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#23: Kyle C

Age: 26

Location: Washington, DC

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. Like many ’90s kids, I started off with Pokemon and Digimon, but back then I didn’t even really consider or know that it was a Japanese product. It was only until I watched Spirited Away for the first time and watched the extras that I understood what anime actually was. Shortly after I came across Fullmetal Alchemist, happily bought all 13 volumes for $25 a pop, and the rest is history.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? The stories were so different than the American media (mainly games, TV shows, and comics) I consumed that I couldn’t stop watching. Especially coming to FMA during my last year in middle school, it was my first introduction to cartoons that went deep into adult themes, conflicts, and ideas. So perhaps a part of it was being drawn to something that was a little more “adult.”

You’re one of many to say you were interested in anime’s “adult” themes. But can you elaborate on what that means to you, ideally with examples? When I speak about “adult” themes, I have two examples I can give. The first is the original Fullmetal Alchemist series during the Ishvalan War arc. When it was released, the wars going on in the middle east were still pretty fresh. Being able to watch one of those episodes, change to any major news network channel and see scenes of the wars going on really stuck with me at the time. Of course, there have been and continue to be series that cover current events (war or not), but FMA was the first series where I experienced that direct parallel. And when you’re a young teenager just starting to develop your tastes and ideas about the world, I think it was pretty pivotal. Another example is Welcome to the NHK, which goes really deep into issues of depression, the value of friendships, and dealing with growing up. Granted I was midway through high school when the series came out, but Welcome to the NHK was one of my first series with more relatable adult themes that made me evaluate my own life and relationships.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Absolutely FMA and Inuyasha. Basically anything that was on Toonami or Adult Swim around the 2005 era.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? I feel like a part of it was the beginning (some say golden age) of forum fandom. Everyone had their particular website, and their online screen name or persona. Around that time Gaia Online was huge, so being a part of fandom also meant having your dumb little avatar as well.

Please tell me what it was like to be on Gaia Online. (I have never been on it, so go into detail!) Gaia Online was definitely a strange place in retrospect. It was a forum that allowed you to customize an avatar with special monthly items. However all of those items were heavily influenced by anime/manga/games, but they got around any copyright stuff by being non-specific. For example when Naruto was a big hit, they released a bunch of ninja-related items—one of them being the signature headbands—but without any of the symbols from the show. Everyone I knew ate. it. up. At the end of the day, everyone was just trying to make their avatar look as close to their favorite character as possible. (And if you paid up, you probably could!) The people behind the site knew their audience for sure. From there it was basically an all-purpose forum with fan discussions/convention talk/cosplay how to’s/role playing. I actually met a lot of my earliest convention friends through the site.

How did you participate in fandom at the time? Funny enough, the way I mostly participated with fandom was staffing at cons. My senior year of high school, I started staffing for Anime Iowa and, long story short, the Programming Head couldn’t go that year and I took up the role. While I was still only a few years into the actual fandom at that time, I really dove headfirst into organizing the events people went to in the first place!

How did you connect with other fans? This answer definitely flows from the previous, but I connected with other fans through the convention scene. My home con for a long time was a ~3,000 person event out of Iowa. With a con that small, it was really easy to make friends and connections, and I still keep in touch with a lot of the people I met there. Some of those connections got me to go staff at other cons around the country as well.

Did anime inspire you to learn Japanese and become a translator? Oh, absolutely. My path to learning Japanese definitely started with wanting to learn what the shows were saying, but once I started taking it seriously in college, anime-comprehension became much more of a secondary reason. I was lucky enough to have professors who introduced much more broad aspects of the culture, so while I still watched shows and tried reading raw manga, I learned real fast not to rely on my nerdy media as a sole means of practice. I’ve heard similar stories, but classmates in my Japanese 101 classes who were only there out of their love of anime dropped real fast.

Do you remember your first anime convention? Can you tell me about it? God bless my mother, but for my first con we drove all the way from Northern Illinois to Des Moines for Anime Iowa in 2005. After the friend I planned to meet bailed, I was by myself for the entire weekend. I remember that’s where I saw Bleach for the first time and thinking it was the coolest thing I ever saw. I’ll always remember the Naruto dub premiering on Toonami that weekend too. I actually had no idea what Naruto was at the time, but the atmosphere was pure hatred because of the “Believe it!” catchphrase and it being at the height of the “dub v. sub” argument. I took a photo of a sign in the lobby that said “BOYCOTT THE US NARUTO DUB” with a bunch of signatures, but unfortunately that photo is lost to time. I actually went back up to my room that night, watched the two episodes that premiered, and it quickly became one of my favorite series.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom when you got into it and now? Outside of not having to pay $25 for single DVDs anymore, for me the biggest contrast between fandom then and now is the increased visibility and role of female fans. Of course there have always been anime fans who are women, and maybe it was just my perception at the time, but for a while it felt like series for women were “Shojo Beat adaptations” or “Yaoi.” (I am really happy those paddles are not a thing anymore.)

Now it’s pretty well known that the majority of Shonen Jump readers are women, and in general I think everyone enjoys the hits together more. The most in-depth discussions I’ve had about shonen-sports series (Haikyuu!! and Yowamushi Pedal specifically) have been with women, which I don’t think would have been such a thing 10+ years ago. Certainly a welcome change in my book.

Kyle can be reached on Twitter. 

