Category: Male

Age: 49

Location: Grand Rapids, MI

When did you discover anime? I remember watching Speed Racer in 1974 when I would have been like seven. I also had some Shogun Warrior toys from when I was 10 because I thought they looked cool (still have them, BTW). But for anime as something with a specific aesthetic and history, that would be watching Robotech in 1985 when I was 17. I found it on afternoon TV in the weeks between finishing a summer job and going off to college. When I got to college, I found it on the San Francisco station and it was just wrapping back around to episode one, so a small crowd of dormmates started watching it in my room every weekday afternoon at 4. One of my roommates joined in enthusiastically; the other went on to become a literal billionaire. So, remember kids: don’t watch anime, go be evil and rich instead.

When you discovered Robotech in high school, did you recognize it as the same medium that the Speed Racer of your childhood was? I knew it was related, because the visual style was obviously different from American TV cartoons. But I didn’t get a full understanding until I found written sources I could learn from. They did a coffee table book for Robotech, available at comic book shops, and its last chapter was an entire history of manga and anime, so that’s where I first learned about Osamu Tezuka, Leiji Matsumoto, and big titles like Gundam that hadn’t come over yet, etc.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? The storytelling, without a doubt. There was little continuity in 1980s TV, and only anime (and miniseries) had the novelistic approach that’s so popular in scripted TV today. In a way, Robotech was kind of like our animated soap opera, as we were all on pins and needles about whether Rick would end up with Minmay or Lisa, or if Dana would get Zor’s head put back together before it was too late. But it was better than a soap opera because it didn’t just go on forever: things changed, people died, and each chapter of the series came to a solid conclusion.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Well, I’ve said enough about Robotech. Rich, a guy down the hall, also told us about having seen Star Blazers a few years earlier where he grew up, but I’d never seen it (I guess we didn’t get it in Detroit?). As I started getting exposed to the early fandom (see next few questions), I found out about stuff that was popular in fan circles in the late ’80s like Kimagure Orange Road and Urusei Yatsura, though I had no access to it at the time. And when I’d go to hobby shops that imported model kits, I learned the names of other mech franchises of the day: Gundam, Orguss, Dunbine, and the rest.

Your story is different from others about the ’90s because it sounds like you were able to watch stuff legally on American TV. Do you remember what channel? As you got more into anime, how did you find stuff that wasn’t on TV? As the saying goes, “ANIME DEMANDS SUFFERING!” It was actually a little better in the ’80s, because in a big city (I grew up in Detroit and went to college in the Bay Area, then came back to Michigan), you’d have three network affiliates (ABC, NBC, CBS) and then some independent stations. The network stations had game shows and soap operas for their daytime schedules, and the independents would run cartoons. Usually, there’d be an obvious pecking order among the independents: like in Detroit, channel 50 would have the best stuff, then 20, and then 62. Anime, being cheaper than first-run syndication like GI Joe or Transformers, would show up on the lesser independents. So if you really dug deep, and looked at TV Guide listings for 6AM on the crappiest channels, you’d find stuff like Macron One, Tranzor Z, or Teknoman. And remember, Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball both got their American start as syndicated shows on these stations. When I was out of grad school and living in an apartment with my girlfriend in Lansing, MI, I found that if I moved the TV and carefully re-pointed the antenna, I could pick up the Grand Rapids station that played Exo-Squad, an US cartoon that was explicitly an attempt to make an American anime-style space opera (in recent years, its creators have straight up said they were inspired by Gundam). In the ’90s, these independents became the Fox, WB, and UPN stations, and the cheap anime got replaced by the Fox and WB kids’ blocks.

Age: 27

Location: California

When did you discover anime? Like most people in my age group, I discovered anime during the Pokemon boom. I didn’t get a Game Boy to play the Pokemon Blue videogame until a bit later, but I did have easy access to the trading cards and the TV show. While the show itself was grouped together among other Saturday morning cartoons, there was just a certain thing about Pokemon (besides its popularity) that told me it was different somehow. I already forget when exactly I heard the term used, but in no time, the show became synonymous with the term “anime” for me.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? I was never into fantasy worlds with dragons, warlocks, and the like. However, when growing up, those types of worlds seemed to be the only option when it came to some kind of fictional escape from reality. Anime, on the other hand, didn’t seem to play by those rules. The lore of shows like Pokemon or Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball took from a different culture than other shows I watched at the time and as such felt like something less grounded in reality and that much more fun for it.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Pokemon by far. Unlike certain pop culture phenomena where its notoriety relied on how “American” the household itself was, Pokemon was known by absolutely everyone. You know something is big when your grandpa, whose didn’t primarily speak English, still knew what Pokemon was.

