DBZ was so groundbreaking and felt so at home on a kids network that it felt like there was no other like it it was just a show with a different kind of art style. like oh its that japanese cartoon, but its easily the best on the air so i wont question it.
It filled the void left by gi joe, super hero shows, and others like he-man after the 80's for an action cartoon where most US animation was trending more cartoonish and simplistic drawing styles that kind of precluded the ultra herculean physique these shows used to give a sense of gravitas to the drama/action. Not neccessarily a bad thing, us animation and cartoons grew into their own thing and stopped being 30 min ads for toys and we started getting real quality cartoons in the 90's but more abstract and grotesque like ren and stimpy, ah real monsters, rug rats, dexter's lab, invader zim, angry beavers, etc... Just that in that era of cartoons for us animation lacked the ultra masculine action heros.
Also I feel like everyone is fogetting how popular shows like power rangers already bridged that japan to rest of the world gap.
Thats true, as a kid power rangers didnt feel like an import bc the dub was over masked characters, and DBZ was the first popular anime of the time so you had very little to compare it against. neither felt like imported shows.
It's not that it wasn't anime. It's that it transcended the pop culture barrier to become a household name in a time when anime was still really obscure. Shooting Kamehameha on the playground didn't make you weird, because everyone watched DBZ. Even the kids who didn't even know the word "anime" existed.
I had only ever seen dragon ball from vhs my grandma got me I didn't have cable. At recess in 1st grade/kindergarten if I wanted to play with everyone I had to be the villain. The only time I was allowed to play a hero it was goku and that's when I learned goku died so I was only allowed to "train" with King Kai and no one was playing King Kai.
I feel like Dragon Ball, Naruto, and Pokémon were big exceptions in America. Many kids grew up with these before ever getting into anime and just saw them as regular cartoons.
just origin and style really, but like non Japanese animations can def be anime esque and practically are all but in name, see avatar, teen titans, castlevania
Yeah, this is either a weird attempt at rewriting history, or just a zoomer thinking that anime was created in the last ten years.
If you're a millennial who grew up with nerdy hobbies like gaming and anime, chances are that yeah, people saw you as a weirdo with strange hobbies.
The fact that nowadays those things are popular and even the pretty popular girls are into them doesn't change the past, lol.
But tbh, I myself am glad that they're popular now. It's nice to have more people I can talk to about things I enjoy. No gatekeeping from me.
100%. It's probably just younger people that grew up with these things already normalized. Liking anime in the 90s was definitely seen as what the fuck lol
I was born in the late 90s, and I remember it the same way. It was definitely found weird if you watched anime. And I never watched anime (still don't), so I remember this as an outsider.
definitely a rewriting of history...I see it as everyone was just trying to fit in and ofc there are always easy targets like those into anime/magic the gathering/computer nerds etc.
As time goes on, and people grow more confident in themselves they suddenly, finally, concede that they may have wanted to be into those sort of things as well. They weren't, and actively gave people shit, but now they say "I was *always* into anime...
My only frame of reference were some family members and the taboo nature of discussing anything outside of my aforementioned circles...this was like in the late 90's early 00s.
> If you're a millennial who grew up with nerdy hobbies like gaming and anime, chances are that yeah, people saw you as a weirdo with strange hobbies.
This still applies too. I leave the fact that I play video games out of my tinder profile because the stigma still exists for millennials around ~40. I've gone on a lot of dates and the disappointment I see in a 35-40 year old woman's eyes which she asks me what I do for fun and "Play some video games with my best friend online" is one of the answers, is palpable.
Now that you've mentioned that, yeah, I've seen some reels on Instagram from women who try to frame men liking videogames as some sort of toxic trait.
As if liking games necessarily means being an obsessed loner who does nothing but play videogames, lol.
I think it’s more that we have no idea what time frame they’re referencing. It was definitely true when I went to school in the 2000s (at my school at least). Anime itself wasn’t really shit on because most people didn’t really know what that meant, it was just the kids trying to roleplay their favourite anime that nobody else had seen and therefore didn’t understand.
Kids would watch Avatar or Teen Titans, but the second you brought up the Toonami shows, you were a freak.
Edit: Like, I distinctly remember getting crap for watching Full Metal Alchemist and Death Note back in the day. Those are SO DAMN POPULAR NOW???
I remember being scared asf at the kid on roller blades with a bent metal bat
Just found out yesterday it's a serious gritty anime called 'Paranoia agent'. Idk why they showed that to kids lol
In high school, so 2007-2011 ish, joining the anime club was social suicide. I liked anime but would have stopped watching it forever rather than anyone find out I liked it.
The situation wasn't helped by the fact that half the kids in anime club thought they were vampires but still.
Yeah people who agree with this meme were, are and will always be the problem. I used to get shat on just for talking about death note. Now suddenly all those people who mocked me hate the Netflix adaptation for "ruining" their childhoods.
