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Which show kickstarted your interest in anime?
It doesn't necessarily have to be your first show. Which one sparked your interest? Do you still like it?
Hunter x Hunter (2011) was the one that introduced me to weeb culture. From there, I branched out- the earliest I remember are Fairy Tail, Blue Exorcist, Magi, etc. Weirdly enough, I still haven't finished Naruto.
I recently rewatched HxH, and I can still say it's very charming. I can now join the Hiatus x Hiatus gang.
I'm a millennial. I grew up on old school Toonami. From there I watched stuff like Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, and Evangelion. Trigun still holds a special place in my heart, and Cowboy Bebop is still in my top 3 animes.
I was going to say pretty much the same -- it wasn't necessarily one single show that was my gateway to anime, so much as it was that Cartoon Network was airing anime during the Toonami blocks (regular, Midnight Run, and Rising Sun or whatever the Saturday morning block was called).
Sailor Moon was my first anime; I remember watching it on the WB channel, and then Pokemon as well and Digimon on Fox Kids. But it was the proliferation of Toonami that really got me interested in anime as a genre -- the various Gundam shows they aired (I specifically remember G, Wing, SD, and I think Seed as well?), DragonBall/Z/GT, Cyborg 009, Code: Lyoko, Reboot, etc. (I know some of those aren't strictly "anime" but it was during the Toonami blocks.)
We owe so much to Mike Lazzo. He made Toonami and [as]. He showed me that anime could have adult themes. I'll never forget the 1st night of the saturday anime block on [as] in 2002. I was 12, and I had sneaked downstairs to the CRT TV with all other lights off and the sound down. I had to sit close to it of course.
10 (maybe 11) pm hits and the happy Cartoon Network ends and you get this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY1bwRWaLHI
Then, Cowboy Bebop starts. Episode one: Asteroid Blues.
https://lore.capital/f/img/*/KxEr6Mdk-gp6tfsurfRoOmmvsH_JvxDsGEjR5w.png
Scared the absolute shit out of me and I was instantly hooked.
Steve Blum was the voice of our childhoods.
Have you seen the new trigun? Really kicks ass.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Dragonball z, that was one of my favorites on toonami.
DBZ, and Toonami as a whole, were my gateway. DBZ, Gundam Wing, Big O, Tenchi Muyo, those are shows I remember. And even before that, Ronin Warriors. And yes, I watched the new Trigun. I don't hate it as much as many other people who love the original show seem to, but I still prefer the original.
Good Lord, those names bring back some memories for me...
yeah, this is very similar to me! I imagine it probably is for most fans of a certain age...
Adult Swim is where I also got my start.
Back when I was 14 or so, one night I'd fallen asleep on the couch on the living room. The TV had been left on and tuned into Cartoon Network, probably because my siblings had been watching it. By chance, I woke up at about 3AM during a rerun of Cowboy Bebop and it immediately grabbed my attention because of how different it was from nearly all of the animation I'd seen prior.
That was enough for me to start staying up late to catch Adult Swim on the hand-me-down CRT TV in my bedroom, where I found Full Metal Alchemist, Inuyasha, Trigun, and all of the other Adult Swim classics. I was hooked. Staying up super late wasn't working out too well for school though, so after a while I was able to scrape together enough money to get myself a base model TiVo so I could record the anime for watching later.
My earliest encounters with anime was a random episode of Sailor Moon that happened to be on TV at another kid's house when I was 5 or so and then a random SciFi Channel airing of the original Galaxy Express 999 movie that I saw part of on a hospital TV at 7 or 8, but I didn't know they were anime at that point.
Inuyasha!
Did you watch the new Trigun? If so, what are your thoughts?
I thought it was enjoyable. The plot was super dense, so the pacing felt a bit off, but the finale was amazing. I can't wait for season 2 now.
If you are turned off by the animation, I'd recommend just watching the finale at least. It should spark your interest to watch the rest, and you'll be okay plot-wise for the most part.
Trigun is such a good anime.
Something just seems to hit different about older anime, from the style, to the voice acting, to the story, to the animation.
Their english dubs are amazing, and are of the few cases where I prefer the dub to the original audio.
I also watched Akira a while ago, and then again recently.
I recently watched Cowboy Bebop after putting it off for a while, and it gave me the same vibes, also a very good anime, with a really emotional ending.
I'll probably watch Spriggan next and hopefully it'll be similar. I'm hesitant to burn through these shows/films since it doesn't seem like many new ones with similar vibes are being made today.
Toonami for me, as well. I got hooked on Sailor Moon in the third season, and I love every iteration of it I've seen since! I'm trying to catch up on newer stories, as well as catch some series I missed for various reasons. Sailor Moon is my favorite anime, even though I fully admit that other shows are better (Cowboy Bebop is perfect). But PGSM holds a very dear place in my heart.
Love and PEACE!
It wasn't a show, but rather the music video for One More Time by Daft Punk.
Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. A visual companion alongside Daft Punks 2001 album: Discovery
I think Toonami showing all of Interstella when I was a little kid had a significant permanent effect on my music taste.
I actually couldn't remember what the movie was called for years, then youtube became a thing and I watched Stronger by Kanye and realized I knew the song. Next thing I knew something I had started to think was a fever dream had been reintroduced me, along with one of my favorite albums of all time.
Coincidentally, have you seen any more of Leiji Matsumoto's work since? He's got quite a lot of anime that was famous in Japan that Western audiences haven't generally cared much for, but they're pretty good. His style is absolutely iconic.
I believe there's a trilogy of Daft Punk songs that have animated videos telling a story. Fascinating stuff!
I don't think I'll ever really know.
I like to attribute it mostly to Spirited Away (the Ghibli movie), but I don't know how accurate that is. There are also other anime I can remember watching early, mostly Inuyasha (I watched a lot of it, but I don't think all of it, after my father downloaded it for me) and Fullmetal Alchemist (which I saw an episode of on YTV and then I think I downloaded it for myself). There's others that I'd probably consider important because I watched them with my father, including Escaflowne and Ghost Hunt.
And while I can't say it kickstarted my interest in anime... K-On, believe it or not, is a pretty important anime to me. Not even because of the anime itself, but because it got me into fansubbing in high school: the group I was following for the second season needed a timer, and I made the mistake of offering to try it out to get the next K-On episode out... spent a lot of time in high school hanging around on Rizon after that, and it's one of those things where I might not be where I am today without it (it's part of a long chain of events that led to me getting into infosec twitter, which got me interested in infosec instead of software/game dev).