What language did your grandpa speak? How did you find out he knew about Pokemon? My grandpa primarily spoke Ilocano, which is a secondary language in the Philippines. He lived with my parents in order to help raise me and my sister, but once a year, he’d always go back to his home town in the Philippines during festival season and come back with souvenirs. One year, while he was back in the Philippines, my mom told me it would be nice to write and send him a letter. Alongside my letter, I ended up sending him a drawing—a copy of the first Pokemon movie poster, logo and all (I distinctly remember using the newspaper’s ad for the movie as a reference). Upon his arrival back in the states that year, he came back with a ton of Pokemon souvenirs—tin pencil boxes, a pocket mirror, folders, pencils all bright yellow with some markings to indicate it was in the style of Pokemon‘s Pikachu in some way or another. I’m sure the picture I drew him was enough of a lead to go off of to figure out if the area had any related merchandise.

Also, what did your family think of your interest in anime, especially as it continued into high school and beyond? My parents were never the type to discourage things I was interested in, even if anime did seem rather juvenile from their perspective. On occasion, they’d see me browsing online and chatting on anime forums or reading manga, but they never directly addressed it in one way or another. I think part of this was the cultural gap between myself and them. Both my parents grew up in the Philippines, so they’ve gotten used to seeing something they were unfamiliar with and being open to its entertainment value even if they didn’t necessarily “get it” themselves. I was clearly enjoying anime, and I never went as far as imitating the violence or develop a negative attitude from it, so they just let things be.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? While anime existed when I grew up, there were definitely shows that people would watch while still not considering themselves fans of anime. Those earlier shows were able to cross that barrier of “weird Japan” in a way that most anime still can’t do, simply because they were the first to do so (at least for that particular era). As such, I wouldn’t consider myself part of “anime fandom” until I was well into high school with shows like Naruto and Bleach.

By high school, there were a lot more shows readily available in America to the point that people (myself included) felt a bit more comfortable with being considered an “anime fan” rather than specifically a fan of one show. And while that lends to the misconception of anime being a genre over a medium, it does allow for people of similar interests to find each other. While I didn’t attend it religiously, I would attend my school’s anime club from time to time and be subject to its president’s pompous ramblings on what obscure anime deserved the highest praises over mainstream trash. It’s pretty much what today’s anime fandom experience is, honestly, except with a lot more torrenting and blank-disc-burning over internet streaming.

That sounds like a crappy situation. Did you have any other interactions with anime fans around that time, or were they all kind of like that? In general, I’ve kept my circle of friends small, making sure to weed out or just ignore anyone that had a “holier than thou” type of approach to their fandom, hence why I didn’t go to my high school’s anime club often, even in senior year when I knew the head honchos of the club. The people I interacted with on a regular enough basis to consider “friend” in high school were either more into videogames and simply tolerated my own anime-related ramblings (as I did their videogame ramblings), or was someone I considered an “equal” in fandom– someone with similar anime tastes and opinions as me. Slightly unrelated, but it’s for this same reason that I’ve hated going to comicbook shops– so many egos in such a concentrated space.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? While streaming wasn’t what it was today by a long shot (YouTube came around my sophomore year of high school. I remember the one “full episode” type of upload I saw was of a Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends episode.), people still had means of accessing anime online. Certain corners of the internet would provide access to torrenting anime illegally. And if you wanted to share a certain series with a friend, you’d have to transfer those episodes from your computer to a disc (read: Multiple discs. Dozens of discs.).

In terms of fandom within the internet, social media wasn’t nearly as prominent as it was today, either. So rather than twitter or tumblr which serve as a nice catch-all for multiple fandoms, at the time I resorted to online forums. Being a big Dragon Ball fan, I immediately discovered the wonderful community at daizex (currently named “Kanzenshuu“), so I never had the misfortune of having to deal with much in terms of vitriol-posters. [Editor’s note: Kanzenshuu’s web master has also submitted an Anime Origin Story.] Being primarily a “sub over dub” type of community, however, it did breed an air of know-it-all-snootiness, though I’d take that over an ignorant fan every time. To this day, I still keep up with a handful of those fellow forum-goers, though the conversation’s shifted over to Twitter.

Do you remember your first convention? Not specifically, but considering my location, it must have been Fanime during high school. I was dropped off by my parents and was immediately given a sensory overload. The dense concentration of nerds, specifically ANIME nerds, was both daunting and soothing, and I definitely took a lot more time wandering through the aisles of merchandise, sifting through what I could only find in small doses at comic shops and occasional Japantown trips before then.

I’m not much of a social person, however, so anime conventions have always felt like this giant oxymoron for me—so many anti-social people gathering together and socializing over this one very specific thing that’s treated as mainstream only within the confines of that building. Anime conventions, especially earlier ones I’ve attended, have been more for me to browse the merchandise in-person more than anything else.

