>>282159707
The first anime I saw was pic related in the early 90s. Then Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, Versailles no Bara, etc. on TV, dubbed. But I only really started watching anime knowing it was anime in 1999 with Evangelion. That's when my love for anime began. From 1999 to 2006, I watched a lot of anime. Until 2009, when I stopped watching anime because everything seemed like crap to me (watching anime from 2008), I thought anime had come to an end, so I stopped watching anime until 2020. I only watched Shingeki no Kyojin, Parasyte, and One Punch Man during those 11 years. Nothing else, and only because I could watch them on YouTube. But I didn't download anything or search for anything.
It wasn't until 2020, because of the pandemic, that I started watching anime again. Madoka was the anime that restored my faith in anime and showed me that not everything after the 2000s was shit. After 2020, I started watching a lot more anime than before to catch up, and I even started watching seasonal anime. And now I'm still filling in the gaps of old anime that I never saw.
If there hadn't been a pandemic, I might never have returned to anime or watched as much as I have in the last 5 years.