to thank, back when he was making video reviews as Jesuotaku. I started watching his reviews simply out of curiosity but his analysis made me curious about a number of the shows he reviewed. Eventually, my curiosity was too great, and I can clearly remember going to Best Buy and mentally debating for something like five minutes over whether to pick up Romeo x Juliet or Ouran High School Host Club. I went with the latter, loved it to pieces, and never looked back.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? I’ve always loved animation in all forms, but anime simply told different stories and looked different from the Western animation I was used to. It was more ambitious in some ways and way more friendly to both older viewers and to women.

How did you find anime to be friendly to older viewers and women? I don’t know if anime itself was necessarily all that friendly to older folk and women at the time. Manga fandom was a different story. Both then and now, it’s always skewed toward an older and more feminine audience so I fit in right away. I was able to find plenty of interesting articles and critics to follow and learn from, especially since it was so easy to discover new voices thanks to the popularity of Manga Moveable Feasts. They were these regular events where a particular blog would host all sorts of articles around a particular series or mangaka and they were a veritable cornucopia of interesting insights and reviews. Sadly, the manga blog scene has died down since then, but I look back at that time fondly and it’s part of the reason I started writing my own reviews in the first place.

As for anime, the fandom at the time was largely centered around forums.  I didn’t really enjoy larger ones like the ANN forums because the conversation was so repetitive, shallow, and sometimes juvenile.  I didn’t really find a sense of community until I found a smaller fan forum where some of the posters would host regular stream nights.  These became the equivalent of must-see TV for me as I would chat with the regulars while we watched half a dozen episodes of some scheduled series along with shorts, AMVs, random Youtube videos, even clips of joshipuri wrestling [female pro wrestling in Japan].  It wasn’t exactly legal, but anime streaming was only just becoming a thing in those days and this format felt more personal and personable than simply marathoning shows on Hulu by myself.  We came from all over the country, if not the world, and ranged in age widely, but that didn’t matter in the chat so long as you have interesting conversation or a few jokes to make.  Some of those regulars are still online friends of mine and I talk with them on Twitter on the regular.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? 2010 was not a great time for anime, considering that so many shows were going out of print and streaming was in its infancy. I think the biggest show at the time was Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, as far as visibility and sales.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? It’s weird that I got into this fandom at a time when it was most decidedly on the decline. That awkwardness could be felt on the anime forums where I hung out. There was more than a bit of pining for the glory days of the boom years, frustration with the lack of quality titles (and thus, the proliferation of piracy), but still some hope and plenty of discussion.

Could you go into detail about the decline you perceived? 2010 was a bad time for both the anime and manga industry. Those few companies that survived the recession in one piece were simply trying to stabilize things and that wouldn’t start truly turning around until Bandai shut down not too long after. The manga scene was in even poorer shape and that wouldn’t come to a head until the next year when Borders shut down and Tokyopop followed them shortly thereafter.

I was largely oblivious to this at the time because I was still trying to learn as much as I could about this strange new world of fandom. There were so many shows for me to catch up on, so many books to read, and so much history I wanted to learn and understand. I didn’t have the same frame of reference that others did. I didn’t really grasp that things were not in great shape until the 1-2 punch of Borders and Tokyopop. I had only just started collecting manga at the time, but I remember being awed by their selection. I couldn’t have known at the time that those long aisles full of books were just about to go away. The Tokyopop shutdown was the first real big fandom event that sticks out in my mind, even if the biggest impact for me personally was that it might affect my ability to finish getting the full run of Fruits Basket. It’s only in retrospect that I can look back at that time and realize just how diminished it was compared to even two or three years later.

So it’s not still on the decline, in your opinion? Oh no, not at all. If anything, it’s the healthiest it’s been in years. Streaming and simulcasting breathed new life into it and made anime more accessible than it ever was before. As for manga, it took the publishers a little longer to gather themselves up and start rethinking their approaches, but they found the big crossover hits and license rescues they needed to succeed. If anything, the manga world is entering into some interesting and unprecedented ground. We’re seeing publishers takes risks again and dabble in genres they wouldn’t have even during the boom years of the 2000s. It’s a brave new world out there in manga, and I for one am eager to see just where it goes.