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#22: Margaret

Age: 30

Location: Boston, Massachusetts

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. I’ve been aware of it almost my entire life. My siblings watched the Speed Racer dub when they were growing up, so I’d seen most of that, and I’d caught a few episodes of the original Voltron series when I was little. I didn’t get super into it until the DiC dub of Sailor Moon, which I watched off and on until it aired on Toonami, and then I became OBSESSED. Gundam Wing, Cardcaptor Sakura, Escaflowne, Ronin Warriors, and a bunch of others only solidified my love for it.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? I think the main appeal to me was the different art and storytelling styles. Specifically, when I got into Sailor Moon (and other magical girl anime), it was the idea that girls could be the main focus and have all the cool superpowers. It wasn’t a totally unknown concept to me at the time, but most of the other media I was into were either strictly male-centric or didn’t bother to focus all that much on the female characters. The fact that Usagi and friends could be silly and argue and at the end of the day still be best friends, all with awesome magical abilities and high-stakes saving-the-world battles, really sold me on it.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? My pre-teen self would’ve only known about the shows on Toonami and Fox, so she would absolutely say Sailor Moon. Looking back now, it was probably Cowboy Bebop or Trigun? Neither of which I watched until I was in college.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? Sailor Moon was my first fandom ever, online or otherwise, so it was sort of life-changing in a lot of ways, if I may be so cliche. I made a lot of friends online back then (one of whom I’m still friends with!) and got exposed to so much amazing media that I wouldn’t have been aware of if it hadn’t been for anime fandom. I don’t remember there being much drama (unlike the fandom I got into in my later teen years, Harry Potter), but I was also pretty oblivious to anything that wasn’t immediately affecting me at the time.

What was it like to be a part of Sailor Moon fandom in particular? Were there certain sites everyone visited? This was 16+ years ago now, so I may be over-nostalgic, but I remember it being a very positive experience! There were a lot of older people in the group I primarily interacted with (probably in their 20’s-30’s back then, which seemed INCREDIBLY OLD when I was 13/14), and they were generally encouraging and nice to those of us who were younger. I learned a lot from them—not just about fandom and anime, but about writing and editing and how to interact with people on the internet. I kind of wish I knew what they were all up to now, but I lost track of them a really long time ago. We used Yahoo! Groups to talk mostly, and AIM when that was a thing, and there were a couple Sailor Moon fansites that we all visited. I’m not sure if any of them are still accessible or not. Lycentia’s Sailor Moon Graphics is one I specifically remember since I think I learned some basic HTML from it. Fanfiction.net was the big fic repository at the time, before they banned explicit stories.

How did you express your fandom? Fanfic! It was usually very angsty and/or dark, or at least what I thought was dark at the time. Pretty sure I wrote a bunch of Sailor Moon/Mary Higgins Clark fusions, which in retrospect is highly embarrassing and ridiculous. Oh well.

Tell me about the friend you are still friends with! How did you meet them? Are they still into Sailor Moon now? S and I met through the Yahoo! Group we were both a part of! She’s a few days older than I am, so it was our Thing to refer to each other as “big sister” and “little sister” respectively (in Japanese, of course), even though we were the youngest in the group. Back then I was very close-minded, but S was always patient with me and provided me with a window into life not informed by my family and the community we lived in. I still really admire her, though we don’t talk much beyond wishing each other happy birthdays these days.

How was being a part of fandom “life-changing?” Life-changing in a way that I think is akin to having spent your whole life living in a cave and then coming out and seeing the world for the first time. I mentioned before that I was spectacularly close-minded back then; I grew up in a very religious community that discouraged interaction with non-religious people and condemned any kind of “alternative lifestyle,” among other things (think Pentecostals, or Seventh Day Adventists, for reference). My friends in real life were all people I’d known since birth, and we weren’t allowed to do a lot things that kids elsewhere could freely do. We were encouraged to pursue religious hobbies only, and academic achievements meant very little if you weren’t considered pious enough. Discovering and getting involved with fandom completely changed the way I thought about myself, my friends and family, and the world. I’m also not afraid to say that I probably wouldn’t still be alive if it weren’t for fandom – I was in a bad place mentally in my early teens, and getting involved in Sailor Moon fandom helped turn that around.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom when you got into it and now? Anime fandom hasn’t changed all that much to my knowledge, except for how there’s a much wider range of series readily (and cheaply) available these days via Crunchyroll, Netflix, and other legal streaming sites (which is still amazing to me—I love the future!). I think perhaps it skews younger than it had before, but that might be my inner Fandom Old Person talking. Fandom as a whole tends to lean in hard on the “the more things change, the more things stay the same” proverb, in my experience, so it’s difficult to gauge any true contrast that isn’t entirely personal.

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#21: Patrick N

Age: 30

Location: Millis, Massachusetts

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. I was in college, and my roommate had me downloading Naruto and Bleach subbed episodes for him. I started watching those with him and got hooked. I am not a huge anime fan, but love those two series, Initial D, Shokugeki no Soma, Eureka 7, Death Note, One Punch Man, Blood+, and a few others.

Also, why did your roommate have you do the downloading if you weren’t even a fan at the time? My roommate did not know how to get the shows from the website, so I would show him and then I just started watching them with him because they were on my computer. It was a weird set up, haha.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? I liked that there were so many episodes of Naruto and Bleach and that the story was so involved. I like that the types of stories are so different from Western media, and yet relatable, with good humor and voice acting.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Naruto, Gundam Wing, or Attack on Titan.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? I was not a huge fan, but it was still not fully widespread. Things were only just starting to be sold in stores. The only way to watch the episodes immediately was downloading them from torrents after they aired and fans subbed them for free. Legal simulcast sites didn’t exist.

You listed eight anime you enjoy, but then said “I am not a huge anime fan.” What characterizes a huge anime fan? What kind of fan are you? To me, a “huge anime fan” watches only anime, or mostly anime. I like a lot of media, so anime is just a part of what I like to watch, but not even most of what I watch.

Did you connect with other fans aside from your roommate? How did you meet them? I am a high school teacher now, so I connect to my kids who wear Attack on Titan gear or other stuff, and they can’t believe their teacher knows anime.

Do you remember your first anime-related purchase? How much did it cost and where did you get it? I probably bought some Pokemon-related things while in high school, but I don’t really remember. I don’t have too much gear, other than some Gudetama things I’ve bought for my wife but that is more of a character than anime-related. I’m not sure if i have any anime gear!

Do you and your wife watch anime together? Yes. We watch Shokugeki no Soma and a few others together. Yuri!!! on Ice is on deck for us.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom when you got into it and now? I think the ease that there is to watching it in the states now is the biggest change. Before, you would have to wait a long time to watch it legally, but now it is available from streaming sources pretty soon after release, with subtitles.  Access is so much easier!

