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#60: Kelly S

Age: 30

Location: Southeastern United States

When did you discover anime? I discovered anime in stages. At first, I found out about a show called Sailor Moon because of chats on AOL. I watched the show on Cartoon Network during the Sailor Moon R arc in the late ’90s. I didn’t realize Sailor Moon was anime at first, but looking around online, I found a fan page that, crazily enough, is still around. I started looking up the different magical girl anime listed, although there wasn’t a lot of information out there at the time. I found the “anime” section of my local video rental store and liked that it all looked like Sailor Moon. The first anime I rented was Ah! My Goddess! It was okay. Then I rented Slayers and fell in love. Slayers was my obsession for years and years, and it was my introduction to fanart, fanfic, fanvids, cosplay… Before I knew it, I was sending out self-addressed stamped envelopes to fansub distros and hanging out at Suncoast. I went to my first convention in 2001.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? I liked the art style a lot. It was colorful and bright, and at a time when Lisa Frank was my aesthetic, I think Sailor Moon hit that sweet spot. After getting hooked on the plot, I was curious about what else was out there, and then when I watched Slayers, the storytelling and humor struck home with me.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Sailor Moon was a big one simply due to it being a gateway anime, along with Dragon Ball Z. After that, I can recall licensed releases being popular due to accessibility: Cowboy Bebop, Tenchi Muyo!, Slayers, Record of Lodoss War, Outlaw Star, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Trigun. Magical girl shows were popular.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? Pretty fun. It felt like an underground culture at the time, and knowing the lingo and connecting with other fans resulted in strong bonds. Even knowing some Japanese was “cool.”

It took some doing, but I converted one of my friends into an anime fan, and we would have sleepovers where we’d marathon shows. My overnight bag was always heavy with clunky VHS tapes, and I can fondly recall the sound of tapes clacking together as I walked with the bag on my shoulder.

I’d like to hear more about the friend you managed to convert into an anime fan. What won her over? Is she still a fan?  Unfortunately, that friendship fizzled out a while back due to various reasons, so I’m afraid that story is open-ended. My impression is that, for her, it was more of a passing interest. She liked Sailor Moon a bit due to its popularity at the time, but I won her over through sheer enthusiasm, forcing her to watch fansubs with me. She did enjoy Slayers, and so for a while, we’d pass notes to each other in class with doodles of Xellos and Valgarv, our two favorite characters. We enjoyed Kodocha, too. In high school, she became less interested in the anime scene and more interested in other things, eventually moving away as I’d reach an apex in my fandom. I took her with me to a convention once, and although she had fun, we spent a good amount of time hanging out and going off the convention center grounds instead of participating in fan activities.

Slayers seems like it was huge for you. What kind of fanworks did Slayers inspire you to make? I was never involved much in the creation of fanworks, more the consumption. I wrote one fic for an online friend in the Slayers fandom, and never shall it see the light of day! With Slayers, I began to read massive amounts of fanfic, and from that point on, I was a fanfic junkie. Even these days, if I watch, read, or otherwise interact with a piece of media, I immediately look for fanfic. I watched a Netflix show out of curiosity four days ago, and since then, I’ve read about 12-15 fanfics from it. Oftentimes, I may not be a “fan” of the show, but I love the show beyond the show. In addition to fanfic, I made a few terrible fanvids. I used my vidding skills to create a fanvid as a school project once… using a VCR! It was very tedious. Happily, learning about encoding and video formats was a résumé booster, so thank you, terrible fanvids.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? If yes, how? If no, how did you connect with other fans? Yes and no. I found anime due to the Internet thanks to simple fan pages. I found the Sailor Moon fan page and learned about the hundreds of episodes that the States didn’t have at the time. I read up on the light novels of Slayers and on the characters of all the shows I watched. Most of the Internet’s role in the late ’90s was as a source of information and images. I saved my favorite illustrations onto 3.5-inch floppy disks.

As time went on, UBBs and message boards became popular, and I talked to people through those. As anime went digital, I talked to people on IRC, too. I bought anime and Japanese imports through web stores. After going to a convention, I’d look up photos on A Fan’s View to relive the moment.

Do you remember your first convention? What was it, and what was it like?
The first convention I went to, Animazement, was amazing. I met up with an online friend at the con and sang karaoke with them. People were really into Chobits, Dragon Ball Z, and Final Fantasy cosplay. I took disposable cameras to the con and wondered what the people at the photo developing lab thought of all the costumes I’d caught on film as I took the rolls of film to be developed. The con was the only place where I could play DDR and buy Pocky, so I stocked up Japanese snacks and played tons of video games. I also got to see weird Japanese commercials and other late-night video trash, the kind of stuff that’d be easy to find on YouTube now. (The “Yatta!” music video, for example.) J-rock videos were hard to come by, and everyone in my friend circle was happy to see clips. Gackt was huge. A highlight of my trip was running into Yuu Watase on the elevator.

What did your family think of your interest in anime? My family was incredibly supportive of my interest. They were the ones who drove me hours and hours to my first anime convention in my early teens, despite having no idea why I liked “cartoons.” My grandmother even helped sew my first cosplay, and I wore a character wig to her birthday party. No one in my family teased me or told me my interest was silly, even though I suspect they thought my interest was a phase.

