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 |