Patrick can be reached on Twitter. 

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#20: James G

Age: 33

Location: Michigan

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. I was about eight and my dad was plowing a driveway for a family friend. When we went inside they turned on “cartoons” for the kids with one of those huge old school satellites. It was the end of Vampire Hunter D where the kids are waving good bye and I was hooked without actually seeing anything. I finally got to see the whole thing years later when Sci Fi used to show anime on Saturday mornings like Project A-Ko, Robot Carnival, and Demon City Shinjuku to name a few.

I also was huge into Robotech and Voltron which as a kid didn’t realize was anime and taken from Macross and Beast King GoLion respectively.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? City smashing robots and mecha designs mainly. I used to try and make MD Geist armor out of cardboard when we’d play outside.

Who is “we” and did they like anime, too? Do they still? Haha yes, one of the few times my younger brother and I have ever gotten along was over anime. While other kids were outside playing Ninja Turtles we’d make MD Geist armor out of dirt bike gear and cardboard. We don’t see each other a lot but yeah he still watches anime. He has a very bad habit of borrowing without asking… He still has my complete Trigun, Escaflowne, and Nadesico series and i’ll probably never see them again.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? If I had to guess i’d say Vampire Hunter D when I first “found” anime and Ninja Scroll when I first started buying anime.

What was it like when you started buying anime? It was kind of a pain. I live in Northern Lower Michigan which is pretty rural and about a year behind on whatever’s current. Back when Game Pro and other video game magazines were popular the backs of them would have ads for stores like The Game Cave or others heck even Paul & Judy’s coin collectibles sold DBZ for a bit. Suncoast video chain used to sell anime so getting it there was about it. VHS ran about $19.99-$24.99 and they didn’t check ID because I remember my friend buying La Blue Girl and his mom tearing the manager a new one once she caught wind of it, then they changed all anime to ‘Must be 21″ for about a week.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? You were a nerd that liked cartoons. It was horrible and, before social media, next to impossible finding someone who you could talk to about it. That is, until a shitty show from a property I love started called Gundam Wing…

You said fandom before social media was “horrible.” Were you ever teased for liking cartoons? The fandom before social media was horrible due to the fact you had no one to connect to with similar tastes and if you did, others were too embarrassed to talk openly about anime as if it was childish or taboo.

I remember a “popular” girl who is still a friend ask me about anime all the time when we were alone or away from the clique kids. If you did meet someone near you it was the stereotypical fan who plays Vampire the Masquerade, had samurai swords, and was super awkward socially. Personally for me, I got along in school with people from all walks so I never was really teased about what I watched but I was teased about having/collecting toys but it was all in fun nothing serious. Most people dog on you, then when they come over and see a Transforming Veritech Fighter they shut up and beg to check it out.

Tell me about when Gundam Wing started. How did things change for you, and how did you start meeting other fans? Toonami broke the wall down. There’s no two ways about it. You had Voltron, DBZ, Thundercats, G-Force/BotP’s, and Gundam shows—beginning with Wing. If you talk to most Gunpla builders I’m willing to bet most will even tell you that Wing is what got them started. I loved that Gundam had made it over but I loathed Wing and that’s largely in part to I had the Mobile Suit Gundam movie trilogy on VHS and had seen it long before Wing had showed up. Instantly i was able to see five boys with little quirks of Amuro showing through, a Char clone, Zaku & Leo similarities. I, in fact, was a spoiled brat that was ruined by what had come before and became the uber asshole fan. I even gave it a chance numerous times but I couldn’t get past the turd of a character Heero Yuy was and Relena’s childishness. Give me Duo and Trowa-loaded episodes any day. But to give credit where credit is due: without Wing we wouldn’t have gotten the first Gunpla boom that Cartoon Network and Toys “R” Us started. (Those god awful commercials…)

As for meeting other fans, it was like Toonami hit and over night EVERYONE I went to school with was an anime expert. All my classmates would come to me with questions during sports bus rides, study hall, wherever. Slowly I would start to meet others on Yahoo groups, BBS’s or forums in which would turn me on to new shows, OVAs, or movies. On a side note, Toonami was so popular that our whole team before playing our rival school went Super Saiyan and bleached our hair before the game. Parents blamed it on Eminem.

What was online fandom like at the time? Online fandom was rough due to know-it-alls. “Oh you’ve never seen Ranma 1/2? You’re a poser,” or “You never read the manga? I don’t even want you in this group.” Being 16 on a school computer talking 8 Man After with some 30-year-old fan sounds creepy now that i think about it. Older fans felt kind of resentful the new anime boom brought all these young kids in to what was a tight knit exclusive group.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom when you got into it and now? Anime was hard to come by. Titles in the US were limited to just a handful. Dubbed wasn’t done a whole lot for anything else that wasn’t Akira or Vampire Hunter D so you can imagine reading subtitles was a turn-off for a preteen. Now it’s everywhere and there’s so much more to offer, from slice of life, mystic & medieval, giant robot, gotta catch ’em all—it’s crazy all the different anime types you can get at you fingertips with services like YouTube, Crunchyroll, Daisuki, you name it. Pop culture has even allowed anime in with clothing, toys, licensed properties like DC and Marvel. Now’s the best time to be a fan because there is so much out there to take in and enjoy.

James can be reached on Twitter and Instagram.

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#19: Alexander

Age: 22

Location: New York

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember.
I discovered anime through Toonami when I was four or five. My first show was Dragon Ball Z. I was hooked ever since.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? The cool fights and art.

What about the art specifically appealed to you? I think the biggest reason I liked the art was because of how detailed and kind of angular it was, in comparison to the regular American cartoons at least.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Dragon Ball Z or Pokemon.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? Basically every kid at school was watching shows after school so it didn’t really feel special.