Tell me more about acquiring anime at the time. Truth be told, I spent a lot of money on VHS tapes at Suncoast. I was also very lucky to have a well-stocked video rental store nearby that had lots of videos. For example, I didn’t have to buy all of the tapes from Slayers… just the last few. I would say that all of my earned money from my after-school job went into buying VHS tapes. The lack of dual language tracks made the dub versus subs wars very fierce at the time, but I was online friends with some people wanting to be voice actors, so I think dubs were looked at more fondly in my circle than in the rest of fandom. For series that weren’t released yet, I sent in S.A.S.E. (self-addressed stamped envelopes) to various fansub distros. At the time, there were titles out being released that people were 100% convinced would never be brought over to America. When digital media became more prevalent, I upgraded to sending out CD-Rs for digisubs. For a few years, I traveled to another school’s anime club, and all of the members would trade tapes, DVDs, and burned CDs. These days, I have a Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Anime Strike subscription, most of which have offered streams of the shows I watched fansubbed all those years ago. It might be an unpopular opinion, but I still like dubs! I’m so happy to support the people who bring these shows and comics to life.

What’s the biggest difference between anime fandom then, and fandom now? I’d like to know about the biggest different for you personally. It is unbelievably easy to get anime these days, and the pace at which titles are streamable is incredible. For example, the fact that simuldubs are a thing is something I would have never, ever thought possible. If I want to watch Slayers right now, I can press a few buttons on my smartphone and cast it to my television in under a minute. If I want to make a cosplay outfit, there are tutorials available. If I want to binge-read a manga, I can buy the whole series for my Kindle (which I have done). All of this accessible media is not only easy to get a hold of, but it’s accessible in a way that supports the creators, too. It’s also easier to find fans of even the most obscure media.

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#59: Chris Adamson

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.

Sometimes you could find video rental stores that would go deep on anime. Not Blockbusters or Hollywoods, but in Lansing we had a store called “Video To Go” that went deep in many categories, and they had all of Bubblegum Crisis along with Project A-ko and the Dirty Pair movies, plus a generous selection of hentai of course (it’s hard to overstate how the mere existence of that stuff helped compartmentalize anime as its own distinct thing, if only to help separate it from the cartoons for the kiddies).

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? Only a few people knew that there was a fandom or what to call it, and I wasn’t really in that group. It wasn’t until Carl Macek gave over the last 30 pages of his Robotech coffee table book to praising the rest of anime and manga that I could get a sense of what was out there and what I could seek out, at which point I’d get into stuff like Trish Ledoux’s “Animag” magazine at the comics shop. So, for me, it was a personal journey to learn more about this stuff, not so much an engagement with a fandom.

Was anime fandom something you could share openly? From what you told me, it sounds like all your college dormmates were fans, too. Except that there were only one or two other clearly anime things around in the mid-’80s (Star Blazers and Voltron), so anime wasn’t quite enough to identify as its own form or genre and merit a lot of discussion. So the small group of us following Robotech were mostly only into Robotech, and it was just one of many interests we had. Also, I did have one friend who got so obsessed with it, seeking out model kits and comics, that he neglected his studies and failed out of school, so that was kind of a black mark that put our enthusiasm in check.

Anime kind of crossed over with comic book culture too, most prominently through Marvel publishing a colorized version of the Akira manga, so some of my comic-book fans went with me to the Akira movie when that hit the local independent theater, though they weren’t interested in anime much beyond that.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? Only for super nerds. I was doing computer science at Stanford, and it wasn’t until my junior year until I could get access to Usenet and rec.arts.anime, which was the English-speaking anime world’s most significant online presence for a time. This was also right around the time of the American animation renaissance — at one point, people wanted to post about American cartoons on rec.arts.anime because there wasn’t a better place for it, at least not until rec.arts.animation and alt.tv that groups for those movies and TV shows emerged. I got really into the American renaissance (The Little Mermaid, Tiny Toons, etc.) so around 1990 or so, I drifted away from anime for a while and into these online communities.

Do you remember your first convention? Anime Weekend Atlanta in like 1997 or something. I only found out about it because they happened to be running their early website on the same server as something else I was into (I think the Gundam site from one of the editors of MacAddict magazine?). So that would have been like AWA 4 or something. I’d never been to a pop culture convention, so I didn’t do much the first time, just bought a bunch of Final Fantasy VII stuff in the dealer’s room and attended the Cartoon Network panel (which had the voice actors from Space Ghost Coast to Coast, like George Lowe, who were a total blast but of course had nothing to do with anime). In returning to AWA in later years, I’d get more into watching shows in viewing rooms, learned about AMVs, etc.

What did your family think about your interest in anime? (And what do they think about it now?) In both directions, zero interest. My parents are still alive, and when I mention I’m speaking at an anime con, they politely change the subject, so I don’t stick with it. I once mentioned anime to my wife’s grandmother and she started in on a Pearl Harbor rant, so that was fun. I have kids of my own (ages 15 and 12), but they’re not into anime at all, and it’s not something I’ve pushed; I’m happier they find their own stuff. My wife watched a little anime with me over the years, and she liked some of it (Project A-ko, His and Her Circumstances), but it’s not something she’d ever watch on her own.

