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Opinion Personal

Charting a Course

How deep into the anime fandom would you say you’ve delved? If I really push it, I can trace my fandom back to somewhere in the mid 1990’s, when Sailor Moon and Akira were first popular in the US, and perhaps even earlier to when a friend of mine commented that my character doodles looked like “Japanese cartoons” – it turned out it was mimicking some of the designs from one of several anime that had been wiped of Japanese culture for the consumption of American kids on Nickelodeon. While I know that anime had a minor presence in the West even prior to that, the era of anime alongside Saturday morning cartoons really marked a big jump in its fandom cache. I don’t say all this to imply that I’m somehow “more” of an anime fan than any particular person, I just want to point out that I have the benefit of time and exposure to a lot of series that have since become much less available to newer fans.