Why didn’t it feel special? It was kind of mainstream, lots of kids had Dragon Ball and Pokemon stationary. Maybe if I was older and had access to shows not on TV I’d feel weird about sharing my interest in anime with people, but not the way things were then when everyone was into it.

Do you remember the first time you connected with other fans, in person or online? Besides talking to kids at school about power levels and such I think the first time I really talked about anime outside was waiting on line to buy Pokemon Platinum, there were so many anime fans at Nintendo World, I almost felt obligated to join in a conversation. The first time I really connected with fans online though was probably in 2013 when I started using Twitter a lot more. Before then I’d look at anime forums for download links but never post anything, heh.

What made you stick with anime even after you were done with DBZ? Toonami continued to show more stuff that caught my interest and then I got access to DVDs coming out and a international channel that aired some shows in Japanese without subtitles, like Detective Conan.

Could you tell me about your first anime con? I’ve never been to an anime convention, but with Anime NYC coming up, I might change that.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom when you got into it and now? How many different types of anime fans there are now from the sakuga crowd, to the people that only love certain studios, and those that follow certain directors. It doesn’t feel strange but I think it should.

Why should it feel strange? I mean I get how anime became bigger and different people like it for different reasons but when I think about how it was marketed at least, it should feel weird to me that people follow anime for certain directors, voice actors, or studios .

How was it marketed? I think I mean when I used watch to commercials for new shows, they would focus on the genre or subject. Now people who don’t care about that stuff in a show might still watch it if their favorite director was directing it or a certain voice actor was in it. Fans get invested today not only because of who the show is marketed for, but because they care about the production behind it.

Alexander can be reached on Twitter.

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#18: Austin P

Age: 28

Location: Brooklyn, New York

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. When I was in first grade, I used to get up early on Saturday mornings just to maximize the amount of time I could play video games on the weekend. I was all set to jump into a new session of Super Mario RPG when, flipping through the channels, I stopped on a cartoon I’d never seen before that was utterly unlike anything else I’d ever seen, a cartoon that turned out to be Dragon Ball.

I don’t remember what it was that caught me beyond the novelty—though I could bet money the expressive character designs and exotic look did a lot to pull me in—but I was pretty much hooked from there: waking up at 6 AM to catch the newest adventure of Goku and co. was now part of the weekend ritual. I remember being devastated when it ended and remember desperately trying to find ANYTHING like it, but that was basically impossible without the internet.

So I was all primed and ready when Dragon Ball Z started airing on Cartoon Network three years later. From there? It was a pretty typical story.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? I don’t remember exactly, but I have the distinct feeling that the serialized—as opposed to episodic—nature of the storytelling, the expressive character designs, the playfully built mythology and the sheer wackiness of it all had a lot to do with that.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Probably Speed Racer; that was the only point of comparison my folks and their friends had for Dragon Ball. Anime just wasn’t really heard of beyond that.

What did your parents and friends think of your new interest in Dragon Ball? My parents were more baffled that I was up at 6AM on a Saturday than anything, while my friends didn’t really think much of it other than that it looked odd. I tried to show it to one or two at sleep-overs, but between being woken up much earlier than they were used to and their general disinterest, I don’t think I managed to do more than annoy them.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time?
I wasn’t aware of a fandom at all, honestly. I had one friend in my class who was also a big fan—we’d spend our recesses making up our own little fanfiction comics—but that was it.

Tell me about that friend in your class. Which shows did they like? Could you tell me more about the comics, if that’s not too embarrassing? Are they still an anime fan/in touch with you? Most of our cartoon diet at that time was what any other kid had in their daily diet: like most of our peers we were watching all the same stuff on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, your Rugrats and your Rocko’s Modern Life and your Ren and Stimpy. The furthest our interest in anime extended beyond Dragon Ball was to Speed Racer, which would just show up on Cartoon Network at random times we could never quite predict, but we weren’t following it the same way we did Dragon Ball (couldn’t, really), so while our parents’ reaction to the cartoon and our own recognition that this and Speed Racer were somehow not like everything else we were watching let us know that we’d stumbled onto something “other,” we just didn’t have the context to understand why it was different. Which coupled with a lack internet and real information network to keep us in the dark.

And the comics were about exactly what you might expect from a buncha first-graders with rudimentary drawing abilities. We basically just had Goku reunite with the crew and go on more adventures and tangling with the same characters again and again. We weren’t very creative, sadly. (Though I do think there was a bird man who could also ride the Flying Nimbus in there? For some reason the bird man couldn’t fly under his own power. I don’t think we ever knew why). I remember we were both REALLY depressed after the end of those thirteen episodes, especially because the American narrator said something about how Goku never saw the others again, so we were kinda desperate to change that. Looking back this is, really oddly, probably the first time I came up against the idea of loneliness as a kid. Odd.

But no, that friendship didn’t really last long. Sidney and I stopped hanging out about two years later and while I was in the same schools as her all throughout high school, I’d be surprised if she remembered even a word of this beyond 5th or 6th grade.

Do you remember your first anime-related purchase? How much did it cost? Sure. It wasn’t for another three years, because I just never saw any anime merchandise before that, but once Dragon Ball Z premiered my friend and I were trying desperately to get any look forward into the future of the series, so we were all buying VHS’s without really considering its connection to what we were seeing on Toonami. I’d grabbed The Tree of Might thinking it was somehow this big deal, because, well, I didn’t know any better. It was about $20—a month’s allowance—and boy, looking back, I wish I’d known so much better.

The first important purchase I ever made was of the first VHS of The Slayers, which introduced me to the idea that maybe, just maybe, this whole anime thing was a LOT bigger than I’d first realized.

When you got the internet, did you participate in online fandom early on? What was it like? Yup! I found the internet in 3rd grade and was pretty active sucking up any information I could about older Dragon Ball episodes and even had this awful webpage that did some weird conflating between Dragon Ball and Final Fantasy and the Redwall series (Christ, I was an embarrassing kid). From there it wasn’t long before I was finding chat rooms so that when Dragon Ball Z hit I was ready to start migrating into a lot of chat rooms. I remember Steve’s Dragon Ball Z page being a big one, and remember getting REALLY into the chat rooms there.

