Category: North America

Age: 26

Location: Just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. I think it all started back in elementary school, when Pokemon was becoming popular. I never was the type of person to follow the trends and fads, but my cousins managed to get me into Pokemon, which has now become a lifelong obsession of mine.

I watched the Pokemon anime on TV, though at the time, I didn’t know it was anime, or what anime was. And this eventually led me to watch other shows.

I eventually started watching Yu-Gi-Oh!, which was the most addictive show I’d seen yet. It wasn’t until it was in its final seasons that I really discovered it was anime, and what anime was.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? At first, a lot of it was the art style, and the character designs, especially creatures. But what really stuck with me is the complexity of some of the characters and stories, and the fact that it’s just darn addictive to watch.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Probably Dragon Ball Z, but I never had a chance to watch it myself until much later.

What was the first anime you got really into? How did you express your passion for it? Well, I am a lifelong Pokemon fan.  But I’d say the anime that really made me a fan was Yu-Gi-Oh! I collected the cards extensively (and still do to a degree), and maintained a massive database of them.  I used to try and put together some of the character’s decks and tell some of my own stories by arranging some mock duels with them (and of course, making some of my own cards too).  I remember when I found out it was the last season, and was disappointed.  Then I heard rumors of a spin-off/sequel series, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, and for a time, was crazy obsessed with trying to find a way to watch it, despite the fact that it aired only on a cable channel I didn’t have at the time.  So I spent lots of time looking up episode summaries and trying to track down DVDs of GX that I could watch—I was so excited when I first found one.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? The thing is, I don’t feel like I was.

My father was cheap. He never invested in cable television or good internet. Because I didn’t have cable, for the longest time, I was only able to watch anime that aired on network television, usually alongside Saturday morning or after-school cartoons. Because of this, I felt like I was watching shows meant for younger kids.

While there were some otaku at my school, I didn’t feel I would fit in with them, because I hadn’t seen Inuyasha or Fullmetal Alchemist or Naruto or Dragon Ball Z, or any of the other well-known more mature anime at the time.

On top of that, I had an interest in costumery, and in secret, I put together makeshift costumes based on some of my favorite characters (a lot of Pokemon). I felt this was weird too, especially given that I wasn’t a fan of Halloween when I was younger. I didn’t know cosplay was a thing at the time either.

The other kids at my school were not very tolerant of people who were different. They found ways to twist more mundane things into something they could use against me. I had to keep this interest a secret—it was a matter of survival. Unfortunately, keeping secrets took a toll on me—in my case, it caused me to develop social anxiety.

Can you tell me more about the ways anime fandom caused (and later helped) your social anxiety? Well, the people at my school proved to me that they aren’t very tolerant of people who are the slightest bit different, taking something that’s just a simple difference of opinion, and escalating it, basically rubbing it in my face how their opinion is the only right one. If I gave these people the slightest bit of information, they would use it to make my life miserable. I felt that something like my anime fandom, which was a major part of who I am, would be used against me in a big way—especially as I’d heard some people talking negatively about some of the anime I loved. So I pretty much just kept to myself. For me, that was a matter of survival. And when you fall into that habit for long enough, it’s difficult to break—even when I got into college, which was a much more tolerant environment.

It was really my convention experiences and finding other fans on the internet that helped me start to recover from this. Just realizing that there were more people like me, being around them, and basically being accepted, though it did take some time for that feeling to truly sink in. I had the idea of doing a panel last year, and when I first presented, it was in many ways a liberating experience—just being able to talk in front of a large group of people about what I love and not feeling like I’ll be judged for it. I mean, I do still have a ways to go—I can still be a bit nervous when talking off the stage.

Was the internet a part of fandom at the time? Well, like I said before, I was stuck with cheap internet as a child, so I didn’t have a reliable way to connect to the internet until I was a senior in high school.

But this also meant I didn’t grow up with the internet the way most millennials did. I was distrustful of social media and afraid to post anything, and remained largely a lurker online for years. But despite that, the internet did reveal the existence of the anime community, the cosplay community, and conventions to me.

Do you remember your first convention? Sadly, there weren’t a lot of good conventions in the Philadelphia area, and being that I first learned about them when I was a college student with low income, I couldn’t afford a trip to someplace like Otakon until much more recently.

But eventually, I found a small local event at a college over in New Jersey, Kotoricon. It was an amazing experience, I felt like I could freely be myself, though I was also having difficulty processing it, so I remained very shy.

When I went back for the second year, I was actually able to cosplay. The first three hours I spent cosplaying was pure bliss. I remember seeing a picture somebody took of me online. My hood was up, I couldn’t see most of my face, but I could see my smile. I don’t think I’d smiled like that in years.

I’m still an avid convention-goer and cosplayer to this day, though now I also go as a panelist (I was a presenter at Otakon last year), which gives me the chance to share my passion with others, and has helped me with my social anxiety.

Tell me about making friends with other anime fans for the first time. The first time I remember was a convention panel I attended. One of the panelists approached me after the panel, having liked a comment I made during the panel. She handed me her card, asking me to contact her after the convention.  I tried to do this, but the email on the card she provided wasn’t working (and I didn’t have Facebook at the time). I eventually was able to get a message to her through her co-panelist, but didn’t hear anything more back from her. I thought that was the end of it, but I was at one of her other panels at the convention next year, and she remembered me. Some time after that, I did get a Facebook page, and finally reached out.

Aside from that, there were a few people I meet after they get my picture in cosplay, and sent me a copy, or I found and commented, or they found a picture I got. Though most of these are just one-off chats.

