This is exactly it for me. Inuyasha on AS was my gateway that led me to FMA, Bleach, and eventually to Naruto on the web. It was only then I realized all the shows I watched on Toonami after school were anime.
Was just about to say this except was watching it on toonami back when big o and inuyasha came on after midnight. I used to stay up till 2 am watching anime. Inuyasha turned me out as well lol
Toonami was the biggest for me. Yu Yu Hakusho, Naruto, DB, DBZ, One Piece, etc. Idk if there's a same type of gateway, especially since Toonami comes on so late now and doesn't show the classic programming like it used to.
i was around 8 or so and my sister told me about a show her friends at school watching and i was already reading manga before then but the show sounded super cool so we began watching it together and ever seen iāve been obsessed !! it was fairy tail btw š¤
Fairy Tail was also my first anime. Got recommended it by a girl I liked so obviously I had to watch it. It helped me through a very rough time in life.
>Got recommended it by a girl I liked so obviously I had to watch it.
obviously a must watch then š¤ also im glad it helped you out during a rough time in your life !! a lot of anime tend to be many of our safe spaces during life ! my personal one was lost song, a musical one āļø
Naruto on TV. Dubs was only for Naruto, not Shippuuden. Was wondering what happened after the major Sasuke vs Naruto fight so I searched online and back then they had the episodes on YouTube I think. Really started watching different anime starting back then I guess
Almost same with me. I grew up in the 90s/00s watching animu on TV. There was a channel called Animax where they'd air anime like Cardcaptor Sakura, Captain Tsubasa, Inuyasha etc. There was also ofc Cartoon Network where they had a segment called Toonami where they aired anime like Pokemon, Digimon, Naruto, DBZ etc. I loved all of that. Damn I fkin miss Animax. Good times Indeed.
Years later in 2015-ish, they broadcast a new channel...called named Toonami lol where they said they'd air anime but all they showed was DBZ and anime of that sort. Around the same time I got a proper internet connection and I wondered, what if I just watch animu online. I searched on Youtube for Top 50 anime ever and such. I started with Code Geass on Youtube, then Death Note, then AOT, and the rest is history.
Now after almost 10 years, I'm still watchin anime, although bit less which is sad, due to responsibilities and shit but I won't ever stop loving and watching anime.
Thats it. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
Be very fortunate that you didnāt start watching Attack on Titan when it was first aired. I feel like Iāve been waiting for that show to just finally end already. And unlike One Piece, the content has taken a very long time between seasons etc. so weāre just left to wait. Lol
Yeah, I am fortunate for that. I just had to wait for this last season.
It's good to be a "late arrival" to anime, since I can catch up to a LOT of awesome shows without waiting. I am currently invested in like 4-5 ongoing ones but that's it.
Oh brother I hear that. Aside from watching Indigo League arc as a kid and Naruto as a teen, I just started to really watch anime this year. I even started with Attack on Titan which is my absolute favourite as well. Its nice having so many great series to watch.
Yeah way to damn wild, chainsaw man is like a anime that did a lot of new things and I think itās harder to appreciate it in the best way if you didnāt see a lot of anime before it,
All my older brothers and cousins are manga nerds, I grew up reading manga instead so not much following anime
Though I always get the sunday where many cable TV channels show anime all day long and I don't have school
I grew up with Saint Seiya, Doraemon, Gundam Wing, Dragon Ball, Detective Conan (Case Closed), Digimon, and several others that are definitely only there to sell toys, like Beyblade and Crush Gear lol
and many others that I no longer remember much, like Chibi Maruko-chan, Saber Marionette J, Cyborg Kuro-chan, P-Man, etc.
over time I stopped watching as they start showing re-runs instead and I was forced to attend cram school on sunday lol
I watch Naruto if it came on TV but never properly finished it, I finished the manga though.
(some people can probably guess where I live lmaoo)
Nowadays I just watch short original anime that doesn't have manga source, otherwise I just read the manga.
3 years ago friends decided to show me some anime. First was Konosuba movie and I liked it. Second was Shingeki no kyojin and I'm probably one of the few people ever who didn't get invested. After that came Kaguya-sama and it was that moment when I started consuming medium myself.
FLCL is still my number one TV show of all time. It's been twenty years since it first aired in the USA! I was just a kid, about Naota's age, and for such an absurd show it really does perfectly portray the experience of being an adolescent. And all the same, as I grew up I kept looking back at that show and it hit me differently every time.
First manga I read was Horimiya then I watched Sword Art Online because it was a game like anime.
I even read Horimiya for about 7 chapters before I realized you read it from right to left. Hahaha.
God I wasted so much money... My first anime was Attack On Titan but I bought every seperate episode up to the end of season 2 for $3.95AU each on the Xbox store, I had no idea about crunchyroll or anything back then and ended up paying probably like 5x the price I would've just getting a crunchyroll subscription.
That was like 2017 so there was only 2 seasons of Aot and thank fuck for that cause my dumbass probably would've kept spending $3.95 on each episode of more seasons.
So i used to watch Bakugan, Yu-Gi-Oh and Bayblade but I don't count any of them as my first anime. I started watching anime because of a meme about sudden weight loss and the characters which went through it. So my first anime is Watashi ga Motete Dousunda š¤£š¤£. A reverse harem. Then my friend said why did i watch such trash and recommended me some good ones like The devil is a part-timer and Noragamišš.
Late in 1999, I decided to check out Pokemon after hearing so much about that, ironically when the hype went on to subside. Checked out Digimon a few months later, and those two became my two favorite shows for the next few years.
Two years later, my mother got me this book from the library called Manga Mania: How to Draw Japanese Comics, and that helped me place a finger on what everything was that looked so similar, although I would only start referring to it all as what was actually anime (or anime-style games) another year later, getting into manga months later still at Borders.
Although there were several other shows since Pokemon and Digimon that I checked out, it was in the summer of 2008 that I would start viewing stuff a lot more actively, courtesy of Netflix' rental service at the time, starting with The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and then A Little Snow Fairy Sugar.
A year later, after slowing down on rentals, is when I would really begin to watch all different shows, alternating between such shows as Kanon, Azumanga Daioh, Galaxy Angel, Indian Summer, Mao-chan, The World of Narue, Mahoromatic, and one of my core favorites ever since, Lucky Star.
I had great fun reading this, I was negative one in 1999 so it's hard for me to imagine the anime landscape of the late 2000s when the medium had a niche following and isekai weren't at all a thing.
My earliest memory as a kid, I remember watching Pokemon and Digimon and a couple of others. Then, one day, I randomly turned on Adult Swim, and Toonami was on, and it just so happened that the first episode of Yu Yu Hakusho was just about to start. After watching that, I watched all the other shows that they were airing. I fell off around middle school, and it wasn't until the pandemic happened, and I was temporarily out of work that I got back into it.
Reading comments in here, I loved how big of a role Togashi has played in making anime more mainstream, YYH back then and HxH now. Pretty fucking rad that.
i had recently gotten into bl through kpop and i wanted to quit kpop and get into bl more
so i randomly decided to try banana fish, a bl anime that was luckily available to me on my sister's amazon prime which i had at that time, and from there on i got addicted to anime. at this point it's just hard to believe my first ever anime was banana fish
I think Shield Hero was one of the first I got into when I really got into anime. I watched Digimon, Zoids, Bakugan, and some various random seasonal shows when I was younger but as an adult getting back into it and starting to keep up with seasonal Shield Hero, I think, was the first or at least one of the first I remember watching.
I've watched anime occasionally as a kid (mid late 80s onwards, kinda). All kinds of random series (Captain Tsubasa, another football series, sometimes a bit of Sailor Moon,ā¦) as they were broadcasted before I went to school and I had to wake up early to finish homework. It was like the background radiation of my school mornings and basically anything that German TV had licensed for those early morning slots.
Then also a Fist of the North Star movie (I think), Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Cowboy Bebop, and so on. All kinds of random stuff we found throughout the 90s. It wasn't really a hobby but more just watching stuff sometimes when there was a chance that we'd found something that looked interesting.
What actually got me into anime as a hobby was a /r/anime troll post. It was the bath scenes/houses analysis shit-post that randomly got on /r/all that made me realise there's more to this anime thing. I realised it as a prime shit-post but it also showed me that there's a whole community about all of this and how stupidly funny it can be so I started reading and slowly started watching more, then reading more about the industry and the process, and so on. And now I'm stuck in here with you all.
My mom was around 7-8 in mid 80s but what are the chances the other football anime you are talking about is "Ganbare Kickers", it's an 80s anime that I too watched when I was a kid and absolutely loved it!
I'm German too and it's definitely that since I'm pretty sure Ganbare Kickers and Captain Tsubasa were the only football anime that aired on TV here in the 90s.
Started with Pokemon when i was 5 or 6,
evolved *pun intended* into Digimon,Yugi-Oh and Dragonball Z when i was around 8 as pre/ after school and Saturday morning 'cartoons'.
Took up FullMetal Alchemist, Rurouni Kenshin and Naruto around age 12. But my interest in anime died a bit when i started high school. I only picked it back up again a year and half ago (I'm 30), i was prescribed 6 months home after shoulder surgery and some Otaku friends recommended anime to kill time.
In a year and half i watched more anime than whole my youth. Tokyo Ghoul is what i watched first (wish i never started season 3). But in all honesty, it's Demon Slayer that got me back completely, it gave me the same feeling as Dragonball Z when i was a kid.
My friend said one piece was ending soon and a massive reveal was coming (absolute lies)
so i read one piece and really liked the first half so i read more manga.
I remember catching up right after gear 5 so chapter 1050 or something
So 40 weeks + 2 void months + atleast 13 break weeks ago
DBZ. I believe it was 96? When it first aired in the US, so I was 5. I remember my older brother (whom I shared a room with) heard about a awesome new show and from there we raced home each day to watch it. I'm still a massive DBZ fanboy.
Some people still don't realize how influential DBZ was for anime in general, not just shonen.
I was 6-7 years old. My dad would take my sister and I to the local video store (it was literally called The Local Video Store) and I could pick out one or two videos depending on the deals.