It was really odd. Judging by language and attitude and topics of conversation, I’m pretty sure I was the youngest person in these areas, a fact that only became more pronounced every day and which in turn made it a little bit creepier every day, too. There was a lot of aggression, there: these stupid play fights we’d do act out in the chatroom would always turn into real-life pissing contests. A LOTTA tough guy talk, a lotta trash talking, a whole buncha people trying to prove that, well, they were as cool and manly as the characters on the show (I think it was telling that EVERYBODY there had a Cell, Piccolo or Vegeta avatar or screen name). There was never serious talk about the show, never any real discussion about plot or theme or other anime. Just a lotta posturing, especially whenever somebody with a slightly feminine handle or avatar came into the room. I left after about a month and, quite frankly, felt pretty good about that departure.

How has anime fandom changed as you’ve gotten older? I’ve never really been big into any fandoms. While I had about three friends throughout high school who were big fans of anime and one college (we literally became friends because he heard me talking about Zeta Gundam on my radio show and called in to say that I was mistaken, Yazan Gable was in fact the best pilot in the series), most of my life I’ve gone without a larger network. Right now I can think of literally two people I can say anything about anime two without earning a cocked eyebrow. My own per love for the medium has deepened over time—probably the biggest change in the last few years is that I’ve started contributing articles and reviews to Unwinnable and Otaku USA—but I’ve never really found myself comfortable with communities at large. I tried anime clubs in college and was in one when I first moved here to NYC, but I got bored of them fast. I find a lot of the fandom is more celebratory than I’m comfortable with: I’m one of these incessantly critical people who finds dressing up as characters and paying $60 to spend a weekend hundreds of other people in celebration of a shared hobby to be REALLY squicky.

I’ve never considered anime a part of my identity the way a lot of fans do. I love it, don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t be writing about it if I didn’t. And I find the community of writers that’ve sprung up on the internet to be a real blessing for my own tastes and my own work. Honestly, this has been my favorite thing about the last decade of the anime fandom! I just find that it’s not such a defining part of my identity that I have a need to share this with others. And I don’t begrudge the fandom what it is. I’m just really selective about the folks I spend my time with and  there other things in relationships I value more than whether or not they share my love of anime. I try to introduce them to certain series that I think they’ve got to see or a movie that might appeal to their sensibilities, but I mostly keep it to myself.

Austin can be reached on Twitter and Bandcamp. He also has a webcomic. 

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#17: Cai Kingston

Age: 31

Location: Vermont. (But my recollections take place in the Deep South.)

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. This is a little tough to answer, because during the ’80s and early ’90s it was pretty common to get introduced to Japanese animation through localized dubs on local TV or video store rentals. Additionally, Japanese studios were deeply involved in a lot of properties we assume to be American productions.

For the sake of brevity, I’d say proooobably 1989 or so? I remember being very, very small and watching stuff like Robotech and Star Blazers in the time after I got a baby brother but before we had a Nintendo, so it had to be sometime before Christmas 1989. Yeah, 1989. I didn’t know where the shows came from or anything, naturally.

As far as knowing where the shows came from and understanding that I could follow sources for more of this thing that was so appealing to me, I think I was like. Eight. So 1994-1995. This was around the same time I was getting into Japanese monster movies and Chinese martial arts films, so I was at this point asking probing questions of video store people and running into tapes with subtitles instead of people yelling really fast in English and going ~AH~

So: 1989 or 1994, depending on whether you need me to have known it was a separate kind of thing from cartoons and not just cartoons I liked better that kind of looked alike.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? PEOPLE WITH THE PROPORTIONS OF HUMAN BEINGS. I know a lot of people will write that they were struck very hard by the art, and it’s no different for me. I was really drawn in by the expressive faces and the reasonable proportions of the human characters.

I realize now that I was also drawn to the approach to animation and direction even if I didn’t have the language for that yet. I liked the economy of it, I liked the sense of wider space and tolerance for quiet establishing moments even in localizations cut and dubbed to try and match the constant noise and movement of American cartoons.

I liked that they didn’t always have to be funny.

Overall, even localized all to Hell, Japanese animation had a sensibility that appealed to me in a way the majority of American animation still doesn’t.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? I could not tell you. I just couldn’t. I know Robotech was still enjoying a lot of attention/circulation toward the end of the ’80s, I know Dragon Ball Z started getting very popular sometime after 1995. For the most part, though, lack of internet access and being literally raised in the woods without going to school kept me pretty ignorant of what the nerd world at large was into.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? I didn’t have many fans to interact with, or that much drive to do so.

As far as being into it was concerned?

Weird. It was, looking back, very weird and desperate. It wasn’t stuff you could buy in Wal-Mart at the time, not really, so if you wanted to get something specific you needed access to niche physical sources like a comic shop or a good circle of people with connections. You COULD get catalogs, but those were where? At comic book stores, usually. Or in video stores, sometimes.

I found most of my best stuff in flea markets, either because the vendors had deals with bootleggers or because moms were cleaning out their college-bound kids’ collections. I would go on literal pilgrimages to a particular market that I knew to be an especially choice and ever-refreshing source. It was 40 miles away.

I am not kidding.

How much did flea market tapes cost? I’d put the average at around $15, the median at $25, and the tippy top at $40. Remember, VHS were still fairly contemporary things at the time. Depending on where I went and what I bought, it would fluctuate. If a vendor knew that what they had was abnormal and desirable, or had attractive tapes in boxes and so on, it would always cost more. If it was a big place with shelves and shelves of tapes that people just dumped off regardless of box presence or bootleg status, it tended to be cheaper. Now, when you look at figures like an average of $15, understand that this was for around 90 minutes of footage. Mmmmaybe 120 minutes. Except! Sometimes you’d get swindled and it would be as little as 60 minutes! That works out to like $7.50 an episode, which is BONKERS by today’s standards.