Tell me about Japantown. What was it like discovering it as an anime fan? I grew up in the San Jose area, so I had the option of going to either the Japantown in San Jose or making the slightly longer trip to San Francisco. I never had a liking to American comic book shops just because there was so much ego involved with whoever ran the store. So to go to a shop in Japantown that was similar physically, but run so much more casually felt like a breath of fresh air. Seeing walls and display cases lined with Pokemon cards and figures where I couldn’t read any of the text on it since it was in Japanese felt so much more welcoming. I don’t specifically remember any of the store runners, but it was in this casual and quiet environment that I was able to better appreciate anime and further branch out into other things like figures and manga in the first place. The feeling was only multiplied when a mall closer by opened an Asian-exclusive hobby store.

As a self-described “not much of a social person,” how do you most often participate in anime fandom? I mainly do fan-art, but I also do manga/anime reviews on Fandom Post and have also done a piece on ANN a few months back. And in the case that freelancing doesn’t take any ideas I pitch, I end up just posting them on my personal blog.

For you, what’s the biggest difference between being an anime fan then and now? The biggest difference would have to be the library of what’s available to you. Even if you took some of the less seedy routes to get your anime fix back in the day, it would still be limited to what the distributors released. And at the time when I grew up, the majority of those were action-centric series, resulting in distributors playing catch-up and this strange wave of anime from the 80s and 90s ending up being the most readily available anime for consumption stateside (I remember Yu-Gi-Oh being announced in the states and thinking “oh, they’re trying to catch up by taking a chance on a newer show this time”). Now, there’s so many genres and subgenres released and available via streaming alone that the opposite problem has happened– America has finally caught up to what’s currently being released in Japan and anime fans have become far more picky as to what they want to consume. Lots of “sifting through the chaff to get to the wheat” types of moments are becoming more commonplace because there’s such an oversaturation of anime. It beats the alternative of not having enough and knowing there’s more out there, though.

Gabe can be reached on Twitter. 

Age: 45

Location: Florida

When did you discover anime? (Note: Not long ago, I wrote an essay that contains many of the answers to these questions. I’ll be quoting parts of that essay here as my response.)

For a while, I didn’t even know the name of the first anime series I ever watched. I didn’t even know it was “anime”. It was merely this curious-looking TV show that appeared in one of the leased-time programming blocks on a UHF station that reached my house in northern New Jersey in the early 1980s. Most animated shows were about cartoon animals beating each other into bloodless submission; this one was about a boy with a shaved head living in Japan’s distant past.

The show was called Ikkyu-san, and its sheer oddity (at the time, anyway) made me go back to the leased-time programming block to see what else might turn up. Sure enough, later on, other shows also from Japan appeared: Space Battleship Yamato, Galaxy Express 999. All of them, including Ikkyu-san, aired with English subtitles. (Between those and the foreign films that aired on PBS, the idea of reading my movies was something I got comfortable with at an early age.) But again, the idea that I was watching something special called “anime” hadn’t entered my mind yet.

In a way, I got into anime backwards. The idea of Japan being a place of interesting things had lodged in my mind early enough that at the tender age of ten, I found myself spending one of my last dollars on a Yukio Mishima novel that proved too tough for me to plow through at the time. A little later came Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, just then in theaters for the first time, and the impact of that sent me scurrying back to the library with a whole passel of names to research: Kurosawa himself, composer Toru Takemitsu, actor Tatsuya Nakadai. The books I unearthed about Japan’s live-action film industry dated from too far back and were too narrow in scope to say anything substantive about animation. There had to be more.

It wasn’t until six years later, when Akira got fairly dropped on my head by a friend, that I was reminded in a full-blown way that yes, Japan did animation too. Boy, did they ever. With far more ambition and enormity of purpose than most anything in this side of the Pacific, too, from what I’d seen. That touched off the second phase of my “Japan thing”, punctuated not only by buying up anime itself, but back issues of the late lamented Mangajin and remaindered copies of Anime UK. A whole culture of others existed who were as curious as I was.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? Some of it was the thrill of discovering something that, at the time, seemed like completely undiscovered territory. It wasn’t until I was into my college years that I realized the material in question had a specific label. That made it all the more mysterious, and for that reason all the more inviting.

The other thing that appealed to me was how it presented the absolute flipside, as it were, of everything I’d come to know about Japan through its literature and its cinema. Much of that material had been staid, sober, straight-laced. This stuff was anything but. The contrast between the two made me feel like I had been given a privileged glimpse at Japan—at least until it became a relatively mainstream phenomenon in the West.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? At the time of my first exposure, there wasn’t one, as anime hadn’t yet become a thing of any kind in the U.S.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time?
As I was to later understand it, there was essentially no fandom in the U.S. worth speaking of at the time. There were people scattered here and there who had stumbled across this stuff and were spreading enthusiasm about it essentially by word of mouth between peers. But no fandom as we currently know it.