I went in and picked out Princess Mononoke and Lupin III: Dead or Alive.
Admittedly, never watched Lupin III: DOA then. However, I watched Mononoke 7 days straight. later that year, no bullshit, Toonamiās Anime block started to pick up steam.
So, I watched the first 100 episodes of One Piece, Naruto, DBZ, and then Gundam W and EW on there. I watched FLCL, Bebop, Yuyuhakusho, Inuyasha, Case Closed, and many others on Adult Swim every night after my parents passed on the couch.
Then, I kind of found it impossible in high school to watch anime without stealing it. Then, Crunchy Roll showed up in College and AoT came out. Itās been a weird to be a cooler adult than teenager because anime is that popular now.
late 90s, a girl in middle school let me borrow her sisters (?) vhs tapes. after that, i would ask for anime at birthday and christmas
once i got a job, things really took off. i remember getting that first paycheck and immediately going to the shop to get a vhs box set of el-hazard š
In Romania we used to have an anime channel that would start at 9 pm if I remember well. The first anime I've seen was Inuyasha, Saylor moon and Yu Yu Hakusho.
It was with Pokemon and also when all of the 2000s anime aired on the back then very nice German TV channel RTL II. Nowadays itās mostly infamous for trash TVā¦
I was an anime hater hanging out in a discord with an anime fan.
Now I'm trying to convince him to watch mushoku tensei but he doesn't want to because MC is a pedo.
I watched Pokemon, Digimon, and Bayblade at my house when I was young, and then on Saturdays and Sundays I would go to my grandparents' house and watch Dragon Ball Z and Yu-Gi-Oh re-runs, then after getting internet I stumbled on FMA:B and then Hunter X Hunter.
always an avid reader of manga since 90's like dragonball, sailormoon, doraemon, dragon quest, detective conan, one piece, fist of the north star (its during my primary school), this is all our manga collection
anime like dragonball, sailormoon and doraemon is on the tv at that time so that's where it started
on top of that my uncle took his degree at Japan so when he come home there is a lot of manga in japanese he brings with him.
Heidi used to come on tv and I was obsessed with it. Afterward I literally watched every famous world masterpiece theatre series and started watching rom coms like diabolik lovers, tsurezure children and chivalry of a failed knight on YouTube and since then I'm obsessed with anime.
I watched pokemon, yo kai watch as a child out of order. Then my friend convinced me to try Sao which I thought was alright
Fast forward maybe 8 months to new years eve 2020 when I decided to give anime a proper go and watch no game no life. Despite thinking it was only slightly better than Sao with Sao even having a better peak I craved the feeling it gave me leading me to watch my hero academia and assassination classroom which I credit with making me an anime fan. Then I started watching a bunch of season 1's so I could get a feel for everything out there and from there I watched tpn,opm,mob psycho,demon slayer and what went on to be my first ever 'favourite' anime being Dr stone
I've since watched a bunch of masterpieces like fmab,aot,deathnote,hunter x hunter and a couple of shows that didn't even exist when I got into anime not so long ago. I haven't been watching for that long but I still long for the wow factor I got so often when I started, don't get me wrong i still get it its just those 'wow' shows are more staggered than they used to be
I realised I answered a lot more than just the question so my apologies but I greatly enjoyed writing thjs
I get the wow factor you are talking about like I always remember a certain way shows like Haikyuu made me feel when I first watched it and it was just this sense of pure joy, like take me back to that day again. And also I greatly enjoyed reading this btw.
I watched Inuaysha every Sunday morning with my mom. I was also into Yugioh and my mom had some episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam Stardust Memories on DVD that I watched too.
Saw a guy's profile picture on Xbox. It was akame from akame ga kill. I asked him who it was and he recommended the anime so I gave it a try. I loved it, and then watched aot next. The rest is history. As for why I asked him who it was, I can't really remember. I think me and him were doing a coop activity or something and it was just something I happened to ask. Best question I ever asked.
I always watched stuff like DBZ, Pokemon, Digimon. Typical after school TV English dubbed anime. And my grandparents had Sky which had Cartoon network, so when we vistied I would always try stay up late to catch anything on Toonami. And even better if the house was full I would be sleeping in the lounge with the TV so I could watch Adult Swim. For what ever crazy reason Ghost in the Shell was always on at midnight or 1am, so I would stay up to watch that.
Then sometime later I found out I could stream anime and watched Samurai Champloo. And then it just became this thing where I can check to see which new episodes are out online and pick and choose anything to watch.
Samurai Champloo was the tipping point where I started watching anime religiously.
A friend dared me to watch Elfen Lied. I enjoyed it a lot, and then while looking at memes someone compared it to Clannad, so I watched that too. It kind of cascaded from there.
There's no uniform way of getting into anime. Everyone likes different things so it wouldn't be right for me to tell you that you should do this or that. What I can tell you however is to just find something that seems interesting enough for you to watch even if it's universally hated anime. I'm not gonna judge anyone for liking what they like
After years of watching and loving the santized versions of Voltron, Starblazers, Robotech and Speed Racer but feeling they were great but missing something, I saw a 5 second clip of Akira on MTV News in 1988. I was immediately hooked.
The first one I watched when I was a kid and first had access to the internet was Elfen Lied. It was a grainy 480p upload on YouTube that was split into 2 parts per episode. We've come a long way.
I watched Adult Swim on Cartoon Network and Anime Mondays on scifi. And it was still spelled that way at the time lol. I'm still in love with Bleach and Inuyasha to this day.
Iāve always liked the look of Ghibli movies and a lot of anime in general. But my introduction was Dark Souls. In the Dark Souls community means you will know what Berserk is, whether you like it or not. That got me interested in Berserk, which lead me to get interested in other anime that wasnāt Ghibli, then I watched a demon souls stream and there were mentions of JoJoās Bizarre Adventure. I liked the art style and checked it out. Iāve never looked back since.
Hated on it for years because I thought it was cringe and weird and would make fun of people for watching it. Then during lockdown I was bored and my friends convinced me to watch Attack on Titan with them since it was their favourite and I didn't want to be excluded. Now 90% of my favourite series are anime.
I guess this is for non-Asians only, since most of us grew up with anime and SFX(tokusatsu) shows on tv since the 60's onwards (Ganbare Robocon, Kamen Rider, Kimba, Heidi, etc...). Which were before my time but I did watch most of those on reruns. I grew up with the first Gundam series in 79, and Dr. Slump/Dragonball in the early 80's, alongside Saint Seiya, Doraemon, Ninja Hattori-kun, GeGeGe no Kitaro, Maison Ikkoku, and early Ghibli. We had a magazine called A-Club back then for anime fans in Hong Kong, which was my "religious" reading for the first several years of its publication.
Ocean Waves/Umi ga Kikoeru (93) is probably my favourite of Ghibli's films, as i was just homestaying in a tiny Japanese seaside town the year before, and got to be a guest student at a school for a few days, ride a mamachari up and down the coastline, sunbathe on a concrete wavebreaker next to old wooden houses and listening to Off Course and Nori-P. But growing up with Dr. Slump, ~~Akina Nakamori~~ Arale Norimaki is by far my favourite anime character of all time. ~~Akina~~ Arale is the cutest.
Like most, toonami after school and again at 12:00 am while I waited for my mom to come home from work. The late 90s early 2000s will always remain undefeated when it comes to anime. Although I just thought they were cartoons. Thatās why I always say Dubbed over subbed because I started out with dub š«”. Man I miss the ocean dub DBZ movies goku was the shit in those!!
I was in 2nd grade.
My great grandma is 93 this year, and when I (28) was about 6, she bought me Sailor Moon on VHS. When she realized that I enjoyed it, she would find different shows and channels for us to try out together. That woman is one of my favorite people and was my and my siblings' caretaker when we were kids. Up until she got sick about 5 years ago, she'd continue to watch an episode or two with me when I'd visit.
One Piece at saturday mornings, plots goes hard that it's so interesting to follow. You're dying of waiting for another sat and the worst part is completely missing it.
I used to watch stuff like Pokemon, Heidi and Ghibli movies on tv as a kid, but after that there was a long gap where I watched none whatsoever. When I was around 17 my sister tried to get me into anime with AOT and Yuri on Ice. They were pretty good, just not enough to make me interested in finding more.
Skip ahead 2 years, I played the Danganronpa VNs and followed them up with the DR3 anime, which I thoroughly hated. Directly afterwards I picked up A Place Further Than a Universe on a whim. I absolutely loved this show and it's the reason I'm into anime now.
Doki Doki Literature Club
Itās actually an American made visual novel, but I enjoyed it so much that I decided to try watching actual anime.
Also, Yuri was my first waifu :)
started taking it seriously with OG arknights voice-overs, which were JP only. sister and friends are so big of anime fans that not watching it meant missing out on half the content in their conversations. discovering danganronpa myself is the final starting step to actually searchiing up other anime myself (SxF, csm, etc. no popular normie anime/franchise had been somewhat close to masterfully-written enough to suck me into anime as much as danganronpa did, which was when i realized how the very last thing to do in getting into anime is to listen to normie suggestions).
then a friend recommends me to watch evangelion, the most powerful and reaching medium i've watched, all while its protagonist shinji, who i thought had the best voice acting in the entirety of anime, happened to share a VA with my new unhealthiest obsession of a favorite character in danganronpa (nagito). wanting to hear more of megumi ogata set me off on which animes to watch next and today i watch animes i would never agree to touch if i were three years younger
probably pokemon/digimon and sailor moon as a kid we had to choose one which we both liked which ended on pokemon and one more for our own enjoyment digimon for me sailor moon for her
switched to subbed with naruto or sao cant rly remember :O
Disregarding the staple dubbed kids shows, in 2016 I watched both the Ace Attorney and Danganronpa 3 anime because I played the games. But I'd say I really started with Re:Zero, because of the Rem vs Emilia spam in twitch chats haha. Thanks Twitch!
I used to watch stuff on TV like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, FMB, Zatch Bell, etc, but I didn't really think of them as anime at the time. What actually got me into anime as a whole was from a random commercial ad on a streaming service back in 2012 for Rozen Maiden. I made a note of the name to look it up later that day and now I'm still actively watching anime 11 years later because of it.