For me it was the Ghibli movies initially as well. I ended up with a nasty leg injury from rugby as a teenager and whilst being laid up Princess Mononoke came on. It absolutely turned my head on storytelling and more abstract motivations for characters I had not really seen in media at the time.
I did end up following up with Inuyasha and FMA as well but those turned me down the manga trail, which is how I grew to appreciate the whole art form as well.
I'm not familiar with K-On, does it hold up well in your experience? Always interested in giving something I haven't seen a shot.
K-On is sort of the classic/ultimate "cute girls doing cute things" slice of life show. If it's the kind of show you're into, it's still pretty good (though it's a genre that did end up a little oversaturated).
I was randomly flipping through the channels and this scene. I'd never seen anything like it.
Dragon Ball Z on Toonami. It was just so cool and it made me feel strong and powerful. Even though I was far from that. It also inspired me to get into drawing. So while I do not consider myself a great artist. I can draw decently well. And DBZ has a lot to do with that.
Yup, same here. I think the main draw for me was that I had just never seen anything remotely like it before. All cartoons had just been comedy with occasional serious messages, seeing something with such a different look take on action and fighting was so amazing it blew my mind.
Same, but as a Canadian it was on YTV. I'm not really big into Anime much, but I do have an appreciation for Ghibli, and really well animated/shot Anime like Evangelion or similar.
I'm also not a fan of all the moe and tropey stuff. There is anime out there that respects their viewers' maturity, but they're overwhelmingly outnumbered. I've spent quite a bit of time over the years sifting though, so if you want to trade recommendations let me know.
There was this winamp shoutcast stream that played Great Teacher Onizuka, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Love Hina on repeat all day long.
This was of course during the time when winamp was alive and it had streamed tv-channels in the library.
Love Hina is so special to me. Having access to my parents' PC, discovering IRC and fansubs, eventually led me to Love Hina. Despite the wonderful story and characters and animation quality, it's criminally underappreciated in the US because it was never shown on TV to my knowledge. From Internet fansubs to a licensed DVD release.
Wikipedia says:
I guess I got a thrill out of being in this cool secret underground club, talking with these grown-up college kids who knew everything, curated the best stuff for you, and controlled these impossible supercomputers with every piece of media ever produced.
Astroboy! They still called it Japanimation when I started watching that in the early 80s.
Mine wasn't a show. Cartoon Network aired some anime back in the '90s, and I happened to catch an airing of Vampire Hunter D. It blew my mind!
I think I'd had some exposure to anime before that, but I didn't know it. A lot of the anime that came over before that was localized in such a way as to obfuscate the fact it was anime. Not that you wouldn't be able to tell but they weren't up-front about it. I was young enough back then to not know the difference.
I'm intrigued -- can show me one of the genuine local non-anime productions as an example? :) or do you mean they market it in a way that got you interested, you tune in, and right away first episode you can tell it's actually anime?
I get fooled into watching idol anime like that
I'm talking about properties that either were anime but weren't marketed as anime or that were derived from anime and anglicized for US release. Here are a few examples:
and, not anime, but similarly anglicized from a Japanese property:
In the 80s and well into the 90s, the belief seemed to be that Japan was a weird scary place to Americans and they wouldn't accept media coming out of that country unless they didn't know it was Japanese.
I don’t watch much anime these days, but your breakdown of Robotech just answered so many questions I had as a kid. I was so confused. Even young me could tell there was something weird going on with the story.
Robotech was my intro to anime. I got really into it, saving up my paper route money to eventually buy the six-VHS tape Macross set! (It had been cut down but that was the only way to re-watch it!)
I went looking for more info about Robotech and learned about “japanimation” (thank god that word fell out of favor). At first I just got the sanitized version of things put out by Harmony Gold but eventually learned more. In any case, that and Captain Harlock were my only real exposure to anime until college, when I saw Akira and my mind was blown apart.
I saw Ghost in the Shell when it was released to American theaters in, what, 94? 95? And that started an obsession that runs to this day. (2nd GiG ftw!) And a friend turned me on to Ninja Scroll.
Even so it wasn’t until the late 90s that I started watching fansubs from pirate sources, and then American dvd imports. I went hard for a few years into series like Evangelion, Serial Experiments Lain, Bubblegum Crisis 2040, Cowboy Bebop, Vampire Hunter D, Ergo Proxy, Blood, Jin-Roh Wolf Brigade…
By 2010 I had largely tapped out. I haven’t really kept up with current anime. Outside of Ghost in the Shell I don’t recognize anything released in the past decade. Got busy with work, motorcycles, parenting… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They did this all the time back in the day. Everything was changed to appeal to a western audience. Going all the way back to to the likes of Speed Racer, Prince Planet, Starblazers (Space Battleship Yamato), Battle of the Planets (Gatchaman), and of course Voltron (Golion) and Robotech (Macross, mostly).
Most of this was before my time. But even when I was a little kid, there were dubbed Japanese cartoons on Nick Jr. that no one at the time would think to lump together with the likes of Robotech. And for a lot of people, DBZ, Sailor Moon, Pokemon, Digimon, etc. weren't necessarily widely know as "anime."
I remember thinking that Robotech was grown up for it being a cartoon. The fact that characters died, etc.
The style of animation was way different with the action sometimes being almost too fast for my eyes to follow.
That's crazy! But it makes sense now that I think of it..... power Rangers is redubbed tokusatsu with American teenagers!!!
That was slightly before my time on this continent and by the time I came it was marketed as proper anime for adult swim etc
There isn't one specific anime. Each one I saw would drag me deeper and deeper. I suppose a lot of the things I saw were things that other people my age would have talked about. Heck, most cartoons at the time were "technically anime" in that the actual animation production was outsourced to Japan; Batman The Animated Series was one of the bigger ones.
The ones that drew me in the most would probably be Sailor Moon, Big O, and Cowboy Bebop. Definitely more Sailor Moon though. It really stuck out because American culture at the time was still fairly misogynistic, and when it came to young girls it was very patronizing; to have a show where young girls are given such a huge amount of agency and power was practically revolutionary. The only place where you'd see a woman have power usually was in relation to children they are raising, and girls were the lowest on the totum pole. In a way the show was like radical feminism for kids.
I'd actually say that Big O was a bigger deal to me than Cowboy Bebop. I couldn't say for sure which I like more today, but Big O was on top when it was new. It really cemented anime as art. I adore the aesthetics, and the concept of a Japanese Batman type fighting in giant robots really doesn't need a salesman to convince you it's good. The production was top notch for the time and I think it really holds up very well today; I honestly can't think of another show where giant robots are animated nearly as well. But the thing I loved about it the most is when it would delve into philosophy and the metaphysical.