More recently, I made a lot more friends when I discovered a group that holds regular meetups for cosplayers and anime fans in the Philadelphia area. I quickly became a regular at their meetups, and a lot of the other regulars know me. And I’m currently in talks to become a staff member in this group, or at the very least help arrange a few activities for a future meetup.

What kinds of topics did you present panels on? My big panel right now is on papercraft, or more specifically, a somewhat lesser-known form of papercraft called Pepakura. With this artform, somebody can make a physical paper model out of a 3D model from the computer, so it can be a cheap and fun way to get a collection of your favorite characters.  I’ve done this panel at five different conventions so far, including both AnimeNEXT and Otakon. If you want to learn more, you can check out my website or my corresponding DeviantArt or Facebook galleries. I have a few other panel ideas in the works, but don’t think they’ll be ready for presenting anytime soon.

How do you think you’ve grown as an anime fan since first discovering the medium? Well, today, I feel like I have so much more opportunity to express my fandom. Like I said, back in the day, I felt like I had to be secretive about it, today, I feel like I can be quite a bit more open about it. Back then, I felt a bit weird because of it, but I don’t anymore. Today, I have access to online streaming services, that I’ve been using to catch up on some of the anime I missed out on when they first aired.  I have the money needed to commission better cosplays, and I’m making friends in the community. And I feel like having more opportunity to express my fandom has made me overall a bigger fan.

Joe can be reached on Twitter and DeviantArt. 

Age: 29

Location: Baltimore, Maryland

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. Mornings before school, probably in ’95 or ’96, I watched the Sailor Moon dub on TV. Sometimes only the last half of the episode depending when I woke up. The style and action grabbed me immediately when compared to US cartoons I saw.

Then came Toonami and an increased awareness of what I was watching. Sailor Moon was included in that lineup at some point in 5th grade and I remembered it from two or three years previously.

The tail end of 5th grade also saw me begin playing a little game called Pokemon. Everything was starting to really make sense, all these super cool things I liked came from Japan. And then the big wave hit me.

It was called Gundam Wing. I was just old enough where I could “get” the storyline. I set the VCR to tape every episode on Toonami in case I missed it. I was obsessed. A store in my local mall sold merchandise and I spent my allowance on as much of it as I could.

The summer after my obsession with Gundam Wing began, I got internet at my house. As a quick learner I found out how to find anime websites, you know the old Geocities ones. My resource was Anipike. I am so nostalgic about this site; it opened my eyes to everything. Before I knew it, I was obsessed with anime.

The ups and downs followed—this was an expensive hobby. For a number of years my fandom was obsessing over shows I wanted to watch. But soon enough Adult Swim happened and I was able to finally watch Trigun and Cowboy Bebop. That same spring, I sanded and then repainted the ceiling my parents’ front porch in exchange for the Evangelion box set. For those wondering, that job is as rough as it sounds. You try holding a power sander above your head for hours!

All told, I’m fast approaching my 20th year as an anime fan, and each year with this hobby is more fun than the last.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? It was the art style. It was like nothing else I had ever seen. And there were these series-spanning stories. If I missed an episode I would have no idea what was going on.

Tell me about your Gundam Wing obsession. What kind of stuff did you buy at the mall? I bought multiple t-shirts and I’m sure more than one poster. I couldn’t tell you how much they cost but I do know my allowance back then was about $10-15 every week roughly. I definitely paid market price, whatever that was in 2000 and 2001. It’s wild looking back at it from today’s perspective, where I’m buying merch from shows I got into years ago.

With Gundam Wing, this entire obsession lasted about a year at most. Your interests move a whole lot faster when you’re a kid. But as a result I didn’t wind up with as much stuff as I could have. I remember also getting a small Wing Zero model as a kid, already assembled. I have that in a box somewhere. My T-shirts, which numbered three or maybe four back in the day, are all gone I believe. I assume they got donated to charity or in the case of my beloved Deathscythe shirt destroyed by wearing it at Blizzard Beach and letting the chlorine in the water do a number on it. It’s probably for the best. I’m 5’4″ and 135 pounds now at age 29, so age 13 me definitely wouldn’t have looked good in those size large T-shirts if I don’t look good in them now.

However, I do still have the “silk” (these things were always 100% polyester) Dragon Ball Z shirt I bought around that time from Another Universe. I also still have one Gundam Wing poster that inexplicably has survived the pre-high school throwing everything away purge, pre-college purge, post-college purge, and moving out of my parents’ house. I’ve attached pictures of each.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? It was weird. My fandom was heavily rooted in shows I couldn’t afford and would never watch. The fandom was younger then though, a lot of us wound up growing up together in it and are still talking about anime 20 years on.

What was that like to be a fan of shows you couldn’t watch? (BTW I totally understand. I used to print out Fushigi Yugi screenshots for my school binder even though I couldnt watch it). It is so fascinating looking back on it. I was too young to participate in VHS trading and certainly too young to afford much of anything. So if it wasn’t on Toonami or one of the other anime blocks popping up on cable I couldn’t see it, except for maybe on the TV at my mall’s Suncoast or Another Universe.

However I had a huge interest in anything CLAMP did. I tried to read about their various works, look at websites covered in their art, and watch Cardcaptors on TV when I could. Fushigi Yugi was another show that interested me greatly, in part because of the massive fan community it had online. I remember finding a script for one of the manga chapters and printing it out, putting it in a binder, but never actually finding the corresponding untranslated manga chapter to read with it.

