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Comment count is 35
infinite zest - 2015-03-16

"7 out of 25 people?" Shit, I was the only person I knew who liked anime in high school, and just because I avoided prom like the plague didn't mean that I didn't have friends. And this guy's only 3 years younger than me. Plus, he's just talking about shows that are on Adult Swim, like Dead Man Wonderland. Even back in the late-90s/early 2000s Toonami was picking up Gundam and Tenchi among other things, as well as FLCL. So that's mainstream the way that Family Guy is.. chances are a lot of people get high and forget it's anime night on Adult Swim and watch it anyway. The reason I got into anime was a trip to Japan when I was 13, so I knew about DBZ well before people started making jokes like "Dragon Ballz." Even Sailor Moon was at least making an attempt to become Americanized, as was Voltron before that.. maybe people didn't realize that this show and toy line was Japanese or adapted from a foreign word "anime" but don't worry, bro, your Love Hina tat will always be an obscure reference.


Gmork - 2015-03-16

Love Hina represents everything about anime that sucks.


infinite zest - 2015-03-16

You're telling me! I had to review that game on Dreamcast back in high school. We were in direct competition with other websites with more money so we took what we could get. I reviewed that game with no knowledge of Japanese and didn't even know it was an anime. I pretty much made up a story for the whole thing and just went ahead and gave it a B+, because an exclusive is an exclusive I guess? Still never watched the show.


Maru - 2015-03-16

Certified Grade A Twaddle USDA Approved


Monchiles Monchiles - 2015-03-16

The preload image already nails it though. While there are lots of really great, though-provoking anime, the vast majority of the industry uses the art style as a vehicle to power fantasy masturbation fodder. About half of all new anime for a season will be some variation of "A brother and sister join an afterschool club together and realize they have feelings for each other and a little girl genius with big boobs."


EvilHomer - 2015-03-16

Don't judge. Anime gives the people what they want; it's not anime's fault that what the people want is incest and fanservice.


infinite zest - 2015-03-16

I watch Breaking Bad now because nobody else knows what that is..


Xenocide - 2015-03-16

All this gratuitous sex is ruining my gratuitous violence!


SolRo - 2015-03-16

masturbation fodder keeps the studios open, lets them take a hit making a decent anime occasionally.

it's not like film, where some trustfindie can buy a ,000 camera, screw around for a couple years, and accidentally make a hit.

animation takes a lot of money to make something half-decent, and burns money to make something visually stunning.


SolRo - 2015-03-16

You might like this seasons The Virgin Witch Maria, it's thought provoking AND masturbatory!


Quad9Damage - 2015-03-16

I haven't watched the weeaboo's six minute video yet. But if I were to argue that point, I would say newbies don't appreciate Vampire Hunter D, Ninja Scroll, Akira, Overfiend, and ADV's insistence on making everything in their catalog look like hentai.


Kid Fenris - 2015-03-16

It's funny how this mindset endures for decades. When I was a gawking young anime nerd in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I remember old fans complaining about how everything was mainstream and commonplace.

They had more of a point back then, of course, since you couldn't get heavy anime exposure in the 1980s without trading tapes, importing laserdiscs, or going to clubs and conventions. Yet I suspect that made '80s fans value their underground Japanese cartoons a bit more than they deserved.

In 1985, anime must've seemed obscure and surprising just by virtue of having sex, violence, or a style slicker than anything Transformers might show. Ten years later, anime lost some of that inherent gleam when you could rent lots of it at Blockbuster. Ten years after that, anime eroded its novelty when you could watch it on Adult Swim and torrent just about anything less obscure than Eternal Filena. Today, it's just another thing to stick in your Hulu and Netflix queue. And I approve.

Man, I sound like this guy now. Thanks a lot, Sasazuka.


