Anime How did YOU start watching anime?

[Udon]

[FONT="Arial"][SIZE="2"][COLOR="SeaGreen"]So how did you get into the world of anime and manga?

As for me, it happened when I was very young l, my mom said that I watched Salior Moon and Pokemon (so i guess I was about 5 or 6 years old). Then when i was 7 years old, I moved to a new school and my friends introduced me to Digimon. So when I was a few years older I still watched Saturday morning cartoons like Metabots, the second season of Digimon, and the second season of Pokemon.

When I was about 10 years old I started a couple of episodes of Cowboy Bebop and Inuyasha on cartoon network. As I kept watching the anime on cartoon network, I discoverd FLCL because of its funky title. But it was, and still is, my favorite anime of all time. Then I saw a manga book of Cowboy bebop and manga FLCL. I bought them as soon as I saw them and those were my fist manga books. I've also heard of Fullmetal Alchemist when I was about 12 years old, but since I watch the first episodes I realy didn't understand it (because I got the part when Ed was fighting No.48). Thats also the time when my sister got into anime and Fullmetal Alchemist was her first favorite anime series. Then years on I heard of Naruto and Bleach from my cousins, I started watching them and soon I found my self addicted to both series.

So after several years of exploring different titles of manga anime and manga. I've collectied quite a collection, I've even got my parents to watch anime :D. [/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT]

[Umbra II]

[FONT="Franklin Gothic Medium"] [STRIKE]Ow, GreenDemon. Your bright demon green font is making my eyes bleed. I don't think I'll be able to see straight for a while.:animestun [/STRIKE] There, that's better.

All kiding aside, when I first saw anime, I didn't know what it was. All I know was that Toonami showed some things I hadn't ever seen before, and it didn't take me long to fall in love with such jems as Ruruoni Kenshin, Outlaw Star, Tenchi Muyo, and possibly some others I can't recall. Of course, I liked DBZ when they showed it. Fast forward through a few years of continued anime-obliviousness, and a friend of mine introduced me to Inuyasha, telling me it was an anime. When I saw the first episode, though, I thought I had caught it in the middle of the story, and I didn't want to watch something without seeing the first episode first, but I knew I'd be back for more:animenose.

Since then, I've broadend my horizons anime-wise and have had a lot of reversals in my taste of shows. (a.k.a, I grew dis-enchanted with DBZ, and channel that same devotion I once had for it to Evangelion)[/FONT]

[PWNED]

I actually started watching Anime back in the mid-90's; Not religously as many hadn't been translated so it was only really stuff like Sailor Moon. What I really view as my crowning moment in Anime was when I begun watching Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 when I was about 8 which I never missed an episode of and Princess Mononoke soon afterwards which I absolutely loved.

[Sazumechan]

I am like PWNED,I started watching anime with Salior Moon but up untill several years ago I never realized it was an anime. Really it was my dad that introduced me and my sister to anime.Its funny because people think their parents are lame but I really get along with my dad so I dont find it werid that he was the one who showed me anime.

[Japan]

[COLOR="DarkRed"]I started with Sailor Moon, Pokemon, and Dragonball Z in 1998 in England. Yeah, the last two are overdone anime. However, the first episode that I watched of Sailor Moon was in German. I just vaguely understood it.

After that, it was history. I moved back to the states and I got into Toonami and met some friends who downloaded anime off the internet. Shortly after starting high school, I bought my first manga, Kare Kano, and collected the last volume this year.[/COLOR]

[jessxemo]

well i never really new what anime was until my little brother introduced me to the manga books. he knew that I loved to read so he lend me some and i began reading.
I got so enthralled by them that i began looking for anime cartoons. and thats how it all started. Now thats all I do while I am in summer vacation. I really really love anime. :catgirl:

[Guest Subliminal]

[COLOR="DarkSlateGray"]Well, my friend got me into anime. The same friend who introduced me to OB recently. He told me about these cool cartoons when were in school. i was about 6 years old at that time. The first anime I watched was Dragon Ball Z. Now I watch Bleach, Tenjho Tenge, Naruto and a couple others. [/COLOR]

[2010DigitalBoy]

[COLOR="DarkOrange"]Like most, I didn't know that [B]DBZ [/B]and [B]Pokemon [/B]and such were anime when I first saw them. The first anime I ever saw unedited and with knowlege of what it was would be [B]Ninja Scroll[/B]. My cousin, who was like 19, showed it to me and my other cousin, who was like 14, and we both thought it was like the coolest thing in existence. Somewhere around that time, [B][AS][/B] came into existence and I saw it on it's second night with said 14-year old cousin (I was like 10 BTW) and we both loved it. My cousin then started buying anime magazines and that's when things first started.