But the biggest one was Evangelion, in part because I caught most of an episode at the mall. Coming from Gundam, this just seemed like an incredible step. As it came to be, the first series I actually came to own was Evangelion. My 8th grade binder was decorated almost entirely with Evangelion pictures I printed off my computer.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? Yes. There were fansites, role playing communities, message boards, and the conventions scene was exploding. Though I didn’t participate in cons at the time, I was heavily active on the internet in every way I could be.

Could you tell me about some of those early sites? I couldn’t tell you the name of any of those websites or shrines besides Anime News Network and Animenation. They were probably a little later on as well. I would say my first foray into and first year or so of fandom was basically devoted to whatever websites and shrines Anipike linked me to. Obviously a lot of Gundam sites first jumped out, but from there I branched out. It’s cool thinking about all the people I’ve crossed paths with in fandom since then and how many of them probably visited the same goofy little shrines and fan pages I did. Even cooler is to think about how many of them might have made one of those sites.

Can you tell me about role playing, message boards, and stuff like that at the time? How did you participate? Through Neopets, another bastion of early 2000s internet life, I found people who were also interested in anime and especially Gundam Wing. I found Yahoo! role playing groups for Gundam Wing and jumped right in. I think I wound up playing Treize—poorly. I did better when I branched out and just found fan groups. I spent a lot of time on one that had a focus on more shojo-targeted shows. None loomed larger there than Sailor Moon. But this group opened my eyes to the art of CLAMP, which needless to say is a good group of artists to be exposed to when you’re just starting out in anime fandom. I also spent a lot of time with a group of Final Fantasy fans a lot older than me who kind of took me under their wing. We had chat rooms and everything, it was a real formative experience since I got to talk about a ton of things with them that none of my friends in school knew anything about.

As Yahoo! Groups died down, or at least my interest did, I branched over into message boards. Merging my love of anime with longer-standing love of JRPGs I found GameFAQs boards a great outlet to talk about all the things I wanted to talk about. I was also relatively active on Animenation a few years later. Unfortunately I have lost contact with everyone from my pre-Animenation days.

Do you remember your first convention? Otakon 2004.

I was anxious, at the time I didn’t handle large crowds of strangers well. I barely did anything that weekend—my mom had to pick me up early as I hadn’t gotten my license yet. The presence of 18+ panels naturally made her uncomfortable as well. I remember more about my excitement of finally going and waiting in line for my badge than anything else.

Also I drank more Red Bull that weekend than I had in my entire life up until then. Yuck.

What did your parents think of your interest in anime? They would sometimes wind up watching whatever was on Toonami with my brother and I. They never said much since I’m sure they weren’t overly focused on what was on TV. However I remember one time I was sick and my parents were taking care of me, helping me eat, and my dad eye-rolled so hard at whatever was happening in Outlaw Star. I suspect there was a point they assumed it was cartoons, and it was just kids’ stuff.

We also are from Baltimore, the now-former home of Otakon. So they started to make the connection that a lot of people of all ages, but especially skewing older, came to town for this convention. Cosplay was a brand new concept. My mom was unfortunately a bit too on the controlling end to let me go when I was in middle school. I know she didn’t get what anime was at all in part because my generation were more or less prime adapters. So when she heard they played adult entertainment at conventions she made the connection the entire thing must have been adult entertainment. I don’t want to throw her under the bus but at one Otakon she drove down there to pick my younger brother up, still in middle school, when she found out they showed hentai and such after dark. This despite the obvious fact, to us at least, you need ID and wristband to get in.

After talking her off that ledge I got to attend my first Otakon the next year, but had to leave before it got too dark. She still tells that story about my brother’s first Otakon whenever the name of the convention comes up. I barely talk about anime, conventions, or anything similar with my parents. They, my mom especially, never truly made an effort to understand it. I am very close with them otherwise so things are good. It’s a bit unfortunate since it’s a huge part of who I am though.

Since discovering anime, how do you think you’ve grown as a fan? I’ve gone through a lot phases and even waves of fandom. A handful of times I drifted off the scene, usually for a few months and then I came back discovering a new slate of shows people were interested in. I had one big break right after college. This honestly lasted around two years where I barely watched any anime. In hindsight that was the best thing that happened to me because since I came back, barely a day has gone by where I haven’t watched anime or at least discussed anime.

I think most of my early fan years were built on discovering what anime meant to me, and then after not having it in my life for a few years I realized it’s a huge part of who I am. It’s certainly my favorite form of entertainment. I’ve become much more critical, but deliberately not negative, in the past few years. I notice things now I never noticed before. Beyond just bad animation or being bored by a show, I’m more perceptive of themes and messages. I was really forced to develop as an early anime fan completely on my own. And while I had a lot of great friends online I didn’t have any at first in school. So I was often prone to needing to be “in the discussion” and feel that sense of belonging.

But that’s changed too, and now I’m happy to watch shows in a vacuum without all the surrounding hype. Overall, I feel like I still have a long ways to go in my fandom, there’s so much out there to explore and I still am at the tip of the iceberg in understanding it all.

Chris can be reached on Twitter. 

Age: 33

Location: Baltimore, Maryland

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. I was 16 and the only “anime” I had seen up to that point were bits and pieces of Robotech and an odd episode of Dragon Ball Z that aired at 6:30 on a Sunday morning.

I thought anime was pronounced “animmh” because the only reason I was familiar with it as a concept was reading the word in an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, talking about a Japanese RPG for the Sega CD. I was a *hardcore* classic cartoon and animation nerd (I wrote a 55-page research project on Hollywood cartoons my junior year when honestly we were only required to write maybe 10 pages) and after some Altavista-ing in 1999 I found an anime club on the University campus: the Tucson Animation Screening Society (TASS).

