If you were a fan...from the 90s/2000s who actually watched anime that wasn't on TV did you ever expect it to get this big? I didn't.

I'm not an Amerimutt, anime has always been big here

>>280057439
Let me guess. Dubbed anime. Which doesn't count

Nerds. Don't really notice a difference to be honest. But I have a feeling the change was already happening by the early 2000s because of, well, yeah, all the dubbed shit. I was into anime before I even knew what that really meant.

>>280057402 (OP)
no, i never thought that geek culture shit in general would ever go mainstream like it did.

>>280057402 (OP)

IDK how big anime is these days. I like anime but i don´t like weebs so i avoid the community like the plague. It´s the smell (and the cringe)

>>280057402 (OP)
Kind of? All throughout my school years, many of the kids I grew up with were obsessed with some anime or the other. In elementary it was Pokemon, Digimon, DBZ, Yugioh. In middle school it was the big three, Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece to a lesser degree because of the 4Kids butchering. I'll never forget when the pre-shippuden Naruto and Sasuke fight was going on and even the stacys were talking about it in the cafeteria like it was a PPV boxing match. In high school people got more lowkey about it since everyone was trying to impress each other with their maturity, but it wasn't uncommon to see people reading manga. Makes sense that social media's increased prevalence helped anime explode.

>>280057402 (OP)
I've seen bigger than this

>>280057402 (OP)
As someone who got ridiculed for liking the "strange cartoons" in my younger years, No I didn't expect anime/manga to become as big as it did.
Back then I wanted to share my joy of this hobby with anyone that would listen, but now I fully regret how normalized it has become.
Most of the current fanbase are nothing more than normie reddit-tier cum guzzlers with peak tourist-level opinions on anything that doesn't fall to western standards.
I fucking hate it.

>>280057402 (OP)
Yes.
What I didn't expect was western cartoons to lose so much ground.

>>280057402 (OP)
If you didn't watch anime that wasn't on TV in the 2000s then you don't belong here.

>>280057661
Yeah, I wouldn't have guessed it back in the 90s. But I could tell what was happening by 2005. Especially with the way World of Warcraft hit, since MMOs were considered one of the geekiest things someone could be into up until then.
>>280059412
Incidentally it was around that time that the concept of a big Saturday morning cartoon block seemed to die off.

>>280057402 (OP)
No it needs to be BIGGER until it's the only thing left.

>>280059524
Anon, the average 4channer wasn't even born until the 2000s.

>>280059700
Based

>>280059726
I refuse to believe that.
People who were born after 9/11 are all little children and will be forever.

>>280059849
Kek. It's sad, but true. We're OLD, brother. The zoomers have taken over.

>>280060042
>underages are a nonexistent population segment
Who do they think they're kidding?

>>280057439
Same

>>280059670
The other thing is that anime cons became MASSIVE in some areas. Fucking big business. Even in cold ass winter seasons, anime cons can attract a lot of people. Baffles me that Cartoon Network had ever killed Toonami, it has to be one of the more underrated bad decisions they made. They brought Toonami back but late at night.

Really, the decay of CN marked a lot of lost ground for western cartoons. Bloomberg even put out an article about their decline, it's even worse than I imagined. As it said, no child is asking their parents for HBO Max.
>>280058143
>>280057756
COVID shutdown led to people streaming more. More people started trying anime. 2020 really marked a before and after in anime fandom desu. We're in another boom period.

>>280057402 (OP)
It has been big in my country since the 70s so for me it's business as usual, if anything I was surprised to know that in places like USA anime wasn't big and was something people made fun of you for liking it.

>>280057462
Watching subbed anime on VHS was pretty common on the 90s.

>>280057402 (OP)
So this is a northamerican only thread I see.
Everyone watched anime left and right during the 90s in my country, including older people, my dad loved Space Cobra and Mazinger, it was fun seeing how church people seethed at Evangelion.

>>280057402 (OP)
South America had a Japan fever since the 80s, by the time CR nuked es fansubs I expected it to grow big, but not "anime is outselling hollywood" big

America didn't like most anime since they were full on muh sexual fanservice
Notice the rise in censorship as anime got more popular in Muttland

>>280065640
touch some grass, anon, most people don't actually mind the sexual content in anime. Many people don't interact with the retarded culture war that goes on via social media.

If youre not watching both subs AND dubs youre low iq. To low iq to read fast enough.

This is a fact. Ive been reading and watching anime since the early 90s.

>>280057402 (OP)
No. It only exploded after 2020. It suddenly became something that was considered weird, to suddenly everyone watching it and it's weird if you are NOT watching anime or know about it.

>>280065809
>It only exploded after 2020
This, in high school maybe 5 out of us 130 in the generation watched anime

>>280057402 (OP)
Does the On Demand features of TV count? I remember a friend showing me a section on Adelphia On Demand called The Cutting Edge that had all sorts of cool shit, like Eva, Excel Saga, Colorful, and I think GTO. It only ever had a couple episodes at a time, so I had to check it about every week.

>>280062957
>COVID shutdown led to people streaming more.
And streaming more made people have to confront the fact that western media has largely become fucking garbage. I really think that's one of the biggest reason anime took off so fast in NA in recent years.

I still marvel at 1/5th of the entire store in Barnes and Nobles being licensed manga. Shit's weird.
I was into /co/ and /lit/ genre stuff as a kid. I never really expected both of those to so utterly collapse in quality, driving people toward manga. I did see the normalfagification of /v/ coming pretty early on, before the original xbox, mostly because of how Sega and later Sony marketed you could see what they were shooting for in audience.