Where and how did you access anime? Were you able to buy it at stores? Most access was by way of whatever was available at the local video rental store. Very occasionally, I picked up an import LaserDisc (albeit with no English subs); occasionally, bootlegs as well. Sometimes I’d go to the Tower Records Bargain Annex in downtown NYC and pick up cheap stuff from the cut-out bin. (I also found many back issues of “Animage” there, which only fueled my curiosity all the more.) But it wasn’t until DVD came along—and until I had more disposable income generally!—that I could really begin to satisfy my curiosity properly.

In such an early time for fandom, what did your family and friends think of your interest in anime? When they did know about it, they understood it mostly as an adjunct to my existing interest in Japan. That impression was doubled when I started buying the now-defunct magazine “Mangajin”, which I wrote briefly for just before they went bust. My other friends who were fans saw it as being essentially the same kind of thing as being a fan of, say, European comics/BD: a niche taste.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? I had to wait until the Internet came along before I became fully aware of the breadth and depth of anime fandom. The fans had been out there waiting all along for something like that to help them find each other. Before that, there were U.S. and U.K.-based publications like “Anime UK”, and publishers like Dark Horse Comics, but they were very few and far between. My only connections with other fans until the Internet really took off was almost entirely by accident.

What kind of accident? Most of how I bumped into other anime/manga fans during that time period was by way of other things—role-playing games, for instance, or meetings at conventions that didn’t really have an anime theme track. I was always surprised by the mere fact that they knew about anime or manga at all. They also almost always had some novel facet of it to share that I’d never been aware of before, again because access to any information at all about such stuff was so hard to come by.

How did you first get Internet and discover over fans that way? I was an early adopter. In the early ’90s, I was an avid dial-up BBS user, and from there I gravitated to online services that were the precursor of modern Internet connectivity. A key one was CompuServe, which had SIGs (Special Interest Groups) that covered a great many subjects. As weird as this sounds, I never thought to look specifically for anything anime/manga related in such SIGs, in big part because I always believed the whole thing was still too obscure to merit that kind of documentation! Eventually, when my CompuServe account became an actual Internet account (by way of another early dial-up provider), I bumped into the first web sites put up by anime fans.

Do you remember your first convention? The first convention, period, that I attended was not specifically anime-themed—it was a general SF/fantasy con with some minor anime track programming. The folks in the anime track were a lot more welcoming than those in the general SF track. Later, when I attended my first general anime con, I found that feeling to have been spot-on.

Tell me how you started writing about anime for About.com. It happened twice, actually! I started back in the late ’90s, when they first appeared under the moniker “The Mining Company” (as in, mining the web for useful information), and managed their anime subsite for several months. I left mainly because I was having trouble juggling the workload, and because I was able to make more money doing freelance work in other venues.

Some years later, in 2010, I circled back and saw they needed an anime guide once again, re-applied, and was accepted. I kept that position for three years, but I didn’t like the format constraints imposed on my work, struggled with their toolset, and grew annoyed with the general lack of guidance. After three years of declining traffic they elected not to renew my contract, and I didn’t shed any tears. One month later I launched Ganriki.org.

Tell me about your anime-inspired novels, and anime-inspired writing in general. In the spirit of this project, how did that start? The first project I did that really fit in that category was probably my 2007 novel Summerworld, which was as much an outgrowth of my general studies of Japan as it was an attempt to do something that had an anime flavor or theme to it. The same went for Tokyo Inferno, which stemmed from me wanting to write something that was set in the Taishō Era, and that had a strong horror/supernatural flavor to it. A third such project in that vein was The Four-Day Weekend, a sort-of love letter to the fandom/convention scene, although that was more about the culture around anime/manga (and the ways people create substitute families through appreciation for such things) than the subject itself.

After that, though, I made a conscious effort to move further way from doing explicit homage to anime/manga in my work. (Another book from this period that did have such things in it, The Underground Sun, remains unfinished, and I don’t know if I’ll ever complete it at this rate.) But a lot of what I took away from the experience of creating those books continues to influence the work I do now, even if my current work isn’t explicitly influenced by anime/manga

What I wanted to keep was not any one particular set of elements or aesthetic sensibilities—it didn’t have to be set in Japan, or employ tropes familiar to anime fans, or what have you. Rather it was about the narrative energy, the thematic fearlessness, the thrill of encountering something unfamiliar but at the same time immediate and accessible. Watching and reading anime and manga sparked those feelings in me, and I wanted to find any way I could to create them on my own for my audience, in a way that only I could.

For you personally, what’s the biggest difference between being an anime fan then and now? The biggest thing I can think of is the ease of access and entry. It used to be appallingly difficult to learn *anything* at all about anime or manga; now, it’s more a question of which of a dozen different competing venues to choose from and be flooded with.