I emailed one of their officers asking if I could attend a screening, and that same weekend I saw the first two episodes of Cowboy Bebop, subtitled episodes of Sailor Moon, Rurouni Kenshin, and the capper: Katsuhiro Otomo’s wonderful, gorgeous anthology film Memories. That film struck me like seven concurrent bolts of lightning, and to this day I call it my favorite film ever.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? The novelty of it was something of a shock at first, having grown up on Looney Tunes and the like, but I was instantly drawn in to the fact that series like Rurouni Kenshin were definitely serialized stories, not just one-off episodic adventures that could be watched out of order.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? I can’t separate my time in TASS with Gundam Wing; I vividly remember watching dingy fansubs at screenings and then, several months later, seeing those same episodes (largely) unchanged and dubbed on Toonami.

What was the first anime you got really invested in? How did you express your fandom? Because I came at anime from a very snobbish mindset I never really got “invested” in any particular series or anything. It was always my view that animation itself was art, so I gravitated more towards the feature films with more serious stories. I mentioned Memories, but I also remember feeling levitated by Wings of Honneamise and of course Akira. I remember seeing Jin-Roh on a fansub around this time as well and being completely blown away. I saw the people who were into fanart and fanfiction and cosplay; I was always kind of jealous in a sense that I felt as though I couldn’t contribute to those in some way due to my own insecurities.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? It was a liberating social experience. Not too many nerds who argue about Frank Tashlin’s best cartoons have bi-weekly meetings. It was also my introduction to things like shojo, and series like Revolutionary Girl Utena, both of which had me like “Hey whoa, girls like these things too; all kinds of people like these shows but sometimes for different reasons and it’s all good!”

Could you tell me about making friends with other anime fans early on? As far as making new friends, it helped that TASS had a club atmosphere. It was in the club’s interest to grow membership numbers (you had to pay your yearly dues to stay in good standing) and so they were always welcoming to newcomers. I remember just a few months after joining the club, going to the house of one of the club’s leaders and checking out his backyard telescope (southern Arizona has very clear skies so it’s a popular haven for astronomers) and watching imported laserdiscs. I think we watched the first episode of Tenamoya Voyagers.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? Wouldn’t have found out about fandom otherwise. I also VERY quickly graduated from just going to TASS meetings regularly to aggressively sending away SASEs [Self Addressed Stamped Envelopes, more on this here] to fansubbers (God bless Kodocha and their purple Barney tapes) and tape trading, all of which wouldn’t have been possible without alt.rec.anime.misc and nascent Geocities websites.

What was tape trading like? Purple Barney tapes? The purple Barney tapes! Kodocha was a fansub group named after the manga and anime series of the same name, and their gimmick was that all their tapes came on purple VHS tapes. From what I understand, someone in the fansub group visited a VHS manufacturer that had hundreds upon hundreds of blank, purple VHS tapes that were originally meant to be used for episodes of Barney the Dinosaur, and they had the foresight to snag as many blank extras as they could.

I started with Kodocha because they were one of the few who didn’t require any tape trading—you sent an SASE, maybe a few bucks, and you got your fansub. I didn’t have a second VHS player at home to copy tapes, but I sure did at my high school. I was part of the Media Arts program, and for my junior and senior years I had an independent study. They never gave me any directive on what to do, so I ended up using their VHS equipment to copy tapes and take naps. Tape trading was fun and I built up a sizable collection over the span of those two years, though lord knows where those tapes are now. (I was also trading tapes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes.)

It’s the sort of thing that I can’t imagine having the patience to deal with as an adult, spoiled with broadband internet. You’d find somebody on Usenet or their Geocities webpage where they’d list what they had as well as what they were looking for. You’d exchange emails (“I got the complete set of Hyper Police, can I trade you for the first arc of Rurouni Kenshin?”), send ’em off in the mail, and wait oh-so-patiently for weeks and weeks until my mom or dad would confusedly ask me if I had ordered something from Cincinnati or wherever.

I don’t have any, but Zac [Bertschy] posted some old Kodocha tapes on Twitter some time ago.

Was anime seen as something weird back then? What did your family or friends think of your interest in anime? Of course it was seen as weird. Nobody really knew what it was. My parents—conservative Mormons though they were—were mostly just happy that I was getting out of the house and meeting friends, so they didn’t seem to upset about it. I’m sure if they knew the content of some of what I was watching they’d be upset, but this was around the era when Pokemon was starting to become a popular children’s cartoon show, so they mostly thought I was just watching more of that.

Most of my peers in school who weren’t into anime themselves were at least curious about if, if I remember right. If anything I was made fun of more for being the weird kid who read books about old Disney cartoons in class than I was for liking anime. Anime at least had an edge to it that most kids my age found interesting: there’s violence! Swearing! Boobs and stuff!

Do you remember your first convention? Only vaguely. I believe it was Anime Expo either in 2005 or 2006, one of the last years it was held in Anaheim. The convention itself was a drunken blur. Mostly I remember the ride from Tucson to Anaheim: 8 1/2 hours in a crummy, smelly van, driven by a TASS volunteer with a cowboy hat, the place littered with old computer parts probably dating back to the 1970s, while a bevy of Kimagure Orange Road soundtracks blared.