For you personally, what’s the biggest difference between anime fandom then and anime fandom now? Mostly that it’s identifiably its own thing. Anime in the ’80s was largely attached to other fandoms. It was another source of sci-fi action, since there was only so much of that available domestically, even after the “Star Wars” boom. So a lot of where I’d learn about anime was from a comic books store where they had the American comics of Robotech, Lum, and Ranma 1/2, and then import toys and model kits. The store I went to in Palo Alto, CA (“Comics And Comix”), would show random videos on a tiny TV on the counter on Fridays, usually American stuff like the terrible Pryde of the X-Men pilot, but sometimes anime—they had a tape (unsubbed) of the Akira movie before it came out in theaters here, and Char’s Counterattack, which was surely the first fansub I’d ever seen.

Today, you also have all these other genres of anime that even if they had existed back then, wouldn’t have been brought over. The economics of broadcast TV and even for-sale VHS tapes demanded more fans than you’d get for unconventional genres like moé or BL.

The other role anime served at the time was as something for people generally interested in animation. The late ’70s and early ’80s were the nadir of American animation, so some people interested in animation found anime compelling if only because anime directors knew what an over-the-shoulder shot was (because clearly nobody at Hanna-Barbera or DiC did). Along with anime, I was digging into stuff like Ralph Bakshi’s movies and the UPA cartoons from the 1950s, just because I was so frustrated with how plan bad US animation was, at least until we got the renaissance with Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, Tiny Toons and all that stuff.

Chris can be reached on Twitter. 

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#58: Gabe P

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. 

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#57: Serdar

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. 

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#56: Jennifer

Age: 44

Location: Durham, North Carolina

When did you discover anime? In the olden days of the 1970s, there existed Speed Racer and Battle of the Planets, but they never hooked me. In college in the early 1990s, a vampire-loving friend acquired VHS tapes of Vampire Hunter D and Vampire Princess Miyu (OVA) at a science fiction convention; in a fit of nostalgia in 1997 I bought Miyu through Suncoast video, but the clerk gave me such grief for requesting anything as uncool as Japanese cartoons that I resolved to purchase future tapes from some new online vendor called Amazon. Fast forward to the 2000s, when I caught a glimpse of Inuyasha on Adult Swim, and I was hooked. After Inuyasha was Ghost in the Shell, and while it wasn’t to my taste necessarily, the voice actor who played the Major had a phenomenal voice. I bought a TiVo so that I could capture both shows. In 2007 the twenty-something in my lab introduced me to online fan-subbed, and this was back in the day before YouTube videos played longer than ten minutes. To have accessible material was a dream. I’m now a subscriber to legitimate anime stations, and I consume print and digital manga.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? Two things: it filled a hole left behind when Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the air. I will always be a sucker for Scooby-Doo crossed with Days of Our Lives shows. Secondly, the on demand aspect of online fan-subs: all I wanted to do was watch television while eating dinner after a long day at work, and the only thing on cable TV at that time was news or garbage.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? I was a working professional, so I was only confiding with close friends.

How did being a working professional make fandom prohibitive? Working for a large corporation, there was a lot of pressure to not stand out. It was a very competitive environment. The only safe topics of conversation were traffic, sports, or weather; admitting to liking anything unusual might give your coworkers something sticky with which to label you or otherwise undermine you. It took me years to realize somebody the next lab over watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, too, because we just couldn’t admit it aloud.

Is it different today? Are things easier now? In the workplace, it really depends on the folks in your micro environment. In my mid-forties I mind less about my reputation. If my manager gives me grief because I slapped a Hello Kitty magnet on my car, so be it. What is easier is accessing other fans online.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? If yes, how? If no, how did you connect with other fans? I only connected by word of mouth with other fans I knew through work: the twenty-something recent graduate, and the friend practicing her hiragana with names from an anime during a company safety meeting.

When did you first begin participating online, and what form did that take? I had no idea that an online fandom existed until relatively recently. (A couple of years ago?) I found Anime News Network through internet searches and followed the handles of contributors to Twitter. I read more than I write or post, because at the end of an exhausting day, I just want to be informed and entertained. I had no clue that other fans were out there or that I could search for them.

Do you remember your first convention? What was it, and what was it like?
2009(?) Animazement in Raleigh, NC. I hear that it’s a very well-run convention, and the participants have a reputation for enthusiasm and good behavior. It was overwhelming and fun!

Why did you decide to go to a con? I knew a family who were volunteering, and they encouraged me to go.  They also gave me advice as to which panels to go to, and that helped me from becoming overwhelmed.  It helped that I had been to my own professional conventions before, so I didn’t mind the noise or the crowds.  It also has helped that Animazement has earned a reputation for being a very well-run event, and the crowds are generally well-mannered and cheerful.  I love the  shopping, the energy, and the many creative cosplayers.

For you, what’s the biggest change between anime fandom when you discovered it and anime fandom now? My perception of fandom has changed.  I used to think that fans were all young adults, and while that is who mostly goes to cons, I have found writers online who represent much more diversity in age and experience.

Jennifer can be reached on Twitter.