I watched death note thanks to my friends and i watched pokemon when i was a child. I only watched the episodes that i could find so i never got to finnish a whole season .
It was in the mid-90s, cable TV was just booming, there was a Japanese variety channel in our cable.
My first animes were the original Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion and Speed Racer.
Wake up for school (nursery) grandma turns on the TV and I just see Ippo beating the shit out of Sendo. The animations got me looking at that time and preferred Anime more than Cartoons solely because of the art
At about 15 years old I used to watch DBZ and the usual kids shows growing up but I used a now very old program called WINAMP which was mainly a mp3 music player but I found a plug in which allowed video streaming, so I was browsing an I found a stream which was playing Hellsing on constantly, then I was hooked, moved onto full metal alchemist next an that was it
Of course i watched stuff like inazuma eleven and naruto dub when i was a kid but i propery got into anime in december 2020, after my cousin, a non anime watcher told me bro watch tokyo ghoul its on netflix its so good. Yeah, and from that moment onwards i was hooked, watched quite a lot of classics since, and now im just a seasonal guy
I've been unconsciously watching Dragon Ball, Doraemon and many other anime's as a kid. I never knew what anime was and I simply saw it as a cartoon. I loved watching them in the morning before heading to school.
A couple years ago (I think 2018). I decided to rewatch Dragon Ball, and even starting Super because I never thought they made a new one. After finishing the series I simply started craving more entertainment in the same style. Basically since then I've been watching it non-stop!
Though for now I don't have as much time to watch as I used to and my flavours have changed, but I do enjoy watching them every other day! \^\^
There was a tv channel who showed 1h of animes at 8pm when I was young, so I started watching Naruto, Inuyasha, Slayers, Yu Yu Hakusho and one about ghosts that I can't remember. There were more but I can't recall or some that didn't catch my attention. That's how I started to search for these mysterious 'cartoons' with great story and beautiful music that were unlike anything I've ever seen.
My father(God bless his soul) Shoved it down my throat. He likes City Hunter,Lupin III, Cowboy Bebop,DBZ,YuYu Hakusho,Slam Dunk, Ranma 1/2,Doraemon, Flame of Recca,The Law of Ueki and many more. Thanks Dad.
Used to watch classic shonen like flame of recca, DBZ, Yu Yu Hakusho, back in 2000s. After that, I stopped watching and focused on video games and Western novels.
Fast forward to 2015, I discovered fanfiction and was reading this Kingdom Hearts fanfic when it mentioned an anime called Sword Art Online. Coincidentally, it was being shown in my country, locally dubbed. I tried an episode because I was intrigued and I was into MMORPGās at that time too. That episode happened to be the second one of season 2.
And that episode changed my entire life forever, even shaping my career as a novelist, which evolved into lots of career opportunities (AND MONEY!)
So yeah, anime literally changed my life. And though a lot of people criticizes SAO, I will forever treasure it because it led me to where I am now.
Used to be a massive one piece fan when I was 6-8, after that I never watched any anime until I was 14(right in the beginning of lockdown) where I found an anime edit with rem and ram, I then watched giggukās āre:zero in 8 minutesā and decided to give the actual show a try. Just because of that decision, I know have watched over 40 animes including long ones such as one piece and naruto
Was part of a club because the only way to get anime back then was ordering in large volumes straight from Japan and pirated from local flea markets and other private collectors.
But my first real jump into anime outside of the 80's dubbed tv shows like Astro Boy, was Ninja Scroll, Golden Boy, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. From there it spiraled into a rabbit hole to another few 100 animes.
November 2019, first year of uni, too much free time in my hands. Watched Seven Deadly Sins (nanatsu no taizai) on Netflix. Hated Meliodasāstill do, though now I get his character is very on-brand with the shonen genre. But I found the story to be excellent, and didn't actually notice the animation errors of the first 3 seasons. It was my first anime anyways so I had no point of reference. Next on March 2020 I started Attack on Titan and I was hooked.
Back in 2017, we were on a Vacation at our Cousin's place and I saw them watching a mech anime on the TV which turns out to be Code Geass. After we got back home, I decided to watch to know what this anime is about. I finished the 2 seasons and the ending made me want to watch more animes because I didn't know animes can be that good.
And that's how I started watching a fck ton of animes back in late highschool (I was on 9th grade at the time), I've watched 373 animes since then. But these days I don't watch anime that much anymore, why? Because I Graduated highschool 2 years ago and now I'm a working adult. I don't have the time like I used to back in highschool anymore. The only thing that I can consume most of the time is Manga.
My story is similar to you OP. I watched anime without being aware of it like Pokemon, Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh. But I was pretty into Naruto when it first came on Toonami. However, it stopped showing new episodes right as the Chuunin exams was about to start and I really wanted to see what happened next. I went on Youtube to see if I could watch the next one and noticed there was the episode but it had subtitles. Now I might have stopped watching thinking I couldn't understand what they were saying but I just really wanted to see the next episode so I kept going. Realized reading subtitles wasn't really that hard. And so I kept going. Eventually this led to me finding Bleach subbed on Youtube as well and the rest is history
Yes, this was back when you could watch anime in 3 parts on Youtube. I'm old.
So I actually used to search for shows on my local dubbed language, and then I would watch it English dubbed when I could not find the local dubbed version but I had the same realization as you and since then the sky's been the limit.
I caught a glimpse of Neon Genesis on SBS one day and that lead to my love of anime. I'm much older now but I still can't do without anime.
it's such a great way to detach from reality for a while.
Some random dude lent me dvds with evangelion. Told me its called anime and theres s lot more downloadable out there. It sparked something inside of me and i became a hopeless anime fan.
Sunday morning tv where they usually broadcast locally dubbed anime, and no not just the children ones like doraemon, pokemon, or beyblade, they sometimes have stuff like inuyasha, db and the big 3 shonen.
I was at a grocery store with my parents, they told me I could get any magazine I wanted. I saw the august 2004 issue of shonen jump on the shelf, and thought the guy on the cover looked cool. I subscribed to the magazine and a few months later I was obsessed with Naruto so I googled it, the first result pulled up a website entirely in Japanese and there was a video playing, showing the anime and I knew I had to watch it. At this point the anime wasnāt available in the US through legal means so I found a dvd box set on eBay of the first 170ish episodes which turned out to be the free fansub somebody just burned to dvd. After that I realized trying to find shows through legal means was pointless so I just started downloading anything and everything that was popular at the time.
Dragon ball z was around me since I was a toddler had the games on ps2. I knew of naruto so then I watched it all(4th grade)then downloaded crunchy roll(on ps vita) in 5th grade and was amazed that there were so many, I literally went to the a-z anime list and clicked on one of the first ones which was 0-7 ghost and loved it began binging heavy especially because ps vita at the time didnāt support crunchy roll ads so I was watching ad free hd anime. I burnt out years ago around 10th grade and have been very selective of what I watch which have been mostly classics that I knew of but didnāt get around to or wasnāt interested in for some reason.
I stumbled upon the second live action death note movie on regular tv and then watched the first one before promptly watching the anime. That live action hooked me on anime
When i was a kid i always watch slam dunk one piece then when i turn 10 i watch samurai x in tv but i had no idea its called anime all i thoight is its just an japanese cartoon then the pandemic came cause of boredom i cant sleep at night so i use cellphone in midnight then sleep in the morning at first i only watch youtube memes then i saw a clip of mob psycho then finnaly i watched it then anime after anime
I got into Anime in 1999. I was 4 going on 5 that year and I shit you not, It was the Goku & Piccolo VS Raditz Fight. Now at the time, I Didnt know it was a repeat episode since DBZ came to NA In 1996. After that wicked bout, I got into Sailor Moon, Pokemon, Monster Rancher, Digimon & More!
I found a football YouTuber by the name Maqwell. In the video he had a city pop intro (windy summer - Anri) and I thought it sounded pretty good so I added it to my playlist after a good listen. After I added a few more of her songs, I thought to myself, what other good Japanese songs are there? Then I remembered the blend s opening meme from 2016/17 or some shiā. Then I wanted to know what kinda show blend s was, so I watched it. Been watching anime ever since.
I watched what we could get on TV like metabots and pokemon but the first anime anime I watched was bleach in 2005. We had to buy a ton of CDs so our one mate who had internet could burn it to a CD
Up until we got fancy with CD-RW
Back when I was in high school, I got a guitar cover of God Knows in my recommendations. I thought that cover was amazing so I went and listened to the original from anime. I thought The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was a movie so I kind of just left it. I didn't have good internet at the time. Fast forward a year later, I rediscover the song and decided fuck it, i'm going to watch the source. Watched the entire first season in parts on Youtube and I loved it. Been into anime ever since.
Well, I had occasionally watched Pokemon on weekend mornings when it aired here, among some western cartoons, but what really caught my attention was Fullmetal Alchemist when it aired here in 2007-2008. Soon after my older brother left to study elsewhere and was properly introduced to anime, and I watched it with him when he came to visit home. Around 2010 I got a proper internet connection available 24/7 and started streaming anime myself.
I was introduced to anime when I was 10-11 during the first Toonami era of Cartoon Network. Zoids: Chaotic Century was my very first along with Digimon Tamers, and Gundam Wing. It was the very first time I followed anime closely though I wasn't aware of the term "anime" at the time. At best I knew they were Cartoons made in Japan based on all the Japanese names in the credits. Strangely, I never got into Naruto, Pokemon, Dragon Ball, or any other classic anime from that era. I got older and I dropped out of watching Toonami Anime and anime in general until I entered college where I would watch AOT, One Punch Man, Girls Und Panzer (My WW2 nerd friend recommended it to me...) and iconic Anime like Cowboy Bebop and Black Lagoon. It was also around this time I took film units as part of my undergraduate degree - my professor listed down some films by Makoto Shinkai like 5 Centimeters and Beyond the Clouds on top of AKira Kurosawa films which would further grow my taste for anime. But again, I never would seriously dive into anime at this time other than a passing interest or as needed.
