21 replies to this topic

[pizhhh]

I remember penguin71 posting something like this a few months back, and thought It'd be interesting to read about peoples' introduction to the world of manga and anime.

Here's a short history of my road geekdom.

Spoiler

Before I was an anime and manga geek (from now on referred to as otaku, even though I'm not one in the strictest sense), I was, and still am, a military geek. A big chunk of my childhood was spent watching Extreme Machines on Discovery Channel. All those MBTs, aircraft carriers and fighter jets, and thinking how awesome it would be to ride those (my dad even recorded a few episodes on VHS tapes.) Back then, I was already watching anime, mainly the World Masterpiece Theater series, but I didn't really know, or cared about, the difference between western cartoons and anime.

Then Gundam Wing got aired on local TV. It showed a reasonably realistic (word used very loosely here) depiction of how grim war could be, while at the same time being romanticized enough for a naive kid like me to enjoy. That was when I got hooked. I was officially an otaku.

Back then, the only anime I could watch are those aired on local TV, Cartoon Network (Toonami), and a few on AXN. If I missed an episode, there was no way for me to watch it, except to hope for a rerun. There were a lot of series I wasn't able finish. But then my dad opened an internet cafe, and suddenly I had unlimited internet access. I could now watch episodes I missed, and finish what I couldn't. The cafe's customers are also the ones that introduced me to scanlated manga, and the rest, as they say, is history.

How bout you guys?

[Katzen]

one of my friends then was japanese and she's really good at drawing. i occasionally commissioned her to draw for me, and to teach me as well i started with sailor moon, doraemon, magic knight rayearth. the kind of stuff that got aired in local networks here in my country. dubbed, so it was horrible. i was about in grade school. i guess she was a big influence on me.

[Antitheton]

When I was a younger, a lot younger, I went to a hotel for my uncle's wedding. So after unpacking at the hotel room, it was around 12 PM.
Being the hyperactive child, I turned on the TV.

Needless to say, FLCL was on. Then, at a young age, I saw a girl plunge her hand into someone's skull and pull out a guitar.
I was scarred.

My path was set on that day.

[chriftopher]

I have enjoyed the story line and messages of anime since prep (pokemon and sailor moon), Other kid shows just did not have that, they had messages but that was it and every episode was a new thing. And that is still my reason for reading and watching it today.

I was unaware of the whole anime community and that it was anime till about year 8 when i met someone and went to manifest in Victoria Australia in year 9, At this moment in time i just watched his stuff.

But then I got to year 12 and my family got internet and then I got sick of bleach fillers so i started reading manga. So it was a long trip but I got there in the end. While my internet is not good enough to watch anime I am reading as much as I can. When i get out of uni and get my own place that will change. Will be AWSOME!!!!!

[greenguy]

i will be open and direct!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! D<

i watched captain tsubasa, ghost at school, yuyu hakusho, and a lot of other anime aired on local tv when i was a kid.

i read that pokemon manga, detective conan, and a lot of shoujo manga (thanks to my sister) too.

but that all didn't get to me.

i don't really care about anime and manga at all, didn't even know they're called that way.
(i referred em as cartoons and comics) xD

BUT THEN! as a kid i heard a lot of rumor about a very perverted book called "Love Hina" they say it's so dirty and for adult!
(exaggeration people, it's only ecchi, not even seinen : / )

sooo when i was at this book store (3-4 years later), i miraculously found a love hina book, opened! *O*

i excitedly read the book! looking to make loads of sins! D:

to my surprise, the story's good! everything seemed perfect! tsunderes are too awesome!! *O*

soo my sis told me about this manga web called onemanga.com and i started reading love hina til finish there :3

i liked it a lot, and start to read a lot of other mangas. BAM! i'm an otaku before i knew it xD

a lot of people will TL;DR this.

Doesn't matter, had fun! xD

[Tεία]

I have always been a bit nerdy I watched Animal planet, discovery channel, national geo and zone reality already at the age of 4 (my dad always watched those channels, so i didn't really have a choice either) Not understanding much, but very fascinated by all the colors and facts.
One day at the age of 7 i saw a girl in my class drawing a strange looking human, with over sized eyes and tiny nose.
I became interested immediately "what's that?" she looked at me like i was crazy. "You haven't heard of it? It's manga"
That's where it begun, i googled it and learned how to draw it, back then i didn't even know that manga wasn't just only a drawing style, but also comics.
At the age of 8 i started to watch anime, me and my best guyfriend became obsessed with naruto, it cooled off though.
The age of 12 was the break through, i discovered the world of anime and manga and loved it. That's also when i actually understood every word of what they were saying in the English manga's, that's what made me what i am today. End~