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#55: Annalyn

Age: 24

Location: United States

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. It was 2009, during the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, and I was barely sixteen years old. At the time, Hulu provided my main TV source and online escape from reality—and with my mental health the way it was at the time, that escape was much valued. This was in the good old days when you could have a free Hulu account and only get thirty-second commercials. Naruto popped up as a recommended show, likely because of my interest in action-adventure and fantasy shows. The description caught my attention, so I watched the first episode. And the next. And the next. The first Naruto OP still fills me with nostalgia, transporting me back to where I sat on (not at) my parents’ kitchen counter, watching my first anime late at night. With Hulu’s help, I discovered similar anime, like Inuyasha. Before long, I was hooked on anime as a medium.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? The continued storylines. I felt like most American TV shows were very episodic, whereas anime would continue with the same complex storyline for dozens—or even hundreds—of episodes. I hadn’t seen these layers of conflict and character development in more than a couple other shows. Plus, the scenarios captured my attention and characters captured my heart in ways that, again, few American shows had ever managed.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Probably Naruto. I didn’t talk much with other fans during my first year of anime viewing—in fact, I can only think of three or four off the top of my head—but I remember the sites with illegal streaming often had something Naruto-related in their titles, and Naruto and Shippuden were nearly always at the top of any list sorted by popularity.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? Again, I can’t comment on much that has to do with other fans for my first year of watching. But after about a year and a half, I started getting involved in fandom online, primarily on Anime-Planet. In the A-P forums, I got to know a wonderful mix of people from all over the world, folks who knew how to be welcoming and have fun—but many of whom were also willing to engage in deep discussions about things like religion. We’d play forum games, talk about anime, participate in forum signature competitions, discuss religion…

This community propelled me into aniblogging, a hobby I continue to this day. I barely know how to start telling you what it was like to be a part of this community of anime fans. I can say that Anime-Planet and the aniblogosphere encouraged me and gave me a sense of companionship during one of the loneliest, hardest times of my life.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? If yes, how? If no, how did you connect with other fans? Yes. In addition to the forums and blogging I mentioned above, Twitter quickly became a center part of my anime experience—for me, that part started 2011, over a year and a half after I first found Naruto.

You imply that mental illness was a major part of your early anime fandom. If you’re comfortable discussing it, how did anime help you during this time? I did struggle a lot with anxiety and depression before and during my first couple years of anime fandom—and these issues exasperated ADHD symptoms that had barely bothered me before. At first, anime wasn’t exactly a help. It was an escape, and an unhealthy one at that. I would easily watch an entire 12-episode anime on a school night… multiple school nights in a row. There were times when I’d be watching anime in bed, then suddenly notice light coming in my window, alerting me that I had to be at school in just a few hours. This resulted from my lack of time management, my hyperfocus, my struggle with switching tasks, and, again, my need to escape anxiety.

When I discovered Anime-Planet, I found other fans who had similar or worse anime habits, and who pretty much boasted about how much anime they consumed at a furious rate, and about how addicted they were. I started to absorb that attitude and feel sort of proud of my anime habits—while still feeling a bit guilty.

But if it wasn’t anime, I’d have used American TV shows and books to escape the world. My anime binging habits were definitely a symptom, not a cause, of my troubles.

And anime did help. At first it was only in more shallow ways. It could make me giggle and squeal even in the depths of my depression. It stopped my racing thoughts—a temporary relief, sure, but a relief nonetheless. It provided my scattered, tangled brain with something it could actually focus on for hours at a time.

As I started blogging, anime became a help in bigger ways. Or rather, I believe God used what began as unhealthy anime and internet habits and turned them into something wonderful. I started using concepts from anime to help me process my own life. The football anime Eyeshield 21, for example, resulted in an excellent journaling-turned-blogging session on perseverance and effort. I saw how Sena (the main character) overcame repeated failure and pummeling, and I concluded that I could do the same—that I must do the same.

The online community helped, too. One of the initial triggers for my depression was loneliness, though it took me a while to figure that out.

How did the community you found at Anime-Planet make you feel less alone? Oh boy. I wrote a 2,000-word essay on this—and that’s the word count after significant pruning. Let’s see if I can give a shorter answer than that…

First of all, I could drop my mask online, among anime fans. Or rather, I could start fresh. People in real life knew me from before my mental health issues. I felt like I had to continue being that put-together, smart, hardworking good girl. That distanced me from people IRL. Online, though, I had no mask. I knew my anime habits wouldn’t cause judgment or disappointment, but the opposite. The people I met actually had similar interests and faults. And as I aniblogged more, I was determined to be open about everything except personally identifiable info (like location, name, and birthdate). That was the only way I knew to keep my mask from re-forming. I shared my anime habits, my anxiety, my depression—and because of that, I was able to truly connect with people. I probably could have connected more deeply with people offline if I’d been more open about my brokenness… but I was clumsy about relationships. And shy. Offline openness would become much easier later, after I practiced online.

On Anime-Planet, I found people who valued what I had to say in my blog posts and recommendations. We had common ground, connection—and goodness, those comments lit up my world, especially at first. People cared about what I wrote. They watched what I recommended. They heard me.

An even bigger breakthrough happened in the forums, starting in January 2011. I’d been lurking around the forums for a while, still too shy and unsure of myself to contribute to conversations about anime or daily life. But then a new thread in the “General Discussion” section caught my eye. It was titled “General Religion Thread.” Long story short, this had two effects on me: First, it got me started in the forums, where I found a whole bunch of welcoming people to play forum games with, discuss religion with, and who even got me started on making forum signatures. This was my main social interaction outside of school. But second, and more importantly, this is where I met TWWK—or Charles, as I’d later start calling him.