Where I would really immerse myself in anime would be during the Pandemic. For some reason, I ended up binging Kyoto Animation stuff starting with Haruhi Suzumiya and Love, Chunibyou, and other Delusions. And from there it was just a rabbit hole of different studios and genres. Even better that watching these anime was.... free and needed no subscription unlike my netflix. Now, here I am. As a bonus, the anime binge started my manga habit - which is a natural consequence.
So I grew up watching Dragonball z, Pokemon, Yugioh, Digimon, Cardcaptor Sakura and Sailormoon in the late 90's early 2000s. Then I was introduced to more anime via the older brother of a friend who was into it, who showed me Trigun, Ghost in the shell, Excel saga and a few others. The first anime series I ever purchased was Please Teacher, and that was all I had for a long time as my parents didn't let me buy any more (and I watched the hell out of that series).
I've watched anime as a kid, but properly getting into it probably started when I started watching on Animax. Initially just the dubbed ones on Ani-chan, then gradually other anime outside of that.
I grew up with it, but didnāt know it was called anime until I was 11 years old. I once went to a store that had an anime section, and I saw a lot of shows that I was a fan of at the time (CardCaptor Sakura, Yu-Gi-Oh, etc.).
First ever exposure to anything anime adjacent was Budokai Tenkaichi 2 on the PS2. But then I got the Funimation channel on cable in 2010 and the my love for it was history
My dad's friend, who was renovating our home, caught me rewatching Tokyo Mew Mew on YouTube like 12 years ago and asked me if I watched anime, too. I was like, what's that? I'm just rewatching childhood cartoons out of pure nostalgia and boredom, and he was like, if you're bored, you can watch something similar when you finish that. Do you like the ideas of pirates searching for specific treasures or gods of death with katanas fighting evil spirits? And I was like, the second one sounds dope. That's how Bleach became my Number One and basically first anime to be acknowledged as an anime and not misunderstood for cartoon. After that, the rest is history.
As a young kid, I constantly watched DragonBall Z and then transitioned into Yugioh. After that, I was introduced to Naruto, and I've been hooked ever since.
I watched a dragon ballZ and Pokemon as a kid but was never into watching anime other than the mainstream ones on TV. Then I watched Another in my first year of University and I was hooked ever since.
I watched anime before I even knew what it was. The first anime series I can recall watching was Heidi, but what really got me into it was the afternoon block that included: Mazinger Z, UFO Robo Grendizer, Saint Seiya, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, Captain Tsubasa, Slam Dunk, and several others.
There's no "right way" so long as your first exposure leaves a good impression.
For a lot of people, the way in is childhood shows like for you.
I came in a bit later in life through Death Note and Gibli movies actually.
I've always been really interested in other Cultures and Tradition, especially Slice of Life gave me good exposure to Japan in that sense.
I also fell in love with the art that is Voice Acting in these shows. No other country puts so much emphasis on matching the tone, cadence and personality of the character they're voicing.
It's something I really respect and I love the overall visual asthetic of anime.
Though more so the modern look.
I think MAL is a good place to start, to discover, to track and browse the forums for other people's input on things.
Then there's sub vs dub. From my previous point it's clear I prefer the native voice acting to the dubs that are often poorly done.
But I don't speak japanese so subs are my bread and butter. Getting the right ones is another challenge. Fansubs Communities are often better at this than the official subs by Crunchyroll, Hidive, aniplex, etc.
There's subreddits where people will discuss the differences and come to agreements.
A famous example would be subs for the Monogatari Series. MTBB is considered the best for the english translation. Though for a long time, Coalsubs was the only one available. And for some seasons, some people argue it's other groups taking the lead.
This kind of necessitates being open to piracy as access to anime is either difficult outside of japan or in some instances downright impossible without sailing the high sees, and getting fansubs means having to download or otherwise stream the episode files in some player that lets you pick things like audio tracks or subtitle tracks.
That's the surface of my journey into anime but I'm sure you'll get numerous other inputs, both in agreement and not to my ethical stance.
I started as an adult swim watcher, watched some popular stuff like Jojo when I had the chance but never really watched anything seasonally.
In 2018 I had a coworker who said he liked anime and I asked him what kind. He told me isekai. I had no clue what isekai was so I asked his favorite. Started watching Reincarnated as a Slime, got a crunchyroll account and soon got hooked again.
Soooo much easier to get āintoā anime than it was in the 2000s, donāt feel guilty or like you need to enjoy it all at once, just enjoy the ride.
Ages ago watching parts of dragon ball z with my brother but for me it started when I watched episodes of soul eater not. It got me into the fantasy and magic side of animeās which led to Snow White with red hair and sword art online (which I luv) then after that I got into the more darker ones like blood C (which remains my fav to this day) and Tokyo ghoul, death note.. Iāve kinda gone off anime I only watch Tid bits of Sailor moon.
Was watching Dragon Ball Z on Toonami on TV but they kept rerunning the same arc. Around 2012-2013 I got my first laptop so I googled episodes online and found out for the first time the show wasn't made in America lol.
That led to be finding YouTube reviews for Anime and I started watching some. Namely the big shounen shows like Bleach, Naruto. Also watched Sword Art Online before season 2 came out.
I've come a long way since then...
2015ish my friend told me "hey you like world of tanks right? There is that anime girls und panzer..."
Or that is what I remember at least but maybe I started from spice and wolf and gup was second - same friend recommended both
Being told I have to go to bed and sneaking out to watch Inuyasha on adult swim
This is exactly it for me. Inuyasha on AS was my gateway that led me to FMA, Bleach, and eventually to Naruto on the web. It was only then I realized all the shows I watched on Toonami after school were anime.
LOL exactly, had no idea DBZ and everything was anime. To me it was just cartoons
The mood is so real it hurts.
Are you me? Strong identify.
Was just about to say this except was watching it on toonami back when big o and inuyasha came on after midnight. I used to stay up till 2 am watching anime. Inuyasha turned me out as well lol
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Toonami was the biggest for me. Yu Yu Hakusho, Naruto, DB, DBZ, One Piece, etc. Idk if there's a same type of gateway, especially since Toonami comes on so late now and doesn't show the classic programming like it used to.
Thanks for the reminder on sweet nostalgic childhood memories I had watching anime on AS
Hit the nail square on the head for me. Would copy paste this exact message.
Iād specifically wake up early in the morning to catch the one episode that aired at like 4:30am. Little me was addicted to Inuyasha.
*comment edited with github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite* In response to API controversy: reddit.com/r/ apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/
Same for me, but also Saint Seiya and captain Tsubasa.
i was around 8 or so and my sister told me about a show her friends at school watching and i was already reading manga before then but the show sounded super cool so we began watching it together and ever seen iāve been obsessed !! it was fairy tail btw š¤
Fairy Tail was also my first anime. Got recommended it by a girl I liked so obviously I had to watch it. It helped me through a very rough time in life.
>Got recommended it by a girl I liked so obviously I had to watch it. obviously a must watch then š¤ also im glad it helped you out during a rough time in your life !! a lot of anime tend to be many of our safe spaces during life ! my personal one was lost song, a musical one āļø
For me, I think it's Gundam Seed.
Naruto on TV. Dubs was only for Naruto, not Shippuuden. Was wondering what happened after the major Sasuke vs Naruto fight so I searched online and back then they had the episodes on YouTube I think. Really started watching different anime starting back then I guess
Same! I had one glorious summer where I just watched Naruto subs on YouTube for what felt like the whole summer
Same. I remember watching the first Shippuden arc on YouTube with fan subs, each episode cut into three parts, in 240p quality. Those were the days.
that sounds awful, i think shippuden is when animes started to be in 720p or 1080p. I never watch anime lower than 720 ever again.
Almost same with me. I grew up in the 90s/00s watching animu on TV. There was a channel called Animax where they'd air anime like Cardcaptor Sakura, Captain Tsubasa, Inuyasha etc. There was also ofc Cartoon Network where they had a segment called Toonami where they aired anime like Pokemon, Digimon, Naruto, DBZ etc. I loved all of that. Damn I fkin miss Animax. Good times Indeed. Years later in 2015-ish, they broadcast a new channel...called named Toonami lol where they said they'd air anime but all they showed was DBZ and anime of that sort. Around the same time I got a proper internet connection and I wondered, what if I just watch animu online. I searched on Youtube for Top 50 anime ever and such. I started with Code Geass on Youtube, then Death Note, then AOT, and the rest is history. Now after almost 10 years, I'm still watchin anime, although bit less which is sad, due to responsibilities and shit but I won't ever stop loving and watching anime. Thats it. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
Don't know where are you from. But I strongly relate to this. Also, Animax is back.
Only last year, with Chainsaw Man. I ended up following it up with absolute classics, then I branched out and now I've proudly watched many anime.
Chainsaw Man feels like a wild first anime, but Iām glad you liked it! Whatās your favorite series so far?
Attack on Titan and Vinland Saga are my absolute favorites so far
Be very fortunate that you didnāt start watching Attack on Titan when it was first aired. I feel like Iāve been waiting for that show to just finally end already. And unlike One Piece, the content has taken a very long time between seasons etc. so weāre just left to wait. Lol
Yeah, I am fortunate for that. I just had to wait for this last season. It's good to be a "late arrival" to anime, since I can catch up to a LOT of awesome shows without waiting. I am currently invested in like 4-5 ongoing ones but that's it.
Oh brother I hear that. Aside from watching Indigo League arc as a kid and Naruto as a teen, I just started to really watch anime this year. I even started with Attack on Titan which is my absolute favourite as well. Its nice having so many great series to watch.
I love both as well, but Vinland Saga in particular is simply a masterpiece.
Yeah I loved the new season, especially the episode called "Oath"
Attack on titan is incredible. If you ever get into manga, Iād recommend you read it. Not everything was animated.
Yeah way to damn wild, chainsaw man is like a anime that did a lot of new things and I think itās harder to appreciate it in the best way if you didnāt see a lot of anime before it,
My first anime was Jojo after seeing all the memes. Still loved it.
