How Were You Introduced To Anime?

Mostly from watching shows airing on TV like Pokémon, Cardcaptor Sakura, or reruns of The Mysterious Cities of Gold. I can't say exactly which one was first.

seeing my brother watching the asuna torture scene when I was like 10

@Desqera Ah! That's cool, I assume SAO was your very first anime then?

My parents introduce me to anime and video game when I was four, my first ones are Slayers and Soar High Isami on VHS so my first exposure are on VHS and video games playing Famicom playing Super Mario Bros and Double Dragon.

the philippines air anime in our local tv back in the 1990s when i was a kid so my first exposure to anime is watching dragon ball z and sailor moon

@deg Nice! So anime was pretty much just part of your childhood?

Many of my childhood anime were aired on TV.

Anime 80-nichikan Sekai Isshuu
Chiisana Ahiru no Ooki na Ai no Monogatari: Ahiru no Kwak
Ginga Nagareboshi Gin
Ginga Patrol PJ
Jungle Book Shounen Mowgli
Meiken Jolie
Mitsubachi Maya no Bouken
Nils no Fushigi na Tabi
Seimei no Kagaku: Micro Patrol
TaoTao Ehonkan Sekai Doubutsu Banashi
Tanoshii Muumin Ikka
Wanwan Sanjuushi

Watched anime as kid without knowing it was anime though it was really cool back then. Stayed in animation during my teens come accros some series with the help of my comrades in high school still didn't know it was anime. Finally 11 years ago had a bad break up decided to buy dragon ball z with Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood on Amazon and started my anime journey there. At that time I was also more active on the YouTube side of the community since the YouTubers back then were really fun to watch as opposed to today.

Watching with my brothers.

(Come to think of it, I must have spent a lot more time on anime than they did)

My sister introduced me to it when I was 14/15. It was mostly stuff she'd thought I liked with a few "starter" anime I guess. I also played 2 of the danganronpa games, so that could've helped.

I was introduced to:

1. Death Note
   
2. Odd Taxi
   
3. Youjo Senki
   
4. Beastars
   
5. Gakkou no Kaidan
   

I started finding stuff for myself when I was 17.

Like many people, I was exposed to anime when I watched the Ghibli films like Kikis delivery service and such. I also watched Pokemon as a kid.


In 2010, I walked into a comic shop asking if there was something like Pokemon but for adults and that is probably what got me officially into anime. I have completed the lifecycle of an anime fan though sometime around 2019 and realized almost all of it sucks so I do not watch as much anymore.

It wasn't until middle school that I found out about anime from the forums related to an MMO I played (other than like Pokemon, but I never watched it). It seemed "cringy" to me at the time, however, I was always interested in learning how to draw, and was later properly introduced to it by a friend in school who offered to teach me. I only had a few lessons, and to this day cannot draw to save my life, but hey, I like anime now.

The first anime I saw was technically a couple episodes of School Rumble and Clannad After Story that I stumbled upon on YouTube, but the first proper series I watched was Bleach (only about 60 episodes though before I was enticed by other stuff). The first manga I read was... well, not even a manga (Witch & Wizard - my mom picked it up for me from the library). The library became my source for manga, and I'd check out basically anything I could get my hands on. This meant I ended up sampling a lot of different series, because it's unreliable what's on shelves.

growing up with local television airing shows like

• Doraemon
  
• Crayon Shin-chan
  
• Ninja Hattori-kun
  
• Pokemon
  
• Idaten Jump
  
• Keroro Gunsou
  
• Zatch Bell!
  
• Magical Hat
  
• Obocchama-kun
  
• Tsurupika Hagemaru-kun
  
• Dinosaur King
  
• Perman
  
• Chinpui
  
• Ultra B
  
• Tottemo! Luckyman
  
• Folktales from Japan
  

I happened to catch an episode of Sailor Moon on TV in 1998, when I was 13. I really enjoyed it, and it was so different from anything I'd seen before, so I watched the next day, and the next. I can't really say why I enjoyed it so much, but it just totally grabbed me and wouldn't let go. When I went online to find out more about this new show I loved, I learned about "anime" as a concept for the first time. If other anime was anything like Sailor Moon, then I knew I wanted to see more of it, so I started seeking it out, and it just kind of went from there. It wasn't as simple as going online to watch anything you wanted to back then, so I started with whatever I could find on TV or at rental places, and I bought what I could afford on VHS with my paper route/holiday/birthday money. By the next year, I had signed up to eBay just so I could buy anime merch (first thing I bought was a pair of Sailor Moon collectable cards, and I still use that very same eBay account to occasionally buy anime merch today), and found a local comic book store that carried a bit of manga. Of course, the first one I read was Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon was also my first subtitled anime (I watched fansubs of the 5th season in 2001).