I had moved away about 6 months, but then whenI moved back, my cousin and I first really got into anime. Back then I didn't have a DVD player yet, nor did he, so our first 4 movies were on VHS. They were [B]Ninja Scroll[/B], [B]Blood the Last Vampire[/B], [B]Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust[/B], and [B]X[/B]. My cousin then got a DVD player and Char's Counterattack, and thus our anime collecting began.

We were getting into it at the exact time that anime was just getting on the rise in America, which is pretty cool in retrospect, cuz it makes me feel like I was right there in the action, lol. Most of the DVDs we bought were volume ones because we wanted to get so many different series, but couldn't afford to buy whole series, so i've seen like the first 5 episodes of a whole ton of anime. A lot of the shows we were buying back then are either now well-known or have been on TV, sometimes to my chagrin >_>

For about 2 years all my time and money was dedicated to anime and manga research, so I pretty much knew everything about the anime that was around in America and about the history of anime. Unfortuanetally, I was basically unaware of how uninformed i was in comparison to most major anime fans. I didn't know I could watch subs or anything, nor how easily I could have gotten anime. I was a hopeless n00bish anime fanboy who loved shows like [B]Kenshin [/B]and read [B]Naruto [/B]religously (I liked it before it was cool!)

After those 2 years, though, i had a falling-out with anime because I got back into video games and spent a year dedicating my time and money to researching and buying video games. When I got poor for a while I fell out with that, too, and when I got money back, it was all about music...

It was around February of this year that I rediscovered anime via the [B]Megatokyo [/B]forums. I started watching shows that were still airing in Japan and I opened up to an entire different world of anime. Now I'm one of the anime big-wigs round these parts ^_^[/COLOR]

[Goodbye, Face]

[font=arial][size=1]In like 1993 or 94, there was a show called Ronin Warriors that was on one of the major channels (I think CBS?) and my cousins (who were living with me for the summer) and I would make it part of our routine to watch it everyday because it was awesome. It got ported over to Cartoon Network years later.

But yeah, eventually, the same channel started showing Dragonball on Sunday mornings for some reason, and then the show was taken off. We got cable in 1998, and with that came CN, which had Dragonball Z. So I basically started like that.

I got into manga simply by loving FLCL and then seeing the manga somewhere, and then my friend got me into Death Note, so I've been working on a set of those.[/font][/size]

[inactive]

Well, I guess you could say I sort of grew up with anime. As a toddler my mother picked up this VHS tape from God knows where, entitled [I]Thumbelina[/I]. My sister and I, and also a close friend of ours, were absolutely in love with this little 1 hr 20 min movie, but I didn't find out that it was actually a compilation of a 26 episode anime series called [I]Oyayubi Hime Monogatari[/I] (1992) until about October last year. Anyway, this was my first exposure to anime and, consequently, all three of us (my sister, my friend and I) ended up being anime fans. Go figure.

Anyway, the three of us also became avid [I]Sailor Moon[/I] fans when it first hit the Canadian public. I was still quite young at this time, and I have to admit that I did eventually grow out of it, even though it was still on TV. I do remember a large portion of my childhood being dedicated to it though. Shortly after that time came [I]Pokemon[/I] and the whole elementary-school-Pokemon-Card craze. Heh, that was great fun. When I grew out of that I became addicted to [I]Digimon[/I], which was a lot better than Pokemon...

Anyway, up until this time I really didn't know what the heck this anime thing was. I was just naturally drawn to it, but I hadn't given it a second thought, really. I'm not exactly sure when I found out what it was, but I think it must have been around the time our family acquired The Internet. :animeswea Anyway, once I knew what anime was, needless to say, I was quite excited when they started showing [I]Inu Yasha[/I] on YTV (I was about 12), and after that they expanded their anime repertoire significantly, and I liked a lot of the shows. Along with what I was getting on TV, I also discovered Miyazaki, and fell in love...

Anyway, needless to say, I didn't exactly have a lot of access to anime. Not many TV channels and not enough funds. But then I discovered the power of downloading! It has changed my life... :animeswea Seriously though, last summer (I think) I was searching around, trying to figure out how so many English speaking people on the internet had seen Gundam SEED Destiny before it was out in English, and I came across a site... and the rest is history. Since then I've watched many diverse anime shows/movies, and my passion for REALLY GOOD QUALITY animation has grown significantly.

It took a little bit longer for me to get into manga, but I did eventually. Since I'm pretty cheap (:animeswea) I wasn't exactly willing to go out and spend a bunch of money on manga when I didn't know if I'd like it or not. So it was really only this year (having been guided in the right direction by a person in a gaming class with me) that I started reading it on the web... I quite enjoy it now, although it's not as big a part of my life as anime.