Charles and I checked out each other’s blogs. His blogging approach at Beneath the Tangles, a blog dedicated to the connections between anime and spirituality, would inspire me. His comments on my posts and his requests that I guest post at BtT encouraged me in my writing. And connection with him would lead to connection with other bloggers. Through blogging, I would find other anime fans who struggled with anxiety and depression, who resonated with what I wrote. I’d exchange opinions with others about anime and religion. I’d learn to overcome shyness about commenting on others’ blog posts… I’d grow, I’d have fun, and I’d learn, in a way that was much less stressful than interacting with people IRL. And somehow, the beginning of this managed to overlap with the same months I’d say were my worst, as far as depression and anxiety goes. Anime and fellow anibloggers were often the bright spots in my dark days—though, of course, there were still stretches where even online interactions and blogging were too much for me.

How did becoming an anime blogger change the way you interacted in the fandom? I’m currently blogging at Beneath the Tangles, and my posts can all be found here. Or rather, I’m on hiatus now, but I’ll return there soon! I’ve been blogging at BtT since early 2015, and I was even on the leadership team for a time. I’ve came a long way since 2011, when I felt too insecure to accept Charles’s invitation to guest post.

If you’d like to check out my old blog, you can find it here. But it’s very much retired now—I’ve closed comments and everything.

Becoming an aniblogger kept me inspired and involved in the fandom in a new way. I’ve mentioned much of its significance above. But I’ll add that it’s the reason I first joined Twitter—I thought that would be a good place to network with other anibloggers and perhaps get more blog traffic. Now, my involvement on anitwitter has a life of its own.

How was/is your Twitter fandom participation different than Anime-Planet? My Twitter participation is decidedly more sustainable than my Anime-Planet participation was. Anime-Planet forums took a lot of time and energy. Because of the anxiety I had at the time and my introverted nature, the discussions—both on the discussion boards and in private messages—were sometimes more involved than I could handle. When that happened, I’d drop off the face of the earth… and eventually, I reached the point where I never returned to A-P. On Twitter, however, such involved discussions are rarer. 140-character Tweets are less likely to overwhelm me than a long forum post. I’m less likely to procrastinate on replying—though I still do.

In some ways, Twitter has become more personal than A-P, simply because I’ve been there longer. I share many aspects of my life, and so do others. But I also interact with a wider range of people, especially when I’m tweeting about a show. We all get excited about it together, and that’s a delight!

What’s the biggest contrast between fandom when you discovered it and now? For me, the biggest contrast is how I am involved. I started off as a newbie on the sidelines, trying to contribute to the A-P community by adding recommendations, reviews, and blog posts—but still too shy to comment on others’ blog posts or participate in forum discussions until I was practically invited to do so. I didn’t know much about how community could transcend a single site, spreading out across various blogs and social media. In the months that followed, though, I did gain confidence, and blog comments would become one of my chief ways to interact with fellow fans.

Six and a half years after joining Anime-Planet (so, eight years after watching ep 1 of Naruto), I’m no longer a newbie. I can confidently use “tsundere,” “yandere,” or “yuri” in a sentence. I’ve given advice to younger fans and bloggers. I don’t hesitate to comment on others’ blogs, since I fully understand how comments can encourage bloggers and promote community. But my primary interactions with fellow fans tend to be either on Twitter or with other Beneath the Tangles writers—still online, though in a more private setting. And I’m trying to figure out how the blazes anime fandom and aniblogging fit into an adult, post-college life. Especially the adult, post-college life of an ADDer with two jobs and time management issues.

Basically, I am the the biggest contrast between my fandom experience six years ago and my fandom experience now. As I’ve changed, my experience of fandom has changed immensely, and I’m still sorting it out.

If fandom outside of my personal experience has changed much, I’ve barely noticed. I do think it’s shifted more and more to social media like Twitter and Tumblr, rather than blog comments and websites. But I’ll leave further speculation to the more observant.

Annalyn can be reached on Twitter. 

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#52: Daniela

Age: 24

Location: New Mexico

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. Honestly, my memories of this are very vague? I fell in love with anime in elementary school (and have been in love ever since), but I’m not sure when the shift between my liking anime that I didn’t realize was different than the cartoons I watched (i.e., Pokemon and Digimon) to my actively understanding my love of anime as me loving something called “anime” occurred. I’m not sure if I knew YuGiOh! was an anime when I started watching it. I probably knew Dragon Ball Z was, and definitely knew it by the time I started watching things like Gundam Wing and Yu Yu Hakusho. By the end of elementary school (which was 5th grade for me), I was a full-blown anime fan, relying on rentals from Hastings to introduce me to new series.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? Everything? I liked the stories, the animation—everything. Unlike cartoons, anime had an overarching plot, which I loved. It didn’t hurt that I never really liked live-action television, for whatever reason.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Digimon had a universal appeal among other kids, even those who weren’t into anime/didn’t know what it was. For those of us who did, it was Dragon Ball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Gundam Wing. I was vaguely aware of the existence of Sailor Moon, but never saw it myself because I didn’t have the channel it was on, and, as it wasn’t until I was in 6th grade that I even met another female anime fan, it didn’t even occur to me to check if Hastings had such a girly series to watch.

How did knowing other female anime fans change the way you engaged in fandom, as opposed as when you bonded over anime with your brother? Meeting other female anime fans definitely changed how I engaged with fandom. Before, I watched anime with my brothers and his friends, and we spent a lot of time talking about it, but I also continually restricted myself in what I talked about. That is, I talked about the kinds of topics they talked about, and avoided anything that could be construed as “girly”, like when I had a crush on a particular character or was invested in a particular pairing / wished that a different pairing would happen. Sometimes I got around these constraints with a kind of personal code—i.e., saying a particular character was my “favorite” when what I really meant was “this character is super-cute and I totally have a crush.” It was all very much an attempt to just “be one of the boys” and “not like other girls,” but it also wasn’t really a conscious decision—it’s something that I only realized that I was doing when I met other female anime fans and felt free to talk about whatever caught my attention in an anime, whether that was squeeing over a particularly awesome fight scene or sighing over something especially romantic.