Yeah, that’s right, sometimes (A LOT OF TIMES…) you’d plunk down tens of dollars and not be that sure what you were even getting. If you were buying something out of a catalog, it could be a total crap shoot because you bought sight unseen in a market that was still full of opportunists. Some vendors kept Exotic Foreign Tapes in the same sad sterile glass counter cases as the Game Boy games and other stuff kids might steal, so you couldn’t even touch them without making it clear you were going to buy something before you even read the back of the box. It was a goddamn wasteland.

When did you get internet? Can you tell me about participating in anime fandom online at that time? Hah. As in solid internet at the house? That had to be 1998 or early 1999.  Yeah, definitely. Our first internet-connected computer (’cause they had to be hooked up to a phone jack and use the house phone line, and not every room had that) was in our kitchen. I had my own hand-me-down PC in my room, but that was for games and tinkering.

As for participating, I have to say I didn’t do much of that for a very long time. At least not by today’s standards. Most of what was around for my interests consisted of disconnected sites managed by single people or small teams. You could use programs to get into chat rooms, but I didn’t do too much of that. There were mailing lists, which I guess I could describe briefly as “those marketing newsletters but sourced to everyone subscribing, and also usually about what sci-fi characters you wanted to bone/see naked.” Not a lot of mailing lists for what I was interested in, at least not that I managed to find at the time.  I mostly used the internet as a fact-gathering tool to determine what was coming out, how to get it, and whether it was worth my time.

It’s funny. For being so isolated, I didn’t experience the common drive to find and befriend everyone who was into my particular interests. It wasn’t until things got especially bad at home, around 2001, when my physically present friends thinned out because being around me got too intense, that I got desperate for online friends.

Tell me about your first time interacting with other fans. Do you still know them today? In person, specifically for fan-related things? That’d probably be my first job, when I was 15. I worked at a comic/game/video shop from 15-17, and we ran something of a viewing/gaming group on Saturday evenings.  It was held in this dingy little back room we called The Gulag, and it was a cut-rate circus if ever I did see one. We’d sit around a table made of plywood and saw horses in plastic deck chairs from Wal-Mart, watch a single tape or disc, and then play tabletop games until… whenever. I guess it was kind of like an anime club, but it never received any specific definition. We all liked anime, so that was what we watched. It must have helped that the owner got a whole bunch of feedback on newly-arrived titles that he could then turn around and parrot to customers.

I do (technically) still know some of these guys! Some of them have families which is… terrifying, because I remember getting in back alley sword fight re-enactments with them, but ultimately positive. That having been said, I absolutely avoid them whenever I’m back down south. Mistakes of one’s youth and all that. [Cai is loosely quoting Char from Mobile Suit Gundam here.]

Tell me about your first fan event. When was it and what was it like? I was twenty one years old, and it was the dang worst. As it turns out, when you’re not old enough to drink and you run pretty cold on nerds to begin with, being immersed in nerds set loose in an environment that encourages them to be all the things you can’t hang with, conventions are a nightmare.  No one in my group had warned me, for instance, that people will just grab you. I have no idea if that still flies, but it was totally a thing then and it was absolutely intolerable to me. The first night, I got invited to a room party that culminated in me being shoved forcefully toward a “cuddle pile” and then bailing out of sheer terror. It felt like an inescapable, boozeless, sexless orgy of screaming and cackling for three days and I had no fun at all. Also, everything was overpriced.

I know a lot of people have fun at anime cons, but there’s a dark side, too, so you have to be careful. Lots of people you meet online (and at cons, increasingly) are in fandom out of a very human desperation for contact and validation. That makes it a rich, ever-renewing feeding ground for predators and abusers.

Today you’re still really into Captain Harlock. How has your interest in that show changed over time? I think the biggest thing that’s changed is perspective. I have a perspective and a vocabulary now that let me understand and articulate what I owe to a fictional universe and its creators. I can acknowledge now that I might not have felt even remotely confident ditching a terrible home situation—by train with no plan and next to no money—if I hadn’t been wrapping myself up in daydreams about throwing everything away to live freely since I was 12 years old. That a set of stories affected me so profoundly and for so long is probably why I can’t stop telling stories. Hell, the first novel-length thing I ever finished was Harlock fanfiction I never showed anybody. It wasn’t a self-insert story, but… it might as well have been.

Something else that’s changed is my… self awareness? Regarding it? Like, I’ve made peace with and embraced how much queer theory I can apply to it and how those parts definitely appealed to my issues and fantasies as a weird little queer in the South. Seriously: Name me a better barely-coded gay daydream than uprooting yourself from a society that hates you to go play cowboys and pirates and skinny dip with your best friend forever. You can’t.

Have you always  been really into anime? Or did you take a break from fandom for a while? A break from the collective activity of fandom? Yes. A break from individual interest? No.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom when you got into it and now? I can’t be sure because I was so, so isolated early on and not too keen on reaching out based on interest alone. I could say it’s way more social now, but what if that’s always been the case? One thing I can say with confidence is that it’s way, way, way easier to get everything. Cheaper, too. Damn kids.

Cai can be reached on Twitter. 

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#16: Gary M

Age: 18

Location: Canberra, Australia

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. Back in 2011 or 2012, I was given a copy of Hyper Magazine [an Australian video game magazine] and the back cover was dedicated to anime reviews. This issue had come with a DVD with a two-episode sampler of High School of the Dead as well as a couple of trailers.

I had also been a big fan of the One Piece manga without knowing that it was related to anime for a couple of years by this point.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? Well at first it was violence and tits, but in the series shortly after discovering it, I found that there were cool stories When I was 12, I discovered Deltora Quest and enjoyed it for this reason.

What did you think about High School of the Dead? How was it different than anything else you’d seen? I thought High School of the Dead was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Mostly because of the ecchi elements of it, but also the fusion with the action oriented elements of the series. Nothing that I had seen before it had looked or sounded like this show, nothing had a similar subject matter and nothing had shocked me as much as when I saw that first episode. It was really surprising to me to see it as something that could exist and that I had never heard of something like it.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? I think at the time it was Blue Exorcist.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? In the area I lived at the time (a small town in the countryside), I was the only person who was watching anime online. Other people around me were watching whatever the local DVD store had or what was on TV (mostly 4Kids).