As a fan who got into anime later, did you ever feel unwelcome or like you needed to study in order to grasp people’s comments and jokes? I may have been late to anime and manga, but I had been online for many years and had floated around the edges of some of the major fandoms of the 2000s. I’ve also always been the sort of person who tends to read voraciously and likes to learn as much about any new interest as much and as fast as possible. As such, it didn’t take me too long to adapt to anime and manga fandom.

How did becoming an anime and manga blogger change your participation in fandom? I learned how to better express myself and to really articulate what made the works I consumed good, bad, or something in between. Ever since I was a kid, I was the sort of person to savor the media I loved by myself instead of sharing it with others. I knew in my own mind what I liked or didn’t like, but that approach meant I was never really called upon to explain or defend those preferences to others. By writing reviews, I learned to exercise those underused portions of my mind and to hone my writing skills to best express them. Of course, critique is like potato chips: once you start, you can’t stop. I couldn’t apply these critical skill to the manga I read and not do the same for the shows I watched. I might not always enjoy every show I watch or book I read, but I feel like I get more out of it regardless because I can explain what does or does not work instead of settling for “this was good/bad/ok/whatever”.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime and manga fandom then and anime and manga fandom today? The biggest difference between anime and manga fandom then and now is how instantaneous and free-form things are now. When I started, those fandoms were largely contained within forums and blogs. It was possible to forge communities within those spaces, but it was more limited and distant. Now it’s so much easier to connect thanks to social media and simulcasting. Just through Twitter, I’ve met people and learned things that I would have never known or encountered otherwise. The fandom also feels more lively since shows can be watched as they premiere in real time and you can watch the conversation grow and evolve with it live.

Unlike a lot of my peers, I didn’t know any anime or manga fans growing up because I grew up in such a small, rural community. I didn’t get to enjoy things like anime clubs in high school or college. I didn’t attend a con until I was 30. I wasn’t even aware of things like DVD releases of shows I knew as a kid (which is good, because college-aged me would have spent too much money on those old Sailor Moon boxsets had I known they existed). The online part of anime and manga fandom is essentially all I’ve ever known of it. It’s added so many people to my life that I might not have ever known otherwise, to say nothing of the boxsets and books it’s added to my shelves. It’s given me outlets I would have never considered. It’s added so much color to my life that it’s hard to imagine what what my everyday life would be like without it. I may have been a late comer to the fandom, but I’ve never regretted a single minute of it.

Megan can be reached on Twitter and her website. 

Age: 27

Location: Fort Lauderdale, Florida

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. I can’t recall the year but I know I was eight years old when I watched both of the most popular and recognizable anime series: Sailor Moon and Pokemon. Growing up in Puerto Rico, they were shown at different times based on our cable provider, so WB used to air new Pokemon episodes early in the morning while after school, Cartoon Network showed Sailor Moon during the Toonami block—the first one with Moltar.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? The storytelling aspect of anime in comparison to Western cartoons is what drew me in. Granted, I still loved and grew up with the classic Nickelodeon originals and the Disney Afternoon block, but the sense of character development, emotions, cliffhangers in anime is something else. I’ve cried more and attached myself more to anime characters so that’s saying something in regards to the powerful storytelling on some anime shows.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? Living in Puerto Rico back then, it was a case of being in a small fandom within a small island. It was rare for me to meet other fans that weren’t in the same middle school or municipality as I was because I didn’t have a car, cellphone, etc. in the early 2000s. Then, the last years I was in the island before moving to the U.S. (2004-2007), I started to get more involved in attending local gatherings and cosplay photo meet-ups.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? If yes, how? If no, how did you connect with other fans? Most of my fandom connection was online through early Geocities fansites and anime forums specifically targeted at both Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura fansites. I even taught myself some basic HTML so I could curate my own Geocities fansites based on my favorite Sailor Moon character (Sailor Venus) and favorite Cardcaptor Sakura shipping (Sakura and Yukito—which nowadays I find it completely problematic).