If you liked Big O you should check out Shogun Warriors. Way more dated but they had several large mecha characters.
You mean the toy series that had Raideen?
Or are you getting it mixed up with Ronin Warriors?
Correct. Ronin warriors sounds familiar but didn't have giant robo Mecha; wasn't that a series based on feudal Japan?
also
later it was g-force if i woke up early enough to see it on a weird channel we'd sometimes get.
then of course:
but the bebop showed me i had real feelings and then stomped all over them. it was the bebop i was homesick for, and i bawl big-girl (and little-girl) tears every time i watch it. besides being amazing, it's always relevant to whatever i'm going through at the moment.
lastly i'd like to mention:
sword art online (the anime is good, but the light novels are awesome)
bocchi-the-rock: i can relate all too well
lycoris recoil: i get homesick for the coffee shop in it. while very different from cowboy bebop, i find lycoris recoil pushing a lot of the same buttons and emotions. the character interactions are absolutely stellar and rival bebop... and maybe exceed. there's so much hope and love mixed in with the fucked up-idness. this might just be my second favorite anime of all time... or maybe it'll be my favorite: the second season hasn't started yet
Path was watching Pokémon as a kid, getting linked to Death Note and Shuffle as a teenager, and between those two making some interesting Google searches and learning that holy SHIT they draw them NAKED SOMETIMES??
Gen-Xer here. I grew up in a place without a lot of variety in TV, so my early Anime exposure was Robotech, followed by Voltron. In HS a friend loaned me a VHS tape of Akira, all Japanese, no subtitles. Watched it until the tape almost wore out. Didn't even know what the characters were saying until I found a dubbed version years later.
Watching Robotech (Macross) was a defining part of my childhood. I rented the tapes from my local shop one by one, always eagerly awaiting the day my mother would take me there and hoping no one else had rented it. I remember the scene where the Zentradi nuked a planet (Earth?) and there were children playing in a park and they just got vaporized. I was completely fucking shocked into a new level of awareness at that time. I felt a dull pang of it turn into a twisting knot during 9/11 and some years later when I visited Hiroshima.
Every anime nerd needs to see Macross; it's a right of passage. You have to at least see Do You Remember Love.
I was in middle school (early/mid90s)and my friend lent a recording of Akira from the Scifi channel on vhs as well. I must have watched it well over 20 times by the time I gave it back. I couldn't get enough. I then made sure to catch whatever was airing on the scifi channel on the weekends. Those old promos they had, the old catalogs, and a local comic store called Tate's which had a large collection of anime related stuff made up my early days. Everything seemed so exotic and new back then. Dragon Ball Z on tv was huge as well but I think that was a bit later on.
Not a common choice, but Angel Beats was my first real anime, and I still love it to this day #^o^#
That wasn't my first, but one of the first, and oh boy it did give me some understanding about how hard Japanese authors can kick your heart and cure it with wholesomeness. Episode 9 it's burned in my eyes, and it's been +10 years, I guess...
I had a friend introduce me to anime. I can't remember the first one I watched, but the first ones I remember that made me stick with anime were:
Kamisama Hajimemashita: shoujo rom-com where a homeless girl is given (shinto) godhood and a shrine. I've recently re-watched it and it is funnier than I remembered.
Noragami: action/drama/romance where a mortal girl ends up interacting with the spiritual world and befriends a dwindling god.
SHIROBAKO: workplace drama focusing on a woman who's just got what's more-or-less her dream job doing paperwork for an animation company but finding it not quite what she expected, while her friend group from high school have had much less success so far.
Servant x Service: workplace comedy, and I don't know how to describe it beyond that. Larger-than-life characters doing incredibly mundane work.
For me, it was seeing this weird animated gif of this girl defiantly chowing down on a potato, which lead me to Attack on Titan which led me to trying it out for free on CrunchyRoll which sucked me in to the world of anime.
I've had a few different "waves" of getting into anime. My most recent one was triggered by My Hero Academia- I started watching it during the first season not really knowing anything about it. Watching it really made me wanna get strong. And get strong I did! 💪
My Hero Academia was what got me into reading manga, it wasn't my first anime but it was the first one where I just could not wait for the next season to find out what happens next. I think it was already up to season 4 when I started watching it so I had a lot to binge when catching up, but after the end of that series I decided I absolutely was not waiting 18 months to see how it turns out, so I was down at the bookshop the next day basically clearing out their shelves!
For me it was probably Nier Automata, the game, not the show.
I forget the exact process but somehow that lead me to watch Madoka Magica and that was the first anime I saw from start to finish, and is still one of my favorites
Robotech / Astroboy! I was obsessed in the 80's, which gave me a natural frictionless path to weebdom in later years.
Back in the late 90's sci fi channel used to do saturday anime and showed Vampire hunter D,, Venus wars, Akira, Iria , Record of lodoss wars and others.
Was a huge part of me getting into Anime though I've kind of lost interest lately.
Visually I feel like it's still hard to beat a lot of those...shame that, while 90s trends are all the rage again, 80s/90s animation styles never saw any real resurgence. It boggles my mind when people call 90s character designs ugly when we have a mountain of visual garbage from the 2000s. No wonder tons of anime fans of that era lost interest...there was a pretty big split in the kinds of titles you saw right around when digipaint was becoming the norm ~2000 or so.
Didn’t know it was called digipaint. For me nothing highlights the difference better than watching the opening of the 1987 anime Bubblegum Crisis vs. the opening of it’s 1998 revival effort.
Funny… I like 2040 better. Broody Priss and broken Cylia are just so much more interesting to me than the original versions.
Your Lie in April! I was never big into the most popular stuff as a kid - Pokemon, Digimon, Yu GI Oh, Dragon Ball, you name it, it just wasn't for me. I do always however take special appreciation for anything friends recommend to me. And this was one one of my longest friends recommended to me way back when. I've gotten into some bigger stuff since but that'll always be the catalyst. Im never against some good tears to cap a show.
Oh.. that was so much beauty and pain to experience. It had me crying as well.
Dragon ball z opened me up to anime.
It's goofy, and I'll occasionally watch clips, but I'm done with the series now.
Honestly, I think it's one of two shows that aired during prime time (between 7 and 9 pm) on Cartoon Network... although the funny part is that I also never finished either of them, and at least one of them doesn't have an ending.