How did you connect with other fans?  For a while, I didn’t. But eventually I found the forums of the sites that I was using to stream and this was in a period where I had extremely inconsistent Internet speeds, so on weekends or after school I would lay on my bed and just refresh the tab the forum was in while I waited for the episode to load in another tab. Eventually I found out about 4chan and I started using that as my main contact with other anime fans.

What was fandom like online? Were there certain sites people who were into anime congregated at? From my memory, the only places people were really talking about anime where 4chan and YouTube. I do remember some shows having their own forums or having a discussion section on their wiki. The fandom surrounding anime was really fractured from the way I remember it. People would stick to the things they liked and not really branch out that much.

What was the first anime-related purchase you made, and how much did it cost? Excluding things like YuGiOh and Pokemon cards, it would have been a figure of Charlotte Dunois from Infinite Stratos. She was wearing her piloting suit. It was a Sega Arcade figure so it was really low quality—I think it cost like $10 [Australian dollars] + shipping from AmiAmi.

Do you remember your first anime convention? It would have been Gammacon 2014. It was on the second floor of a hotel. It was more of a split between anime and gaming, not just an anime con. There was a small merchant area which had all these tables set up and it was mostly bootleg merchandise.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom when you got into it and now? I think the community has become more focused on the here and now of anime. While there are still people who are talking about older works (especially in the academic research area), they are much less common and people are in a way forgetful of past anime. Back when I started getting into anime discussions I saw active discussion about Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, and I don’t see that kind of thing today.

Ultimately, I think I was lucky with the time I got into anime because it let me experience two generations of anime discussion and culture—the new stuff, plus the old stuff people were still discussing. Now I think the culture is more and more based around the transience of anime as entertainment.

Gary can be reached on Twitter and YouTube.

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#15: Simon C

Age: 22

Location: United Kingdom

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. I began with YuGiOh, Pokemon, and Beyblade. Only really got started when a friend introduced me to Detective Conan in high school.

Tell me how your friend introduced you to Detective Conan. I cant entirely recall. He was a friend with whom I often talked about gaming and other nerdy things with. I think it was something he had just talked about watching and ended up showing to me. He was already familiar with anime from a young age, as his family was originally from Hong Kong. He had already watched a handful of shows such as Gundam, Doraemon, and so on.

How did you get a copy of Conan? As your probably aware, Detective Conan wasn’t legally available in the UK at the time. So we started out watching it by downloading it in parts that had been uploaded to YouTube. After a while we found the Detective Conan Translation Project, which at the time handled the majority of the fansubs for the show. They hosted most of the episodes on their site via Mega Upload downloads as well as torrents.

Why did your friend like it, and why did you? I think a major draw of the show, initially at least, was the fact that it encouraged viewers to guess the solution to each episodes mystery. It was in some ways a game to try and solve the case before the show presented the solution. The puzzles that were at the core of the show felt, at the time, unique, interesting, and difficult to solve—which made coming up with the solution before the  show even more satisfying. Often, me and my friend would talk about whether we had solved the mystery, what had tipped us off and what our wrong deductions had been. So in that way it also furthered the social aspect of the show. As with many long running shonens, once it had hooked us in, the characters and the promise of overarching plot developments kept us watching.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? Art style and more adult themes than regular cartoons.

When you said you liked its “adult themes,” what do you mean by that? Maybe I should say that it presented events and ideas that I hadn’t seen presented in an animated form before. For example, Detective Conan featured many gruesome murders, as well as suicides. I think more than that, anime presented darker themes in a much more accessible form than live action ever could have for me, at the time.  Detective Conan, for example, was very reminiscent of the many police procedural dramas that dominated UK TV at the time, (and still do). Yet, it presented the ideas of those shows in a more action-oriented style and cut down the length into a format  that was easier for me to consume. Meanwhile, the harem shows that I watched shortly after seemed to appeal directly to me with their teenage protagonists. Shows like Girls Bravo, as much as I would have hated to admit it back then, appealed directly to me as a hormonal teenage boy, and contained themes that I probably would have thought of as adult. By and large, anime was just something different and fresh that seemed to appeal directly to me, while still have at least a little of  what I felt was “adult” at the time.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Had little knowledge of the wider community at the time, just me and my friend.

For you, anime was just something you and your friend did together. What did other people think of it, like your parents? Did they think it was odd? I was, and still am, a very introverted person, thus I didn’t really talk about anime to anyone outside of those I already knew enjoyed it. I think rather than others finding the hobby odd, I rather prescribed that notion to it myself, and so was nervous when labeling myself as an anime fan or bringing the topic up in conversation. The majority of people around me already saw me as a very nerdy or geeky person so I think they saw it as just another extension of that, but again I was myself very aware that others might find it strange or odd.

Tell me about the first time you became aware of a larger fandom around anime. I was very quickly aware of the niche of the Detective Conan community through DCTP, Detective Conan World and other sites.  Finding the wider community I think was a bit more gradual and I don’t have that strong a memory of it. However I think it was around the time I discovered seasonal anime through Angel Beats. I think it was around this time that I discovered sites such as Anime News Network, Anime Planet, as well as the YouTube community.

Did you participate in online fandom? What was that like? I have used forums on and off but never for a long period of time. I did for a while run a YouTube vlog-style channel and participate in things like the 12 Days of Anime, but never really felt like I was interacting properly with the community through it. I also had a few a couple of goes at making AMVs [Anime Music Videos] as video editing was something that interested me at the time. I still like to keep up to date with the conversations surrounding shows via Twitter but I very rarely participate. I think again my lack of interaction mainly came down to my own shyness.