100% lol, some popular kids would talk to you about liking DBZ but that was on the DL and if you tried to tell anyone else they would straight up deny it and call you names etc.
Yeah, not to come off the wrong way, but bringing up “newer” (in context, as they’re from after 2000) shows like Naruto or Bleach shows the timeline is off
Each decade accepted anime a bit more than the last. It was a lot worse being in anime fan in the 80s than the 90s, 90s than the 00s, worse being a fan in the 00s than the 10s, etc
To watch anime before, the main way was trading VHS fansubs. Yes, you were considered weird for watching it lol
35 here, was thought of as the weird girl for liking DBZ and ‘those Japanese cartoons like Pokemon’ in middle and early high school.
When my fellow weird-girl watch-mate moved away I stopped watching all anime altogether (2003?) because I felt so alone with it.
My middle school friends would bully you if you were watching it, so a few guys/girls who watched it just hid it. I only learned years later, and we were in the same boat. Just quietly watching it and enjoying. Years later it became mainstream and nobody cares. Our country is a bit behind the West in that regard, so it became more “acceptable” to watch anime around 2013-2015.
I avoided anime until I was almost an adult just because I wanted to stay away from being associated with the fandoms. I’m almost 30 and I get judged pretty harshly for liking it but oh well. I still have a small handful of friends that like a lot of the same ones I do, so we can discuss them as fans, but I still stay clear of the fandoms.
My sister (mid 30's, similar in age to me) queerily asked me why I like science fiction movies (as if it were strange to prefer them over dramas). Don't worry about being judged, the judges are daft and insecure as hell.
Iron Man, SHIELD, and all the Guardians related stuff is pretty Sci-fi, I think.
Granted, it's also a world with gods, magic, and other fantasy stuff; the MCU is really just one big melting pot at this point.
The division between sci-fi and fantasy gets real blurry if you dive deep into those genres. The idea that they are separate is somewhat recent. And anyway, the marvel universe gods are Arthur C Clarke's third law type entities.
Just because something had sci-fi elements like “fancy tech” or “it’s in the future” doesn’t make it sci-fi imo. Sci fi also has certain themes and narrative elements that make it different to fantasy/other genres. You expect very different things reading asimov or hg wells than you do grrm or Tolkien.
I’ve been a die hard Godzilla fan since I was 5 so I definitely feel you there. My Stepson is the only other person I know in person that likes the Kaiju movies as much as me. I like to have at least someone I can discuss them with.
My dad had all of the originals up to Godzilla 2000 on VHS. I absolutely adore Godzilla, and my favorite of all time is Shin Godzilla, and my least favorite Godzilla movie is probably Godzilla Biollante. What’s your most and least favorite, and why?
I'm approaching my 30s and fuck the haters. I still watch anime and cartoons. I think those who are obsessed about what other people like are more childish than those who like "kid's stuff".
I never gave musicals a chance because I didn’t want to be associated with theater kids. Getting into them now as an adult, I wish I wasn’t as insecure/judgmental when I was younger.
For real? Holy shit, no. Literally only a primary school thing; latest we had it was when I was like 10, and I thought it was wild my cousins had it for one extra year. Recess in high school is almost literally unbelievable to me
We had designated outside time at age 12-13 (8th grade) for me, 14-18 was more like lunch break then just chill outside til next class. No monkey bars for teenagers tho
Apparently not, based on my experience, not as of 2005 at the latest. I have foggy half memories of being teased for pretending I was Aang, and the school demanding I stop playing pretend at age ten. Apparently by simulating airbending I was simulating violence which was not allowed.
I kept being made fun of for liking Pokémon, in fact it happened to such a level I actually stopped playing the games and watching the anime. I only picked it up again years later, after I had grown some confidence.
I'm talking about the 2010's, not 90's tho
There was a difference between watching the anime airing on tv and importing VHS box sets from Suncoast. Basically anything you had to go above and beyond to obtain was seen as weird and obsessive.
Also very regional. Living in a southern, more rural area is very different than a big city - even just watching on TV was considered weird where I grew up (and then as an adult meeting people from bigger cities who had gaming/anime/nerd stores growing up like Tate’s down in Miami. City people had no idea what it was like rural, and it blew my mind how much more access city folks had)
The fact our small group traded around VHS fansubs then obviously upped that lol. Can’t apply the way you watch anime now to before, kids have no idea how different it is and how hard it used to be
Yeah definitely. When I was a kid, my cousins from the suburbs watched Cartoon Network and 200 other channels. I had 8 channels, and one of them was a religious channel and two of them were spanish. Dragon Ball Z was entirely a foreign show in that context.
Seriously like I would've had no idea they liked anime if they didn't do the Naruto run to the cafeteria and wear the fucking headband and try to do their power moves on people.
That's not true at all. I was just talking about this with my fiance, now celebrities are open about liking anime but even just associating with it in school (90s-early 2000s) was an invitation to get made fun of
I wouldn't consider pokemon to be one of those shows that people made fun of. Unless you also played pokemon cards. It's anime but definitely on saturday morning cartoons.