>>280066268
I avoid /co/ like the plague but I am curious what they're reaction to Demon Slayer outselling the entire comics industry was.
It's ironic how a foreign medium is a hundred times more approachable than comics.

>>280065687
Most people DO mind it otherwise we wouldn't be seeing the type of batshit insane rhetoric by faggots on twitter, but note that these type of westerners have been whining about that type of content in anime since forever.

You are the midwit here, stop pretending you know better.

>>280063609
this. you watched whatever you could get your hands on back then. I watched the dub of Eva because it was what the fuckin copied VHS had.

>>280066639
>on twitter
Nta, but you kinda just proved his point. Social media isn't a reflection of real life. 90% of tweets are written by 10% of the users.

>>280057402 (OP)
I didn't expect it to get big either
But with western media being so bad now its no suprise

>>280057402 (OP)
Absolutely not.
I lived in an area where you'd get bullied, isolated at best or attacked at worst for being too different to others yet I saw the slow shift towards people from outside of the nerdsphere take an interest.
Going from people not even being able to get the country of origin right (the Chinese cartoons thing is pretty standard but I'd even heard people call manga fucking "Indian books" of all things) to knowing the names but insulting the hell out of you for liking it to in my teen years seeing people get a little curious about dipping their toes into shit like Naruto, albeit extremely casually to my College years seeing people who used to insult me for playing Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon with the boys actually getting into the TCG themselves or picking up 3DSes to now.
Shit was barely even visible at the best of times, for as popular as it was Naruto didn't even finish airing over here. Got to the "Run, Idate, Run" filler episode then restarted from episode 1. And if you wanted manga you'd better either have been born into luxury or hope to God your local library aren't a bunch of prudes, otherwise heavily curated battle shonen was all you got.
If you'd asked me back in the 90s or 2000s if I thought we'd get to a point where One Piece is not only popular but popular enough to get a remake while it's still airing plus a live action show and seasonal shows are worshiped rather than largely ignored outside of niche circles on internet forums to the extent of them being hailed as "Anime of the Year" over a long running shonen or something and that I'd see regular local releases of anime films in the Cinema where previously the best I could hope for was picking up a pre-owned DVD in the wild? I'd have told you to give me whatever it is you're smoking because I'd love to get that fucked up and delusional myself.
Crazy to see genuine reverence for weebshit these days.

>>280057402 (OP)
Yeah, the industry's gotten bigger but it's still very much a thing you can only talk about behind closed doors. Millionaires on twitter can say that they like anime but that's because they're successful and it's ok for them to be weird.
You'll still get shamed for it when talking about it in public (and rightfully so) so nothing's really changed for me personally since I was a kid.

>>280069805
And you live where? Because that's not the situation in most parts of the world at all.

>>280057497
I never thought about whether anime would get so popular until it already had.

>>280069891
It definitely is the situation in most parts of the world, yeah they'll know anime as a genre and maybe Ghibli if they read the papers but no normalfag is going to know what "seasonal anime" even means or that crunchyroll even exists. It's s till very much a niche genre.

>>280057402 (OP)
I've seen bigger tits than Kohaku's but I guess I'll masturbate to her now anyway

>>280069944
Knowing about crunchyroll or seasonal anime and needing to be a millionaire on twitter to admit to liking anime are vastly different things. Acceptance of it and which anime are most popular where vary wildly by country, but when the majority of Gen Z's now watching anime in the US and watching it more than sports, it's a pretty far cry from niche.

>>280066258
But a big portion of new watchers are retards who hate a lot of the things that make anime anime and want it to become more westernized. I don't know what to make of it all.

Yeah why won't they get big?

>>280069944
Not only you are wrong but you are also wrong, back in school(like 25 years ago) all kids talked about anime, you re going to tell me now your country didn't even have Cartoon Network? And nowadays all kids talk about is anime and "seasonal anime" at that(all anime is seasonal by the way).

>>280058862
I used to get shit for all my hobbies. Anime, comics, pen and paper games. All of these things were taken from me by casuals who now want to go on endless tirades about inclussionism while making the the product worse.

>>280070394
Cartoon Network did not air anime in most countries.

>>280057402 (OP)
I had a feeling the style would be co-opted by american companies due to how superior the high quality 90s anime looked in comparison to anything put out in America at that time, but popularity never really crossed my mind until pokemon/dbz really took off. I didn't really expect it to completely supersede american comics/cartoons though. Like its a complete cultural victory. Goku is more recognizable and inspiring to zoomers than Superman or Spiderman, which I think is hilarious in a way.

>>280057402 (OP)
Every kid in my school knew Dragonball once it started airing on toonami, was that late 90's or early 2000's? I knew it was going to keep getting bigger but I've always been online watching it. I think kids that weren't computer inclined stopped watching it mainly because they didn't know how to find it.
Full episodes were uploaded to youtube before copyright strikes lol.

>>280060449
Kidding? They're all on Youtube and Tiktok. Text as a format is repellant to them. It's not even that great of an exaggeration to say that many of them would have trouble even reading posts here.

>>280071030
I have two young cousins and they literally can't read. Both just scroll on their phones watching videos at every family gathering. The youngest one is like 10. We are not ready for the fall off of literacy. Shitty liberal arts degrees might actually be worth something within a few years.

>>280071148
Being the one literate person at a company will be like the one person who speaks Chinese. You're not going to be paid any more than anybody else and you'll have the worst fucking job there.