For you, what’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today? I’d say the biggest difference in the fandom has everything to do with the internet, most importantly: accessibility. Outside of anime being on cable TV like Toonami, you can go on YouTube and type in the name of whatever anime you’re curious about and you’ll at least find a clip or something, while Crunchyroll has every damn episode of Naruto available on demand. Anime wasn’t something you just happened across, for the most part, and if you were curious about it, it certainly took longer than a five-second Google search to check it out. I mean, I had to physically go to a building on a college campus every few weeks to see it before Toonami got started.

In a way though I think fandom is quite similar in a lot more ways than it is different; if anything I’m the one that’s changed. These days as a grown-up, I’m very picky about what shows I watch. The only thing I’m really keeping up on that’s simulcasting is My Hero Academia. Meanwhile people I know on Twitter are literally watching EVERYTHING. Every damn show that’s airing. That’s insane to me—except I remember my time at TASS and that’s precisely what I did, every other week, for years. I’d sit down and even if it was something that probably wouldn’t appeal to me in some way, I still watched it, just to check it out. It’s how I found out about really great shows like Yawara! and so on; you probably couldn’t get me to spend 20 minutes watching a new anime about a girl in school practicing judo, but at the time I was simply voracious and wanted to watch everything.

Brian can be reached on Twitter. 

Age: 16

Location: Washington, United States

When did you discover anime? Back in winter of 2014. I was browsing images on the internet and came across a gif of Haiyore! Nyaruko-San, which I found to be pretty funny. So I decided to check out an episode or two to see the source material. I never expected to get into anime, but I really liked watching Nyaruko, and I ended up watching everything there was to watch. Both OVAs, both seasons, and both mini series. I had learned pretty much everything there was about that show. I even waited patiently for the third and final OVA to come out that following June. I also re-watched entirely right before June. Never in my life had I been so fascinated by one show.

After Nyaruko, I watched others throughout that summer of 2015, and finished Attack on Titan, (I watched the anime and got up-to-date on the manga), Sword Art Online (as much as people hate it, I still love it, especially the light novels), Kill la Kill, Himouto Umaru-Chan, and some others that I can’t recall. This may not seem like a lot, but I was the guy who was reluctant to actually watch anime, so watching all of that was a lot for me.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? The humor. Even though Nyaruko was chock-full of references I didn’t understand until later on, I still found it to be really funny. I had never seen a show with as characters as vibrant as these.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Let’s see: this was 2014. I wasn’t super into anime yet then so I wouldn’t exactly know, but I think Attack on Titan was still super popular. I can only guess at this because kids at school were still wearing Attack on Titan shirts.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? I wasn’t really a part of the fandom per se. I liked anime, but I never got involved with the community until late August of 2016, when I got into a Discord server about anime. Then, the next month, I joined a cat café themed server revolving around just liking anime in general. I now host my own server centered around my all-time favorite anime Spice and Wolf.

How did you get into Spice and Wolf and why is it your favorite? I got into Spice and Wolf from one of those “Top 10” YouTube videos. I really loved the story. Despite what the title may suggest, there is nothing fanservice-y about it. It’s about a merchant who happens upon a wolf deity who is trying to get to her home in the north. On their way there, they happen upon many economic schemes to profit from. I recommend it to anyone who asks.

Could you tell me more about Discord servers for fandom discussion? Sure! You join a Discord server by receiving the invite link from someone inside the server. That sounds exclusive, right? They aren’t! A lot of people post their server invite links in a public place so people can join. The first one I joined, I found the link on the Crunchyroll forums right around the time I started using Crunchyroll. It was a Discord server for a group I unknowingly joined named “Shenanigans.” From there I got to talk to lots of cool people, and join other servers that people had made, who have their own awesome people in them.

Do you remember your first convention? I have never been to a convention. I don’t think I’ll go to one until after I turn 18, mainly because I show that I like anime around my friends and family. Anime is like a secret passion for me.

If it’s secret, who do you tell about it? Who don’t you tell? Why not? The only people I tell about liking anime are people online. I don’t tell my IRL friends because I’d be made fun of. I used to have their same mindset as well, thinking it was all weird weeb shit. Because of that, I don’t really care.

You said kids wore Attack on Titan shirts to school. Did that mean anime fandom was generally socially acceptable? Whether it was cool or uncool to like anime really belonged—and still belongs to—what social clique you are in. The clique I was in wasn’t very keen on anime, but there were plenty who were.

How do you think you’ve grown as an anime fan since discovering anime? I don’t believe I’ve grown much. I still watch just to watch it, and I watch what I want to watch, no matter the horrible reviews (cough Sword Art Online cough). Everyone has different likes and dislikes, and that’s just fine.

Andrew can be found on Crunchyroll. 

Age: 24

Location: Boston, Massachusetts

When did you discover anime? I grew up in the Pokemon generation but never actually got into Pokemon. The first time I encountered Pokemon when I was five some kid was showing me his card collection, which included a Pikachu that had been edited to have Darth Maul’s face. I was a scaredy-cat as a kid and became scared of Pokemon for a bit.

Even after I got over that fear, I was still sort of “anti-Pokemon” for a while (since I became a big Animaniacs fan and reading online that WB canceled Animaniacs in part because of Pokemon got me angry). I also remember seeing a primetime special advertising the FoxBox when I was nine and the ad for Fighting Foodons was so terrible it almost turned me off of anime forever.

Fortunately, that year was also when a movie called Spirited Away was playing in theaters, and every single person who’d seen it was talking about it like it was the greatest thing ever. I had to check out what the fuss was about. And then I became obsessed.

