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What was your fondest memories of anime?
We all have our fair share of precious moments during our time as weebs.
Mine was watching the final episode of Gurren Lagann when I was 10. Back then kid me was really hyped at the sheer scope of the final battle. I watched it in dub but the impact of it solidified my fanaticism in anime.
My daughter is old enough now to watch and enjoy anime. So I'm getting to make fond memories of watching anime every weekend.
She likes My Hero Acadamia and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood at the moment.
Is your wife a fellow weeb? What did she think of you showing anime to your daughter?
She's asian (ex-wife) she grew up on anime too.
Passing Fist of the North Star fansubbed VHS tapes around school... and knowing I helped add some of the missing subtitles and created a few extra copies (Dad had the tech I knew how to use and friend had the language skills). Felt so "underground club" for a geeky kid.
More importantly, I'm glad anime has become so easily accessible to others now that they can make their own memories (even if some of them make me feel really old).
Probably watching Angel Beats while hanging out in a quiet area at school with my friends. So many feels.
When I first had a friend in high school suggest for me to watch Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and I stayed up until 4:30am to finish it, only to get up at 6am and go into school the next day to tell him how fucking awesome it was. At the age I was at, that anime honestly just made me believe in myself and feel so happy about life.
I suppose most of these are going to be 'when I was a kid' stories, but I do fondly remember watching episodes of Ruroni Kenshin at my grandmother's house over the summer. I had downloaded them I think from DALnet, and they were real video files clocking in at a whopping 40MB per episode, so of course the quality was utterly abysmal. Despite that, I was captivated.
The specific episode which stands out the most was the one where Kenshin is at a hot springs Ryokan and they fight some baddie whose sword causes injuries with compressed air.
Even at age 12 or whatever I reacted pretty strongly to the line "A cut which does not bleed. In other words, it was caused by air pressure." I was outraged, thinking that it exceeded dramatic license.
I had a good time with the manga a few years later too, though I don't know if it is a 'fond' memory, but I was outraged when they revealed that Kaoru hadn't actually died. I felt then as now that if you're going to make me grieve a character, they'd better stay dead.
Good times!
Oh hell yeah DALnet! That was such a fun and friendly place to hang out, unlike EFnet, even though the people with the goods were on EFnet. I had so much fun with the anime trivia bots.
I don't like ranking my own memories, but the first one to come to mind is when I first saw the ending for Gunbuster. I was in such a hazy half-sleeping state, but that really tapped into this deep feeling of just loving humanity and people on such a grand scale that just made the tears flow for a long time. I still can't see it without losing myself...just that one frame destroys me.
Also discovering Dokuro-chan with one of my friends out of nowhere one day...my first step into the weird side of anime that you wouldn't see on TV here, and having no idea how to process it. I miss that feeling of discovery, like there were always weirder things I could never hope to wrap my mind around.
Old school anime OVAs were really unique seeing it had no restraints. Wish there could be more stuff like dokuro.
Love Hina has a lot of great moments. When Naru becomes an idol and sings an entire song during an episode, I was floored seeing that the first time. Don't know if idol anime were as much of a thing back then, but pretty sure it wasn't like today where there's minimum 5 idol shows per season. One of the first anime I felt compelled to find and download all the vocal MP3s. Was kind of a Yui Horie fan for a while.
Remembering more now, Love Hina might have been one of the first shows I watched encoded in DivX. It was magical. Prior to that I don't even remember, it was crappy .avi's, .mov's, .wmv's, .rm's 30MB for a 20 minute episode (of course OP and ED distributed separately), but Love Hina was like 100MB per episode which was really high quality.
On the manga side, I''s. My heart hurt at the end, couldn't believe it was over. I was such a sucker for those types of romance stories for teenage boys.
I don’t know if “fond” is the word, but the opening montage to Akira blew my mind. It was the first anime I saw and I didn’t realize cartoons could be so evocative.
The second anime I saw was Ninja Scroll which my parents definitely should not have let me watch. The rape scene still makes me queasy to think about.
When Libera Me From Hell plays in Gurren Lagann. My first anime, god I fucking loved it. Lead me to a life of weebdom nearly 6 years long now.
The first time I watched Akira, right when their motorcycles first take off and there's that trail of light effect... I choked up, it was that amazing to me. And I yearned to find the door into this world of animation. Other than Goldorak, Harlock and Battle of the Planets as a very young kid, this was my first time seeing any anime. It was so great to see the potential of the medium.
I would say Digimon The Movie. Got that on VHS "back in the day", watched it a million times. My favorite scene, which still makes me tear up to this day (yes I'm a grown adult), is where WarGreymon and MetalGarurumon get stomped by Diaboromon, and Tai and Matt enter the digital world to help them.
Defeat. Despair. Hope. Rebirth. Victory. Those themes were executed perfectly in this early 2000s animated film.
binge watching Naruto when i first got into anime.