And I didn’t just stop with my female friends—having those friendships also left me more comfortable to talk about whatever I wanted with my brother, and, to a lesser extent, his friends. I’m not sure if I can say exactly why this was the case—like I said, much of this was a subconscious reaction from me—but if I had to guess, I’d say it’d because I had a safety net that I hadn’t had before. I no longer had to worry as much about what my brother’s friends thought of me, because I had my own friends who loved anime too. As for my brother, he’d always been my best friend: seeing that other anime fans didn’t have a problem with the more so-called “girly” parts of my interests made me more confident that he wouldn’t have a problem with it either. (And he didn’t—I’m fortunate to have a truly excellent brother.)

Looking back, being an anime fan before I met other female anime fans was characterized by a lot of tension, first in hiding my love of anime from “normal people,” and then from hiding particular aspects of my enjoyment of anime from those who remained. Meeting other female anime fans released that tension and allowed me to relax in a way I couldn’t allow myself to before.

It was also after that I met other female anime fans that I began to be drawn into online fandom, particularly fanfiction, but I’m not sure if I can say that was directly because of meeting them. I do think it accelerated the process (as it was one of those friends stumbling upon fanfiction and then showing it to me that introduced me to the concept), but I’d already been fond of writing for years, and had just begun exploring the Internet myself at home, so it’s not impossible that I would have stumbled upon it eventually. It did become a core part of our friendship, though, and one that was never shared by the male anime fans in my life.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? It was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from how it is now. A big focus was on actually getting access to various series—it was really freaking hard. My brother and I depended on rentals from Hastings and friends who had more channels than us recording bits and pieces of series for us. It was very male-dominated—like I mentioned above, I didn’t meet another female anime fan until I was in the 6th grade; before then, I relied on my brother and his friends to talk about anime with.

Also: loving anime was like, a HUGE SECRET for me. I was open enough about it with my brother and his friends, but with MY friends and classmates? Nope. Never said a word. I only met the other female anime fan in 6th grade because I vaguely described a moment “from a show I saw” in front of a new acquaintance, and SHE (who was ALSO keeping her love of anime a secret) recognized it as a moment from Yu Yu Hakusho—and then, on top of that, that revelation led to me finding out that another girl I’d been friends with since 4th grade was also obsessed with anime and video games and had been keeping it a secret. Like, we’d been good friends for over two years, and these were major hobbies for us, yet neither of us had felt comfortable enough to reveal our “secret” to one another until a series of coincidental events sent our secrets toppling down. There was just such a taboo on being an anime/video game fan, and doubly so if you were a girl—it’s weird to remember that now.

Why did people back then keep anime fandom a secret? Why was it especially important for girls to do so? Again, I don’t think I ever consciously thought about why it had to be such a secret, but I think I can break it down the reasons why I felt that way. There was very much a dislike of the “other,” that is to say, the “nerdy.” This very much only applied to anime and video games. Even what we thought of as the “normal” kids in our school were drawn to card games for a few years during elementary, and other kids actually admired me for reading so much. My brother and his friends were actually bullied to varying extents, though I didn’t know this until years later. At the same time, I was very much aware of how other, “normal” people viewed one particular friend of my brother, who was also happened to be the one who was the most open about loving anime (he wore anime-themed t-shirts, had anime pins on his backpack, etc.) (He was also, I learned later, the one who had been bullied the worst.)

Basically, the culture around me gave me the feeling that liking anime and video games was something to be looked down upon, though it’d never been stated to me in such terms. Furthermore, there was a sense that these were essentially “boy” interests—boy interests that should be mocked, yes, but something for boys all the same. So that compounded the problem for me: it was supposedly embarrassing to like these things, and even if it was going to hypothetically be okay for a boy to like them, I, as a girl, shouldn’t have been interested in them at all. I think I mentioned that I’d been close friends with a certain girl for two years before we found out that we were both closet anime and video game fans (and fairly passionate fans at that). I never asked her why she kept it a secret and she never asked me, and it was because it was something that we never needed to ask: it was something that we both took as a given.

Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? If yes, how? If no, how did you connect with other fans? For me, the internet didn’t really play a role until I got into middle school. Any connection with fans happened only if you happened to meet someone who liked anime (which sometimes was a complicated thing to figure out, as my story in the above answer might suggest.)

What was online fandom like then? What sites and services did people converge around? Most of my online fandom interactions were in the context of fanfiction and the fanfiction-writing community. The very first site with anime fans on it that I discovered was called Quizilla. I believe that it no longer exists, but it was a website formed around user-created quizzes. Not all were fandom-related, not by a longshot—there were all sorts of quizzes with titles like “What color is your soul?” and “What animal are you?” and so on—but there were also fandom-related quizzes like “Which Yu Yu Hakusho character are you?” and “Which Inuyasha character would be your boyfriend?”