[Kreian]

ummmmm had no tv or technology for a year TT.TT (parebts choice <.<) and well I needed to get caught up with naruto and all the anime shows back when cartoon network was a good channel found naruto online then the subs then the manga and then started reading and it became a habit and religion.....true story v.v

[Yan Q]

I grew up with doraemon, crayon shin-chan, detective conan, things like that.
my brother was a huge influence. in yr3, he bought me my first shonen jump, I had every single issue for seven years lol. sad.
he introduced me to yugioh tcg, eventually, my hobby went out of control and in about three years (yr6 - yr9) I had close to 400 volumes. ouch. I started to lay low on the purchasing haha~

he took me to my first con (my mother came too lol) and since then I've just been going to cons, cosplaying and pretty much just hanging out with the anime/manga/game crowd, but not really purchasing anything extremely expensive.
LUCKILY !! my brother buys and sells online a lot, so whenever I really want something he usually just gets it for me (:
hi limited edition figurines and pretty, pretty abjds

we really just share our collection. which is huge and won't fit in our rooms, so we just put it all in our library in the main house. no access to it ):

I read online because it's more convenient, of course, but whenever I get the chance to purchase, I always do.
manga, anime, cosplay photobooks, fanart, whatever. as long as I can support these people, I will (:

Edited by YanYan, 29 September 2012 - 04:13 PM.

[FakeHero]

They sold Dragon Ball volumes for around 2$ at my local book store in the early 2000. I remembered the anime from when I was kid. Got all 42 volumes, was I hooked then? Not really, I enjoyed it very much. But still thought stuff like Gundam and Sailor Moon to be a tad bit boring. Dragon Ball seemed like the only exception. And then..............................I was graced by volume 1 of One Piece.

ROMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANCE ! The sheer manliness One Piece contained made me fall in love with manga everything related.

[Timcanpy]

Being a nerds in my blood so it didn't take long for me to get hooked on the strange things (My dads a huge star wars/star trek/sci-fi collector). From a young age I watched alot of the anime and such on t.v (Didn't know it was anime). By around 6 my sister and I were hooked on pokemon, digimon, yugioh, and Zoids (much to my moms dislike, we talked and bought so much of that stuff). I only really started watching anime again at about 10 when my sister picked up the first disc of FMA at the library. Some of her friends had been talking about it, so we decided to give it a shot. After that we started trying to find out as much as possible about this wonderous thing called anime, later picking up manga. Through the whole thing our parents were really accepting of it, even sitting down to watch with us, ask questions about the show and such. What totally brought me down this path though was Gundam, after watching seed randomly I couldn't stop and watched the older stuff. Now I can't even think how boring life would have been if I never picked up anime and I don't think I'll every stop loving it.

[dinoclops]

Well, my geekdom as a whole is a long answer. Of course my path to anime is a little less long, but still very long.

My earliest known instance of anime is when I was in preschool I would watch speed racer. Then in early elementary school I also watched pokemon, yu-gi-oh later, and naruto in middle school. Also, toonami and other random ones like beyblades and what not throughout a lot of that. But I was never really aware of what anime until my love of it died in middle school. Later in high school my friend showed me the internet community of anime and manga and from there my love was rekindled in a way I had never known. I mean, it wasn't just crazy action and funny dubs, there was so much more. Then ******** and ***** happened and I ended up on batoto.net

[Mystika101]

I loved cartoons and stuff when I was a kid, and my favourites were Digimon and (I was very young) Mew Mew Power. I didn't really realise that they were very badly dubbed versions of the awesome stuff. But one day I stayed up late and was watching stuff on a Sci-fi channel (always been a geek, loved reading and watched star trek:voyager for those who care, and my hero was Captain Janeway for a long while... well her and Baelana) anyways, so watching this sci-fi channel and suddenly these weird cartoons come on and it had a lot of sex in it...(precocious child was I, was I) and I was very intruiged by it (also happened to have tentacle sex, that really freaked out my young mind) but ever since then I was looking for stuff like that, and then I met my one friend who was an anime freak, and he gave me his stuff. It didn't have the sex that I expected but it was just as cool, and thus I ended up hooked on anime. Manga came a lot later when I got sick of all the Bleach, Naruto, etc fillers and wanted to read more, also I looked for all the short anime's that I really enjoyed and see if I could read beyond the point of where the anime ended... thus I am now here... completely geekified... and quite possibly very perverted... gomen!

Edited by Mystika101, 02 October 2012 - 02:05 AM.