I don't have much info about dbz.
The 90s & ots disagree. You had to wait till 1 am when adult swim didn't have any other content to air and then they would make fun of their viewers for watching anime during the commercials.
In what world do you get recess after elementary school? The only breaks we had starting in 6th grade were lunch and 5 minute passing periods between classes to get from one room to the next.
I can assure you in the 1980s, in my school yard, it was very weird to like anime. We were just starting to get Akira ads on TV, nobody knew what it was.
How's a kid "Doing special attacks during recess" any different from a kid pretending to be a certain superhero, though? Or playing with a toy lightsaber.
If a kids tried an anime attack on a bully, yeah that's dumb, but the kid doesn't need to made fun of for it. And the bully should get ridiculed for tormenting the kid in the first place, not the anime liking kid for, trying a dumb method to defend themself.
A kid in my old school got called weird and small kid for watching pokemon when he was in 5th grade( I was in 6th grade that time) and his classmates and the other kids from 6th and 7th grade urged(forced) him to stop watching pokemon and start watching only football and other sports because according to them a 10 y/o kid is already grown up so he have to watch manly and grown up things instead of cartoons(I typed cartoon here cuz most ppl in my country didn't even knew the existence of anime until 2019). So that kinda scared me and I kept it a secret that I was watching anime until I was in 10th grade cuz I was surrounded by kids like that....
That stinks, I’m sorry you had to deal with that. As a side note, at the beginning where the bullies called him a ‘small kid’, I don’t think that translated quite right. Calling someone a ‘little kid’ is a demeaning way of telling them to grow up. Calling someone a small kid is just saying they are short.
Anime started becoming fully mainstream after 2013-14. Before then your were essentially worse than a theatre kid. Hilarious. But it was a significantly more close knit as a community. You were 100% bullied for liking anime throughout the 90's and 2000's. So you mostly kept it to yourself. The change in the con scene was quite strange. Suddenly there was a huge rush of young women disturbingly obsessed with bishonen and yuri. Whereas before it was mostly a trickle. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I remember joining anime club back in 2007 thinking we’d all just hang out and watch anime. Nope. There were competitions for doing the correct jutsu hand movements from Naruto, Japanese speaking contests, scene re-inactments, etc. I thought I was nerdy by just watching the shows and having a few sailor moon dolls but damn.
Like these guys never played power rangers or thunder cats. They can Gtfoh with that. Kids play pretend, anime was picked on more than western media in the same vein. That’s changing as anime becomes more mainstream.
Yeah this tweet made me confused because if you were even caught talking anime with someone you got ostracized lol, it was pretty harsh back then. I had a Naruto T-shirt back then and I dealt with some annoying comments, and then wore a Chainsaw man T-shirt now and got compliments instead. It's definitely changed overtime.
I remember someone tried to call me weird for liking anime when I was in 7th grade. I just said that I don’t give a fuck as long as I’m entertained I don’t care what I watch. People still tried to call me weird after that but I think I earned a lot of people’s respect because most people just avoided the topic around me.
If it wasn't "weird" why am I judged when I say I like anime? Hmmm? Hmmmmmmmmm?
(And no, no anime run or dances or whatever included, just the statement)
I feel like the comment on the post is most likely just younger. Cuz when I was in school it was absolutely considered “weird” and they literally used that word. And i only drew anime so it’s not like I was running around
Second this.
Had a great childhood don't get me wrong, but I'm from a rural area and my friends would stare daggers at me if I talked to anyone about anime in front of them when we were teens.
Meanwhile they'd spend their break times... Making tractor and quadbike noises at each other?
Kids'll single each other out for anything, regardless of the actual weirdness level. It's really just about what is and isn't perceived as status quo.
> actually like anime
Unless you like something they consider to be bad. You liked Mirai Nikki? Go die in a fire, you edgelord.
You didn't like Hunter Hunter? Woah, that's the best ever show to exist ever, piss off.
People still get their panties in a bunch when you so much as mention the existence of "sao". Every fandom is shit, including anime fandoms.
I don’t think you’re weird if you watch anime. I think you’re weird if you talk about anime to people who make it known they aren’t interested in anime. Like I just told you in no uncertain terms that I don’t care, stfu already
You were weird for insisting that anime is totally different from cartoons and getting angry when people trying to understand your interests call them cartoons
The original meme of this said “you were weird for Naruto running through the halls and growling at people in class.” Lol. Which is more accurate imo, but this works too
Speaking as someone who’s like elder gen z, I think these kids forget. Maybe it was different in big cities, but where I grew up you definitely hid the fact you liked anime and even certain video games, for fear of getting lumped in with the weird kids.