Basically, Zoids and Rave Master. Mind you, I've always loved animation from a very young age, and had had various things occur along the way to really get me into it. And for all the guys here, I expect the Sailor Moon transformation scenes got you VERY curious (and this is ignoring some Digimon scenes I still remember quite well from when I was a kid).
The early stuff I watched included Dragon Ball and Evangelion. But what I think got me hooked on anime was Slam Dunk. I loved the whole "working together" stuff (bear in mind I was about 12 when I watched these sort of anime) and development of the squad.
I grew up in HK so kids shows were basically synonymous with anime from the start :) one one first ones I actually sat down to follow every single day was Sailormoon, circa 1994. Because the HK Cantonese dubbing occured well after the original airing in JP, it was in a daily format.
I watched a couple of episodes of Naruto and Dragon Ball (and Z) on TV when I was younger, but I wasn't especially interested in an anime at the time.
Years later though, I saw Naruto on Netflix, I was bored - decided it was worth some nostalgia. Turns out, it was enough to kick start an addiction that survives to this day. Since then I'm a few hundred anime in and I don't regret my decision in the least.
I also credit Naruto for being my sub over dub preference - the Japanese version was just good, enough that I didn't care to switch off of it.
Never looked back, don't plan to.
All about that Toonami. Also my dad's step mom was Japanese so every time we would visit she would take us to the Japanese video rental store (Long Beach CA) and would just grab a random anime off the shelves for us.
Kimi ni Todoke. That was the first time I saw a love story I actually loved: the characters and their personalities, their friendships and relationships, my first empirical impressions on Japanese culture and customs. I liked that.
By the end of the first season I had fallen in love with the Japanese culture, so different from mine (I don't hate my culture, just puntual aspects of it, as all of us), and I understood that I just found my source of good entertainment.
Anime has a lot of different kinds of shows, and this one showed me it can be funny but showing emotional maturity, about normal people having normal problems and not just about epic fights and saving the world.
I watched Toonami as a kid but never really got into the anime that was airing, but I marathoned Evangelion in one night in middle school which left me hating anime for a while after the ending.
A friend was working at an anime convention after I graduated high school and I figured I had the time so why not check it out. That lead to countless recommendations which I binged after the convention, and also made me check out subs when I had no idea there were so many other shows that were never dubbed.
Anohana was the one that I think really turned me on to anime fully. Up until that point I had just watched some action and comedy shows, even Western ones, so crying at that really opened my eyes to other genres that I'd been turning away from.
I worked for various cons for 6 years after that and it truly changed my life in many ways, good and bad. Though I've stopped going to cons and stopped buying merch, I watch 5-10 anime a season now usually and still keep in touch with a few of the people I met working the cons.
To be honest, now that the ending of Evangelion has been officially retconned twice, the original is kind of my favorite. The newest one is really good too (you really should watch it if you haven’t already), but the original feels like it matches the original intentions the best of them all.
I get being angry at it though. It’s so hard to parse that you could say that it’s objectively bad because most people don’t understand it. And to be honest I usually hate things that are this avant-garde, too.
It definitely didn't help that I watched the final episodes at like 8AM having stayed up all night, but yea even going back a few years ago that's a little to avant-garde for me.
I'll definitely have to check out the retconned version, I didn't realize that 3.0+1.0 was the final movie.
It was Sword Art Online for me. It was either my first or one of my first anime as a non kid. I don't remember how I got into it, but I distinctly remember binging it and then reaching my college's bandwidth limit at like 7 PM and not being able to watch more afterwards. I got so into it that I actually read all of the books that were translated and available at that time (I think through the 2nd to last Alicization novel).
I'd say so. I think it gets far more shit then it deserves online. And it pains me in particular when people bash it for things it originated / popularized as being generic. Things like black hair edgy swordsman, or power fantasy isekai. I've rewatched it a few times over the years (mostly 1 arc at a time when I feel like it) and I've always enjoyed watching it.
It's also hard to deny how influential it was in popularising the tropes you already mentioned which are so ingrained in the isekai genre now. The writer was an amateur when he started writing SAO, which explains a lot, but since then he's begun rewriting the Aincrad arc with all the experience he's gained since SAO was first released, yet most people refuse to even give it a chance simply because of the original series's reputation in the community.
I actually recommend SAO to friends who want to get into anime but I manage their expectations by telling them to not take it too seriously and just have fun with it. Most of them actually ended up liking the show.
As a kid it was Star Blazers which was originally Space Battleship Yamato or 宇宙戦艦ヤマトwhich was on a whole other level of space battles than Star Trek, UFO or Space 1999 up to that time. What really turned me into a fan was seeing Rumiko Takahashi's Urusei Yatsura (うる星やつら) in college about a decade after it came out.
A remake of UY was started last year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urusei_Yatsura_(2022_TV_series)
I’m from the early generation of fans and unknowingly started at a young age, cutting my teeth on movies like The Fantastic Adventures of Unico. The atmosphere and aesthetic were radically different from what had come before and what was considered children’s fare at the time. I remember being scared of the wizard Kuruku, just due to his bizarre appearance and mannerisms.
Add I grew older I caught a few episodes of Sailor Moon late in elementary school, when it showed up at 6:30am on the USA Network in the U.S. It showed me that cartoons weren’t all The Flintstones or Tom & Jerry Kids. At this point though, I still didn’t have an idea of that anime was, or that this was any different from other cartoons on TV at the time.
I met a friend in middle school that told me about these amazing cartoons from Japan, and how a new show was starting on the Sci-Fi Channel called Saturday Anime with the Alien ripoff, Lily C.A.T.. I was immediately hooked, not having seen the inspirations of this movie until many years later, thinking it was amazing.
Others in this block included Casshan: Robot Hunter 8-Man After, and the wildly experimental and one-of-kind Robot Carnival.
My friend led me into this new world and presented me with such wonders as Marmalade Boy, and Ranma 1/2 that led to even crazier things.
OMG YES. I only got to watch the Unico movies once each while at a sleepover at a friend's house, and that lingered in my memory beyond any plot. Rewatched that movie a couple years ago and realized the creepiness of everyone becoming dolls and then moving about added to Kuruku's overall scare-factor.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. It was when Part 4 was still airing. That show left an incredible impact on me as a teen. It made me more appreciative of great writing, art (it also got me to learn how to draw), music, everything really. It also got me to start reading manga too. I don't know where I would be without watching that show.
My tastes have shifted, and I don't view it as peak media anymore (maybe peak shonen though lol) but it's influence on me runs deep.
Ninja Scroll, never really found anything like it. I can't really describe what make it great for me. The pace, the characters, the plot, the twist, Jubei?