[marimo]

I don't remember much about how I was first exposed to anime/manga. First was through video games - Dragon Ball. Then Sailor Moon came along<.< Don't know what it was about, just that everyone knew it so I knew it too<.<
The first time I knew the term anime was when I was 13(late lol), and it was Slam Dunk(love it). Then after that, about 3 years ago... My college friend recommended Bleach and that was when I really started reading manga and watching anime. Then some time later, I joined the scans team.

[shard2323]

My interest in anime and manga came from Toonami, Adult Swim, and a penchant for finding different forms of porn (i.e., hentai). Neon Genesis Evangelion is what pushed me down the rabbit hole, however. After that, I starting seeing anime (and other animated media) as being capable of serious, thought provoking topics. Cue Serial Experiment Lain, Ghost in the Shell, RahXephon, etc, etc.

Edited by shard2323, 13 October 2012 - 09:06 PM.

[Viscoun]

this thread shall never be revived

lol

i started when i saw my friends watching bleach... then i started watching it as well... then i started reading manga... then started watching anime... then started scanlating... and became the geek i am today.

that's about it, really. peer pressure brought me here. XD

[Fennec]

It all started when I was young. From a young age I'd been fascinated by anime, starting with Pokémon (actually, that's probably about 30% of my geekdom), Sailor Moon and Inuyasha. Years later, when Naruto came around, I was a bit apprehensive at first (the previews just showed the stupid moments) but eventually decided to give it a shot. I fell in love. As time went on, I began discussing Naruto online with this small small group of friends on a series of Pokémon roleplay forums, and I made a very awful roleplaying forum for Naruto. Somehow a guy not in our group found it (not that it was a bad thing; we were very open to new people) and joined, putting up with our immature roleplay antics. He happened to link to leafninja.com, which I began visiting regularly for information. At some point I began reading the summaries of manga updates on there, which was all well and fine. However, after the big fight between Itachi and Sasuke, there was a scene that I REALLY wanted to see, so I searched for the "raws" which commenters mentioned so frequently, and read my first real chapter of Naruto. Around seventh grade, I began reading the actual chapters over the summaries when the previous cliffhanger was too severe, and eventually I just stopped reading summaries on leafninja completely.

At some point I decided to expand my repertoire of manga, and somehow I found a series called Akuma Jiten, about a demon called Milky Way who makes a male high school student her human servant. It's kind of a cliched plot in retrospect, but it was one of my first real manga series. As I read it, I fell more in love, and once I reached the final chapter... I just felt this kind of void in my heart. I really couldn't stop thinking about it. So, I found another series and began reading that one, too. Since then my manga reading habits have steadily increased, leading me to go through a bit of a weaboo stage. Right now, I'm a hardcore manga otaku. Ironically, although I started out watching anime, I now prefer to read manga since I can do that in a much shorter timeframe than the set airtime of anime. With manga, there are just so many possibilities. The stories don't have to reach some sort of ending at a certain point like novels, but can go on for as long as the author wants. Their worlds can be much more detailed, and the characters have plenty of time to be fleshed out. The art styles can also reflect the nature of the work in ways that mere words alone can't.

Well, anyways, that's my road to geekdom.

[Murdath]

I was a hardcore ragnarok player and some players of the guild I was in would never stop talking about manga or anime, at some point I couldn't keep my curiosity in check.

[Lower life]

I got into it in my early 20s I've always liked comic books but supressed it so i can party with all the cool people in my teens, first manga I've ever read was "lone wolf and cub" vol 1, vagabond, first anime was "astro boy" which i watched when i was at a friends place at 7 years old, i was poor with no t.v. untill my mid teens.

[Kannade]

When I was a kid, I religiously watched the dubbed versions of Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, and Pokemon on Saturday mornings. My siblings and I would get up hella early to watch them, and we'd freak the fuq out, just throwing balls at random shit like we were catching pokemon and playing hardcore air guitar to the DBZ opening song. My older sisters were really good at drawing anime and furries (not gonna lie, I don't like furries) and watching them draw together made my little brother and I start drawing anime as well. Today, my oldest sister still watches a shit ton of anime, actively draws anime characters on the daily, and she's also done a lot of scanlation work. My other sister pretends that she never liked anime and insists that it's lame, but she's still a killer artist. My little brother still reads manga and watches anime and he still sucks ass at drawing lol.

I don't have any patience when it comes to watching anime these days, 45min+ seems too long and as soon as I'm done watching an episode, I feel terribad because I could have spent that time doing something more productive. I still love reading manga though because I don't feel guilty about spending 15 minutes to read a chapter or two a week.

[elohobo]

I started reading Dragon Ball at the age of 9-10 thanks to my brother; then during the beginning of high school, I came across Naruto, and because it was a french dub version, it wasn't as good as expected; but after watching the complete series of Elfen Lied a couple of years later, still during high school, I started to get really interested in anime as a whole.