But that also means there’s that much less curation going on. Once, a given label could only license a handful of properties for U.S. distribution, and so they had to pick wisely. Now, you have access to every show airing in Japan within hours of it debuting over there. That means more of the burden of making choices falls on your shoulders. And let’s face it—a lot of what was released back in the day wasn’t “classic”; it was crap, too, and some of it really only got elevated to the level of classic because there was so little of the stuff available in the first place that you tended to latch onto whatever was offered.

There’s so much anime and manga out there right now that it’s difficult for people just coming in the door to know where to start or how to proceed. Sometimes they walk in, look around, feel lost, and walk right back out again. The usual tactics of marketing for a given demographic only go so far, especially as people find that good properties defy demographic boundaries. (I can’t *only* recommend Revolutionary Girl Utena or Princess Jellyfish to women, but I know they will find them especially heartening.) So the biggest difference between then and now is, where before we had to learn how not to die of thirst, now we have to learn how now to drown.

Serdar can be reached on Twitter and his blog. 

Age: 31

Location: Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. Probably around 1993? Here in Canada, we had the original Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon on the only national kids network at the time (YTV). I remember really getting into Dragon Ball and consequently after that Dragon Ball Z which I had to watch through a cable converter that my parents had at the time. From there I eventually was using paper route money to buy VHS of other series, along with the Pokémon explosion.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? Really it was the artwork I think, and the concepts. You’d never see a show as original as Dragon Ball was at the time on kids’ television in North America. A blend of humour and action all thrown together with interesting characters… that was something else all together.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Definitely Sailor Moon in Canada. It was a huge thing for both boys and girls which was great. I liked it a fair bit, but we always got weird syndication issues here meaning it was a lot of re-runs and not new content. Eventually it became a lost interest as Pokémon came along, and Dragon Ball Z.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? If it wasn’t Pokémon… you were pretty isolated. I had one friend who was into anime other then me and introduced me to a ton of the great classics. Slayers, Slayers Next and Neon Genesis Evangelion are only a few of the things we managed to watch together (though in retrospect if his grandparents, who he lived with at the time, had known what on earth NGE was… well we’d never have seen that).

Tell me more about the friend who was more into anime than you. Did you bond because of anime? How did they get into anime? We definitely bonded because of anime. He was actually a home schooled individual for most of his life, so I didn’t ever really get a chance to hang out with him at school. As a result of this though, I’d walk over to his place after school and watch anime with him. We really didn’t have much in common aside from RPGs and anime honestly, so you could almost say it was the basis of our friendship. He got into anime himself because of other friends he had on the mainland. Not to bore you with a geographic limitation thing, but I was born on Prince Edward Island which at the time didn’t have any attachment to the mainland of Canada. The result of that was a really slow pickup of mainland things, this included anime VHS at the time, so we were limited to what was shown on TV really.

Did his grandparents ever find out about NGE or other shows you guys watched and have opinions? What did your family think about anime? Oh his grandparents knew that we watched things (usually they were the ones buying the VHS), but had absolutely no idea what we were watching in terms of the content. In retrospect NGE was definitely a bit much for a pre-teen/13-year-old as I had mentioned previously. But all they saw were the VHS box art, and it looked benign enough. My own family just sort of assumed they were cartoons in the traditional sense which I had always been really into since TMNT and Transformers back in the 80’s.

Did you stay a fan the whole time up until today? What kept your interest? 
Yep! Proud to say I’ve been a big fan for 20 years at this point, though my interests have expanded just beyond anime itself naturally. I think what keeps my interest going right now is the stories and world building. There is something special about the worlds that anime and manga creators work on that wouldn’t feel right or as in place if it was done live-action style. Other then that, the animation and art style itself keeps me coming back too with a recent example being a series like ACCA (love those colours).

What was the first fandom you got really invested in? Easily DBZ because it was a bit more pronounced in my area. I got into addons to the anime itself pretty heavily and purchased TGC cards, VHS tapes and some models that were extremely marked up at local stores.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today? Being around as long as I have I think what’s going on with anime fandom today isn’t so different from most other fandoms. Really intensity and access are at an all time high, and as a result you have people being pretty zealous about their fandoms. It’s something I don’t really agree with personally but I’m also getting older, so I’m not sure if it’s just my perception or if it’s reality.

What I mean when I say zealous about fandom there is a bigger or more vocal amount of arguing about Anime A being better then Anime B. There doesn’t really seem to be a limit on where a line is drawn when these comparisons are being made either. It’s almost as if the fandom fears that their preferred type of anime won’t get produced because there is a new type that has been seeing a rise in popularity in this cycle or something of the sort. I’ll never really understood that approach because we’re in a great spot right now with the amount of anime being produced. It keeps growing significantly and while there are always some clunkers in the bunch, the good stuff that has been made is really great!