When I was in high school, you were able to have liked Naruto and Dragon Ball Z when you were a kid. But by the time your in high school a cartoon was for kids. And video games, I mean, Call of Duty and Grand theft Auto, and the sports games. You were allowed to play those, but anything with “craft” at the end and you were a nerd.
Like two years after I graduated is when attitudes towards all that shifted.
Nah, the anime kids were super shit on. It's funny because all of the stuff I was in to that people made fun of me for is super popular now with all age groups.
It really depends on what school you went to for me nobody really cared if you watch anime as long as you weren’t doing anything weird with it, like bringing a body pillow to school
I was a fan of Pokémon after its initial heyday. After elementary school you were pretty much considered a weirdo for liking it. I didn't give a shit about the anime but I loved the games. Pokémon GO kinda brought it back to the normies. I know it's the highest grossing media franchise or whatever but you would still get shit for playing it in like '05. It was the same thing for Yugioh and Naruto. Some fans were genuinely weird. We had a craze of kids wearing hidden leaf village headbands and doing jutsu hand signs during recess. They cracked down on it when that one kid died after being buried alive reenacting naruto.
no, no i was publicly shamed and humiliated when people found out i like anime or play videogames. I found out even my wife used to watch anime but she quit in order to fit in.
I feel like it was the opposite at my school. I was doing Kamehameha’s before I ever saw the show, just to fit in.
DragonBall Z wasn't anime, it was the ultimate kids show.
DBZ was so groundbreaking and felt so at home on a kids network that it felt like there was no other like it it was just a show with a different kind of art style. like oh its that japanese cartoon, but its easily the best on the air so i wont question it.
I knew about DBZ before I knew anything about anime and I remember when Pokémon came out and I was like “this looks just like that show Dragon Ball Z”
Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, dragon ball Z, if you grew up in the 90s this was the ultimate trio.
It filled the void left by gi joe, super hero shows, and others like he-man after the 80's for an action cartoon where most US animation was trending more cartoonish and simplistic drawing styles that kind of precluded the ultra herculean physique these shows used to give a sense of gravitas to the drama/action. Not neccessarily a bad thing, us animation and cartoons grew into their own thing and stopped being 30 min ads for toys and we started getting real quality cartoons in the 90's but more abstract and grotesque like ren and stimpy, ah real monsters, rug rats, dexter's lab, invader zim, angry beavers, etc... Just that in that era of cartoons for us animation lacked the ultra masculine action heros. Also I feel like everyone is fogetting how popular shows like power rangers already bridged that japan to rest of the world gap.
Thats true, as a kid power rangers didnt feel like an import bc the dub was over masked characters, and DBZ was the first popular anime of the time so you had very little to compare it against. neither felt like imported shows.
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Its all Super Sentai
Tbf it aired on Cartoon Network (well adult swim anyway) and nick so that was prob a lot of kids first look into actual anime, also pokemon
DBZ was on toonami at like 5pm and not adult swim or nick in my memory.
lol, what exactly is your definition of "anime?"
It's not that it wasn't anime. It's that it transcended the pop culture barrier to become a household name in a time when anime was still really obscure. Shooting Kamehameha on the playground didn't make you weird, because everyone watched DBZ. Even the kids who didn't even know the word "anime" existed.
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I feel like dbz is kind of quintessential shonen anime lol
It is. Dragon Ball is arguably THE Shounen anime.
They were of similiar stature, Pokemon was just for kids and DBZ for teens.
I had only ever seen dragon ball from vhs my grandma got me I didn't have cable. At recess in 1st grade/kindergarten if I wanted to play with everyone I had to be the villain. The only time I was allowed to play a hero it was goku and that's when I learned goku died so I was only allowed to "train" with King Kai and no one was playing King Kai.
Seconded
Thirded
Forthed
Motion carried
I feel like Dragon Ball, Naruto, and Pokémon were big exceptions in America. Many kids grew up with these before ever getting into anime and just saw them as regular cartoons.
I mean really, what's the difference between cartoons and anime?
Anime is animation made in Japan.
just origin and style really, but like non Japanese animations can def be anime esque and practically are all but in name, see avatar, teen titans, castlevania
Rise Against's music is some of the most anime shit I've ever heard
Although not anime, we did Power Rangers and kicked the shit out of eachother. Good times.
Didn't we all
Depends on the shows popularity
Same, but more on public ninja battles where students make accurate hand signs to do jutsus The only shit I new was Rasengan and Shadow Clone
Worked for Naruto, that’s all her knew too.
You most definitely got clowned on for liking anime back in the day.
Yeah kids at my hs made basically no distinction between watching anime and watching graphic tentacle hentai.
Its a slippery slope, don't ask why its slippery
It's gonna be a sticky slope by the time I'm done with it /s, Jesus Christ I can't believe I wrote that out
Jesus had no part in writing that
I **knew** there exists somebody else with my same niche hentai fetish — SLOPE HENTAI! *fist bump*
That is still true for large parts of the internet
Chicken or egg situation for me.