No love for Excel Saga?
Started with Star Blazers, Robotech, Astroboy, and Battle of the Planets.
Love the intro for Ghost in the Shell. Enjoy rewatching Cowboy Bebop. Haven't checked in on the multiple (apparently) reboots of the end of Evangeleon.
It's starts early for me with the original Pokemon anime, although I would have no idea it was anime until a couple of years later. Around that same time, I was watching a lot of American anime dubs of Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Card Captors, and Yugioh, all before I had a name for these shows with a similar feel and flow.
The anime that made me go full full weeb was Naruto. I discovered the manga first, and when I heard the anime was coming to the west, I was super stoked. Around this same time, I began watching Adult Swim's anime block with Full Metal Alchemist, Inuyasha, FLCL, and whatever else was running in the early 2000s, and streaming a bunch of One Piece and other fansubbed anime to shows that were unavailable or butchered in localization.
Sadly, I started to drop out of anime around the 2010s. The last big series I was super into before the big drop was Durarara, and I would basically sleep on the genre until My Hero Academia pulled me back in.
Now I follow about one or two series at a time rather than just being a general otaku. I think the biggest factor is I know longer have the free time or attention span to follow so many series at once, and gaming has more or less taken the time I would have sunk into anime.
Same here, only I also consider the creeping homogenization of the genre part of why I stopped being interested. With so many near-identical character designs and different riffs on the exact same premise, I stopped consuming so many series and only focused on the ones that really caught my attention in one way or another.
Isekai was a breath of fresh air (if you ignore that it's building on the precursors set by El Hazard, Magic Knight Rayearth, Fushigi Yuugi, etc) until it got overrun with nearly indistinguishable premises and characters.
The series you mentioned are the reason I never really Jumped on the Isekai band wagon of the 2010s. I grew up on good isekai, with Magic Knights being my favorite. The problem with a lot of modern Isekai is the other world just becomes set dressing to tell a harem story. I think the only Isekai was got into during that time was the Devil is a Part Timer, because not only did it reverse the premise to be about characters from another world coming to ours, but it wasn't simply a romance title. I also liked the idea of the story being told from the villain's perspective, and his time in our world is what humanizes him.
God. So many interesting isekai premises get washed away by the latest set of boobs with milquetoast personality falling for the equally bland male lead. At one point I genuinely lost track of which series I was reading with a black haired male protagonist and his wolf-eared waifu + extra harem members. And when there's actually an interesting female character introduced, they quickly become background for the latest collectable chick.
I like the Killer Shark In Another World manga for this reason - it spoofs a LOT of those harem isekai lmao. Not exactly tastefully as the shark gives incel vibes, but at least someone out there is publishing an acknowledgment of how lame some of those harem isekai are....
This is a problem I have with Anime in general, as many good animes rely on knowing about tropes from other (worse) ones, specially comedy shows. I find that once you drop off anime watching it is very hard to go back to it.
An older isekai I really liked was Jūni Kokki / Twelve Kingdoms. IIRC there was no romance, and there is a strong focus on world building.
Referential comedy is rough. Many older episodes of South Park, as an example, I feel like need on-screen explanations for references made since the earlier episodes were basically all made in a week and addressed current events that may or may not have been completely forgotten by the following week. Fansubs often do this for Japanese cultural points, and man, sometimes it'd be really nice to have a built in wiki option when watching older Western media in general.
There was one or two spoofs in the Killer Shark that I honestly couldn't tell if it was a generic dig on harem isekai or if there was a specific series being targeted - which says a lot about the state of isekai IMO. The smartwatch guy was definitely a specific dig at the Isekai With My Smartphone series though lol.
Was 12 Kuni the one where the two girls wind up isekaid and when they encounter locals, one of them is fully ready to kill the unsuspecting villagers while the other is horrified by the idea?
I don't remember that much but probably. One of the girls is taken to the other world by some sort of servant because his kingdom has chosen her. I think she was given a sword? A big part of the series is her character growing up and finding her place in the new world. Then there are other smaller arcs about some of the other kingdoms.
The world was inspired by (i think) chinese mythology.
Spice and Wolf kept me watching anime while growing up - it showed me anime wasn’t just for children (looking at you Pokémon) or always cringe (looking at you, classmates Naruto running at school.) Given it's getting a remake in 2024 (after 15 years of being dormant!), I feel like now’s a good time to suggest watching it ;]
Both the dub and sub are fantastic, the story is lighthearted, and the music varies from “perfectly fitting” to low-key bop.
Some more links, if anyone wants follow up and watch...
It was Rurouni Kenshin, back in the day, followed by shows like Naruto and Bleach.
While Kenshins author has become a bit of a controversy lately, I don't think that particular work bears any taint of it and should be enjoyed in its own right. Especially the OVAs are amazing to this day.
The reboot of Rurouni Kenshin looks like it's a 1:1 adaptation of the manga. If you haven't already, I suggest having a look. Depending on whether or not you want to support the author I leave it to you on the sourcing of the episodes.
Dragon Ball Z Kai broadcast on Nicktoons is probably what started my interest. However, the first anime I intentionally went and watched that really got me hooked was Fullmetal Alchemist, followed by Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood.
Saint Seya. Later, there would be Dragonball, Dragonball Z, eventually Evangelion. And many in between.
The elder millennial package.
Mazinger Z later Saint Seiya.
My earliest memories of anime as a kid would be some of those Shogun Warrior shows. I think it was Danguard Ace? Had more distinct memories watching Tranzor Z, Battle of the Planets (G-Force), Speed Racer, and Robotech in grade school. When I was in middle school someone lent me a VHS copy of Fist of the North Star. Boy, this is a trip down memory lane. I remember daydreaming in school of being a veritech pilot when I grew up, ahahaha. OP thank you for asking this question.
I find it harder to get into anime now as an adult and if anyone has recommendations I'd be grateful.
My first one was Saint Seya and, as a kid, that was a wtf moment. I'm pretty sure that people in charge of TV programming don't have a real idea of the anime they're scheduling for saturday mornings. Years later, they also had complete seasons of Ruroni Kenshin in a kids program.
Kaichō wa Meido-sama! Yeah… And, yes, it isn't the first anime which was Death Note; and at this time when I started to watch the kick-started anime, Bleach and Naruto had been already watched by me.
The first anime that I watched, knowing it was anime was Naruto. My friends back in elementary got me into it. Continued into anime from there, the first anime I have saved on kitsu is Steins;gate followed by Fate/zero. Needless to say 2011 me had better taste than I do now.
