03-06-2009, 09:23 PM
Here's a story for you folks, because I know how much you like reading.
This is the tale of how yours truly ever got mixed up in this whole anime business.
First some pre-historic backstory:
I had been aware of anime most of my life. All I knew what that I hated it. Speed Racer was boring, Sailor Moon looked so alien to me that I instantly hated it. Their faces, the style, nothing looked normal. To be fair, Sailor Moon's eyes are larger than most. Anyway, it was an instant turn off and I hated these Japanese cartoons. Once I accidentally watched a few seconds of DBZ, and it was the one where Dodoria is sent to capture Vegata. Dodoria looks like a complete retard, and had an insanely retarded voice. So I immediately changed the channel so I didn't have to watch some purple blob standing there on a cliffside yelling something with his annoying voice.
In grade 9 a few of my friends were talking, then one said "Hey, did you know that in Japan they have porn that's cartoons!?" My reaction was "wtf, that's the most retarded thing I've ever heard". One of my other friends was like "but if you draw a woman, you can make her perfect, better looking than a real woman could be." This made no sense to me, and I was even more turned off of the anime trail.
Of course I loved transformers, but there weren't people in it at the time, so how would I know that it was anime too.
Now for the dawning of a new era:
Grade 10, I was getting better grades than ever before due to my discovery of gameboy and super nintendo emulators. I was getting smarter.
One day in EB Games I saw a DVD case with the title Sorcerer Hunters. What the hell. That's all I needed to see. Two cartoon women better looking than I had ever thought was possible. They weren't catwoman, they weren't Hello Nurse, they were better. At second glance I saw their eyes and knew that it was a Japanese cartoon, what was called anime. I, at first thought it was ridiculous, but I was intrigued. What kind of cartoon had people that looked like this in it? What could it possibly be about?
Either way, time went by, it was nearing summer and I was watching animaniacs or something. A commercial for cartoon network came on (which often happened) and I saw them advertising something called Tenchi Muyo on Adult Swim. There were people teleporting, shooting lasers, sword fighting, wow, I made up my mind. I needed to watch Tenchi Muyo!
So, summer vacation hit and I took a trip to the states where I could finally see Cartoon Network. There it was, Tenchi Muyo. I was lucky enough that the first two episodes I saw (and only two on that trip) were the first two episodes of the OVA. I was blown away. Episodes of consecutive content were almost unheard of with the cartoons I had been watching up till then. The plot was deep, the characters were vibrant, complex, and interesting. I had never seen anything like this before.
When I got back home I got on the net (dialup, wooo) and searched for Tenchi Muyo. I read all the episode summaries, all the back stories, looked up wallpapers and everything. My very first MP3 (and prompter of my Winamp download) was the background music of the Tenchi website I was using for info. I joined a message board (my first!) and spent ages discussing this anime that I had only seen two episodes of (but knew more than the full series of content of). I eventually found a streaming video website (Vivo Active Powerplayer, the original video streamer) that I could watch Tenchi Muyo on. I watched all the Tenchi episodes I could possibly watch on my dialup connection.
Tenchi lead to other Cartoon Network gems like DBZ. Now that I was watching DBZ, that lead into Sailor Moon (yep... before school in the morning Sailor Moon was on... so.... yep...). The Tenchi message board introduced me to many different anime series. I stayed with that community for a whopping 3 years! Over that time I made my first internet friends and got ICQ (the legend lives!). Morpheus was a great way to get DBZ episodes and eventually Animesuki's bittorrent tracker opened a whole new chapter of anime to me.
There was a brief stint with DirectConnect, that was great for anime back in the day. I got into Star Ocean which lead into Star Ocean RPG for PS, then into even more SNES classics I had missed.
I got every anime related SNES game I could get my hands on and eventually I became the connoisseur you all know today.
Da da daaaaaaaaa.
This is the tale of how yours truly ever got mixed up in this whole anime business.
First some pre-historic backstory:
I had been aware of anime most of my life. All I knew what that I hated it. Speed Racer was boring, Sailor Moon looked so alien to me that I instantly hated it. Their faces, the style, nothing looked normal. To be fair, Sailor Moon's eyes are larger than most. Anyway, it was an instant turn off and I hated these Japanese cartoons. Once I accidentally watched a few seconds of DBZ, and it was the one where Dodoria is sent to capture Vegata. Dodoria looks like a complete retard, and had an insanely retarded voice. So I immediately changed the channel so I didn't have to watch some purple blob standing there on a cliffside yelling something with his annoying voice.
In grade 9 a few of my friends were talking, then one said "Hey, did you know that in Japan they have porn that's cartoons!?" My reaction was "wtf, that's the most retarded thing I've ever heard". One of my other friends was like "but if you draw a woman, you can make her perfect, better looking than a real woman could be." This made no sense to me, and I was even more turned off of the anime trail.
Of course I loved transformers, but there weren't people in it at the time, so how would I know that it was anime too.
Now for the dawning of a new era:
Grade 10, I was getting better grades than ever before due to my discovery of gameboy and super nintendo emulators. I was getting smarter.
One day in EB Games I saw a DVD case with the title Sorcerer Hunters. What the hell. That's all I needed to see. Two cartoon women better looking than I had ever thought was possible. They weren't catwoman, they weren't Hello Nurse, they were better. At second glance I saw their eyes and knew that it was a Japanese cartoon, what was called anime. I, at first thought it was ridiculous, but I was intrigued. What kind of cartoon had people that looked like this in it? What could it possibly be about?
Either way, time went by, it was nearing summer and I was watching animaniacs or something. A commercial for cartoon network came on (which often happened) and I saw them advertising something called Tenchi Muyo on Adult Swim. There were people teleporting, shooting lasers, sword fighting, wow, I made up my mind. I needed to watch Tenchi Muyo!
So, summer vacation hit and I took a trip to the states where I could finally see Cartoon Network. There it was, Tenchi Muyo. I was lucky enough that the first two episodes I saw (and only two on that trip) were the first two episodes of the OVA. I was blown away. Episodes of consecutive content were almost unheard of with the cartoons I had been watching up till then. The plot was deep, the characters were vibrant, complex, and interesting. I had never seen anything like this before.
When I got back home I got on the net (dialup, wooo) and searched for Tenchi Muyo. I read all the episode summaries, all the back stories, looked up wallpapers and everything. My very first MP3 (and prompter of my Winamp download) was the background music of the Tenchi website I was using for info. I joined a message board (my first!) and spent ages discussing this anime that I had only seen two episodes of (but knew more than the full series of content of). I eventually found a streaming video website (Vivo Active Powerplayer, the original video streamer) that I could watch Tenchi Muyo on. I watched all the Tenchi episodes I could possibly watch on my dialup connection.
Tenchi lead to other Cartoon Network gems like DBZ. Now that I was watching DBZ, that lead into Sailor Moon (yep... before school in the morning Sailor Moon was on... so.... yep...). The Tenchi message board introduced me to many different anime series. I stayed with that community for a whopping 3 years! Over that time I made my first internet friends and got ICQ (the legend lives!). Morpheus was a great way to get DBZ episodes and eventually Animesuki's bittorrent tracker opened a whole new chapter of anime to me.
There was a brief stint with DirectConnect, that was great for anime back in the day. I got into Star Ocean which lead into Star Ocean RPG for PS, then into even more SNES classics I had missed.
I got every anime related SNES game I could get my hands on and eventually I became the connoisseur you all know today.
Da da daaaaaaaaa.