Anyway, I really have been watching anime practically my whole life, even if I didn't know what it was for half of it. Wow, I sure can ramble.

[OMNOMNOMALY]

[FONT="Georgia"]I think I was 5 or 6, and I was basically hooked from my first episode of Sailor Moon =3 Access to anime was definitely limited, because I live in Canada, so I lived by Sailor Moon, then I grew to love DBZ and then the big one, Pokemon, haha. I've been into it on and off since, but I go through phases where I watch tons and tons and then I watch none at all for 5 or 6 months.[/FONT]

[miss april]

I really don't remember watching anime, but I really recall that I am still a young kid when watching an anime. Sorry I forgot what I first watched back then.:animeswea, That's in the late 80s!

Anime mania had spread when Yu Yu Hakusho was released locally in 1990s, and I started to like anime songs as well. :p

Today I have watched more than 140 anime titles, including OAVs and movies! :animesmil

[aoi_hikari]

Pokemon and Sailor Moon, as usual. After 1st Grade, Pokemon was replaced with Digimon. At that time, I sort of knew it was made in Japan, adn it was different from other cartoons I watched, but I had no idea it was anime

Then when I was 10 or 11, my dad showed me My Neighbour Totoro, subbed. I think the reason I started watching Studio Ghibli movies was because of the catbus :animesmil
My dad then started downloading fansubs for me, which I watched, and then started buying anime magazines as well. It also helped that my mom was an accoutant for an A&B Sound, so she brought random DVD's for me, like the final volume of Earth Girl Arjuna, because she knew I liked that stuff.

Come to think of it, it was my dad who introduced me to a lot of anime sites I still go to, like THEMAnime reviews, and Anime Fringe (which ended in 2005). And my mom continues to buy me manga and anime CD's ^_^.

[emmanuel_xavier]

Well,i don't remember,but the first anime i watched are dragon ball..i think then sensei negima..until i watch fate/stay night..but i'm getting more interested to anime after i finished watching the last episode of fate/stay night..:)

[Rachmaninoff]

One of my friends introduced me to it. She brought over her DVD's of Fruits Basket and got me and the rest of the gang to watch it. Which lead to joining myO and then later OB and watching even more anime so I'd have some clue as to what people were talking about.

So I've been watching it for oh, just over a year. And so long as I keep finding interesting shows I'll keep doing so. And having said that I think I'll go watch another episode of Lucky Star.

[Konata]

I think I was three or four when I watched Totoro. I really liked it, and I moved onto Pokemon, Speed Racer, Sailor Moon, and then to Digimon, Cardcaptors, Dragonball Z, Yu-gi-oh, then .hack//SIGN, Inu-Yasha, Fruits Basket, Azumanga Daioh, etc.

I think Inu-Yasha or .hack//SIGN was the first time though, that I actually noticed that I liked anime. Or rather, it was the time where I finally said, "I'm an anime fan."

[kyogrl]

i started watching anime when sailor moon was on tv. i think i was 5 or 6 around when sailor moon was on. then i started to watch all the shows on toonami, like yuu yuu hakusho and tenchi muyo adn dragonball z. and then other anime shos startdto be on tv like bubblegum crisis. i moved on to other anime shows after that. aww those were the days....lol!!:animesmil

[Guest OnigiriGirl]

The first time I watched anime was when I was 4, I believe. I used to watch Sailor Moon, Cardcaptors and Pokemon every afternoon on WBKids. After Yu-Gi-Oh took over Cardcaptors and I started to watch that.

When I was a little older I used to watch Mew Mew Power {Ya, ya... I know... :animeswea} Then I found out there were books about it and I wanted to read it. My grandfather ordered a Tokyo Mew Mew book and I was so excited! Then I found out that the book was backwards.

That was my first manga. :catgirl:

When I was about 11, I was watching Cartoon Network one night and discovered Naruto. I loved it the first time I saw it, and still do. I decided to start collecting the manga for it. Then I watched One Peice, BoBo-Bo, Dragonball Z, MAR, The Prince of Tennis on Toonami. Most of those turned out to be some of my favorites.

Then I started watching Adult Swim. Bleach is one of my absolute favorites. Then I started watching Blood+, Eureka 7, Trinity Blood, Samurai Champloo, Ghost in the Shell, Inuyasha, FMA and probably more.