I grew up around stuff like Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Yu Yu Hakasho, but I don't think any of those led to any other animes.
If I had to pin down the one anime that really got me really into the culture, it had to be Samurai Champloo. Not only did that spark my love for anime, but it really impacted my musical taste as a young kid.
Mine was Inazuma Eleven. I always came back from school to always find Inazuma Eleven playing. It started as a show i’d watch cause there was nothing else, but it started to grow on me and i looked forward to watching it when i came home.
I was watching Death Note as it was airing on Adult Swim and I missed an episode, so I needed to find a torrent. Couldn't find the dub, only sub. After watching that I couldn't go back, I had to watch subs from then on out.
Yes! Death Note was my first anime I could get through as well. Another friend recommended the original Fullmetal Alchemist to me and I got turned off it. Death Note was a lot less “anime” to me at the time.
Before there was Toonami, there was weekend late-night anime on the Sci-Fi Channel. I got hooked on anime via the movie Venus Wars, and in part by Project A-Ko and Vampire Hunter D.
Although come to think of it, I was watching Voltron well before then.
Though I watched Astroboy, I would say my first mature animation experience was watching Ninja Scroll completely unaware of the roller coaster of pussy licking and people being cut in half in the first few minutes.
Funnily enough, Hunter x Hunter '99 back in (I think) middle school. I watched the whole thing (plus the Greed Island OVA) over spring break week, just couldn't put it down. I'd watched a lot of anime beforehand on like weekend blocks and Toonami, that must've been about the time I figured out ptp sharing and was able to marathon something all at once.
Ranma ½ in the episode where Ryoga encounters Ranma's father as a panda then thinks of a silly pun of "panda" and "pan-da" with bread.
Bootleg fansubs of New Dominion Tank Police on VHS
I actually hated anime for a long time then I had this wicked fever for a few days and when I woke up I thought I'd give it a try. I asked around for suggestions and after a violent sea of terrible animes someone finally showed me one that I actually liked. Gurren Lagann I'm not sure why I liked that and not the others
These days I find myself in an orphaned cohort. I got into it too late so a lot of my tastes were molded by newer stuff but my age has me drawn towards older characters and more complex themes. That could be why I hated most of the stuff people suggested to me.
I got into it around the end of high-school, basically on a whim. Anime wasn't really big where I'm from when I was young (Pokemon was big and Maya the Honeybee it basically a classic), or at least I didn't connect the dots until after I actually got into anime. I was getting little tired of Western TV production and felt like I could do with a change of pace. Out of all things I picked up the Rebuild of Evangelion movies. I though it was great and just started binging show after show (FMAB, Hellsing, Death Note, the classics...). I can honestly partially attribute dropping out of uni in the first semester to anime, lol.
Last Exile was my gateway in.
As a kid, I'd seen bits of DBZ, Sailor Moon, and of course Pokemon, but only if I visited someone with cable TV or if we got really lucky with the antenna that day. But I think I regarded them more as Saturday morning cartoons with little expectation of being able to see a story unfold over time.
But with Last Exile, I got to see the whole thing, subs and all, and then anime as a genre/medium became a separate (and cool!) thing to me.
I would say Fullmetal Alchemist was the one that broke the ice for me. DragonBall and DragonBall Z were what I caught from Toonami, but we didn't have cable until I was older and I never stayed up late enough.
Fullmetal Alchemist really drew me into anime as its own form of entertainment for me. Brotherhood was also amazing, but I didn't watch it until years later.
I cut my teeth on Ranma 1/2 and Sailormoon. Caught one random episode of Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs (I never saw another episode, I have no idea what the schedule for TV was like as a kid, but the theme song stuck in my head solidly), and a couple episodes of Princess Knight (Tezuka), and got neck deep into Robotech.
Honestly, Yu-Gi-Oh on Fox in the afternoons after school. But then I went straight to Neon Genesis Evangelion. lol
Full Metal Alchemist for me. Was on Cartoon Network late at night, so I missed a few episodes and had no idea what was going on. Once we got DVR, I recorded the entire series and started a binge watch with my friends after school. We ended up all falling in love with anime then.
Rewrite by Asian Kung Fu Generation still holds up. It was my gateway song into J-Rock.
Dragon, Dragon, Rock the Dragon, Dragon Ball Z!
Although in reality it was Sailor Moon when I was in like kindergarten, I was just too embarrassed to tell other kids I liked it.
Mt friend introduced me to anime in fourth grade after He rented Tank Police from the video store...that was like, 30 years ago at this point.
Yu Yu Hakusho! Another Yoshihiro Togashi fan here. I loved how the villians weren't evil for the sake of being evil, but had real goals and ways of looking at the world differently. Sensui is possibly my favorite villian. Then I watched Cowboy Bebop and Trigun- really fell in love and saw how artistic and meaningful anime could be.
Honestly hard to say.
Is it Pokemon for being my first anime (or one of them. I'm not 100% sure if it was Pokemon)? Probably not cause my kid self wasn't differentiating Pokemon from other cartoons.
Is it Digimon or Inazuma Eleven? Maybe. They're the first ones I've gone out of my way to watch knowing they're made in Japan. But other than watching those 2 (and Pokemon still), I had yet to go out of my way to properly start anime as a whole medium.
Is it Yu-Gi-Oh, after which I started to branch out? Again, maybe.
Or is it Steins;Gate and Code Geass for being the first two I watched after I started to branch out into all kinds of anime post-Yu-Gi-Oh? This could also be a potential answer.
So it depends on what we define as "kickstarting my interest in anime". I know OP said it doesn't neccesarily have to be my first, but then I wouldn't know which one to consider as being "the one".
So I'll answer the question of "Do you still like it?" for each of the options.
I haven't rewatched the Pokemon seasons I grew up with, but I am currently watching the new Pokemon Horizons after not watching any Pokemon in years, and I still like playing the games. So I assume I would still enjoy the seasons I watched back then.
Digimon I also haven't rewatched since. I'm not watching the newer stuff either. But since Digimon also has a "kids have monsters that fight" premise except with a lot more plot than Pokemon, and I still like Pokemon, I would guess I'd still like Digimon too.
Inazuma Eleven is harder to say. Again, haven't rewatched it. I tried to watch Ares, the newest season and I only got a few episodes in before I dropped it. The popular opinion is that Ares is a lot worse than the original series or the Go series, so I'm not going to say that I wouldn't still like Inazuma Eleven just because I didn't finish Ares.
