Season’s Greetings, and a Happy New Year.
I have survived Christmas quite nicely. I gave and received some nice presents. I visited my family – mom, dad, my two brothers, a nice selection of aunts, uncles, and cousins, my surviving grandparents, and my nephew. All and all I had a very good time.
With that out of the way I have, of late, been thinking about how I became a fan of anime. I’m not really sure when I first heard about anime. I’m guessing it was likely in the late 1980s probably while I was in junior high (middle school if you prefer). My first exposure to anime came almost exclusively through movies. A showing of Vampire Hunter D I randomly ran across on cable is very likely the first anime I ever watched (or at least the first anime I ever watched that I consciously knew was anime). In high school, and through my first year or so in college I made a small effort to track down some more anime. I watched Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Ninja Scroll, and The Professional: Golgo 13 to name a few, or more accurately to name the ones that I can remember. I know there were a few other movies, but they were all pretty bad, and I remember little beyond them being pretty bad.
The first series I ever watched was Sailor Moon (yes even before I knew what it was I had a weakness for shōjo). Interesting thing about Sailor Moon, to this day I would swear to you that I watched Sailor Moon (1st season, and the first part of the 2nd season) while I was in high school, on Wednesdays, at my grandparent’s house, on the USA Network, while waiting to go to CCD (also know as catechism). However every bit of information I could find about the North American broadcast history of Sailor Moon would say I am dead wrong. Apparently the show didn’t air in North America until August of 1995. In August 1995 I was getting ready for my second year of college. And apparently the show didn’t appear on the USA Network until 1997. All of this leads me to wonder just when did I watch this show, because I know I had watched most of the first season (and the first part of season 2) before it started airing on the Cartoon Network in 1998. Ultimately it doesn’t matter when and where I watched it, only that I did.
A little side note here. CCD, or Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (until I looked that up today on Wikipedia I didn’t know what it stood for either) is basically Roman Catholic Sunday school, expect in my home town at least, it takes place on Wednesdays during the school year (I think this may be true of all of South Dakota, but who knows). From 1st through 6th after classes let out every grade every school kid who was being raised catholic would make their way from the elementary school over to the local Catholic Church for one hour of religious lessons. CCD would start about 30 minutes after school ended. The 7th – 12th graders had CCD in the evening (at 7pm if I recall correctly).
The first real blossoming of my interest can be traced to Cartoon Network (first Toonami, and later Adult Swim), and my friend Tim. In the late 1990s as Cartoon Network’s Toonami transitioned from showing old Hanna-Barbera action cartoons (and the like) to more anime my interest grew with the increased offerings. I started taking note of things like Outlaw Star, Big O, and even Dragon Ball Z. For me the thing that really sealed my fate was the 2001 premier of Adult Swim in general and Cowboy Bebop in particular.
A second side note: Cowboy Bebop is an excellent series to use when introducing somebody to anime. The show just looks great with excellent production values, and wonderful animation. Its characters and stories are interesting. The soundtrack is quite amazing. Perhaps the best feature to recommend using it as an introductory anime is the fact its English dub is really very good. Subtitles can take a person awhile to get used to, and even longer to appreciate, and the English dubs of most anime runs from serviceable to questionable, to downright bad, which makes Cowboy Bebop’s English dub stand out all the more.
A third side note: Late 2001, early January of 2002 marks the time I obtained the Big Eyes, Small Mouth RPG. In addition to remaining one of my all time favorite RPGs the book is the first anime/manga related merchandise I ever bought. The list of sample anime with genre contained within also provided the impetus for my first purchase of any anime which was the Ah My Goddess! OVAs (still the only anime I ever purchased on VHS).
With Cartoon Network stoking the fires what I really needed was a large source of anime I could watch. Enter my friend Tim. Tim is a firm believer in spreading the joy of things he likes from Babylon 5 to anime. As luck would have it Tim was ready to start showing another group of newbies some anime, just as I was a newbie in search of some anime. He started us off with Fushigi Yuugi, then moved on to (not sure of the exact order) Neon Genesis Evangelion, Trigun, Bastard!!, and Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure. From here I start purchasing both anime and manga with some regularity.
The years of 2002 and 2003 saw a gradual, but steady growth in both my anime and manga collections. I continued to watch Adult Swim, and also slowly started the process of learning how to track down information about anime on my own. Either 2002 or 2003 also saw the founding of an anime club at the local university by a guy I was gaming with. I had been out of school since 1999, and my work schedule kept me from attending with much regularity, but the little I did attend resulted in me being introduced to two things: fansubs in general, and Azumanga Daioh in particular. This introduction to Azumanga was in fact a bit of serendipity because the club was scheduled to start showing Love Hina (I had been buying the manga and wanted to see how the anime compared), but for whatever reason I got Azumanga Daioh instead.
