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What Anime has had the biggest impact on your life and how you live?

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Dec 8, 5:54 PM
#1
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Nov 2022
2
As an avid watcher, you will eventually find something that will hit so hard that it will effect your outlook on life, your values, carrier path and passions, and how you choose to live your life. I have had plenty of shows that have had a heavy influence on me and how I live, Trigun making me want to be more kind and hold myself like Vash, Ocean Waves making me want a social life and to have life experiences, to so many manga making me want to draw and make a comic one day. I am curious what shows have impacted you and the unique ways they have. Obvious answers come to mind, but is there any show that uncommonly has had a huge impact on you? And what has that impact been, big or small, and what did you take away from these series’?
Dec 8, 5:55 PM
#2

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Sep 2018
14691
I do not like admitting it, but probably pokemon. Other than that I would say yugioh then beyblade.
Dec 8, 6:21 PM
#3

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Jul 2013
12869
I would say Hyperdimension Neptunia or Senran Kagura. I really like how Nepgear always gets into trouble.
Dec 8, 6:23 PM
#4

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May 2021
40
Barefoot Gen had the biggest impact on my life, showing the horror of war and losing everything. Watching completely innocent people who are not even participating in war suffer from it. It showed how good I have it in life, even if its a fictional anime the reality depicted is depressingly accurate. Made me feel like I have no right to complain about my life despite the problems I have to face. A perspective many people don't consider, as current wars rage today this movie is at the back of my mind. It's made me Anti-war, watching the human created hell is sickening. But despite all of its horror it taught me to keep moving, don't stop its not over until you are dead. As long as you live you owe it to yourself and those you lost in life to live. Finding happiness through the most extreme hardships, moving on from dark experiences in life and looking forward to the positive side.
(>'O')>
Dec 8, 6:50 PM
#5

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Jun 2013
1948
That’s never happened to me. Anime has always been entertainment. Sometimes great, sometimes forgettable, occasionally thought-provoking, but never something that altered my values, career path, let alone the way I carry myself. At most, an anime might make me appreciate a certain idea more, or nudge a small preference, but that’s about it.
Dec 8, 6:56 PM
#6

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Apr 2010
410
BrendanIsCool said:
you will eventually find something that will hit so hard that it will effect your outlook on life, your values, carrier path and passions, and how you choose to live your life.

initially wanted to say that this statement is false, but really it's just so vague and noncommittal that it barely means anything by itself.

Anyway to keep this response on topic, the anime which had the biggest impact on my life and how I live is Slayers, it's the first show I've watched with the understanding of what exactly anime was and how it was different from other cartoons, and it was fundamental to developing an interest in and a passion for the medium as a whole which has lasted for over twenty years now and I honestly can't imagine subsiding any time soon.
Dec 8, 9:04 PM
#7

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Mar 2021
4576
BrendanIsCool said:
What Anime has had the biggest impact on your life and how you live?


There was never a single Anime title that fucking “changed my life”, like having some earth-shattering epiphany about the meaning of life or some shit like that. This shit was more like carbon dating myself through successive fandom epochs, each one leaving a faint radioactive trace rather than a dramatic anime-induced personality rewrite. lol

My first actual epic exposure wasn’t some solo, epiphanic moment either… it was seeing shit like “Project A-Ko” in Osaka at the theater with my parents in the mid-80s, back when my father was still a full-on otaku living in Japan, and that sort of thing didn’t come packaged as a fucking identity badge either. It was just… stuff you watched. Like catching a weird movie on late TV and moving the fuck on. lol

Then, once my family moved to North America in the late 80s, the West made the contrast impossible to ignore. Anime didn’t disappear... the shit simply got distilled. Suddenly Japanese IPs showed up as curated slices inside Western comic shops, translated into floppy issues instead of phone-book-thick magazines stuffed with ten unrelated authors arguing on the same paper stock. It felt less like discovering a new world and more like realizing half the library back in Japan had been quietly fucking deleted. lol

By 1989-1991, animation film festivals at places like the Cleveland Institute of Art started acting like accidental portals. One weekend you’re a normal person, the next you’re watching "Akira", "Robot Carnival", "Golgo 13", "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind", "Vampire Hunter D", "Fist of the North Star", "Wicked City", "Neo Tokyo", "Venus Wars", etc... like someone dumped an unsecured hard drive of Japan’s 80s collective animated theatrical ID straight into an art theater auditorium and closed the doors, being shown alongside Western shit like “Wallace and Gromit” and “Heavy Metal". lol

Comic conventions were the next layer of the onion... isolated niche corners with VHS bootlegs stacked under tables like contraband fruit. Almost completely hidden shit in a room flooded with 99% Western IPs, such as X-Men, Batman, Fantastic Four, etc... The shit was not advertised. Not explained. You either knew what you were looking at or you didn’t, kind of like finding a speakeasy that only sells tapes recorded four generations removed from the fucking original broadcasting. lol

By the early–mid 90s, it turned fucking physical... VHS tapes... LaserDisc copies the size of an asshole plugged by a manhole cover. Trading OVAs and sharing with new friends like anime was some dangerous experimental fungus that only grew if you kept passing spores around. Renting tapes from local video rental stores that carried maybe one shelf of the shit if the owner was feeling adventurous that month.