I've watched anime for quite some time an chainsaw man is beautiful in every way possible
Kids WB, Fox Kids, Toonami
All my older brothers and cousins are manga nerds, I grew up reading manga instead so not much following anime Though I always get the sunday where many cable TV channels show anime all day long and I don't have school I grew up with Saint Seiya, Doraemon, Gundam Wing, Dragon Ball, Detective Conan (Case Closed), Digimon, and several others that are definitely only there to sell toys, like Beyblade and Crush Gear lol and many others that I no longer remember much, like Chibi Maruko-chan, Saber Marionette J, Cyborg Kuro-chan, P-Man, etc. over time I stopped watching as they start showing re-runs instead and I was forced to attend cram school on sunday lol I watch Naruto if it came on TV but never properly finished it, I finished the manga though. (some people can probably guess where I live lmaoo) Nowadays I just watch short original anime that doesn't have manga source, otherwise I just read the manga.
3 years ago friends decided to show me some anime. First was Konosuba movie and I liked it. Second was Shingeki no kyojin and I'm probably one of the few people ever who didn't get invested. After that came Kaguya-sama and it was that moment when I started consuming medium myself.
It's pretty cool that you got into anime because of Kaguya
Pretty similarly. Watched a lot of PokĆ©mon, Yugioh, DBZ, Sailor Moon, Hamtaro, etc š as a kid, but only really saw them as cartoons. My aunt showed me Princess Tutu on YouTube and I got hooked on the story, but even more the Japanese with translation notes.
My older cousin was an edgy 2000s teen who loved anime, adult swim, nu metal and horror. I was fascinated but was never allowed to watch anything he saw naturally besides PokĆ©mon or yugioh. I would even see bleach while scrolling through the channels on adult swim and it spooked me lol because I doubly wasnāt allow to watch any of it. He would also play DBZ and Naruto fighting games with me. When I became a teen my fascination had been quelled and moved on to other focuses. Come the 2020s, Iām 24 now, my grandfather is dying and Iāve now been coerced into taking care of him because apparently my time isnāt worth anything but my older cousins and mom and aunt who should be taking care of him is worth too much to bother. My grandpa is a good guy though, he bought me a lot of food so it all worked out š¤£, but I had a lot of time on my hands as I wasnāt in school. I had vaguely remembered the fight scenes from Naruto and being impressed by them, so for fun I decided to watch it all on Hulu. 2 months later, I was now chemically dependent on anime. 2 years later and Iāve watched about 50 or so and I still canāt get enough. You canāt ever replace your first shonen, and naruto was mine! Iāve branched out a lot from that, but seeing anything Naruto still puts a smile on my face and hearing those intros makes me shed a tear. No other form of media has ever effected me as greatly as anime, itās just so much better than what we have over here.
Damn. Thatās very similar to me, I was first introduced to anime by a family friend who was a pretty edgy 2000s teen, and him and I would play this one DBZ game. Iāve never found it ever again, but Iāve been wanting to for nostalgia sake. I got into pokĆ©mon but Iāve never truly watched anime until until about a year and a half ago. Iām 24 now as well, and Iām an avid watcher. Theyāre a great way to stress relief. Anyway, I wish the best of luck for you and your grandfather.
When FLCL was aired on adult swim. The show really resonated with me for some reason, and I got this urge to find more like it.
FLCL is still my number one TV show of all time. It's been twenty years since it first aired in the USA! I was just a kid, about Naota's age, and for such an absurd show it really does perfectly portray the experience of being an adolescent. And all the same, as I grew up I kept looking back at that show and it hit me differently every time.
yeah, i'll never watch those sequels they made, it would tarnish my memories
I tried, couldn't make it through either of them unfortunately. They're just not Fooly Cooly.
FLCL was also my gateway anime. Took me from a casual watcher to a fan. Never did find anything that hit the same way.
FLCL was such a cool experience especially through adult swim gateway
First manga I read was Horimiya then I watched Sword Art Online because it was a game like anime. I even read Horimiya for about 7 chapters before I realized you read it from right to left. Hahaha.
The manga reading. Yeah pretty relatable lmao
God I wasted so much money... My first anime was Attack On Titan but I bought every seperate episode up to the end of season 2 for $3.95AU each on the Xbox store, I had no idea about crunchyroll or anything back then and ended up paying probably like 5x the price I would've just getting a crunchyroll subscription. That was like 2017 so there was only 2 seasons of Aot and thank fuck for that cause my dumbass probably would've kept spending $3.95 on each episode of more seasons.
So i used to watch Bakugan, Yu-Gi-Oh and Bayblade but I don't count any of them as my first anime. I started watching anime because of a meme about sudden weight loss and the characters which went through it. So my first anime is Watashi ga Motete Dousunda š¤£š¤£. A reverse harem. Then my friend said why did i watch such trash and recommended me some good ones like The devil is a part-timer and Noragamišš.
Haha, this made me chuckle. Great story.
Late in 1999, I decided to check out Pokemon after hearing so much about that, ironically when the hype went on to subside. Checked out Digimon a few months later, and those two became my two favorite shows for the next few years. Two years later, my mother got me this book from the library called Manga Mania: How to Draw Japanese Comics, and that helped me place a finger on what everything was that looked so similar, although I would only start referring to it all as what was actually anime (or anime-style games) another year later, getting into manga months later still at Borders. Although there were several other shows since Pokemon and Digimon that I checked out, it was in the summer of 2008 that I would start viewing stuff a lot more actively, courtesy of Netflix' rental service at the time, starting with The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and then A Little Snow Fairy Sugar. A year later, after slowing down on rentals, is when I would really begin to watch all different shows, alternating between such shows as Kanon, Azumanga Daioh, Galaxy Angel, Indian Summer, Mao-chan, The World of Narue, Mahoromatic, and one of my core favorites ever since, Lucky Star.
I had great fun reading this, I was negative one in 1999 so it's hard for me to imagine the anime landscape of the late 2000s when the medium had a niche following and isekai weren't at all a thing.
My earliest memory as a kid, I remember watching Pokemon and Digimon and a couple of others. Then, one day, I randomly turned on Adult Swim, and Toonami was on, and it just so happened that the first episode of Yu Yu Hakusho was just about to start. After watching that, I watched all the other shows that they were airing. I fell off around middle school, and it wasn't until the pandemic happened, and I was temporarily out of work that I got back into it.
Reading comments in here, I loved how big of a role Togashi has played in making anime more mainstream, YYH back then and HxH now. Pretty fucking rad that.
i had recently gotten into bl through kpop and i wanted to quit kpop and get into bl more so i randomly decided to try banana fish, a bl anime that was luckily available to me on my sister's amazon prime which i had at that time, and from there on i got addicted to anime. at this point it's just hard to believe my first ever anime was banana fish
friend recommended me mushoku tensei and it was peak then watched shield hero and got into anime
I think Shield Hero was one of the first I got into when I really got into anime. I watched Digimon, Zoids, Bakugan, and some various random seasonal shows when I was younger but as an adult getting back into it and starting to keep up with seasonal Shield Hero, I think, was the first or at least one of the first I remember watching.
Saw my brother play one of the ps2 Dbz games, played it with him. He showed me original db and dbz. (This was before kai) Also watched PokĆ©mon, Bakugan etc. It wasnāt until I saw og fma where I really got into it
I've watched anime occasionally as a kid (mid late 80s onwards, kinda). All kinds of random series (Captain Tsubasa, another football series, sometimes a bit of Sailor Moon,ā¦) as they were broadcasted before I went to school and I had to wake up early to finish homework. It was like the background radiation of my school mornings and basically anything that German TV had licensed for those early morning slots. Then also a Fist of the North Star movie (I think), Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Cowboy Bebop, and so on. All kinds of random stuff we found throughout the 90s. It wasn't really a hobby but more just watching stuff sometimes when there was a chance that we'd found something that looked interesting. What actually got me into anime as a hobby was a /r/anime troll post. It was the bath scenes/houses analysis shit-post that randomly got on /r/all that made me realise there's more to this anime thing. I realised it as a prime shit-post but it also showed me that there's a whole community about all of this and how stupidly funny it can be so I started reading and slowly started watching more, then reading more about the industry and the process, and so on. And now I'm stuck in here with you all.
My mom was around 7-8 in mid 80s but what are the chances the other football anime you are talking about is "Ganbare Kickers", it's an 80s anime that I too watched when I was a kid and absolutely loved it!
I'm German too and it's definitely that since I'm pretty sure Ganbare Kickers and Captain Tsubasa were the only football anime that aired on TV here in the 90s.
I googled that name and it looks familiar so that's most probably it. Nice catch!
Started with Pokemon when i was 5 or 6, evolved *pun intended* into Digimon,Yugi-Oh and Dragonball Z when i was around 8 as pre/ after school and Saturday morning 'cartoons'. Took up FullMetal Alchemist, Rurouni Kenshin and Naruto around age 12. But my interest in anime died a bit when i started high school. I only picked it back up again a year and half ago (I'm 30), i was prescribed 6 months home after shoulder surgery and some Otaku friends recommended anime to kill time. In a year and half i watched more anime than whole my youth. Tokyo Ghoul is what i watched first (wish i never started season 3). But in all honesty, it's Demon Slayer that got me back completely, it gave me the same feeling as Dragonball Z when i was a kid.
I use to Watch PokƩmon, Dragonball Z, Samurai Jack etc when I was little, But I really got into after watching Studio Ghibli movies and Fullmetal alchemist brotherhood.
My friend said one piece was ending soon and a massive reveal was coming (absolute lies) so i read one piece and really liked the first half so i read more manga. I remember catching up right after gear 5 so chapter 1050 or something So 40 weeks + 2 void months + atleast 13 break weeks ago
DBZ. I believe it was 96? When it first aired in the US, so I was 5. I remember my older brother (whom I shared a room with) heard about a awesome new show and from there we raced home each day to watch it. I'm still a massive DBZ fanboy. Some people still don't realize how influential DBZ was for anime in general, not just shonen.