What appealed to you about anime then? With Miyazaki’s films, the sheer beauty of the animation was the primary appeal for me. The stuff I got into on Toonami around that time. ( Shows like .HACK, Ruroni Kenshin, Yu Yu Hakusho.) They weren’t as amazingly animated but I was intrigued the serialized plots more complex than what I was seeing in American cartoons at the time.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? After the initial burst of Pokemon‘s popularity, Dragon Ball Z was the most popular title when I was getting into anime. I never got into that show; I tried, but it was in the middle of the series when my family first got cable in 2003 and I couldn’t really follow it, plus it dragged out a lot. Sailor Moon had already left TV so that was before my time. Meanwhile, I got into Naruto before it became super-popular in the states.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? It was exciting to discover stuff. My mom started working at Waldenbooks and would show me the cool new stuff in the manga section (there were also manga like Chobits she discovered out of her own curiosity and wouldn’t let me read but enjoyed herself). Anime club in middle school and high school became my social life.

Ii’s neat your mom was interested in manga. Is she still? What did she think about your interest, especially as you and your sister got older? My mom’s had health problems. Her vision has gotten worse and she’s sort of fallen out of reading in general (still can do audiobooks though lately I’m afraid she’s a bit distracted by constant phone messages from a couple of very needy friends of hers to stay focused listening). She still will watch anime with us (having a Fire Stick and the Crunchyroll app now makes it a lot more convenient since she doesn’t like watching longer shows on the computer) and is totally supportive of our interests as always.

Tell me about your school anime clubs. Middle school anime club was run by an art teacher and was mainly focused on drawing while mostly Ghibli movies played in the background (one week I convinced the teacher to play Cat Soup and I think I scarred her for life). Anime club in high school met twice a week at the library, one day for viewings and one day for general socializing. It was the biggest club in the school, 50 or so members, even bigger than the football team! Though we did also sort of cheat those numbers by allowing recent alums to attend.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? I was already reading general animation message boards such as ToonZone and Animation Insider before I got into anime in particular, so those communities ended up being my primary online places to discuss anime. A couple years into my time as a fan I discovered torrenting (I wanted to see the version of One Piece that wasn’t butchered by 4Kids); I stopped in 2007 after Geneon closed and I became serious about getting anime legally.

Do you remember your first convention? What was it, and what was it like?
Anime Boston 2004 sold out but my parents were able to get me tickets to the dealers room on Sunday (that year they sold separate tickets for the dealers room and the general con). 2005 my mom took my sister and I to the real convention. I cosplayed Shigure Sohma, my sister was Tohru Honda. It was fun, though conventions got significantly more when I started going with my high school club in 2008 and didn’t need my mom there.

I would love a photo of your cosplay to include! Sadly don’t know where they are if we still have any. Oldest cosplay photo I still have is from 2009 when I went as Masami Eiri from Lain.

For you personally, what’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today? There’s two big contrasts, one good, one bad. The good contrast is ease of access, now pretty much everything is freely and legally accessible (or, well, it was before Amazon Strike started buying everything up this year). The bad contrast is that it seems the uglier side of fandom has become more visible. For a long time if someone told me they were an anime fan I almost always knew I could get along with them; now I have to be a bit more careful to make sure they’re not THAT type of fan. For me personally the dividing moment between those two mindsets was when one of my former high school clubmates, who was also the boyfriend of my best friend, went full GamerGater.

Reuben can be reached on Twitter.

Age: 36

Location: Sidney, Maine

When did you discover anime? My first anime series was the original season of Voltron back in the mid ’80s. I was a huge fan of the series as a kid, even though I didn’t know what “anime” was.

It wasn’t until the late ’90s and the advent of Toonami on Cartoon Network that I discovered Voltron‘s origins but also discovered Sailor Moon, which aired as a replacement for Thundercats after that show had gone through all its episodes twice. Although dismissive of the “girl show” at first I started getting into the story, characters, and the art. Besides Voltron, other shows followed like Robotech and Dragon Ball Z. Everything snowballed from there.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? I’ve always been an animation fan, but anime had an approach to art, characters, and storytelling that wasn’t insulting to my intelligence like many American shows produced at the time.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? This was 1998, so the big shows for American audiences were Ranma 1/2, Tenchi Muyo (Both TV and OAV), and Evangelion. Pokemon and those shows hadn’t come to America yet.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? Being in Central Maine, it was just me and my best friend. During school one of my friends was an exchange student from East Asia who was the only other person who was familiar with anime outside of Akira, so it was kind of lonely.

Did you meet your best friend because of anime, or did that happen after? My best friend and I have been friends since we were 11. He knew of anime some time before I did. It wasn’t until I got into it that we started becoming big time otaku and started watching everything we could find. A lot of what he had watched was from the old Sci-Fi network back in the early ’90s, whereas I didn’t get the channel until 1996.

Also, how did that exchange student join your duo? She really didn’t. We had an art class together and when I started getting into anime by my senior year. She said she used to watch that stuff when she was back home growing up. She ended up giving me a Right Stuf catalog and we became friendlier during the year. Unfortunately, I lost contact with her when I graduated. Like I said, she was the only person I knew at that school who knew what anime actually was instead of “that Akira stuff.”

What was the first fandom you got really invested in? How did you express your fandom? I was a He-man kid! When I was very little (kindergarten age) I was big into He-Man and the Masters of the Universe! I knew all the characters and had a number of the figures, vehicles, and playsets. I was into that until about 1988 when the original series was ended. After that was G.I. Joe and I never really got out of that. I still collect those little figures and this past year my collection topped 500 figures for the first time. I also got into Silverhawks, Thundercats, Voltron, Centurions, Inhumanoids, and a bunch more of those good ’80s cartoon shows and toy lines.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? It certainly was. Back in those days a lot of people had free Geocities websites (myself included) and a lot of places to find fanfiction and message boards to go to, even if those sites were basic ones.

