holy shit. I almost can't believe it's been almost 15 years since I started out with anime and manga. like that number seems really damn wild to see typed out.
I can remember it to this day, honestly. I was 5 years old and it was after school, almost night time. as a kid I was obsessed with cartoon network, so I was pretty familiar with the stuff on at the time. also, thanks to my parents letting me stay up a bit more than usual sometimes, I was able to catch the programming on Toonami. when we turned on the tv after dinner, there was Sailor Moon. I can vividly remember which episode it was too! uwu its was the 12th episode of season 1, which involved Nephrite and Mercury and Moon! lemme tell you how fucking excited I was to see this 'cartoon' that looked so magical, much more than the other things I'd seen before it.
so I decided to watch as much of it as I could for a good time, then I started to dip into more shows like Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon. I was utterly obsessed with all three of these, and even to this day I can say I am (at least with Pokemon and Sailor Moon)
when I turned 8, and our library in town had been rebuilt, I finally took a visit there with my mom and I kind of almost started screaming because guess what: they had Sailor Moon dvd's there. I could finally watch all of it! (what I thought was the whole series) and with that, I also decided to look more into it online and BOOM. I was introduced even more to the world of anime. I could finally label what I was watching as something! and I learned of manga too, which got me really pumped.
growing up I was a big morning person (nowadays that seems really impossible lmaoooo) so I'd sneak into the living room early in the mornings to watch the tail-end of the anime segments of cartoon network. there I learned on gundam wing, inuyasha and full metal alchemist.
flash forward a few years and its around 2006 and a nice little website called Youtube decided to take over my life. I have really fond (I say this with sarcasm of course) memories of struggling to find 'parts' of episodes to new anime I wanted to watch, usually to little avail. then sadly I took the route of watching anime on sketchy websites because thats all I knew at the time. 2006 to 2012 was really a bulk of my life where I didn't do much besides watch anime in my free time omg.
as cliche as it is to say, without anime, I wouldn't be where I am today o v o
the majority of the friends I've made have been through this, and the things I've learned through this have been so amazing. and although i partly was influenced by anime to wanna learn japanese in high school (which I ended up taking 3 years of) I did honestly wanna learn it for the sake of the culture and history of japan anyways because its a fascinating place and always has been to me uwu
↧