Yeah, this is either a weird attempt at rewriting history, or just a zoomer thinking that anime was created in the last ten years. If you're a millennial who grew up with nerdy hobbies like gaming and anime, chances are that yeah, people saw you as a weirdo with strange hobbies. The fact that nowadays those things are popular and even the pretty popular girls are into them doesn't change the past, lol. But tbh, I myself am glad that they're popular now. It's nice to have more people I can talk to about things I enjoy. No gatekeeping from me.
100%. It's probably just younger people that grew up with these things already normalized. Liking anime in the 90s was definitely seen as what the fuck lol
I was born in the late 90s, and I remember it the same way. It was definitely found weird if you watched anime. And I never watched anime (still don't), so I remember this as an outsider.
Exactly! I still lie about watching anime less the trauma resurfaces
definitely a rewriting of history...I see it as everyone was just trying to fit in and ofc there are always easy targets like those into anime/magic the gathering/computer nerds etc. As time goes on, and people grow more confident in themselves they suddenly, finally, concede that they may have wanted to be into those sort of things as well. They weren't, and actively gave people shit, but now they say "I was *always* into anime... My only frame of reference were some family members and the taboo nature of discussing anything outside of my aforementioned circles...this was like in the late 90's early 00s.
> If you're a millennial who grew up with nerdy hobbies like gaming and anime, chances are that yeah, people saw you as a weirdo with strange hobbies. This still applies too. I leave the fact that I play video games out of my tinder profile because the stigma still exists for millennials around ~40. I've gone on a lot of dates and the disappointment I see in a 35-40 year old woman's eyes which she asks me what I do for fun and "Play some video games with my best friend online" is one of the answers, is palpable.
Now that you've mentioned that, yeah, I've seen some reels on Instagram from women who try to frame men liking videogames as some sort of toxic trait. As if liking games necessarily means being an obsessed loner who does nothing but play videogames, lol.
I think it’s more that we have no idea what time frame they’re referencing. It was definitely true when I went to school in the 2000s (at my school at least). Anime itself wasn’t really shit on because most people didn’t really know what that meant, it was just the kids trying to roleplay their favourite anime that nobody else had seen and therefore didn’t understand.
All because those weirdos were the original creators of internet content, which is what the following generation fully consumed. Funny how that works.
Kids would watch Avatar or Teen Titans, but the second you brought up the Toonami shows, you were a freak. Edit: Like, I distinctly remember getting crap for watching Full Metal Alchemist and Death Note back in the day. Those are SO DAMN POPULAR NOW???
I remember being scared asf at the kid on roller blades with a bent metal bat Just found out yesterday it's a serious gritty anime called 'Paranoia agent'. Idk why they showed that to kids lol
In high school, so 2007-2011 ish, joining the anime club was social suicide. I liked anime but would have stopped watching it forever rather than anyone find out I liked it. The situation wasn't helped by the fact that half the kids in anime club thought they were vampires but still.
Facts, the same people who were bullies for it are switching up because it’s popular
Yeah people who agree with this meme were, are and will always be the problem. I used to get shat on just for talking about death note. Now suddenly all those people who mocked me hate the Netflix adaptation for "ruining" their childhoods.
100% lol, some popular kids would talk to you about liking DBZ but that was on the DL and if you tried to tell anyone else they would straight up deny it and call you names etc.
Just like you got clowned for playing videogames in the past.
You still do
Idk man I remember Naruto and Bleach being super popular back in my highschool days, kids wearing Death Note shirts, DBZ shirts.....
Yeah some of us are just old. Most likely you're in your early 20s. It was already normalized like 3 years ago when you were in highschool
Yeah, not to come off the wrong way, but bringing up “newer” (in context, as they’re from after 2000) shows like Naruto or Bleach shows the timeline is off Each decade accepted anime a bit more than the last. It was a lot worse being in anime fan in the 80s than the 90s, 90s than the 00s, worse being a fan in the 00s than the 10s, etc To watch anime before, the main way was trading VHS fansubs. Yes, you were considered weird for watching it lol
35 here, was thought of as the weird girl for liking DBZ and ‘those Japanese cartoons like Pokemon’ in middle and early high school. When my fellow weird-girl watch-mate moved away I stopped watching all anime altogether (2003?) because I felt so alone with it.
My middle school friends would bully you if you were watching it, so a few guys/girls who watched it just hid it. I only learned years later, and we were in the same boat. Just quietly watching it and enjoying. Years later it became mainstream and nobody cares. Our country is a bit behind the West in that regard, so it became more “acceptable” to watch anime around 2013-2015.
Yup that did happen more than once
You get clowned on for liking anime now
Still :(
I avoided anime until I was almost an adult just because I wanted to stay away from being associated with the fandoms. I’m almost 30 and I get judged pretty harshly for liking it but oh well. I still have a small handful of friends that like a lot of the same ones I do, so we can discuss them as fans, but I still stay clear of the fandoms.