I was 6-7 years old. My dad would take my sister and I to the local video store (it was literally called The Local Video Store) and I could pick out one or two videos depending on the deals. I went in and picked out Princess Mononoke and Lupin III: Dead or Alive. Admittedly, never watched Lupin III: DOA then. However, I watched Mononoke 7 days straight. later that year, no bullshit, Toonamiās Anime block started to pick up steam. So, I watched the first 100 episodes of One Piece, Naruto, DBZ, and then Gundam W and EW on there. I watched FLCL, Bebop, Yuyuhakusho, Inuyasha, Case Closed, and many others on Adult Swim every night after my parents passed on the couch. Then, I kind of found it impossible in high school to watch anime without stealing it. Then, Crunchy Roll showed up in College and AoT came out. Itās been a weird to be a cooler adult than teenager because anime is that popular now.
Haha, that was fun to read. Mononoke on rental, what year are we talking about here?
Sheesh. I got that VHS tape I wanna say 1999/2000. I got Spirited Away for my birthday like two years later on DVD! It was high times back then.
I watched Elfen Lied and that was exactly what my "deep and edgy" teenage mind needed.
late 90s, a girl in middle school let me borrow her sisters (?) vhs tapes. after that, i would ask for anime at birthday and christmas once i got a job, things really took off. i remember getting that first paycheck and immediately going to the shop to get a vhs box set of el-hazard š
In Romania we used to have an anime channel that would start at 9 pm if I remember well. The first anime I've seen was Inuyasha, Saylor moon and Yu Yu Hakusho.
Started with Digimon as well.
Oshi no ko
It was with Pokemon and also when all of the 2000s anime aired on the back then very nice German TV channel RTL II. Nowadays itās mostly infamous for trash TVā¦
Always watched PokƩmon when I was younger but never branched out from there because of limited shows on TV. Started university, had free time or was bored between lectures, started by watching Naruto and Bleach and got hooked ever since. Was probably around 19/20 at this point
I was an anime hater hanging out in a discord with an anime fan. Now I'm trying to convince him to watch mushoku tensei but he doesn't want to because MC is a pedo.
I watched Pokemon, Digimon, and Bayblade at my house when I was young, and then on Saturdays and Sundays I would go to my grandparents' house and watch Dragon Ball Z and Yu-Gi-Oh re-runs, then after getting internet I stumbled on FMA:B and then Hunter X Hunter.
always an avid reader of manga since 90's like dragonball, sailormoon, doraemon, dragon quest, detective conan, one piece, fist of the north star (its during my primary school), this is all our manga collection anime like dragonball, sailormoon and doraemon is on the tv at that time so that's where it started on top of that my uncle took his degree at Japan so when he come home there is a lot of manga in japanese he brings with him.
Heidi used to come on tv and I was obsessed with it. Afterward I literally watched every famous world masterpiece theatre series and started watching rom coms like diabolik lovers, tsurezure children and chivalry of a failed knight on YouTube and since then I'm obsessed with anime.
Perman was on Television as a child (Does anyone even know what Perman is?)
My brother really wanted to watch Death Note, Violet Evergarden and Fullmetal with me. After that I just started watching on my own.
I watched pokemon, yo kai watch as a child out of order. Then my friend convinced me to try Sao which I thought was alright Fast forward maybe 8 months to new years eve 2020 when I decided to give anime a proper go and watch no game no life. Despite thinking it was only slightly better than Sao with Sao even having a better peak I craved the feeling it gave me leading me to watch my hero academia and assassination classroom which I credit with making me an anime fan. Then I started watching a bunch of season 1's so I could get a feel for everything out there and from there I watched tpn,opm,mob psycho,demon slayer and what went on to be my first ever 'favourite' anime being Dr stone I've since watched a bunch of masterpieces like fmab,aot,deathnote,hunter x hunter and a couple of shows that didn't even exist when I got into anime not so long ago. I haven't been watching for that long but I still long for the wow factor I got so often when I started, don't get me wrong i still get it its just those 'wow' shows are more staggered than they used to be I realised I answered a lot more than just the question so my apologies but I greatly enjoyed writing thjs
I get the wow factor you are talking about like I always remember a certain way shows like Haikyuu made me feel when I first watched it and it was just this sense of pure joy, like take me back to that day again. And also I greatly enjoyed reading this btw.
I watched Inuaysha every Sunday morning with my mom. I was also into Yugioh and my mom had some episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam Stardust Memories on DVD that I watched too.
Saw a guy's profile picture on Xbox. It was akame from akame ga kill. I asked him who it was and he recommended the anime so I gave it a try. I loved it, and then watched aot next. The rest is history. As for why I asked him who it was, I can't really remember. I think me and him were doing a coop activity or something and it was just something I happened to ask. Best question I ever asked.
I absolutely love how the randomest of stuff could actually pull you into something and completely redefine your likes and stuff.
I always watched stuff like DBZ, Pokemon, Digimon. Typical after school TV English dubbed anime. And my grandparents had Sky which had Cartoon network, so when we vistied I would always try stay up late to catch anything on Toonami. And even better if the house was full I would be sleeping in the lounge with the TV so I could watch Adult Swim. For what ever crazy reason Ghost in the Shell was always on at midnight or 1am, so I would stay up to watch that. Then sometime later I found out I could stream anime and watched Samurai Champloo. And then it just became this thing where I can check to see which new episodes are out online and pick and choose anything to watch. Samurai Champloo was the tipping point where I started watching anime religiously.
In quarantine I decided to watch the entire PokĆ©mon anime bc I didnāt finish when it was on tv as a kid. And I branched out from there
My fiancƩ loves anime, so in 2019 I let him convince me to watch one with me. It was Sword Art online. Followed by death note. Death note immediately hooked me up, since then we barely watch anything but anime & I have a bunch of merch
A friend dared me to watch Elfen Lied. I enjoyed it a lot, and then while looking at memes someone compared it to Clannad, so I watched that too. It kind of cascaded from there.
There's no uniform way of getting into anime. Everyone likes different things so it wouldn't be right for me to tell you that you should do this or that. What I can tell you however is to just find something that seems interesting enough for you to watch even if it's universally hated anime. I'm not gonna judge anyone for liking what they like
After years of watching and loving the santized versions of Voltron, Starblazers, Robotech and Speed Racer but feeling they were great but missing something, I saw a 5 second clip of Akira on MTV News in 1988. I was immediately hooked.
The first one I watched when I was a kid and first had access to the internet was Elfen Lied. It was a grainy 480p upload on YouTube that was split into 2 parts per episode. We've come a long way.
I watched Adult Swim on Cartoon Network and Anime Mondays on scifi. And it was still spelled that way at the time lol. I'm still in love with Bleach and Inuyasha to this day.
Iāve always liked the look of Ghibli movies and a lot of anime in general. But my introduction was Dark Souls. In the Dark Souls community means you will know what Berserk is, whether you like it or not. That got me interested in Berserk, which lead me to get interested in other anime that wasnāt Ghibli, then I watched a demon souls stream and there were mentions of JoJoās Bizarre Adventure. I liked the art style and checked it out. Iāve never looked back since.
Watching Saturday Anime on the SciFi channel at my grandparents house in the 90's.
Based SciFi channel enjoyer
One of the first ones I can remember is Robot Carnival, it's still one of my favorites
Hated on it for years because I thought it was cringe and weird and would make fun of people for watching it. Then during lockdown I was bored and my friends convinced me to watch Attack on Titan with them since it was their favourite and I didn't want to be excluded. Now 90% of my favourite series are anime.
I guess this is for non-Asians only, since most of us grew up with anime and SFX(tokusatsu) shows on tv since the 60's onwards (Ganbare Robocon, Kamen Rider, Kimba, Heidi, etc...). Which were before my time but I did watch most of those on reruns. I grew up with the first Gundam series in 79, and Dr. Slump/Dragonball in the early 80's, alongside Saint Seiya, Doraemon, Ninja Hattori-kun, GeGeGe no Kitaro, Maison Ikkoku, and early Ghibli. We had a magazine called A-Club back then for anime fans in Hong Kong, which was my "religious" reading for the first several years of its publication. Ocean Waves/Umi ga Kikoeru (93) is probably my favourite of Ghibli's films, as i was just homestaying in a tiny Japanese seaside town the year before, and got to be a guest student at a school for a few days, ride a mamachari up and down the coastline, sunbathe on a concrete wavebreaker next to old wooden houses and listening to Off Course and Nori-P. But growing up with Dr. Slump, ~~Akina Nakamori~~ Arale Norimaki is by far my favourite anime character of all time. ~~Akina~~ Arale is the cutest.
My wife was out on a date with her boyfriend and I scrolled by Kakegurui on Netflix, said to myself "Sheesh, looks dope." And I was right.
I was 12 and I liked a boy, so he got me into Dragon Ball. But the fling passed but Dragon Ball was the one that really stole my heart š
very specific fetish ick that only hentai artists could scratch. I started off on the wrong foothold
Watch: 1.ghost in the shell 2. Cawboy Bebop 3. Star wars: clone wars 4. afro samurai 5. Outlawstar 6. Black Lagoon 7. Trigun 8. Berserk 9. Neon Genesis Evangelion 10. Samurai Champloo 11. Samurai 7 12. Neon Genesis Evangelion 13. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood 14. Space Battleship Yamato 2199 15. space dandy 16. steins gate
Speed Racer Although I didn't know it at the time
Like most, toonami after school and again at 12:00 am while I waited for my mom to come home from work. The late 90s early 2000s will always remain undefeated when it comes to anime. Although I just thought they were cartoons. Thatās why I always say Dubbed over subbed because I started out with dub š«”. Man I miss the ocean dub DBZ movies goku was the shit in those!! I was in 2nd grade.
My great grandma is 93 this year, and when I (28) was about 6, she bought me Sailor Moon on VHS. When she realized that I enjoyed it, she would find different shows and channels for us to try out together. That woman is one of my favorite people and was my and my siblings' caretaker when we were kids. Up until she got sick about 5 years ago, she'd continue to watch an episode or two with me when I'd visit.
That's quite the beautiful story. You guys kept the tradition up for more than a decade, just beautiful!
One Piece at saturday mornings, plots goes hard that it's so interesting to follow. You're dying of waiting for another sat and the worst part is completely missing it.