It was through this website that my friends and I discovered fanfiction. Quizilla definitely wasn’t created to host stories, but people posted them anyways. This is a bit difficult to explain, but I’ll try. Each chapter of a story was posted as its own “quiz” (and before Quizilla implemented a folder structure where you could group quizzes of a similar type, it was sometimes difficult to find each chapter in the right order on the writer’s page). People handled this in different ways: some posted the entire chapter text in the first question box, others split it up among questions boxes with the “answers” being used to track people’s reactions (i.e., “I like it so far, keep going!” could be the first answer option, while the second would be something like “Ugh, this sucks!”). The only way to track how many people read a story is if they went to the quiz results page, so some authors would post the last section of the chapter in the results in an effort to get people to click through, while others would try to tempt them with the promise of pretty/cute/sexy fanart (which they’d usually found through Google—crediting the original artists definitely wasn’t a big concern back then). Later, Quizilla did implement a story posting feature, and reactions among the writers were mixed: most of my friends (online and offline) and I were decidedly against it, though I no longer remember why.

Pretty much all the stories on Quizilla were self-inserts, and I believe that it was mostly younger fans in their teens who converged there. Most discussion took place through private messages, which were usually started when someone liked someone else’s story. Some people did put what were basically chat room widgets in the results pages of their stories, but most of what was posted there was feedback on the story itself, though sometimes actual discussion did occur. I think that Quizilla did implement message boards or community posts later on, but I never spent much time on them.

A couple of years later, I discovered fanfiction.net, and through it Livejournal. I still spent time on Quizilla, but I definitely began to fade out of it as my main online home in favor of Livejournal. I joined LJ when I was about 13, and I do think there was an older demographic there than there was on Quizilla: while there were plenty of people around my age and older, I don’t really recall anyone who was younger than me—at least, not who would admit to it—and there were plenty of people college aged and older. There was much more in-depth discussion there than on Quizilla, but also more discussion about our personal lives. I made friends on Quizilla, but I made many more on LJ, and the environment on there was definitely more conducive to that. At the same time, there was a stronger emphasis on pseudonyms than there is now. Only my closest friends learned my real name, for instance.

I also briefly spent some time in a general chatroom on an anime website. I’m not sure which one it was anymore. Both male and female anime fans talked there, most of them in their teens or early twenties, and fanfiction didn’t play a role in the discussions at all. There were also roleplaying communities on LJ and Proboards, but I didn’t really spend much time there, so I can’t say much about it.

Do you remember your first convention? What was it, and what was it like?
I’ve… actually never gone to a convention. I remember that I was D Y I N G to for most of middle school and high school, but all the conventions at the time were just too far away, and too much money for me to justify it with.

Have you been to any in-person fandom events, like a club? I was technically a member of my high school’s anime club for about two years, but it was a disappointing experience all around. It mostly comprised of everyone disagreeing about what anime to watch, and then watching nothing in the end. There was also a bit of an unwelcoming attitude there. For instance, my best friend at the time had a well-known love of Pikachu, and when we were tossing around ideas for a potential t-shirt for the club, many of the members thought it would be “hilarious” if some drew a picture of Goku killing Pikachu to use on the t-shirt. Yeah.

For many years I also attended a regular meet-up of card players at a local restaurant every Saturday, and while the focus was mostly on card games (all kinds, but the main one was initially Yu-Gi-Oh, and then Magic: The Gathering later on), many of them were fans of actual anime as well. Some of the memberships between these groups did overlap (though there were many more card-players than anime club members), and both very much had a boy’s club kind of atmosphere (my best friend at the time was the only other girl who attended the card-playing meet-ups), though I liked the card-player meet-ups better.

You said anime fandom, “was very male-dominated.” Is it different today? Why or why not? This is a bit of tricky question for me to answer, because the context in which I interact with anime fandom is so very different. Anime fandom was very male-dominated for me in my early years as a fan because I was almost entirely limited to interacting with anime fans in real life, and the majority of them (at least, the majority who would admit to be anime fans) were male. Even when I started interacting more with (mostly female) fans on the internet, I continued to know mostly male anime fans in real life. These days, I interact almost solely with female anime fans, but nearly all of those interactions occur online.

That being said, I do think it’s easier for me personally to be open about being an anime fan than it was when I was younger. If I worry about someone judging me for being an anime fan in real life, it’s because I’m worried that they’ll judge me for being someone who likes anime, period, not because they’ll judge for specifically being a girl who likes anime. In that sense, I do think the boundaries have broadened.

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#50: Rine Karr

Name: Rine Karr

Age: 31

Location: Colorado, USA

When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. I first discovered anime when I was in late elementary school or early middle school. My first brush with it was with Sailor Moon in 1995. I distinctly remember getting up really early in the morning, at around five or six, and sneaking downstairs after my dad left for work to watch it on FOX. I fell in love with it and eventually watched most of Sailor Moon and Sailor Moon R on the staticky USA Network in 1997. Technically, I suppose, I also saw The Last Unicorn when I was young, and although it’s not a Japanese cartoon, per se, the animation was done by Topcraft. I also watched ThunderCats and other ’80s cartoons on television that had ties to Japanese animation studios.

What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? Something about Sailor Moon stirred my imagination. When I first started watching the show in 1995, I didn’t know what anime was. I remember thinking that the style of the animation seemed different from most shows on television. I remember thinking that the setting seemed different somehow from my suburban hometown. Initially, I did not know that Serena/Usagi lived in Tokyo, and I remember wishing that I could wander around my town like Usagi, visiting jewelry stores, cake shops, and Crown. I also remember wondering why all the girls wore sailor suits. And I remember really wanting Usagi’s Mary Jane shoes and her black satchel school bag, except that I could never find them at the mall. Usagi was one of the first female cartoon characters that I could really relate to, and I became enthralled by all the magic and lore in the story.