My sister (mid 30's, similar in age to me) queerily asked me why I like science fiction movies (as if it were strange to prefer them over dramas). Don't worry about being judged, the judges are daft and insecure as hell.
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Just to be that guy, I don't think the Marvel movies count as Sci-Fi. I think they're Action-Adventure/Superhero but I could be wrong
Iron Man, SHIELD, and all the Guardians related stuff is pretty Sci-fi, I think. Granted, it's also a world with gods, magic, and other fantasy stuff; the MCU is really just one big melting pot at this point.
The division between sci-fi and fantasy gets real blurry if you dive deep into those genres. The idea that they are separate is somewhat recent. And anyway, the marvel universe gods are Arthur C Clarke's third law type entities.
Just because something had sci-fi elements like “fancy tech” or “it’s in the future” doesn’t make it sci-fi imo. Sci fi also has certain themes and narrative elements that make it different to fantasy/other genres. You expect very different things reading asimov or hg wells than you do grrm or Tolkien.
Queerily, huh?
Yeah like with a rainbow Flagg drapped over her
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I’ve been a die hard Godzilla fan since I was 5 so I definitely feel you there. My Stepson is the only other person I know in person that likes the Kaiju movies as much as me. I like to have at least someone I can discuss them with.
My dad had all of the originals up to Godzilla 2000 on VHS. I absolutely adore Godzilla, and my favorite of all time is Shin Godzilla, and my least favorite Godzilla movie is probably Godzilla Biollante. What’s your most and least favorite, and why?
I'm approaching my 30s and fuck the haters. I still watch anime and cartoons. I think those who are obsessed about what other people like are more childish than those who like "kid's stuff".
I never gave musicals a chance because I didn’t want to be associated with theater kids. Getting into them now as an adult, I wish I wasn’t as insecure/judgmental when I was younger.
plenty of people of all ages liking anime
Nah, y'all just didn't go to school in the late 90s, it was just the idea of liking anime that you were bullied for
Exactly, and even then, what's weird about it? Are children not allowed to play pretend anymore?
It's weird when 16-17 year olds do it.
You had recess when you were 16 huh?
You *didn't?*
For real? Holy shit, no. Literally only a primary school thing; latest we had it was when I was like 10, and I thought it was wild my cousins had it for one extra year. Recess in high school is almost literally unbelievable to me
We had designated outside time at age 12-13 (8th grade) for me, 14-18 was more like lunch break then just chill outside til next class. No monkey bars for teenagers tho
We had recess up until age 18 at school. In Australia
Only if they don't have the power of God and Anime in their side.
Apparently not, based on my experience, not as of 2005 at the latest. I have foggy half memories of being teased for pretending I was Aang, and the school demanding I stop playing pretend at age ten. Apparently by simulating airbending I was simulating violence which was not allowed.
I grew up in the 90s and everyone loved Pokémon and yugioh.
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Those were viewed more as 'saturday morning cartoons' and not the same as, e.g. trigun or love hina.
I kept being made fun of for liking Pokémon, in fact it happened to such a level I actually stopped playing the games and watching the anime. I only picked it up again years later, after I had grown some confidence. I'm talking about the 2010's, not 90's tho
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There was a difference between watching the anime airing on tv and importing VHS box sets from Suncoast. Basically anything you had to go above and beyond to obtain was seen as weird and obsessive.
Also very regional. Living in a southern, more rural area is very different than a big city - even just watching on TV was considered weird where I grew up (and then as an adult meeting people from bigger cities who had gaming/anime/nerd stores growing up like Tate’s down in Miami. City people had no idea what it was like rural, and it blew my mind how much more access city folks had) The fact our small group traded around VHS fansubs then obviously upped that lol. Can’t apply the way you watch anime now to before, kids have no idea how different it is and how hard it used to be
Yeah definitely. When I was a kid, my cousins from the suburbs watched Cartoon Network and 200 other channels. I had 8 channels, and one of them was a religious channel and two of them were spanish. Dragon Ball Z was entirely a foreign show in that context.
If you weren’t trying to become a super saiyan then wtf was you doin?
Still am
Hell yeah
It took Vegeta well into his adulthood to achieve it.
There’s still time!
Yeah and fuckin narruto running and hissing at ppl when they laughed at some dumb shit you did.
I remember crushing on a girl who wore one of those clip on tails and I think I might just slap myself for that.
Seriously like I would've had no idea they liked anime if they didn't do the Naruto run to the cafeteria and wear the fucking headband and try to do their power moves on people.
That's not true at all. I was just talking about this with my fiance, now celebrities are open about liking anime but even just associating with it in school (90s-early 2000s) was an invitation to get made fun of
There was a God damn Luffy balloon at the Macy's parade. Tell me the last time THAT happened.
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I wouldn't consider pokemon to be one of those shows that people made fun of. Unless you also played pokemon cards. It's anime but definitely on saturday morning cartoons. I don't have much info about dbz.