So really, Sailor Moon was my introduction to everything involved with anime.

I did watch a lot of anime on TV when I was young (I think pretty much everyone did), but I don't consider them as my introduction to anime, since they were just like any other cartoon to me. I didn't even find out they were anime until years later.

I'm kind of jealous of your family! My mom loves anime now, but before I introduced it to her, she was never really into anything like this. My sister got into it when we were younger, and she still watches it now and then, but again, I was the one who introduced it to her. It would have been neat to grow up with it the way you did, with other people who were into the same things, and to have someone to help guide me, so I didn't have had rely on bad late 90s websites for info.

The first anime I saw was accidental,just saw Hellsing on a torrent site,thought the art looked cool and watched it.It hooked me due to it's stylistic gore and mature atmosphere,then I watched DMC,Claymore,Black Lagoon & forgot anime existed until 2022 when a friend kept pestering me to watch Code Geass,I caved in after 2 weeks and yeah I loved it...ever since then & with the quality decline in live-action I've been an anime fan

Well it would look like this:

200x-2006 - I don't remember the initial year but I've watched on TV stuff like pokemon, naruto, sonic x, yu gi oh but back than I thought of them as Polish cartoons cause they were fully dubbed and as anyone else had no idea what anime is I didn't know what I was watching, which why I don't consider them as my first anime.

around 2007 or 2008 - In a dialogue with my classmate in primary school I was recommended to watch Bleach and he has written on my notebook the Polish site where I could watch it so that's when I started to watch anime with sub, but there's a specific thing about it:
2007/8-2012 - I was just rewatching Bleach all the time, rewatching certain arcs/episodes and ocasionally also Naruto.

2012-2025 - I have started to watch other shows when Bleach S1 has finished.


Besides me, only my cousin's daughter watch some anime, but I don't know how much and to what extent as one day she asked me if I could draw for her daughter 2 anime characters so that's the only reason I know about it.

Toonami when I was a child but I stopped once Toonami stopped as well. Didnt use to watch anime while being aware of it being an anime.

Later on, some of my friends in school were discussing anime. It was some of the craziest discussion. OPM, Tokyo ghoul, AOT and the ecchi food wars. I was literally baffled by the craziness in their discussion and I did not like it at all. Few months later I got recommended a lot of anime videos on Youtube. Like those small clips from anime or compilation videos and such. Due to curiosity, I clicked on one of them. Lets just say that was the turning point. I instantly became a fan of the medium. I used to watch a lot of anime related or compilation videos on Youtube a lot. I watched my first complete episode months later. I dont remember cause I binged 1 episode from multiple different series but they were Elfen lied, Kaichou wa maid sama, Fruits basket and Fate zero.

I also had anime in my cable television, but it would be wrong to say they introduced me to anime in the sense that I googled what anime is and learnt about it upon watching them. For me they were just cartoons.

The first time I came into contact with what I consciously understood to be anime is when my parents bought me Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm for the ps3 and I noticed it's a separate medium.

Entirely depends what you count. It gets complicated when you started when you're in single digit ages and didn't know what anime is when watching it. Just stuff on TV is where it started. I think I knew what anime was by time I was 10 maybe. I don't fully remember.

>first animes you watched
Moomin/Muumin and Sailor Moon on local TV when I was 2-3 years old. I remember my uncle (who was clinically retarded and didn't work) made fun of me for watching this girly show. Then it was Dragon Ball Z when I was in elementary school.

>what made you an anime watcher
I don't fucking remember! It was ~20 years ago after all. All I know is that in middle school (around 2004-2005) I spent a lot of time on the internet and somehow I found my way into anime.
The most probable explanation is when I was using file sharing programs like LimeWire, BearShare and eMule to download porn pictures of Final Fantasy X characters, those pictures often had the word "anime" in the filename. I then started downloading anime to watch from those file sharing programs. I remember my dad getting angry at me when he found out about it.
Another explanation is that I was playing a rhythm game called Stepmania a lot (I don't fucking remember how I found out about this game). And there were many, many anime songs in this game that I liked. I probably started watching anime because of this.