After Detective Conan, what did you really get into as an anime fan? After Conan, the same friend introduced me to Ah! My Goddess and through that we both watched/found quite a few harems and romantic comedies. At this point I found airing anime through Angel Beats and focused mainly on watching airing shows for a while. I think around this time I started to grow bored of a lot of the tropes I had seen in a large majority of the shows I had watched up until this point, and made it a mission to find and watch strange shows. So I ended up watching a lot of Gainax and Shaft shows, anything by Masaaki Yuasa, although at the time stuff like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya still felt strange to me. I think through this process I became interested in the history of these studios and their creators.

Do you remember your first anime-related purchase? How much did it cost? My first directly anime-related purchases were FLCL and Darker than Black on DVD, each of which cost around £15.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom when you got into it and now? Definitely availability, both in the content itself as well as information about the content. We have gone from maybe one show streaming legally when I was starting to watch anime to almost all shows streaming. This year we are also getting a multitude of theatrical releases. There is also certainly a greater wealth of anime content as well as a greater demand for it.

Simon can be reached on Twitter. 

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#14: Chito

Age: 21

Location: Lima, Peru

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. I’d say that the first time I watch an anime was back when I was five, when I first watched Cardcaptor Sakura, but apart from that, Dragon Ball Z, and Naruto, I really didn’t watch much anime nor I was interested.

It all changed in 2014. I was bored at home and decided to watch something on Netflix. There was an anime that looked like Cardcaptor Sakura that triggered my interest. I thought it was going to be the same fluffy adventures about a magical girl saving the world, but it wasn’t. It blew me away completely for how different it was from anything I’ve watched before—it was Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

Once finished, I wanted more. So I watched the next show in the queue: Sword Art Online. I fell in love with it and was really sad when I finished it, but then I read in a local anime magazine that a new season has just been released. I was really excited and wanted to watch it ASAP. Fortunately, the article shared the place where I could watch it. That’s how I discovered Crunchyroll.

I got an account, watched a lot more of anime, then started watching anime seasonally, then started importing Blu Rays, then started buying manga, then discovered anime blogging, then created my own anime blog, and now I’m filling this survey while listening to “Renai Circulation” (on loop).

That’s how I discovered anime as hobby and a passion, and I’m pretty happy with my current life.

What local magazine was that? The magazine is called “Club Manganime”. A few days after finishing SAO, I happened to see the cover of this magazine with GGO Kirito and the main villain, DeathGun, [both Sword Art Online characters] on it. I bought it immediately and looked for their SAO article. There was this little box at the bottom saying that we could watch SAO II for free on Crunchyroll. My older brother told me that his friend had a premium account and he was really nice to share his account with me. There I discovered lots of new things, and my days as an anime fan officially started.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? When I watched Madoka Magica, I was absorbed by its dark story and its characters. It was completely different from everything I’ve watched before. I thought it was going to be like Cardcaptor Sakura, but turned out to be one of the greatest anime ever created!

It was amazing and changed my views on anime as a media forever.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? At that time, Akame ga Kill, Tokyo Ghoul, and Sword Art Online II. I think ufotable’s Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works was airing as well.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? I guess it was really fun. It felt different from any other fandom. For the first time in my life, something felt really personal to me, and I wanted to share the things I loved with a lot of people.

Anime fans in Peru are really nice people and have a lot fun watching and discussing anime. And with the help of Twitter, I was able to be part of the English-speaking anime fandom. This part of the fandom helped me a lot to learn about this industry and, that way, love it even more.

What is anime fandom like in Peru? How is it different than English-speaking anime fandom? In my experience with anime fans here in Peru (especially beyond the Internet), I’d say anime fans here are very lively and like to have fun with what they’ve got. The times I talk to people in festivals and the like, they’re very nice. Casuals LOVE Dragon Ball, but the most hardcore fans tend to like lots of anime, especially the ones that became huge hits, like SAO, Attack on Titan, Tokyo Ghoul, etc. I really haven’t met people or read comments of people talking about things they don’t like, they usually just talk about the things they love. There isn’t much difference between Peruvian and English-speaking fandoms, but if I had to mention something, it would be the memes and the jokes, which are a bit dirtier than in English.

Can you share one of the dirty memes? No. I’m rather ashamed of them, to be honest.

What inspired you to start an anime blog? I’d say my main inspiration was reading Nick Creamer’s reviews at Anime News Network and discovering his own blog. Back in February 2016, I started working at a company where I had to use WordPress a lot. Shortly after I discovered that many people on Twitter talked a lot about anime in their own WordPress blogs, Nick included, I really wanted to talk about anime myself, too. So I said why not? I got my debit card, asked some friends to help me out with the website, and started writing! I started in Spanish, of course, but some months later, I discovered “12 days of anime“, which invited all anibloggers out there. I once again said why not, and started writing in English! My personal blog is called miblogotaku.com, and as I said before, I write in both languages. (but English is harder than I thought!)

How did your fandom change once you started creating content as well as consuming it? Once I started writing and sharing things on Twitter, I got to know a lot of very nice and fun people. Which really made me happy, because I felt there’s actually someone out there who actually likes and reads my stuff, and that feeling is really precious to me. There was one time one of these people took a screenshot of one of my articles and showed it to me on Twitter, telling me that he found that part hilarious and loved it. I was shocked and very happy at the same time.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom when you got into it and now? As a Peruvian, watching anime legally was a bit harder than it is now. Online stores didn’t ship DVDs or manga to my country,  and if they did, shipping costs were very expensive. Licensing restrictions were hell to me, especially when Funimation licensed something I wanted to watch. But time has passed and shipping costs have gone down. Amazon started sending more stuff to my country, and the impossible “marriage” between FUNI and Crunchyroll happened, bringing even more anime than ever before.

Fall 2016 was the golden season to me, as everything was available in Latin America. Even Amazon Prime Video became available here, and I’m getting an account soon only to watch Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul. And there’s even a Mexican anime festival that is bringing A Silent Voice to my country!!! Believe it or not, back in 2014 I could just dream about these things, now they’re slowly becoming something possible and even true. It’s a very good time to be an anime fan.

Chito can be reached on Twitter.