Do you remember your first convention? What was it, and what was it like?
It was 4th of July, 2004 at the YMCA center in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Back then, our “conventions” were more of a subculture flea market in that local vendors had tables set up at the basketball gym arena and several of them just happen to sell anime merchandise. I remember seeing a post online about how they planned to cosplay at said event so I, my brother, and my former best friend at the time spent two weeks prepping up our first cosplays. The “conventions” were held up on a quarterly basis on Sundays at the YMCA, and over time the attendance grew so much that it wasn’t until I moved away that they rebranded into “Puerto Rico Comic Con” and expanded to the national convention center in the tourist area of San Juan.

I want to hear about your first cosplay! Oh my God, it was a really awful Sailor Venus cosplay LOL. I say this because there’s only so much a 14 year old with limited allowance money and no prior sewing skills could do in 2004. My wig was an itchy and bright Party City-esque blonde wig that I actually bought at a theatre costume shop at my nearby mall and the rest of my set-up (skirt, bow, tank top, shoes) were bought from the street markets in my hometown.

I may bash on it now but at the time, I was so proud of creating something from scratch and I had people take photos of us (myself and my former friend who cosplayed as Kagome from InuYasha), so I got instantly hooked. At that point, I saved up as much of my allowance to evenly budget what kind of cosplays to work on. For my quinceañera, I bought a sewing machine and had my grandma teach me on top of signing up for sewing classes out in San Juan. Besides Sailor Venus, I cosplayed Mimi from Digimon, Aerith from Final Fantasy 7, and Misato from Neon Genesis Evangelion while attending the local cons back home in Puerto Rico.

How did your fandom experience change after you moved to the US? The biggest culture shock for me was the diversity of anime fans. Obviously, growing up and living in Puerto Rico, most of the friends I had and made during my time there strongly identify as Boricua/Latinx so moving to the US and meeting people who are from different races and ethnicities—especially here in South Florida, where the population is just as diverse—was awesome. However, I had to tone down my Spanish/Spanglish talk and references sometimes so I struggled with that for the first half of my freshman year.

Also, during the first years of living here (2007-2009), I stopped watching anime altogether because of the group of friends I hung out with were mainly into video games or comic books so that was always the main focus within the group dynamic. It wasn’t until 2010 when I moved away from Florida to Virginia that I got back into anime. At that time, my mom created a Netflix account and the first anime I saw was Nana and it was the best worst decision ever. I say this because I was preparing to move away when I started to watch it and my husband and I (back then, boyfriend/girlfriend) were in a long-distance relationship, and Nana is a deeply emotional shoujo anime so I was in tears for weeks.

I thought it was neat how your first site was about a ship you don’t like anymore. How have you changed as a fan over the years? Pardon my French, but I was a weeaboo little shit when I was younger compared to nowadays hahaha. Back then, I used to watch and read whatever I could get my hands on just because it was “anime” and I was a snob when it came to people liking popular anime. Nowadays, I have a secure identity of what I like and don’t like with different anime genres and it’s okay to own it and admit you don’t like certain things and there’s nothing wrong with that or yourself. When I see an anime gaining popularity or traction via social media or cosplay groups at conventions, I’m the total opposite now in that I seek it out immediately because there’s a reason why it’s so popular.

Also since becoming more of an intersectional feminist, I’ve gained a more critical perspective than when I was younger regarding anime I watch. A big example is watching Hana Yori Dango/Boys over Flowers when I was a teenager, and how romantic I thought the relationship between Makino and Domyouji was. Nowadays, I see the problematic and sexist tropes behind it all and some of the scenes like the bullying ones make me uncomfortable to rewatch now. Do I still watch it once a year when I’m feeling sappy? Yes, but now I know better than to long for something like that anymore.

Lynette can be reached on Twitter and Instagram.