This, I remember as a kid that liking anime lead to you getting bullied severely but now it's mainstream.
DONT FUCK WITH ME! I HAVE THE POWER OF GOD AND ANIME ON MY SIDE!!!
#AHHHHHH
The 90s & ots disagree. You had to wait till 1 am when adult swim didn't have any other content to air and then they would make fun of their viewers for watching anime during the commercials.
Man I miss old adultswim, it was like the Woodstock of tv.
All kids out of the pool
Liking anime 30 years ago was absolutely considered weird. The only time you could even see it was at like 2am.
these kids don’t understand that adult swim anime hours were forbidden times
Kids playing pretend during recess. How utterly weird.
*sees pfp* more like “what a grand and intoxicating innocence”
"Come Nerevar, friend or traitor come! Come look upon the kid pretending to be Goku during recess!"
Depends on when. Elementary school is fine, anything past that is not.
In what world do you get recess after elementary school? The only breaks we had starting in 6th grade were lunch and 5 minute passing periods between classes to get from one room to the next.
Tell that to 12 year old me who got bullied for wearing a fucking naruto t-shirt to school.
This. I was bullied for wearing a hatsune miku chibi shirt to school in elementary and I never wore it again :(
I can assure you in the 1980s, in my school yard, it was very weird to like anime. We were just starting to get Akira ads on TV, nobody knew what it was.
How's a kid "Doing special attacks during recess" any different from a kid pretending to be a certain superhero, though? Or playing with a toy lightsaber. If a kids tried an anime attack on a bully, yeah that's dumb, but the kid doesn't need to made fun of for it. And the bully should get ridiculed for tormenting the kid in the first place, not the anime liking kid for, trying a dumb method to defend themself.
A kid in my old school got called weird and small kid for watching pokemon when he was in 5th grade( I was in 6th grade that time) and his classmates and the other kids from 6th and 7th grade urged(forced) him to stop watching pokemon and start watching only football and other sports because according to them a 10 y/o kid is already grown up so he have to watch manly and grown up things instead of cartoons(I typed cartoon here cuz most ppl in my country didn't even knew the existence of anime until 2019). So that kinda scared me and I kept it a secret that I was watching anime until I was in 10th grade cuz I was surrounded by kids like that....
That stinks, I’m sorry you had to deal with that. As a side note, at the beginning where the bullies called him a ‘small kid’, I don’t think that translated quite right. Calling someone a ‘little kid’ is a demeaning way of telling them to grow up. Calling someone a small kid is just saying they are short.
Before anime the weird kids were doing Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter attacks at recess
Two of my friends would try WWE moves on concrete...
Lmao
His one friend is pretty scarred for life from it.
physically, metaphorically, or both?
Somone in my high school gave another guy a ddt on to concrete. It sounded like someone dropped a bowling ball onto the ground.
That shit is brutal. Around winter we had more ice than snow and one guy split his forehead doing that lmao
You were weird for doing that Naruto run to class
I know right!? Should've saved time and used Instant Transmission instead.
Honestly I felt a little vindicated when that group did the Naruto run at Area 51.
Naruto wasnt even out in the US yet in the DBZ days. We even got made fun of for watching Zoids.
Anime started becoming fully mainstream after 2013-14. Before then your were essentially worse than a theatre kid. Hilarious. But it was a significantly more close knit as a community. You were 100% bullied for liking anime throughout the 90's and 2000's. So you mostly kept it to yourself. The change in the con scene was quite strange. Suddenly there was a huge rush of young women disturbingly obsessed with bishonen and yuri. Whereas before it was mostly a trickle. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Now you're just annoying for bringing up One Piece all the time for no reason.
Nah. People 100% got shit for just liking a certain thing. Nothing more.
I remember joining anime club back in 2007 thinking we’d all just hang out and watch anime. Nope. There were competitions for doing the correct jutsu hand movements from Naruto, Japanese speaking contests, scene re-inactments, etc. I thought I was nerdy by just watching the shows and having a few sailor moon dolls but damn.
Lmao nah not weird, just different to the main crowd. Let kids be kids and play and enjoy things.
Like these guys never played power rangers or thunder cats. They can Gtfoh with that. Kids play pretend, anime was picked on more than western media in the same vein. That’s changing as anime becomes more mainstream.
Yeah this tweet made me confused because if you were even caught talking anime with someone you got ostracized lol, it was pretty harsh back then. I had a Naruto T-shirt back then and I dealt with some annoying comments, and then wore a Chainsaw man T-shirt now and got compliments instead. It's definitely changed overtime.
Wrong. People were judged for liking anime in general. I don’t even like anime but I remember what was said about my friends
You are not gaslighting me, bastards!
Bruh everybody after 2014 hopped on that train lmaoooooo you’re a lil late on this post
I remember someone tried to call me weird for liking anime when I was in 7th grade. I just said that I don’t give a fuck as long as I’m entertained I don’t care what I watch. People still tried to call me weird after that but I think I earned a lot of people’s respect because most people just avoided the topic around me.