Basically, ever since I was 4 i've been addicted to anime. :animesmil

That... was a lot of typing... :animesigh

[Inkstitchling]

[SIZE="1"][COLOR="DarkOrchid"]Unlike most of my peers, I did not start with Sailor Moon. Nor have I ever seen Sailor Moon. I believe my very first anime was [B]Speed Racer[/B], though I remember nothing more of it than that. I did watch a small amount of [B]Pokemon[/B] in the third or fourth grade. It wasn't until the second half of my eigth grade year that I was formally introduced to anime and manga. My first anime as an "anime fan" was the series [B]Happy Lesson[/B], borrowed from a friend. I fell in love. My first manga was either [B]Kodocha: Sana's Stage[/B] or[B] Love Hina[/B]. I think it was Love Hina. For a first manga, that series is baptism-by-fire. I never read past the sixth volume though; my sister stopped buying them, and I could see where the plot was going too easily, even if I did love the characters. The first series [I]I[/I] bought was [B]Demon Diary[/B]. I've lost count of all the manga/manwha and anime I've read or watched since. My favorite manga artists are[B] CLAMP[/B], [B]Ai Yazawa[/B], & [B]So-Young Lee[/B] (manwha). I'm partly grateful I spent many years without cable or even a tv connection at home and therefore discovered the world of anime outside of Cartoon Network. I can't stand english dubbings.[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[Gavin]

[SIZE="1"]My first consistent exposure to anime would have [B]Dragonball Z[/B], when it was airing on Cartoon Network in the 90s, I immediately thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen, despite understanding relatively little of the overall plot as I'd dropped in right in the middle of the Frieza Saga.

Looking back, the first anime I ever saw was probably like Inkstitchling, [B]Speed Racer[/B], although until now I could never remember the name, only a vague memory of a car and the words Mark 5. [B]Starvengers[/B] AKA Getter Robo G, [b]Sci-Bots[/b] AKA Starzinger and [B]Grendizer[/B] were two very early animes I saw when I got them on VHS tapes at a car boot sale.[/SIZE]

[SunfallE]

[COLOR="goldenrod"]Putting aside the obvious answer of seeing shows on tv when I was a kid or that I discovered subtitles. The real answer of when I really started to watch anime was when a friend of mine, who I teased for liking Sailor Moon, gave me her dvd's and challenged me to watch them with the subtitles and once I had done that I could tease her.

Of course some of the older stuff was butchered quite a bit so it was surprising to see just how much had been altered and seeing that got me back into watching anime since at that point I had given up on it. Though now that translations are constantly improving and content isn't being mangled so much I would feel strange if I wasn't watching at least some anime every week. ^_^[/COLOR]

[Kenshin DX]

Remeber when Toonami didnt suck? Thats when I started watching anime. DBZ , Outlaw Star (which sucks looking back at how much they edited it) YYH and the Tenchi series. Good times then I stopped watching for quite awhile when Toonami was killed.

When Adult Swim was introduced it renewed my faith in anime Trigun got me back into anime along with Bebop and such. From there I started investing time into anime.

[Break]

Same kinda story really. I used to watch Cartoon network, a lot. And then this new thing called Toonami came up. There were adverts for this show called 'Dragonball Z' and I figured that I really liked the adverts. Then I really liked the show itself. On the same channel they showed Gundam Wing, which I liked a lot. A year ago they showed the first series (perhaps more?) of One Piece. This, I loved.

[Guest Ever_Change]

[FONT="Fixedsys"][COLOR="Purple"]When I was a kid Cardcaptors and Sailor moon were still on television, back to back, three thirty and four pm! ^_^ I always watched them no matter what anyone said! After a while they went off the air and I lost intrest in the whatever-teenth series of pokemon, (especially since it now takes almost fifteen minutes to say a complete poke'rap, with all of them!!!). I was over at a friends house and we were watching tv and they said, "Hey, check this out. Its called Yu-Gi-Oh." Of course I started watching it and suddenly I was completely in love with Yami. (Totally would still marry him! lmao :catgirl:) But after that I saw the manga section in Borders and the rest is history! I've been addicted ever since!!! :animesigh[/COLOR][/FONT]

[Magus]

[font=comic sans ms][color=blue]I had no knowledge of anime whatsoever when I first saw DBZ, and that was when it was coming on Fox Box or something of that nature.... I don't even think Cartoon Network was around at the time. I remember when I use to watch DBZ on Sunday mornings either right before or after some karate show (think it was called WMAC Masters or something like that... I know Shannon Lee was the host of it.)

And even when Cartoon Network came around, I still didn't know what anime was. (Still don't come to think of it. In my eyes they're just another cartoon with more action, or story, or whatever you want to call it.) Anyway, I didn't really get into anime until Ruroni Kenshin was aired on Toonami.[/font][/color]