Yu-Gi-Oh's newer seasons apparently are pretty bad, at least according to stuff like MAL ratings. If they were considered good, I'd 100% go and watch them since I still like the idea of the card game. I would most likely still enjoy rewatching the ones I've seen.
Steins;Gate and Code Geass I definitely still enjoy. With these ones we're getting the closest to present day. S;G is still my favorite anime of all time and I've rewatched it multiple times. I also rewatched Code Geass once, although that was a few years ago at this point. I don't doubt I'd like it even if I were to watch it now.
Someone showed a Death Note clip on middle school for a dumb school project and I thought it looked cool so I guess it all started there.
Growing up I never watched anime. It was pretty niche in the 80's and I think I was just put off by the anime kinds in school and never gave it a fair chance. My wife has always been into it but I never watched it with her. This year we went to Japan and it was just kind of everywhere. I talked to people in our group about stories in their favorite animes and they sounded really interesting. So I decided that I needed to give it a fair chance. My wife started me out with Spirited Away and now we're watching One Piece together. It's new for her too so it's fun to discover it together.
It was a movie. Long time ago, in the days when stuff like FYE existed, my neighbor bought a copy of Akira and we watched it at his house.
It was so fucking awesome that I had to find other things like that, and then toonami started airing Gundam, so my fate was sealed.
My first exposure is hard to remember but it was probably through Netflix, I think it was Rosario+Vampire. Then I burned through all the netflix titles that seemed interesting and moved onto established titles like Naruto and Bleach, eventually dropped those and started just watching whatever sounded interesting on MAL or other places.
It kinda saddens me that I can never experience those titles the same way ever again; when I was watching stuff like Heaven's Lost Property, Girls Bravo, Baka on Test, etc. I was the same age as the characters. I don't really feel much different than I did then but now it feels weird to watch those shows being older than the characters.
There will never again be an anime that could make me cry uncontrollably like they used to, especially Gurren Lagann, which is impossible to make myself watch a second time since it's my favorite of all time, and it just wouldn't be the same on a rewatch.
I had a friend that had the game One Piece Grand Battle on his GameCube around 2006 which I thought was fun. I didn't know anything about anime back then. About 5 years later, I went to live in France and One Piece was playing on the live TV. It was the episode where Luffy was in Loguetown. I slightly remembered that the character looked familiar. The episode was hilarious. I decided to watch the show from the start not knowing anything about it. It took a few months to get caught up.
I probably would never have gotten into anime if the art style was more like regular anime. It took me a while before I got used to more regular looking stuff with shows like Bleach or Fairy Tail.
One Piece is still definitely my favorite anime. Been keeping up with it for more than 10 years now.
Trigun started it, but Hikaru No Go and Yakitate!! Japan solidified it.
Hikaru is about a kid learning to play Go with the help of the spirit of an ancient master. Yakitate is about baking bread.
Those two showed me that you can make highly engaging shows about pretty much any subject if you present it right.
Oddly specific but as a Dutch person it was the German dubbed Mega Man (the intro song is FIRE) along with Sonic the Hedgehog. I loved that stuff at the time. Later I got introduced to Bleach, Great Teacher Onizuka and Cowboy Bebop. I watched some shows every now and then but wouldn't consider myself a hardcore weeb.
Nowadays it's mostly stuff intended for some older audience with deeper meaning. I don't really enjoy the highschool stuff anymore.
I watched OG Pokémon first when I was super young and then a few years later I got into dragon ball z. Watching Toonami and also all of those amv's helped cement my deep dive into anime.
I was a fan of Dragonball Z & Pokémon when I was a kid but I didn't really consider this as 'anime'. Hunter x Hunter is the one that actually kickstarted my interest. Still probably my favorite anime show, or at least top 3. Haven't been watching much anime anymore though.
Shonen on cartoon network/toonani when I was a younglin, with DBZ and Naruto
Then death note expanded my anime interests into other things
I also have strong memories of a very sad anime about psychic girls with invisible arms mutilating each other. Not sure why I watched that at 12 years old but here I am
Not sure now that we have an infusion of new users we have to relitigate what is and is not an anime, but Avatar: The Last Airbender got me into the genre and the canon of anime shows. Madoka was my first watch explicitly seeking out "anime," but Avatar got me into the scene.
Count me among the Toonami kids. Since my dad was into earlier localized anime like Robotech, I started out watching stuff like DBZ and Sailor Moon with him as a toddler instead of me finding those out on my own. But I think it was stuff that aired later like Big O and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, stuff that I could re-watch and really chew on, that ensured I'd be interested well into adulthood.
When I was in middle school, I went to a local rap concert where the guy was using Akira and Cowboy Bebop clips as the backing visuals. Took a bit to figure out where they came from, but once I found those two, I also got into Neon Genesis Evangelion+Ghost in the Shell and there was no turning back at that point
I started with Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann back in high school and have always enjoyed anime since then. Other great ones I enjoyed starting out were Code Geass, Steins; Gate, Death Note, Monster, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and Hunter X Hunter.
I need to rewatch Gurren Lagann though. So over the top; I love just reading quotes from time to time:
"Even so, I will...! I will believe! I will believe in the me that believes in us, humans and the future! This drill is... my SOUL!"
RWBY, which is not exactly an anime, except that there is an actual proper RWBY anime now (which I haven't seen yet). Dropped it after some writing choices I didn't agree with some time ago, though. Also, wah.
If I remember correctly, my (then-unknown to me) introduction to Anime was Cardcaptor Sakura, heavily edited into 'Cardcaptors' in an attempt to make Syaoran Li an equal main character for US television (couldn't have a show about a female MC then I guess).
I liked it a lot, and watched it when I could catch it on TV.
My first real-to-me Anime that I watched was Serial Experiments Lain just as I started college, which lead to discussion with a classmate, which then lead to me being introduced to Anime Club and a whole lot of happiness on my part for meeting that group.
I got so into it that I made it my mission in life to archive all anime that ever existed (at least I did back 20-odd years ago when I was still in college). I built out a cube server case with 10 hard drives in it, 8 of which were Maxtor 250GB drives - the largest available at the time. Took advantage of the Universities T3 connection to get as much bandwidth as I could.
I miss those days.
A Certain Scientific Railgun. The name of it had been kicking around in my head for like a decade, so in June of 2021, I decided to watch it on a lark. I was totally enthralled. For over two years now, I havent gone a single day without watching at least one episode of an anime. I'm on show number 40 now, and recently finished another rewatch of Railgun–it absolutely holds up, even after watching 39 other absolute bangers. The Sisters arc is still my favorite storyline in any show I've seen.