What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Pokémon and Digimon definitely were more popular than Sailor Moon, at least among my male classmates. None of the girls I knew watched anime. Also, YuGiOh! became popular later.

What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? There wasn’t much of a fandom to be a part of, at least, none of my friends watched Sailor Moon. I didn’t get AOL and dial-up internet at home until 1998, so I didn’t really learn more about Sailor Moon and other anime like Escaflowne, which I also loved, until then. I joined some webrings and connected with some people through Neopets, but again, I didn’t really know anyone who liked anime until I went to college. There I watched Adult Swim, went to my first anime convention, and occasionally visited my college’s anime club. I finally made friends who also loved anime! Crunchyroll soon became popular after that, and, obviously, now I get most of my fandom kicks from the internet and anime cons.

You didn’t meet other fans until you went to college. How did that work out? I’ve always been a bit nerdy. I’ve always gotten into books, movies, and video games more than my classmates. My parents met in the ’70s playing D&D after all, so I’ve never been adverse to geeky pursuits, but in high school, I kept most of my interests to myself. Perhaps there were other girls interested in anime and manga, but I didn’t know any of them. In college, it felt like everyone was out to be themselves, to wear their hearts on their sleeves, so I embraced my geekiness and found friends who were also interested in anime. A couple of them are still my friends 10 years later, and my husband who I met in college is also an anime fan, so I’d say that it worked out well!

 

Did you stay a fan the whole time up until today? If yes, what kept your interest? If no, what got you back into anime again? I’d say that I’ve been an anime fan ever since I saw Sailor Moon in the ’90s, but I probably had a small break in high school, since no one else I knew watched it. Also, there was a lot less anime on TV then, and I didn’t have cable, so I sort of stopped watching for a couple of years. College was an excellent time to get back into it, since, like I said, I met other people who liked it, and my college had cable TV. In the end, however, it was probably my first anime con in 2007 that really inspired me to fully embrace the anime fandom.

Can you tell me more about early internet fandom? Were there particular sites or forums you visited? It’s difficult for me to remember all of the sites I visited back in the day. Many of them don’t exist anymore. I remember visiting a lot of Expage.com and Geocities websites. Some of them had scanlations of all of the Sailor Moon manga and artbooks, some of them had GIFs of sprites from the Sailor Moon video games, and some of them had fan art. But they were hard to find. Webrings helped, but it still wasn’t that easy, so if Tumblr had existed back then, I would have been addicted! I also spent a lot of time on LiveJournal, but what I sampled there was more like personal blogs than fan blogs. I didn’t participate in too many forums, no anime forums at all, although I did spend a lot of time on the Cittàgazze website and forum, a community for His Dark Materials fans, as well as The Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza.

What was the first fandom you got really invested in? How did you express your fandom? Definitely Sailor Moon! The Sailor Moon fandom feels ancient at this point. It’s 20 years old! And although I never really talked to other Sailor Moon fans until I became an adult, I’ve always felt like I was a part of the community. When I first started watching the show, I couldn’t really express my fandom; I didn’t have any money, and it was difficult to find Sailor Moon merchandise. But now I can, and I have done so by purchasing the entire series, as well as many of the manga volumes. I’ve also written about my love of Sailor Moon for Women Write About Comics a number of times, as well as my love of other anime at Girls in Capes.

Do you remember your first anime con? If so, what was it like? My first anime con was Tekkoshocon in 2007. Tekko is a small con hosted in Pittsburgh. When I went, there were about 2,500 attendees, a small number compared to cons I’ve attended since, but it was the perfect size for a newbie back then like me. I had been reluctant to go initially, but I had a lot of fun in the end. The con allowed me to experience everything an anime con has to offer, and I got to talk to a lot of like-minded people. I remember the video rooms were my favorite part. I got to sample anime I had never heard of before, from classics like El Hazard: The Magnificent World to newer shows like Elfen Lied. Now when I attend anime cons, I tend to avoid the video rooms, because they only play shows I’ve already seen, but back then, it was a learning experience.

What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom then and anime fandom today? I think there are two things that make the anime fandom today different and even better than it was in the past. Firstly, access to anime is easier now than it ever was before. I always relied on television channels for my anime when I was young, which made watching a series in order very difficult. Lots of anime in the ’90s were highly Americanized and heavily edited for broadcast TV. American producers and distributors even cut some episodes completely, because they felt that their content was inappropriate for young American audiences. And although sometimes translations of subtitles are changed and censored today, the American anime industry is a lot more transparent than it used to be. The internet changed everything! Secondly, anime and other geeky pursuits have become more mainstream over the last decade or so, which has made the pursuit of anime more fun than ever. Being a geek is more socially accepted, and so going to cons and talking to other fans and expressing your fandom in how you dress, how you decorate your living spaces, and how you spend your time and money is so much more fun! The anime fandom feels like a big family of like-minded people, and although many of my internet friendships are sort of abstract and tenuous, they make me smile every day.

Rine can be reached on Twitter.

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#49: Viga

Age: 30

Location: Minneapolis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Viga can be reached on Twitter and YouTube. 

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#48: Kris Lund

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.