Were you ever bullied/mocked/admonished for "still watching cartoons"?

When I was in school I openly read manga in my classroom and no one gave a fuck about it. So no, I've never been bullied for liking anime/manga.



Tbh I'd mock you for watching them. Why don't you read h-doujinshi instead?

I was never really bullied for watching shit like Anime or Cartoons (not like many people in the West even knew what Anime was back in the early 90s, and it was called Japanimation back then anyways). By my Sophomore year I was already over 6'2", in better shape than most of the football and basketball jocks, and generally towering over everyone in my class. People could try to mock me for anything, but shit like words never really landed... I was always good at flipping shit back at them.

Back in high school, one time after gym class, a group of guys were showing off their junk to each other in the locker room. Over hearing their conversation, the one with the smallest cock tried to deflect by making some racial joke saying, "at least I’m not fucking Asian", while trying to laugh off his personal size. So I walked out of the showers purposely without a towel, making sure they saw that stereotype didn’t exactly hold up. That shut them the fuck up real quick and they all stopped laughing. lol

But what did land with me was shit much darker. Near the end of my freshman year (before my growth spurt), I was randomly jumped by half a dozen guys as part of some gang initiation. They dragged me into an alley, pinned me against a wall, and took turns punching me in the face as hard as they fucking could while throwing racial slurs like "Chink" and "Chinaman". I actually laughed a few times because I’m Korean. lol

I was almost beaten to death. My jaw had to be completely reconstructed, I’ve got a titanium plate in my skull, and to this day a scar over my eyebrow that makes me look like a hard yakuza thug. That gave me real perspective... Compared to that, being mocked for watching shit like "cartoons" or anything is nothing. Words don’t leave scars for me. Violence does.

After that, I made it a point to keep myself in peak physical shape, built my body muscles into solid rocks. Since then, no one had ever tried to pull shit like that on me again. lol

Oh yeah back in the 80s my mom used to ride my ass like I was a $3 whore. She never got the attraction, or the difference, between 'cartoons' and anime. And never wanted to try. Dad on the other hand was cool and couldn't care less what I watched.

@joemaamah judging by the birth year in your profile you have been an adult in the 1980s. How did she even know?

@dunkelfalke Yeah I was in my 20s by then. My parents owned a little store that had an attached apartment where I was living. The family also used it for breaks and office space. so someone was constantly trotting in and out.

Back then there wasn't the tons of content available today. Mostly I was watching modem downloaded fansubs. I wasn't constantly watching the stuff because it could take a few hours to download an episode. Toward the end of the decade, after I was out of school, you could rent some very limited titles on VCR tape. I wasn't hiding my like for anime, so the family seeing me enjoying it happened from time to time.

@joemaamah i think your timing is off by about a decade. Realistically, downloading a digitised anime episode was only a thing starting from 1998 and it took hours back then. Before 1995 and Bt848 video digitising was a professional domain. In the 1980s it was VHS or TV, basically.
I might not be as old as you, but I always was a nerd and an early adopter of all kinds of interesting hardware.

@dunkelfalke No you could get digitized anime files from pirate BBSes c. 1987 or so. Maybe a little earlier. The tapes were processed through A/D converters, some home made, and digitized. The raw video data was then converted into (at least for the time) huge ASCII text files. A typical file size was about 1.4M, the size of a standard floppy disk. That was maybe 2-3 minutes of an episode. You usually had to download 10-12 files, then run a program to reprocess them into a larger file, to get a full episode of crummy looking CGA quality video. Hmm I forget but I want to say that was 360x240 resolution and only 8 bit color. But that format may have been EGA, so it could have been worse. It's been a long time.

There wasn't really much, other than Ghibli stuff, out on VHS until late in the decade, going into the early 90s, at least in the States. There wasn't much demand here until the Cartoon Network started running anime for adults late at night, and they started to catch on. I've heard some European countries started getting more quantity of anime a bit earlier than the US.

@joemaamah 360x240x256 colours (this is what 8 bit means) would be VGA. Which came out in 1987. A home made ADC capable of processing VGA quality video in real time by 1987 - highly unlikely. Moreover, that would be a megabyte per 12 seconds, which would fill even a high end PC hard drive of that time - 40 megabytes - in merely 8 minutes and real time MJPEG compression was difficult even for something from the mid 1990s.
Either your specs are wrong or the decade. I actually learned programming back in 1992 on a 1988 IBM PS/2 model 70, so I remember pretty well what the hardware of that day was capable of.