Part of the reason I feel so strongly about it is that before I watched it, I had a tendency to leave TV shows unfinished. I've seen more shows through to the end in the last year than I did in The first 25 years of my life. It feels good to actually finish them, you know? Helps that many of them are only like 12 episodes but still
Ironically, A Certain Magical Index remains the absolute worst show I've seen, despite being the "original"
At the time I had no clue they were considered anime but it had to be O.G Pokemon, and Dragonball/DBZ. There was just something about the fight scenes in DBZ that young me just thought was the coolest thing ever.
After that stuff like Death Note, Trigun, Blood+, and Code Geass cemented me as a fan of anime.
I didn't realize I grew up watching anime as a 90's kid. YuYu Hakusho, Pokemon, gundam were all shows I attributed to regular cartoons. It wasn't until I watched Evangelion years later that I became interested in anime enough to go looking for more things to watch on the internet.
K-on really open the doors for me though, I used to say I hated the "big-eyed cutsey" looking shows until it changed my mind entirely.
The first I anime titles I watched that I knew were anime were the ones I rented at the video store back in the day. Among these were Evangelion, Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals, Slayers The Motion Picture, Ninja Scroll, and Blue Seed. I've seen plenty of others here and there over the years, but I still have the biggest soft spot for older anime, even, or especially, the ones that were a bit before my time. That said, I keep meaning to get around to watching more new stuff.
It was years before I heard the term anime, but it was definitely Unico: The Island of Magic that got me first. I was a little kid and that was hands-down the freakiest cartoon I ever watched, even more than Watership Down. The living puppets and Lord Kuruku made an indelible impression.
As an adult, Wolf's Rain. I watched Witch Hunter Robin before that, and loved it, but the dual-reality strangeness of Wolf's Rain grabbed me and never let go.
First anime that i saw was Dragon Ball, because aired on public tv back in the mid nineties. Later on i enjoyed Cowboy Bebop and Golden Boy. Also love Ghibli Studios movies.
When I was younger, I watched a lot of Inuyasha, Naruto and Full Metal Alchemist. But I didn’t really differentiate them from the normal stuff I watched. And I didn’t really watch anime until much later, what got me back into it was seeing Death Parade, such an interesting and fun show to watch unlike anything else I had seen. The premise being if someone dies they have to participate in “Death Games” with someone else to see who’s worthy of reincarnation. There’s more to it than that, but I highly recommend it, it’s only a single season.
If you don't count Inuyasha or Pokemon or Yugioh (personally I don't since when I was in school everyone my age saw them), my first anime ever was Sakurasou and it's still the anime I like the best, but the one that got me full into anime last year was Nagatoro. I saw Lilypichu tweeted out that she was voicing an anime character, so I started watching the Nagatoro english dub and it was really good and I liked it and then I got hooked on anime lol
Eh there wasn't a first anime, for me I had seen the art style and loved how it looked. Around age 13 I started looking for more like that and found manga online. Bleach was still in active serialisation and hugely popular so I started reading it on one of the massive manga sites run by a Chinese company, for those of you around the manga and anime scene you probably know the one I mean. From there I found out what anime was and immediately watched the Bleach anime until I caught up with the weekly releases and patiently waited for it to be converted and uploaded to an anime site run by the same company each week once Dattebayo had subbed it, I think back then a week turnaround on a sub was common. At the least it was 3-4 days after airing. While waiting I picked up Ichigo 100% and loved it, then I watched Toradora and a few of the other Rie Kugimiya voiced shows where she was basically the same character but colour swapped. Then started using the forum for the site and watched some GOAT shows like Code Geass, Monster, Death Note, Ghost In The Shell: SAC, Trigun and loads more based on recommendations. Between the fun of anime and the great chats in forums I just had a blast. Ran my own anime forum and was an admin on 3 others at one point plus a mod on a few more. I was young enough to have time to do all that plus I was active in graphics design forums after seeing loads of cool forum signatures and wanting to learn how to do that. Totally changed my life. I went from a loner with no prospects to now a decade and a half later, still using the stuff I learned back then in ways. Just far less free time now.
Honestly can't remember what I've seen at this stage tbough. When I used MAL back in the day I was up to at least 264 shows watched and rated but I can't remember the details for that account sadly. My whole life was anime and anime community centric for a long time though and it'll always be special to me as a result.
Future Boy Conan, a Miyazaki series from (1978?).
Black Lagoon.
Cowboy bebop, got into it back in the day when you had to buy physical anime. Probably still one of my favourite shows. But it always leaves me depressed, so I haven’t watched it in a very long time.
Why depressed? I know it's bittersweet but I guess I always found it pretty life-affirming. What's your take?
I saw it when I was quite a bit younger, that and trigun. I just don’t think I was ready for that real of a message in either show.
As a kid knives felt evil and irredeemable, but rewatching it as an adult it was clear from episode one that he just represented the spider from the metaphor. Save the fly, kill the spider. And Vash was the one who almost killed knives after all. It was much more complicated after rewatching as an adult.
I haven’t done that with cowboy bebop yet, and really, at the end of the day it’s because the ending was really sad to me.
Spoilers if anyone cares:
It really felt like spike was finally getting over his ex, and was potentially moving on with valentine. So to be drawn back into his past and dying was too sad for me, who wanted a successful love story as a kid. Plus I felt like ed and jet didn’t really get much attention near the end either. Just sort of fell off the story.
Hmm. Maybe you should rewatch it (Bebop that is, I've never watched Trigun) and see how differently it resonates. I've seen various episodes at different times but only watched it properly all the way through twice, about 10 years apart. Both times were as an adult, but even so, the difference in what nuance I picked up was impressive... it's one of the few anime I think has real rewatch value beyond mere entertainment. You may find more resolution to Ed and Jet too.
I think I’m going to have to give it a try.
I recommend you give trigun a try. There’s a newer remake anime, haven’t seen it yet so not sure about it. But the original is one of the greats for a reason.
Mine was early bootleg dubbed imports of things like Dirty Pair, Eat Man 93, Bubblegum crisis, Macross, Green legend Ran, Star Blazers, Galaxy railway 999, and Ninja Scroll. Probably far too young for all of them at the time. 😂
Mine was That time I got reincarnated as a slime. It was one of, if not the first one I watched (not counting studio ghibli movies) one of my friends recommended it because it's high quality and a good trope reversal. To this day it is still my favorite anime, currently rewatching it.
Astroboy,Starblazers, Macross (aka Robotech) & Tekkaman :D