Fansubs, short for fan-subtitled, are copies of a foreign language movie, TV show, or OVA that have been subtitled into another language by a group of fans. Generally speaking fansubs are most closely associated with anime. It is also worth noting fansubs are anyway you look at it illegal. Fansub groups are distributing copyrighted material without the consent of the copyright holder. Many if not most fansubbers follow a basic set of ethics which include don’t sell or rent fansubs for a profit, only fansub and distribute titles that aren’t licensed for domestic distribution, cease distributing a fansub once it becomes licensed, and if you like a title purchase it once it becomes domestically available. For whatever it is worth my experienced with Azumanga Daioh worked exactly as intended I purchased both the anime and the manga as they became available.
In the fall of 2004 I was introduced to Dan. He was one of my upstairs neighbors in the duplex I was living in at the time. He also took over the reigns of the local anime club. Before I even knew him all that well he started dropping off whatever anime the club had watched the previous week for my viewing enjoyment, this lead to me venturing up stairs to visit him and watch more anime, all of which lead to what I like to refer to as the CLAMPathon. Courtesy of Dan and the anime club I had just finished watching Chobits, Dan and I had started in on Card Captor Sakura, and while we paused for Dan to purchase more of Card Captor, we consumed Angelic Layer. We started Angelic Layer on a Sunday evening, I sure Dan only intended to watch a few episodes, 16 episodes and 6+ hours later I stumbled back downstairs cursing the fact I had to be at work at 6:30am the next day. We ripped through the final 10 episodes the next day (despite plans to again only watch a few episodes a night until finished). We finished Card Captor Sakura in pretty short order once Dan returned from winter break (having purchased the remaining disks). Card Captor Sakura marks the first, but certainly not the only, series that I watched with Dan only to go on and buy for myself.
The end of 2004 also saw an important development in my evolution as an anime fanboy. I made the seemingly spontaneous switch from preferring to watch anime dubbed, to preferring to watch anime subtitled. I cannot really point to any event leading to the switch; it was more of an epiphany. I really only disliked subtitles at the very beginning of my anime watching experience, I pretty quickly learned not to mind them, and generally when watching anime with other people I went with whatever they liked, but when watching anime by myself I’d go with the English dub. Well around the time of the CLAMPathon (probably while watching Chobits, or at least some anime club title loaned to me by Dan) I found myself watching some anime by myself when I realized I’d been watching it subtitled. So I switched over to the English dub, but didn’t make it through three lines of dialogue, before switching back to the subtitle. I started thinking about it, and I realized I’d been watching the subtitles for all of the titles that Dan had loaned me. I did some experimentation, and put in some random anime I owned switching back and forth between the English dub, and the original Japanese track with subtitles. It didn’t take long to realize I preferred the subtitled version. In addition from sparing me from the sometimes painful world of English dubs, this had the effect of temporarily “doubling” my anime collection as I started the process of watching the subtitled version of almost every anime I owned.
Throughout 2005 I naturally continued to watch anime both on my own, and with Dan. I continued expanding my collection of anime and manga. I even managed (but only rarely) to introduce Dan to a title or two. I also followed the logical fanboy progression and started buying and listening to anime soundtracks. Anime related merchandise (posters, wall scrolls, and the like) quickly followed on the heels of the soundtracks.
The final piece of the puzzle came at the end of summer in 2006 when I purchased a computer. I got the computer in August, and spent that month getting it set up the way I like it. And my anime related activities with it were basically limited to the obscene amounts of anime wallpapers I downloaded. September and October were given over mainly to City of Heroes (although ripping my CDs onto the computer, and playing with iTunes occupied a fair amount of time as well). By November I was done playing around and ready to start using my computer (and broadband connection) to feed my anime habit. And thus fansubs reenter the picture. Fansubs hadn’t really ever left the picture, it’s just that prior to owning my own computer, I needed somebody to burn the fansub onto a CD, loan that CD to me, then I needed to make a trip to a computer lab on campus, and remember to bring the fansub, and remember to bring some headphones. That is how I watched most of the Azumanga Daioh fansubs (except for the episodes I watched at anime club), the first season of Negima, and a few episodes of a number of other series, but generally it was an event that didn’t happen very frequently. I was now able to obtain my own copies of fansubs, and watch them from the convenience of my own home. I haven’t looked back (as evident by recent entries in this blog).
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