Kris can be reached on Twitter. 

Age: 30

Location: New Brunswick, New Jersey

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. If I really think about it, the first anime I ever saw were the likes of Voltron, but I obviously didn’t know that it was originally anime back in the late ’80s. I also had a Captain Power VHS tape as a kid that was animated, but didn’t realize it was “anime” until much later.

The first time I really understood what I was watching was “anime” was when FoxKids was airing Digimon and Escaflowne, and then when Toonami was airing Rurouni Kenshin and G Gundam. In 2004 I truly went in full bore as a fan with Fullmetal Alchemist.

At first you watched anime not knowing it was anime. How did you learn it was anime, and how did that change your perception of it? While I’m sure I heard the term “anime” here & there during the 90s, I didn’t really identify what anime was until around the time I was watching Toonami. I do remember watching Pokémon as a child & not identifying it as “anime”, and I think during that short time Fox aired its edited version of Escaflowne it did advertise it specifically as “anime”, so I guess I would say that was the exact moment I learned stuff like that was anime.

As for perception, it did add a bit of an extra allure to it, especially when Fox Kids (later FoxBox and 4Kids TV) started focusing more on airing anime than domestic animation. It was honestly a really cool time to get into anime, as I had a bunch of really cool series to watch, like more Digimon, Dinozaurs, Flint the Time Detective, Monster Rancher, Ultimate Muscle, Shaman King, and even a little tokusatsu in the form of dubbed Ultraman Tiga. Alongside Toonami, anime was being given this special feeling, as though it was something that most domestic animated series just didn’t focus on being. It was to the point where, I’ll admit, I was one of those “Anime isn’t a cartoon” kind of fan, but eventually I grew up and realized that separation like that is pointless.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? It was so different from what was being made here in North America. Even as a kid, when I saw Digimon, I could tell that it was doing things in a way that I had not seen before with animated television. As I became more and more of a fan, I also discovered my favorite appeal: Anime can truly be about anything.

Could you elaborate? Remember the old ad slogan of “There’s an app for that”? That same concept applies to anime, which is something you really can’t say about animation anywhere else in the world. Ever since I started really getting into anime and manga, I’ve seen, read, or even simply heard of stories about firefighting, wine tasting, basketball, baseball, boxing, American football, soccer, golfing, bread baking, Chinese cuisine, mahjong, go, card games, yo-yos, pachislot, kyotei racing, car racing, cleaning up space garbage, vikings, all manner of world history (not just Japanese), atomic bomb survivors, adapting classic literature (including even the Bible), teaching, poetry, even fictional butt and breast combat, among many others. Plus, this is all alongside the stereotypical stories of ninjas, samurai, swords and sorcery, giant robots, space wars, romances, comedies, and the like. I don’t even have to be initially interested in any of these subjects in order to enjoy them, because they are just well told stories with great characters and heart-felt emotion; I’m not into sports normally, for example, but I have no qualms with watching a sports anime. If you can think of a subject, you can probably be told “There’s an anime/manga for that”, and I don’t think you can honestly say that about any other country’s animation industry. More than anything, what I love the most about anime is that the Japanese are willing to tell a story using anything they can think of, which in turn creates a catalog so diverse that I may never stop being amazed at what comes from it.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Without a doubt, Fullmetal Alchemist. Even someone who doesn’t really follow the general crowd just had to watch FMA, & it was the anime that truly got me to become a fan of the medium in general.

Why did Fullmetal Alchemist resonate with you like no other show before? Admittedly, the main reason I even gave FMA a try in the first place was because I had first heard of it through the video game tie-ins, which lead to me finding out about FUNimation licensing it… Yes, I watched fansubs because it got licensed; everyone had their moments of idiocy back when they were younger. Regardless, once I started watching I was hooked, and it was simply because, even compared to the other anime I has seen prior to it (either on TV or the boxset or two I had bought before then), it was very different. Ed and Al Elric’s journey to regain their missing bits of humanity just felt so tonally different from the Digimons, Arc the Lads, and G Gundams I had seen before. The story was outstanding, the characters instantly memorable, the action thrilling, and overall it just truly, finally, made me want to be a fan of anime in a more definitive & focused way, rather than the fan-on-the-side that I was before FMA.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? At the time, digital fansubs were the big thing, so it was a little wild and crazy at times. Multiple groups were doing the same shows, with varying levels of accuracy, style, and polish, and that resulted in most people preferring some groups over others. The end result was either prioritizing speed (for those who wanted it yesterday) or coming out a little later, but with a more polished & natural translation.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? If yes, how? If no, how did you connect with other fans? I quickly joined the AnimeOnDVD.com forums, now known as The Fandom Post forums, and it was a wild time. There was such a strong focus on not just what titles were being brought over, but also on how well done the DVDs were on a highly technical level. Admittedly, I didn’t quite relate to them on the same exact level, but the passion was still there between all of us (both on a good level, as well as a not-so-good level).

