I’m 29 years old, maybe a bit too old for this, right? I used to watch anime as a kid on TV, from the late ’90s to the mid-2000s. A lot of them were those infamous 4Kids Entertainment versions. I loved Dragon Ball Z, Pokémon, Digimon, and Yu-Gi-Oh. My first contact with manga was around that time too, with an issue of some shojo whatever that I found weird and didn’t continue reading. After that, I had a long hiatus from anime and manga. Back then, I spent my free time playing sports with friends or gaming. I got back into anime in 2012 when a high school friend recommended Elfen Lied and SAO. Around that time, I started collecting Dragon Ball manga. But as a teenager, I was more into video games and music, so I didn’t watch or read much beyond those.
As an adult in 2014, I was a failed normalfag and started lurking places like 4chan where users always talked about anime, and I wanted to join in. I was also dealing with depression, and those places were basically my only socialization. So, I asked for recommendations for different stuff from the battleshounen I used to watch and started binging them one by one. The first ones I watched were Cowboy Bebop and Black Lagoon. I was blown away and just wanted to see more and more. But my pace has naturally slowed down, and now I watch at a much calmer rate. I probably won’t finish my backlog before I die since I don’t focus my free time on anime like I did from 2016 to 2019. I also enjoy gaming, watching Western cartoons, and movies. Besides splitting my time with other hobbies, I’m pretty disorganized and deal with chronic anxiety, which slows down my anime consumption