BHWW - 2015-03-16

I remember the days when the really, really "old school" anime fans included the sort of folks who thought almost everything made after 1982 was garbage, had been raised on Prince Planet, Astro Boy, Ultraman, and Speed Racer, and so on...by the time I got interested in the mess the fandom online at least was like entering a room I remember the days when the really, really "old school" anime fans included the sort of folks who thought almost everything made after 1982 was garbage, had been raised on Prince Planet, Astro Boy, Ultraman, and Speed Racer, and so on, and the whippersnappers back then were people who already thought the original '79 Gundam series was "ancient".

By the time I started getting interested in anime the online fandom was like walking into a room full of people who either couldn't stop yakking about Ranma 1/2 or Dragonball or Evangelion, and you had some of the then current wave of old-schoolers lamenting all of These Kids Today who couldn't appreciate classics like Bubblegum Crisis and Megazone 23 in favor of slick movies like Ninja Scroll and the first Ghost in the Shell.


BHWW - 2015-03-16

Oh hell I got my post all jumbled up, son of a...


ashtar. - 2015-03-16

I can't tell if that's a neckbeard because I can't tell where his neck starts.


il fiore bel - 2015-03-16

my back hurts from laughing fuck you and here are your stars


sasazuka - 2015-03-16

If you're just going by TV ratings and physical media sales, anime was actually a lot more mainstream in the United States 10 to 15 years ago (i.e. peak DRAGONBALL Z era) than it is today, although you didn't have Crunchyroll and other online anime streaming services that ate into the anime on linear television and physical media model, so it's a tough call to say whether anime is indeed less popular with Americans today. Certainly, I don't think the absolute most popular of the most popular anime with Americans today (i.e. ATTACK ON TITAN) comes close to the popularity of DRAGONBALL Z in its prime, but that's only based on my gut feelings, not hard data.

Basically, I think more of the American mainstream public today at least knows what anime is, but mere awareness of anime doesn't translate to popularity.

I mainly submitted this because he seems to think the anime he waxes nostalgic about are shows that were known only to a special few elite fans when I think absolutely every show he mentions was shown on Cartoon Network Toonami or Adult Swim and are as mainstream as anime ever got over in the States (excluding POKEMON).


RocketBlender - 2015-03-16

Is there a reason you're shouting the titles at me?


sasazuka - 2015-03-16

I prefer capping titles to putting them in quotation marks. Ideally, there would be italics but I don't think that's possible on this "no html" board.

What happens if I do?


sasazuka - 2015-03-16

That last sentence was in HTML italics although it doesn't show up as such. Just an experiment.


Kid Fenris - 2015-03-16

Yeah, I don't think anime as a whole ever will get the sort of press it got circa 2000, with Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z and articles with headlines like "these aren't your grandpa's cartoons!"


Boomer The Dog - 2015-03-16

I've seen that a lot, caps = shouting, I never felt that way though, going by the context of what was being said more, so it never bugged me.


StanleyPain - 2015-03-16

Oh, you're 30? That's cute.

I'm 40. When I was in high school, anime was "Japanimation" and we were into stuff like Akira, Bubblegum Crisis, Evangelion, FOTNS, awesome OVAs, and superviolent manga.
Shut up, pussy.


sasazuka - 2015-03-16

If you're 40 now (as I am too), when you were in high school, Evangelion didn't exist, unless you were still in high school into your early 20s.

Evangelion is only just turning 20 next month and it didn't get an official North American release until the autumn of 1996 (although VHS fansubs started appearing a few weeks after the Japanese airing).


sasazuka - 2015-03-16

Correction, Evangelion premiered in October 1995. (Honestly thought it was an April show, sorry, although my point about it not being around when we were in high school stands.)


Xenocide - 2015-03-16

Knowing what a Gundam is no longer makes you a special boy. :(


SolRo - 2015-03-16

But do you know gundam from before it was about emo teena---nevermind, it was always about emo teenagers.


Caminante Nocturno - 2015-03-16

I haven't heard anyone make this complaint in almost 20 years. At least it made sense back then, when anime was starting to lose its exclusivity. Making this complaint now is like making the same complaint about PCs and PC games.