How did you express your fandom early on? For a good number of years, I was simply content with watching anime and participating in forum talk over at AnimeonDVD.com. When Chris Beveridge sold the site to Mania.com, a blog section came with the updated forums, and over there I did start writing some pieces on all sorts of stuff, usually regarding anime or gaming; the Mania forums are now long gone, but that proto-blog wasn’t anything special. After I graduated from Rutgers in 2009, though, I started up a YouTube channel, where I reviewed various video games and smaller name anime. To be honest, I put next to no effort in any of those videos, especially from a production standpoint, though I somehow got props and positive feedback from them; I still can’t explain that. After a year of that, I finally decided to start up a proper blog, one where I could actually use my college-educated writing skills and deliver much more detailed and free form reviews for anime that have been forgotten or simply never talked about before. That wound up becoming The Land of Obscusion, and I’ve been doing that for over six years now.

And, really, the blog is simply a more focused and expressive form of my fandom, as I’ve always aimed more on watching what others are NOT talking about. It’s been like that since I truly got into anime (I didn’t move on to Evangelion or Cowboy Bebop after FMA, but rather I watched Ragnarok the Animation, Tokyo Underground, & Tales of Eternia the Animation), & it’s how I operate to this very day.

Do you remember your first convention? What was it, and what was it like?
My first convention was Otakon 2006, and all me and my friends did during the entire thing was buy tons of manga (and some anime) from the dealer’s room. Looking back on it now, I wonder how exactly we seemingly spent a three-day weekend simply buying manga, and we all bought a metric ton of it. Some of it was great & some of it was crap, but we were hungry for manga & just wanted more to read. Still, I did wish that we actually checked out more of the con, which we started doing from the next year on.

Your first Otakon you spent buying stuff. What about the next year? While I loved having such a large amount of manga to read while on the bus I used to get around Rutgers at the time, I quickly understood that there was an entire convention that I missed out on. From the second year on, I made more of an effort to experience more of what Otakon had to offer. In 2007 I attended some panels and checked out some of the video rooms, alongside perusing the dealer’s room. In 2008 my friends and I went to the JAM Project concert and had the time of our lives, while also doing more of what we did the year prior. Today, I am much more of a panel attendee, and have even moved on to running my own panels. My Otakon experiences have more or less mirrored my evolution as an anime fan, starting as a simple devourer of content before becoming one who wishes to learn more, and now being someone who wishes to show others.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today?  Easily the biggest contrast is the overall changing of the guard and a general relaxation of what makes one a “real fan.” While I didn’t have to deal with “gatekeepers,” like those who started in the old days did, there was still a bit of a hierarchy in the forum culture when I started. There were some people, who will remain nameless, who seemed to take delight in demeaning those who didn’t follow their “superior” tastes and preferences over at the old AnimeonDVD.com forums (and this also followed through to Mania to an extent), and it was primarily because they were giant fans of what was selling (and getting licensed) the most at the time; they truly felt that they were better (i.e. more of a “real fan”) than others for such petty reasons.

Today, however, the concept of a “real fan” is generally looked at with disdain, and that makes me happy. Nowadays, we get ~95% of everything anime that gets made, which in turn allows a person to be a fan to whatever extent or form he or she wants. You can be a guy who follows the newest stuff religiously, you can be a gal who waits until something finishes before checking it out, you can be someone who enjoys what others may not, you can stick with only watching a show or two at a time, you can watch something for the hope of seeing beautifully fluid animation, or you can be a weirdo like me who purposefully watches the stuff barely anyone else does, and the best part of all is that all of them are now considered “anime fans” equally. People can be as “real” as they want to be today, and I only wish it was like that back in the mid-00s.

George can be reached on Twitter and at his blog. 

Age: 31

Location: California

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. In a mix of unsorted memories, I have big Tom Toonami, bootlegs of Inuyasha, setting timers for Adult Swim to catch .hack//sign and Cowboy Bebop, and waking up early to try to watch Pokemon but getting dragged to school. DVDs of Tenchi in Tokyo and random bits of El Hazard from the Chinese video rental place as well.

You gave me a big mix of unsorted memories! Could you give this to me in a timeline, maybe?  These memories take place during my middle school years,—1996 to 2000—when my family had cable TV for the first time. From there I would discover Toonami and Adult Swim.