What was your Geocities site? HA! It was the old Sailor Sun Fan Fic Collective! That site was where I stored and “published” my Sailor Moon fanfiction series. It was a single series that was over 150 stories by the time I ended it, since I was trying to write my novel at the time. I first got into that when watching Sailor Moon and started imagining my own character involved so I just started writing. The story started right after the second season and took things in a much different direction away from the Monster of the Week type stuff the show did.

The pen name “Soul Tsukino” was one of the fan characters I created, I also had a wedding, a childbirth, mixed both Tenchi Muyo and Ranma 1/2 into it, and basically broke every “rule” of fanfiction there supposedly is out there. I use it as a talking point in my “Damn Write!” writing panel at conventions as a way of telling people that I’m not an elitist when it comes to fan iction. “I wrote a 150 story Sailor Moon fanfic series with TWO self-insert characters, an otakukin, involved Sailor Pluto getting married and having a kid, mixed in both Ranma and Tenchi, and gave Kodachi Kuno cancer, and I apologize for NONE of it!”. I kept up that series for 11 years and really cut my teeth as a writer with it.

I have since moved on to original fiction, which you can find here.

Do you remember your first convention? My first con wasn’t until February of 2002. The very first PortconMaine held at the University of Southern Maine campus. It held maybe 200 people during a single weekend. I wasn’t used to gatherings like that and felt a little out of place with the cosplayers and well traveled otaku. It was fun, even if I felt I wasn’t very high on the totem pole.

Was there a pecking order in fandom? Early on in my fandom it kinda felt like it, even if it was more in my head than anything. You had the people who went to cons, the people who went to the BIG cons (Otakon), the cosplayers, con staff, the con chairs, and stuff like that leading to becoming an “Otaking.” As time went on I realized two things: 1) I didn’t need to watch EVERYTHING and just find stuff I liked, and 2) I don’t need to prove myself to anyone other than myself.

In your experience, what’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today? The availability! Sure there was stuff in the stores like Suncoast, Sam Goody, and the video rental stores, but nothing like we have today. Anime wasn’t being dubbed into English as much as it is today and we certainly didn’t have streaming sites like Crunchyroll or Funimation’s site that made finding this stuff much easier. More anime shows up on TV now where as back then having anime come to Cartoon Network was an EVENT.

The convention culture hasn’t changed that much, it’s just gotten bigger. Using bootlegs and fandubs at cons is more frowned upon now (thankfully). In Maine, we have more annual conventions now than we did back in 1998 and even rural places like this can get anime now. It’s also more socially acceptable to be an anime geek now than it was back then.

Keith can be reached on Twitter. 

Age: 29

Location: St. Paul, Minnesota

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. I grew up in Indonesia, where we were introduced to Doraemon on national television in the 1990s. Early in elementary school, I remember waking up on Sundays in time to watch the 8 a.m. broadcasts. (See Quora for further reading.) I don’t think I knew it as “anime” at the time, but at some point I came to learn that it was a Japanese cartoon. Over the next several years, other anime series began airing dubbed in the local language. During days when I attended private English classes, I also remember that many of the students would be watching Sailor Moon on the school television after their class ended in the afternoon.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? As a child, I don’t think I really considered why Doraemon or other anime series were appealing. At the time, Indonesia was undergoing a transformation in its broadcasting industry. Private television networks began to emerge following deregulation, and the amount of children’s programming exploded. As children, we just consumed what was available to us and eventually that shared experience lived on as a form of nostalgia.

When I moved to the United States in middle school, that nostalgic feeling continued and I began to discover other anime series such as Digimon Adventure on Fox Kids. I also discovered Pokémon as a trading card game through friends in middle school.

When you came to the U.S. in middle school, how did you find anime fandom there to be different from fandom in Indonesia? Pokémon was all the rage when I first arrived in the U.S. That series had not yet caught on in Indonesia when I left. At that time, children’s interest in Japanese media was mainly around manga rather than anime or video games. Because Pokémon did not start as a manga series, its arrival in Indonesia came much later.

To be honest, children aren’t that much different from country to country. There isn’t much difference between Indonesian elementary schoolers talking about their favorite manga during class breaks and American middle schoolers trading Pokémon cards during lunch time. They share the same enthusiasm for what was popular. It’s just the works that were popular were different between the two countries.

But it was probably around this time that I started exploring more anime geared toward older audiences. Eventually this led to my discovering Digimon Tamers on Fox Kids, as the series had a markedly different tone compared to Pokémon.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Doraemon was and remains a cultural phenomenon in Indonesia. If you ask anyone who grew up in the 1990s about the Indonesian-language opening theme song to Doraemon, they will be able to recite most of its lines by heart. As boys became older, they were drawn into Saint Seiya and, to a lesser extent, Dragon Ball. For girls, Sailor Moon was quite popular, as well as Cardcaptor Sakura toward the end of the decade.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? Manga had an important role in spreading the popularity of anime, to the point that the most popular manga series often sold more than local fiction novels. (See Quora for more.) Doraemon in manga form was just as popular as the anime series on television. At one point, my family owned all volumes of the Doraemon manga. My siblings and I would read them over and over, and the pages and covers became worn and torn. At school, friends would exchange their recent manga purchases and show off their school supplies featuring their favorite characters. Gadgets from Doraemon such as the Bamboo Copter and the Anywhere Door became part of the Indonesian pop culture lexicon. Children were soon able to imitate the form for throwing the Kamehameha attack from Dragon Ball.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? The Internet did not reach the general Indonesian populace until the mid 2000s. As fans of Japanese cartoons, children could only connect with each other at school when they were growing up. Around 5th grade, acting on a suggestion from my parents, I built a small business renting my own manga and comics collection to other students. At first, it was only to my own classmates, but soon students from other classes began coming to me to rent my collection. Unfortunately, the school forced me to stop my renting business when teachers started to learn about it.