Bailing that, there's no excuse for wearing a flat cap backwards. Wearing a flat cap backwards is a mark of shame that no sane man would willingly inflict upon themselves.


dairyqueenlatifah - 2015-03-16

It's been a long day, so I can't bear to subject myself to the video, but anyone who honestly calls YYH and DBZ "obscure classics" needs their English Language license revoked, because they obviously don't deserve the privilege of it's use anymore.

It's funny because I remember when he would have been the very people that anime fans/self proclaimed "otaku" would have mocked the hell out of and complained about 15 years ago the same way he's complaining about people now. People who knew nothing of anime beyond what was on Adult Swim and Toonami found no love among the anime nerds of the day (if you admitted to partaking in dubs you were damned already), and if you're sitting there today calling DBZ and YYH "obscure classics" then there's a 99.9999% chance you were one of those people.


sasazuka - 2015-03-16

To be fair, I was paraphrasing in the description but that was the gist of what he was saying.


BHWW - 2015-03-16

I made the acquaintance of some people in college who were members of an anime club, not an official one, a sort of mostly informal gathering of people, not all of them college students, many of them well-adjusted folks who weren't complete nerdlingers monomanically focused on anime. There were a few, though, including this one really awkward fellow who offered to show some of the others his anime collection, which he kept in the trunk of his car and consisted of like ten tapes of stuff like Dragonball Z and Urusei Yatsura and some early A.D. Vision titles and he was behaving like he was showing off precious contraband.


infinite zest - 2015-03-16

Hehe. BHWW I have a very similar story. As I mentioned in my above comment, I loved anime throughout high school but never really shared it with friends, as we were also into punk rock and LSD and stuff, and I thought it'd be nerdy if they knew I liked "cartoons." I even hid the fact that I wrote for a website with "otaku" in the title for fear of.. something.. at this point I don't remember why. Anyway, I left Portland for Madison to start school and found myself with no friends in a dorm room with a total jock, so I decided to seek out college social clubs, and the "anime club" was one of them. And it was literally just Pokemon and DBZ. So I didn't join and started my own, consisting of Twin Angels, LA Blue Girl, things like that. We just called it "Tentacle Fuck Fest" and I made a nice circle of friends and moved the fuck out of the dorm.


Quad9Damage - 2015-03-17

I'm 30 now. I was introduced to anime around age 11, which would have been 1995. I was floored. Everything 'cartoons' up to that point had either been Disney, ABC Saturday Mornings, Nicktoons or Merrie Melodies. My parents didn't have a copy of 'Fritz the Cat' or 'Heavy Metal' hidden in their closet so needless to say, adult content in animation was unheard of until I was exposed to anime. I loved the art style, the violence and the tits. It was something fresh, something new. More importantly, it was something my parents weren't aware of because they were Sunday Methodists who learned about what I wasn't supposed to watch from the evening news.

I remember going to malls with mom and breaking away to search out the Suncoast Video or Sam Goody. Half the time I just window shopped, browsing the VHS covers on the tall racks. On several occasions ADV's art and clever wording tricked me into thinking I was buying porn. I wore out my VHS collection of Slayers, all 24 cassette tapes. I'm surprised my Vampire Hunter D tape still plays.

From my point of view as a 90's kid, THOSE was the good ol' days. Anime was hardly underground but Toonami, Tokyopop and Shonan Jump ushered in the 'mainstream' era when I was in high school and college. Now it's 2015 and my teenage cousins watch their Blu-ray box sets subbed. They're no longer thrown over manga being unflipped. They share adorable anime memes across their Facebook timelines. Anime isn't a subset of their pop culture; it IS their pop culture. Dragon Ball Z and Yu Yu Hakusho were the textbook definition of mainstream, so how old is this guy?


Boomer The Dog - 2015-03-17

Good story Quad9, I like when someone is remembering the foundations of what they like, and probably will like forever.

Boomer


Juice Eggs McKenna - 2017-10-17

Ton of Dragon Ball Z tattoos


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