I think in that era started with Sailor Moon, and looking it up I remember bits of Robotech and Dragon Ball Z. During this time there was a video rental place in a Hong Kong market my mom would take us to rent movies. They had Sailor Moon LD if I remember correctly, and a limited list of anime titles. Since I did not have anyone to reference these titles off of, I pretty much picked up what was on the shelf. There were no complete runs so I didn’t really watch any show to completion. The place has long since closed down with the downturn of all home rental businesses, so I can’t really pull up everything I have ever seen from there. Tenchi Muyo and El Hazard ended up sticking in my mind the most, though I think I only saw three episodes of El Hazard off of their one DVD. I think the Escaflowne movie was there as well.

When Pokemon first came out I heard how popular it was from school, which got me to try to watch it. I think I had to look up its air time in the TV guide book that got delivered. I remember the show’s first run was on channel 13, weekdays at 6:30 am. But my parents weren’t very hot on me wasting time in the morning before school watching TV. I only caught a few episodes before I had to stop. Both my parents worked so I had more time during the afternoon runs of shows.

I think around 1999 I finally learned how to set our VCR to tape shows, and I used this to record normal Saturday morning cartoons because I took Chinese classes that started during these show times and I really liked cartoons back in the day. This carried over to recording the Adult Swim stuff at night as well. This is where I remember Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, and .hack//Sign came up.

My younger sister at some point, probably around ’98 or later, brought home Inuyasha DVDs from a friend of hers. Actually I think this was during Toonami’s run of Inuyasha, because I remember watching dubs of the first season, and then subs for a bit from these DVD’s. They were bad subs, that I remember.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it?
I think first was the more serious tones compared to the Nicktoons were showing at the time. Action and animation were big parts of it. I also found myself a “slice of life” genre fan and really only anime had these stories. I think shows with a slow pace to them was a stark contrast to the mile-a-minute activity American cartoons had, which kind of stuck with me.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Doraemon. I think that series is Simpsons-old.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? The high school anime scene was disjointed. Someone tried to get something going for the lunch hour, but it was way too short for anything to happen. I got more into IRC groups, 4chan, and the Adult Swim anime forums at that time. Never really connected well due to that online nature. Only really got somewhere in college with a proper anime club.

What was college anime club like? I went to UCI for my college, right out of high school, and the club there was Cal Animage Epsilon. There I met a few people who had a good history of anime going back to the tape sharing days. They showed pretty much all pirated stuff, except for a quarter or two of working with Funimation’s Anime Club program, which I remember watching Kiddy Grade and answering their questionnaire. For the first three years the club president was really driven to show things we could not normally see, and then also show things that were just freaky. Sexy Commando was one thing he brought on us. Anything with 12 episodes worked great so we could finish the series within the quarter. One interesting thing he got us to watch was Densha Otoko, which got me to look into Jdrama for a while. I’m looking through the club page of shows and they really covered quite a gamut.

At this time I really got the hang of pirating anime and manga. I made use of IRC while on the college campus, and branched to bittorrent when I moved off campus. My second run of roommates were folks I met at the club, and since they didn’t have TV, more entertainment came from the internet.

Do you remember your first convention? What was it, and what was it like?
Anime Expo while it was still in Anaheim. I volunteered for a free badge for a Saturday and a Sunday I believe. Missed the nice panels cause I was working and was too young to have money to shop, and no real way to record the experience.

Did you go back to Anime Expo or did your volunteer experience sour you on it? Up until their second time at the Los Angeles Convention Center, I would more or less make it to the Expo for a day of volunteering. I believe their first year at LACC I went with a full time position, and shacked up with others for the entire convention. I think for the early years, while it was at Anaheim, being able to catch bits of the Cosplay Masquerade was interesting enough. About that time the video rooms were showing things I could find online, but missing panels was neither here nor there, since I was mostly drawn to one by their subject matter. I never really planned for a panel; only seeing them on the schedule when I got there. I stopped volunteering when they made the change to not providing badges for people who volunteered, and I got my own job. I still went for each year since then, think I missed one and I’m not going to this year’s either. They’ve been getting even more crowded and your ability to attend things on a whim is really hurting.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today? I feel like I got into the fandom just as this most recent iteration was taking place. 4chan was the bulk of what propagated anime talk, and everything seemed to derive from that. I definitely felt separate from the legal community as that wasn’t what I was doing for my viewings, since the other two other places I knew talking about anime, ANN and Adult Swim, had restrictions on talking about unreleased stuff. I myself have pivoted for being more legit, and putting off some of the dumber arguments around piracy, but I still feel there’s an argument in putting a priority on how much you’re spending to live. As for contrast, it feels small going from the short period of bittorrent to this run of streaming when right before that was the intricate network of tape trading existed. 2008 seemed to have really changed things though, pushing the kind of experience pirates had up to then to a legit platform. Its definitely a big contrast from getting three-episode DVDs months apart.

Jeffrey can be reached on Twitter.