Do you remember your first convention? I only became a modern fan of anime around 2009 and 2010, quite late compared to other fans in the United States from my generation. As such, I only attended my first convention in 2013 at Sakura-Con in Seattle. I was a fan of Sword Art Online, having been a fairly dedicated player of MMORPGs, and was enticed by the line-up of Sword Art Online guests. Being able to meet industry professionals and anisong artists was an eye-opening experience as someone who was learning about this side of the fandom for the first time. When I moved back to Southeast Asia later that year, I began attending regional conventions and events such as Anime Festival Asia more regularly. There, I connected with other fans and learned about how the anime industry has changed in the 15 years of my absence from Southeast Asia.

Today you work for an anime company, MyAnimeList. How did you go from fan to pro? Renting out manga since little might make you think I’ve been a professional since little, but that’s not the case at all. At the time, it was still a child’s hobby, and my parents just thought it was a way to put that hobby to good use. (Even today they encourage me to think about how I can make money from my anime hobby.)

When I started exploring more anime after college, I was already a fairly active editor on Wikipedia. As I began to discover new anime and manga I enjoyed, I poured my energy toward improving the Wikipedia articles of these titles. Last Exile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Exile) and Twin Spica  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Spica) are two examples of articles which I rewrote from scratch and attained Good Article status. Being a member of WikiProject Anime and Manga helped me develop an eye for researching various materials and sources on the industry. Along the way, I essentially ended up teaching myself Japanese without any classroom instruction in order to help decipher the material I was reading.

I lost interest in Wikipedia at some point and started submitting modifications to the MyAnimeList database to improve the accuracy of information there. MyAnimeList’s database moderating team is always shorthanded, and recruitment drives are held every few years to replenish the moderator ranks after they thin out due to attrition. During one such drive in 2012, I was invited to submit an application to become an anime database moderator. I initially had no intention in applying until one of the database administrators reached out to me after she noticed my meticulous submissions.

As a database moderator, I came to learn more about the industry and eventually renewed my interest in writing again. I began writing occasional industry news stories for MyAnimeList. When we were acquired by DeNA in 2015, we decided to formalize a news team structure to create consistency in our reporting. Based on the objectives we discussed with DeNA, it was decided that my experience as a Wikipedia editor would be useful in creating a MyAnimeList standard of reporting. I was made news managing editor and am still in that role today, while still moderating the anime database on the side.

How did becoming a professional in the industry change how you watch anime and participate in fandom? My watching habits have changed pretty dramatically. I used to be a more prolific watcher, sometimes watching 10 to 15 shows a season. Today, however, I will admit that I haven’t watched a single anime while it’s airing in more than a year. I probably watch one show in any given season now. You might wonder how I can remain an active member of the industry if I haven’t been watching anything, but I will say that this is definitely possible. I’m still aware of all the trends and what titles are popular, but after a while you actually don’t have to watch that much to still stay in the loop with the fandom.

The timing of my joining the MyAnimeList team was rather fortunate. About a year after I joined the staff, I was able to relocate to Southeast Asia for a few years thanks to my day job. This helped me explore the fandom in entirely different ways from the fandom experience in North America. I was able to visit anime conventions in different countries, and travel to Japan was also within reach. The influence of Japan in Southeast Asia is more prevalent than in North America, so it was easier to immerse yourself in Japanese culture, such as attending events by the Japan Foundation, going to concerts by Japanese artists, etc.

It was easier to get carried away by the abundance of Japanese culture events. I convinced myself to attend concerts by anime idols Wake Up, Girls! and THE IDOLM@STER in Japan. I traveled to Singapore to watch EGOIST and vocalist chelly perform live overseas for the first time. After becoming a professional, I became a much more active consumer of the anime culture rather than of anime itself.

In your experience, what’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today? The fandom today is a lot more fragmented, but in a good way. There are a lot more options in how one person can enjoy being a part of the anime fandom. Some will limit their enjoyment to just watching anime, but others may be more inclined to attend events and meet creators and artists directly, or even supporting a peripheral industry such as the anisong market.

However, as English becomes the dominant language of the fandom, I feel that the discourse on anime and manga has become less diverse. As North America becomes an important overseas market for the industry, I am concerned about over-representation of North American viewpoints in the English-speaking fandom. We have a term for this in the Wikipedia editor community: systemic bias. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias.)

Personally, I’ve grown tired of the generic narrative of an American fan discovering anime through Cowboy Bebop. There is not enough international coverage of fans at overseas events such as Japan Expo in Paris or Anime Festival Asia in Singapore. There is no discussion of how a series like Alps no Shoujo Heidi became popular in apartheid South Africa, or how Doraemon became a cultural phenomenon in Asia.

Global stories like these are the ones I would like to help uncover at MyAnimeList in the near future in order to help the fandom understand itself better and connect with other members in other parts of the world.

Richardson can be reached on Twitter and MyAnimeList.