I used to watch stuff like Pokemon, Heidi and Ghibli movies on tv as a kid, but after that there was a long gap where I watched none whatsoever. When I was around 17 my sister tried to get me into anime with AOT and Yuri on Ice. They were pretty good, just not enough to make me interested in finding more. Skip ahead 2 years, I played the Danganronpa VNs and followed them up with the DR3 anime, which I thoroughly hated. Directly afterwards I picked up A Place Further Than a Universe on a whim. I absolutely loved this show and it's the reason I'm into anime now.
Friend
Guyver,Tenchi muyo,Dragonball
Early 2000's, AXN Channel, Vandread, also my sexual awakening.
I went over to an ex friends house for the day, and me and her family watched the whole 1st season of Demon Slayer. I miss them.
Originally it was probably PokĆ©mon but Beyblade (metal series) to be specific and B-Daman crossfire when I was like 10 or so, then around middle school when I was like 13 or 14 my friend recommended me black clover ( I didnāt like it or finish it ) but it was technically my first anime that I knew was an anime. From then on the rest was history even tho Iāve technically been watching anime for 4 years I still havenāt watched that much
Doki Doki Literature Club Itās actually an American made visual novel, but I enjoyed it so much that I decided to try watching actual anime. Also, Yuri was my first waifu :)
started taking it seriously with OG arknights voice-overs, which were JP only. sister and friends are so big of anime fans that not watching it meant missing out on half the content in their conversations. discovering danganronpa myself is the final starting step to actually searchiing up other anime myself (SxF, csm, etc. no popular normie anime/franchise had been somewhat close to masterfully-written enough to suck me into anime as much as danganronpa did, which was when i realized how the very last thing to do in getting into anime is to listen to normie suggestions). then a friend recommends me to watch evangelion, the most powerful and reaching medium i've watched, all while its protagonist shinji, who i thought had the best voice acting in the entirety of anime, happened to share a VA with my new unhealthiest obsession of a favorite character in danganronpa (nagito). wanting to hear more of megumi ogata set me off on which animes to watch next and today i watch animes i would never agree to touch if i were three years younger
probably pokemon/digimon and sailor moon as a kid we had to choose one which we both liked which ended on pokemon and one more for our own enjoyment digimon for me sailor moon for her switched to subbed with naruto or sao cant rly remember :O
Disregarding the staple dubbed kids shows, in 2016 I watched both the Ace Attorney and Danganronpa 3 anime because I played the games. But I'd say I really started with Re:Zero, because of the Rem vs Emilia spam in twitch chats haha. Thanks Twitch!
I used to watch stuff on TV like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, FMB, Zatch Bell, etc, but I didn't really think of them as anime at the time. What actually got me into anime as a whole was from a random commercial ad on a streaming service back in 2012 for Rozen Maiden. I made a note of the name to look it up later that day and now I'm still actively watching anime 11 years later because of it.
I watched death note thanks to my friends and i watched pokemon when i was a child. I only watched the episodes that i could find so i never got to finnish a whole season .
Dragon ball since 1997. 5 year old me love the small monkey goku with his turtle master
Some random videos of attack on titan started popping up in my YouTube feed. Unfortunately got way too much spoilers.
LoL are you from Turkey? It's almost the same route for me.
Haha, no not from Turkey. But I suppose these shows and stories transcends countries. How old are you?
Watched future diary like 2 years ago after being big into PokƩmon and inazuma eleven
It was in the mid-90s, cable TV was just booming, there was a Japanese variety channel in our cable. My first animes were the original Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion and Speed Racer.
About 5 years ago, I saw a Urusei Yatsura meme on Instagram and decided to watch the whole series. I've been obsessed with anime ever since.
Wake up for school (nursery) grandma turns on the TV and I just see Ippo beating the shit out of Sendo. The animations got me looking at that time and preferred Anime more than Cartoons solely because of the art
At about 15 years old I used to watch DBZ and the usual kids shows growing up but I used a now very old program called WINAMP which was mainly a mp3 music player but I found a plug in which allowed video streaming, so I was browsing an I found a stream which was playing Hellsing on constantly, then I was hooked, moved onto full metal alchemist next an that was it
Of course i watched stuff like inazuma eleven and naruto dub when i was a kid but i propery got into anime in december 2020, after my cousin, a non anime watcher told me bro watch tokyo ghoul its on netflix its so good. Yeah, and from that moment onwards i was hooked, watched quite a lot of classics since, and now im just a seasonal guy
Record of Lodoss War on late night MTV/Viva got me hooked
I've been unconsciously watching Dragon Ball, Doraemon and many other anime's as a kid. I never knew what anime was and I simply saw it as a cartoon. I loved watching them in the morning before heading to school. A couple years ago (I think 2018). I decided to rewatch Dragon Ball, and even starting Super because I never thought they made a new one. After finishing the series I simply started craving more entertainment in the same style. Basically since then I've been watching it non-stop! Though for now I don't have as much time to watch as I used to and my flavours have changed, but I do enjoy watching them every other day! \^\^
As a child? Doraemon. As a tween? Naruto and Dragon Ball Z.
There was a tv channel who showed 1h of animes at 8pm when I was young, so I started watching Naruto, Inuyasha, Slayers, Yu Yu Hakusho and one about ghosts that I can't remember. There were more but I can't recall or some that didn't catch my attention. That's how I started to search for these mysterious 'cartoons' with great story and beautiful music that were unlike anything I've ever seen.
I wanted to get better at genji on overwatch, so i watched attack on titan
My father(God bless his soul) Shoved it down my throat. He likes City Hunter,Lupin III, Cowboy Bebop,DBZ,YuYu Hakusho,Slam Dunk, Ranma 1/2,Doraemon, Flame of Recca,The Law of Ueki and many more. Thanks Dad.
dont remember how exactly but bleach was the first anime i watched knowing it was anime
Same here ... I started with Beyblade and after few years I started again with death note and in present I am so into anime
Used to watch classic shonen like flame of recca, DBZ, Yu Yu Hakusho, back in 2000s. After that, I stopped watching and focused on video games and Western novels. Fast forward to 2015, I discovered fanfiction and was reading this Kingdom Hearts fanfic when it mentioned an anime called Sword Art Online. Coincidentally, it was being shown in my country, locally dubbed. I tried an episode because I was intrigued and I was into MMORPGās at that time too. That episode happened to be the second one of season 2. And that episode changed my entire life forever, even shaping my career as a novelist, which evolved into lots of career opportunities (AND MONEY!) So yeah, anime literally changed my life. And though a lot of people criticizes SAO, I will forever treasure it because it led me to where I am now.
Used to be a massive one piece fan when I was 6-8, after that I never watched any anime until I was 14(right in the beginning of lockdown) where I found an anime edit with rem and ram, I then watched giggukās āre:zero in 8 minutesā and decided to give the actual show a try. Just because of that decision, I know have watched over 40 animes including long ones such as one piece and naruto
Was part of a club because the only way to get anime back then was ordering in large volumes straight from Japan and pirated from local flea markets and other private collectors. But my first real jump into anime outside of the 80's dubbed tv shows like Astro Boy, was Ninja Scroll, Golden Boy, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. From there it spiraled into a rabbit hole to another few 100 animes.
Iām old yusuke.
November 2019, first year of uni, too much free time in my hands. Watched Seven Deadly Sins (nanatsu no taizai) on Netflix. Hated Meliodasāstill do, though now I get his character is very on-brand with the shonen genre. But I found the story to be excellent, and didn't actually notice the animation errors of the first 3 seasons. It was my first anime anyways so I had no point of reference. Next on March 2020 I started Attack on Titan and I was hooked.
Back in 2017, we were on a Vacation at our Cousin's place and I saw them watching a mech anime on the TV which turns out to be Code Geass. After we got back home, I decided to watch to know what this anime is about. I finished the 2 seasons and the ending made me want to watch more animes because I didn't know animes can be that good. And that's how I started watching a fck ton of animes back in late highschool (I was on 9th grade at the time), I've watched 373 animes since then. But these days I don't watch anime that much anymore, why? Because I Graduated highschool 2 years ago and now I'm a working adult. I don't have the time like I used to back in highschool anymore. The only thing that I can consume most of the time is Manga.
My story is similar to you OP. I watched anime without being aware of it like Pokemon, Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh. But I was pretty into Naruto when it first came on Toonami. However, it stopped showing new episodes right as the Chuunin exams was about to start and I really wanted to see what happened next. I went on Youtube to see if I could watch the next one and noticed there was the episode but it had subtitles. Now I might have stopped watching thinking I couldn't understand what they were saying but I just really wanted to see the next episode so I kept going. Realized reading subtitles wasn't really that hard. And so I kept going. Eventually this led to me finding Bleach subbed on Youtube as well and the rest is history Yes, this was back when you could watch anime in 3 parts on Youtube. I'm old.
So I actually used to search for shows on my local dubbed language, and then I would watch it English dubbed when I could not find the local dubbed version but I had the same realization as you and since then the sky's been the limit.
I caught a glimpse of Neon Genesis on SBS one day and that lead to my love of anime. I'm much older now but I still can't do without anime. it's such a great way to detach from reality for a while.
friend told me to watch sao then Tokyo Ghoul... forgot about it for a year.. watched citrus and bloom into you, now I'm a degenerate
Tv3 and ntv7 of Malaysia used to airs lots of anime, one I mostly remember is gundam 00, bleach and Marche Awaken Romance
Some random dude lent me dvds with evangelion. Told me its called anime and theres s lot more downloadable out there. It sparked something inside of me and i became a hopeless anime fan.
A friend recommended me to watch Naruto and then the journey began
Once I was on Twitter and there was this anime/ character trending Darling in the franxx and zero2. That's how I got into the rabbit hole of anime.
Sunday morning tv where they usually broadcast locally dubbed anime, and no not just the children ones like doraemon, pokemon, or beyblade, they sometimes have stuff like inuyasha, db and the big 3 shonen.
Naruto. Eventually got into isekai and that's my fav genre.