Eventually it wasn’t even about the anime anymore... Sometimes it was just background noise while hanging out. Sometimes it was background noise while making out with a new girl friend. Sometimes you were “re-watching” something you barely paid attention to, because the real plot was that you finally had an excuse to be alone for a few hours with a girl in high school, always trying to get inside their pants the entire time, and nobody wanted silence or a chaperone looking over our shoulders when actually going out on a date in public. lol

By the time college hit, others around me were suddenly discovering “tentacle rape” images on crappy dial-up internet, which mirrored shit seen in “Urotsukidoji” by 1995... And finally discovering others were actively hunting down shit like VHS bootlegs and trading that shit around like hot cakes in the college dorm. Even the existence of Cartoon Network in the late 90s completely changed the ball game of shit... where after classes, a group of guys in the dorm would be perpetually hanging out in the common room watching Battle Shounen Borner material from "Dragon Ball Z" to "Yu Yu Hakusho" on Toonami.

After graduating college suddenly Anime conventions became a real fucking normal thing, one could cosplay with their wife and find a buffet of merch and rare official physical releases on every available format that existed by the turn of the century. Just from Suncoast Video and Best Buy, I could basically find anything I wanted that was ever officially available in the west on DVD, Even getting shit like "Najica Blitz Tactics" and having it come with an actual pair of panties with its limited-edition physical release in a very well made artbox to store the rest of the DVD volumes that would soon be released within the next few months...

So yeah... no single title reshaped my morals or dictated my career path. It was more like living inside the medium as it mutated, migrated, and survived by sheer stubbornness. Anime didn’t hand me values... it just happened to be playing while life was doing its fucking thing. lol
ColourWheelDec 8, 9:28 PM


Dec 8, 9:16 PM
#8

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Feb 2018
3126
"Tenchi Muyo!" (1992) was Directly Responsible for Launching me into Anime CharaDoll Collecting and Customization...
a Hobby and an Obsession unto itself that Began nearly 25 Years ago... and Continues to this Day~


(2001/2002)









(2025)




Dec 9, 11:12 AM
#9

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Sep 2016
23542
One Piece, because it has so much content, and I have been watching it for so long.
*kappa*
Dec 9, 11:36 AM

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Oct 2010
22252
gundam taught me that if you want to sleep with your eyes closed and not look over your shoulder when you go outside, you have to kill all your enemies
Dec 9, 11:40 AM
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Sep 2025
14
Reply to Catalano
gundam taught me that if you want to sleep with your eyes closed and not look over your shoulder when you go outside, you have to kill all your enemies
@Catalano lolll as a fellow gundam enjoyer, this cracked me up
Dec 9, 4:51 PM

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Mar 2022
81
I watched Death Note when I was a kid back in '08, and it affected me so much I ended up falling in love with Psychology/Human behavior and i'm studying to land a career in that field. I notice the flaws in the series now (and Ohba in general...Death Note is his only work I enjoy), but for what it's worth I still love it and it holds a very special place in my heart.
Dec 9, 5:01 PM

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Mar 2024
337
It's probably gotta be Gurren Lagann for being the title that really got me into watching anime.
Yesterday, 4:54 PM

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Aug 2019
1704
I wouldn't say they affected how I live my life, but they definitely had a huge impact.

Dragonball Z back in the 90s. Used to religiously watch that show after school finished.

Attack on Titan over the last 10 years. Not many pieces of fiction, let alone anime, stick with with me for as long as it did, especially when S3P2 ended.
Today, 12:00 AM
Nostalgia Rules!

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Jun 2008
15768
Probably Cardcaptor Sakura, it's a series I instantly fell in love with and admired many of the personalities of the characters. I tried to mimic some of those in my day-to-day life.
Today, 12:26 AM
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Jul 2015
156
.hack//Sign changed my life more than any other anime, solely because that was what got me interested in anime to begin with. Sure there was InuYasha and Naruto around the same time, and the former inspired my lifelong passion for writing, but it was Sign that made me look at that as something beyond just another TV show. I got interested in fandom as a whole because I was interested in what people were saying about Sign, which led me to discover fanfic (though InuYasha had better material at the time), which led me to writing and roleplaying and cosplaying and eventually to the most world-altering media of my life (Homestuck).

All because I stayed up late one night when I was sick and caught an episode of this weird anime that wasn't anything like the other stuff I was watching at the time.

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