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.