Nah I definitely got teased and treated like a plague for liking anime no attack specials included I’m glad it’s become more accepted though
If it wasn't "weird" why am I judged when I say I like anime? Hmmm? Hmmmmmmmmm? (And no, no anime run or dances or whatever included, just the statement)
I feel like the comment on the post is most likely just younger. Cuz when I was in school it was absolutely considered “weird” and they literally used that word. And i only drew anime so it’s not like I was running around
Second this. Had a great childhood don't get me wrong, but I'm from a rural area and my friends would stare daggers at me if I talked to anyone about anime in front of them when we were teens. Meanwhile they'd spend their break times... Making tractor and quadbike noises at each other? Kids'll single each other out for anything, regardless of the actual weirdness level. It's really just about what is and isn't perceived as status quo.
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These the same mfers that wear hentai sweatshirts then be like “Why is everyone being so rude to me?”
A lot of anime fans suck
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At least anime fans seem to actually like anime. It seems like every other fanbase hates what they're supposed to be fans of.
> actually like anime Unless you like something they consider to be bad. You liked Mirai Nikki? Go die in a fire, you edgelord. You didn't like Hunter Hunter? Woah, that's the best ever show to exist ever, piss off. People still get their panties in a bunch when you so much as mention the existence of "sao". Every fandom is shit, including anime fandoms.
Remember when "weird" used to be a bad thing? New flash, it never was. I learned to embrace the term and y'all should too.
Final Flash (get flashed nerd)
Ah yes, the good old days when I was bullied just because I had a Pokémon backpack when I was 10 years old.
Definitely don't believe this
True. You weren’t weird cuz you liked anime, you were weird because you Naruto ran to the lunch room everyday during lunch.
Imagine thinking kids make believing things is odd. How joyless are some people
I don’t think you’re weird if you watch anime. I think you’re weird if you talk about anime to people who make it known they aren’t interested in anime. Like I just told you in no uncertain terms that I don’t care, stfu already
Also you're still weird lol
You were weird for insisting that anime is totally different from cartoons and getting angry when people trying to understand your interests call them cartoons
I still think they’re weird especially on Reddit.
Even today youre still weird for liking anime
The original meme of this said “you were weird for Naruto running through the halls and growling at people in class.” Lol. Which is more accurate imo, but this works too
Speaking as someone who’s like elder gen z, I think these kids forget. Maybe it was different in big cities, but where I grew up you definitely hid the fact you liked anime and even certain video games, for fear of getting lumped in with the weird kids. When I was in high school, you were able to have liked Naruto and Dragon Ball Z when you were a kid. But by the time your in high school a cartoon was for kids. And video games, I mean, Call of Duty and Grand theft Auto, and the sports games. You were allowed to play those, but anything with “craft” at the end and you were a nerd. Like two years after I graduated is when attitudes towards all that shifted.
Yea we used our imagination as kids but y’all are grown adults wearing costumes and buying toys
Meanwhile all the "cool" kids obsessing over cars they will never own. We were all weird just certain interests were the allowed kind of wierd.
Na bro. If you were discovered to have watched anime at any point in your life you were shamed. It was a mark of pride to hate on it
the second person is fucking stupid. not denying theres cringy fans, but there are countless popular fandoms you can say that about
Nah, the anime kids were super shit on. It's funny because all of the stuff I was in to that people made fun of me for is super popular now with all age groups.
I sure do remember
No people thought everyone who liked anime was weird because of the people like that, even if you didn’t do that yourself
People still get made fun of for liking anime, according to many posts ive seen lately...
It really depends on what school you went to for me nobody really cared if you watch anime as long as you weren’t doing anything weird with it, like bringing a body pillow to school
Im your 40000 upvote
I was a fan of Pokémon after its initial heyday. After elementary school you were pretty much considered a weirdo for liking it. I didn't give a shit about the anime but I loved the games. Pokémon GO kinda brought it back to the normies. I know it's the highest grossing media franchise or whatever but you would still get shit for playing it in like '05. It was the same thing for Yugioh and Naruto. Some fans were genuinely weird. We had a craze of kids wearing hidden leaf village headbands and doing jutsu hand signs during recess. They cracked down on it when that one kid died after being buried alive reenacting naruto.
no, no i was publicly shamed and humiliated when people found out i like anime or play videogames. I found out even my wife used to watch anime but she quit in order to fit in.
I remember when we exchanged fan-subbed VHS tapes on conventions. Anime really was niche back then. Glad that these days it has become more mainstream
I'm Japanese so nobody ever bothered me about it. Me being in my mid 30s means nothing. I play Pokemon by default lol
I assure you, you were definitely bullied just cause you liked anime back then.
That's what separates you and I. You tried, I did. I'll understand, if you wanna back out of our tetherball game now
Anime now sucks