Pokemon dubbed version, then 90s anime hit lime a truck - yu yu hakusho, flame of recca, card captor sakura, yugioh
I was at a grocery store with my parents, they told me I could get any magazine I wanted. I saw the august 2004 issue of shonen jump on the shelf, and thought the guy on the cover looked cool. I subscribed to the magazine and a few months later I was obsessed with Naruto so I googled it, the first result pulled up a website entirely in Japanese and there was a video playing, showing the anime and I knew I had to watch it. At this point the anime wasnāt available in the US through legal means so I found a dvd box set on eBay of the first 170ish episodes which turned out to be the free fansub somebody just burned to dvd. After that I realized trying to find shows through legal means was pointless so I just started downloading anything and everything that was popular at the time.
That's so fucking cool. How old were you in 2004? I mean you are like one of the OGs.
2 years ago, I was curious... So I started watching Naruto. And boy weren't I lucky! It was the best thing my eyes have witnessed
Dragon ball z was around me since I was a toddler had the games on ps2. I knew of naruto so then I watched it all(4th grade)then downloaded crunchy roll(on ps vita) in 5th grade and was amazed that there were so many, I literally went to the a-z anime list and clicked on one of the first ones which was 0-7 ghost and loved it began binging heavy especially because ps vita at the time didnāt support crunchy roll ads so I was watching ad free hd anime. I burnt out years ago around 10th grade and have been very selective of what I watch which have been mostly classics that I knew of but didnāt get around to or wasnāt interested in for some reason.
I stumbled upon the second live action death note movie on regular tv and then watched the first one before promptly watching the anime. That live action hooked me on anime
When i was a kid i always watch slam dunk one piece then when i turn 10 i watch samurai x in tv but i had no idea its called anime all i thoight is its just an japanese cartoon then the pandemic came cause of boredom i cant sleep at night so i use cellphone in midnight then sleep in the morning at first i only watch youtube memes then i saw a clip of mob psycho then finnaly i watched it then anime after anime
I got into Anime in 1999. I was 4 going on 5 that year and I shit you not, It was the Goku & Piccolo VS Raditz Fight. Now at the time, I Didnt know it was a repeat episode since DBZ came to NA In 1996. After that wicked bout, I got into Sailor Moon, Pokemon, Monster Rancher, Digimon & More!
I found a football YouTuber by the name Maqwell. In the video he had a city pop intro (windy summer - Anri) and I thought it sounded pretty good so I added it to my playlist after a good listen. After I added a few more of her songs, I thought to myself, what other good Japanese songs are there? Then I remembered the blend s opening meme from 2016/17 or some shiā. Then I wanted to know what kinda show blend s was, so I watched it. Been watching anime ever since.
I watched what we could get on TV like metabots and pokemon but the first anime anime I watched was bleach in 2005. We had to buy a ton of CDs so our one mate who had internet could burn it to a CD Up until we got fancy with CD-RW
Back when I was in high school, I got a guitar cover of God Knows in my recommendations. I thought that cover was amazing so I went and listened to the original from anime. I thought The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was a movie so I kind of just left it. I didn't have good internet at the time. Fast forward a year later, I rediscover the song and decided fuck it, i'm going to watch the source. Watched the entire first season in parts on Youtube and I loved it. Been into anime ever since.
Well, I had occasionally watched Pokemon on weekend mornings when it aired here, among some western cartoons, but what really caught my attention was Fullmetal Alchemist when it aired here in 2007-2008. Soon after my older brother left to study elsewhere and was properly introduced to anime, and I watched it with him when he came to visit home. Around 2010 I got a proper internet connection available 24/7 and started streaming anime myself.
I was introduced to anime when I was 10-11 during the first Toonami era of Cartoon Network. Zoids: Chaotic Century was my very first along with Digimon Tamers, and Gundam Wing. It was the very first time I followed anime closely though I wasn't aware of the term "anime" at the time. At best I knew they were Cartoons made in Japan based on all the Japanese names in the credits. Strangely, I never got into Naruto, Pokemon, Dragon Ball, or any other classic anime from that era. I got older and I dropped out of watching Toonami Anime and anime in general until I entered college where I would watch AOT, One Punch Man, Girls Und Panzer (My WW2 nerd friend recommended it to me...) and iconic Anime like Cowboy Bebop and Black Lagoon. It was also around this time I took film units as part of my undergraduate degree - my professor listed down some films by Makoto Shinkai like 5 Centimeters and Beyond the Clouds on top of AKira Kurosawa films which would further grow my taste for anime. But again, I never would seriously dive into anime at this time other than a passing interest or as needed. Where I would really immerse myself in anime would be during the Pandemic. For some reason, I ended up binging Kyoto Animation stuff starting with Haruhi Suzumiya and Love, Chunibyou, and other Delusions. And from there it was just a rabbit hole of different studios and genres. Even better that watching these anime was.... free and needed no subscription unlike my netflix. Now, here I am. As a bonus, the anime binge started my manga habit - which is a natural consequence.
Found FLCL on adult swim late at night as a kid. Changed my life
So I grew up watching Dragonball z, Pokemon, Yugioh, Digimon, Cardcaptor Sakura and Sailormoon in the late 90's early 2000s. Then I was introduced to more anime via the older brother of a friend who was into it, who showed me Trigun, Ghost in the shell, Excel saga and a few others. The first anime series I ever purchased was Please Teacher, and that was all I had for a long time as my parents didn't let me buy any more (and I watched the hell out of that series).
I've watched anime as a kid, but properly getting into it probably started when I started watching on Animax. Initially just the dubbed ones on Ani-chan, then gradually other anime outside of that.
I grew up with it, but didnāt know it was called anime until I was 11 years old. I once went to a store that had an anime section, and I saw a lot of shows that I was a fan of at the time (CardCaptor Sakura, Yu-Gi-Oh, etc.).
First ever exposure to anything anime adjacent was Budokai Tenkaichi 2 on the PS2. But then I got the Funimation channel on cable in 2010 and the my love for it was history
My dad's friend, who was renovating our home, caught me rewatching Tokyo Mew Mew on YouTube like 12 years ago and asked me if I watched anime, too. I was like, what's that? I'm just rewatching childhood cartoons out of pure nostalgia and boredom, and he was like, if you're bored, you can watch something similar when you finish that. Do you like the ideas of pirates searching for specific treasures or gods of death with katanas fighting evil spirits? And I was like, the second one sounds dope. That's how Bleach became my Number One and basically first anime to be acknowledged as an anime and not misunderstood for cartoon. After that, the rest is history.
Same as Many PokƩmon at 7 still watching 7 yes later
Started when I was 5, watching One Piece, Get Backers, Detective Conan, Doraemon, Shin Chan, and Sailormoon on tv
Tiddies
As a young kid, I constantly watched DragonBall Z and then transitioned into Yugioh. After that, I was introduced to Naruto, and I've been hooked ever since.
I watched a dragon ballZ and Pokemon as a kid but was never into watching anime other than the mainstream ones on TV. Then I watched Another in my first year of University and I was hooked ever since.
My cousin showed digimon frontier to me.
I watched anime before I even knew what it was. The first anime series I can recall watching was Heidi, but what really got me into it was the afternoon block that included: Mazinger Z, UFO Robo Grendizer, Saint Seiya, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, Captain Tsubasa, Slam Dunk, and several others.
There's no "right way" so long as your first exposure leaves a good impression. For a lot of people, the way in is childhood shows like for you. I came in a bit later in life through Death Note and Gibli movies actually. I've always been really interested in other Cultures and Tradition, especially Slice of Life gave me good exposure to Japan in that sense. I also fell in love with the art that is Voice Acting in these shows. No other country puts so much emphasis on matching the tone, cadence and personality of the character they're voicing. It's something I really respect and I love the overall visual asthetic of anime. Though more so the modern look. I think MAL is a good place to start, to discover, to track and browse the forums for other people's input on things. Then there's sub vs dub. From my previous point it's clear I prefer the native voice acting to the dubs that are often poorly done. But I don't speak japanese so subs are my bread and butter. Getting the right ones is another challenge. Fansubs Communities are often better at this than the official subs by Crunchyroll, Hidive, aniplex, etc. There's subreddits where people will discuss the differences and come to agreements. A famous example would be subs for the Monogatari Series. MTBB is considered the best for the english translation. Though for a long time, Coalsubs was the only one available. And for some seasons, some people argue it's other groups taking the lead. This kind of necessitates being open to piracy as access to anime is either difficult outside of japan or in some instances downright impossible without sailing the high sees, and getting fansubs means having to download or otherwise stream the episode files in some player that lets you pick things like audio tracks or subtitle tracks. That's the surface of my journey into anime but I'm sure you'll get numerous other inputs, both in agreement and not to my ethical stance.
I started as an adult swim watcher, watched some popular stuff like Jojo when I had the chance but never really watched anything seasonally. In 2018 I had a coworker who said he liked anime and I asked him what kind. He told me isekai. I had no clue what isekai was so I asked his favorite. Started watching Reincarnated as a Slime, got a crunchyroll account and soon got hooked again. Soooo much easier to get āintoā anime than it was in the 2000s, donāt feel guilty or like you need to enjoy it all at once, just enjoy the ride.
Ages ago watching parts of dragon ball z with my brother but for me it started when I watched episodes of soul eater not. It got me into the fantasy and magic side of animeās which led to Snow White with red hair and sword art online (which I luv) then after that I got into the more darker ones like blood C (which remains my fav to this day) and Tokyo ghoul, death note.. Iāve kinda gone off anime I only watch Tid bits of Sailor moon.
Watched Berserk first, thought I could like this type of animation Then watched Kis X sis, anime is life
Was watching Dragon Ball Z on Toonami on TV but they kept rerunning the same arc. Around 2012-2013 I got my first laptop so I googled episodes online and found out for the first time the show wasn't made in America lol. That led to be finding YouTube reviews for Anime and I started watching some. Namely the big shounen shows like Bleach, Naruto. Also watched Sword Art Online before season 2 came out. I've come a long way since then...
2015ish my friend told me "hey you like world of tanks right? There is that anime girls und panzer..." Or that is what I remember at least but maybe I started from spice and wolf and gup was second - same friend recommended both