Category: 30 Day Anime Challenge

Now that I’m back from my vacation (and through a tough and busy work week), it’s time to continue where I left off with this thought-provoking blogging challenge! Just a note: I might be over-cautious, but I believe some of my statements might give the impression that I just don’t like male characters, which is wrong. I do, however, appreciate certain character traits more than others, which is the point I’m trying to get across.

Picking a favorite male anime character is almost as difficult as picking a favorite anime series, but maybe not for the reasons you might be thinking. Despite believing that even anime aimed at kids and teenagers can and does have appeal to fans who are older, I realized long ago that I’ve aged-out of being able to directly relate to the experiences of most anime characters, especially the typical teenage boys who seem to comprise the majority of anime protagonists. It’s certainly not a dig against teenage boys in general, but I can tell you that I’ve seen more than enough artful musings on male adolescence (or raunchy depictions thereof) to the point that the typical shounen character has kind of lost my interest. That already leaves me with a drastically reduced field of characters from which to choose. Add to that the fact that anime character behavior tends to be very archetypical in the first place, and you have an identity conundrum on your hands.

I’ve mentioned the term “toxic masculinity” before on this website. A rough definition of the term is the tendency in our society to encourage boys and men to behave in a very limited way which fits into a misguided masculine ideal, which then has harmful downstream effects to the aforementioned boys and men, as well as to girls, women, and others with whom they associate. Some examples of this issue are the idea that boys and men aren’t supposed to demonstrate certain behaviors or emotions, especially those that are more associated with femininity – crying a lot (or at all), being physically close with one-another – or the idea that boys and men can’t enjoy certain activities that are seen as “weak” or feminine – cooking, doing housework, taking care of children… making this list is just reminding me how screwed-up it is to assign gender to any activities, ugh. We commonly as a society value the expression of aggressive behavior in men and hold these as examples of how to accomplish things in our world – take charge, be a “boss,” get that raise, make decisions, battle it out (physically or otherwise) with people “competing” for resources, “protect” and dominate women, be a “hero.” These are the stereotypes that tend to make it into our mass media. There are some men (and women!) who naturally embody these ideals, and someone who can “take charge” is not necessarily doing anything wrong by stepping into a leadership role. But to many men and women, idealized gender roles can be a prison for their true selves which more than likely exist somewhere else on the spectrum of various human behaviors.

The issue that anime, as well as every other type of popular media, has is that it’s a product of the culture from which it arises (and I’m not trying to say this is just a Japanese cultural problem – it’s everywhere). Human culture has some pretty strong ideas about the boxes into which men and women should fit, and while there’s consistent progress in more egalitarian directions to various degrees, we still have issues with glorifying certain gender expressions, especially some of those toxic and destructive ones. Just look at how many anime are focused around dudes beating the crap out of their opponents, winning tournaments, and dominating one-another. Sometimes there are also women in these shows, but often their choice is to either play support staff, be sexy/available, or participate by adopting the overblown toxic masculinity of their male counterparts. This isn’t universal, but a lot of times when you mention “anime” to someone, this is the type of material that comes to mind. The iconic “sex and violence” descriptor that has haunted anime since they heyday of violent OVAs in the West is enduring in the public consciousness.

I’ve been heartened, though, by a recent trend more towards male anime protagonists who have helped to embody a softer, gentler side of masculinity. We re-watched the relatively-recent shoujo fantasy series Snow White With the Red Hair in my local anime club, and while I had watched it before it was this time around that gave me some more concrete thoughts on why I liked it so much more than many shoujo romances I had seen in the past. I was heartened by the portrayal of Prince Zen, the primary romantic interest and male lead. He’s certainly a typical hero on paper – a wealthy, attractive prince who excels in swordplay and smarts, and helps lead his country and make big decisions. What I found very fascinating about Zen, though, is that he’s also a character who puts a high value on things like friendship, kindness, and personal freedom. He wants to help others excel and provides avenues for them to do so, even if typical class barriers would normally preclude these people from . He’s gentle and kind. And, perhaps more importantly, he seeks consent on more than one occasion when he wants to kiss Shirayuki, the main character. Sure, he’s not perfect; Zen tends to be rash and misinterpret situations, which gets him into trouble more than once throughout the series. But compared to many male anime characters he’s definitely an example of a type I’d like to see featured more widely.

I tend to be a fan of male characters who are what I’d describe as “dad” characters – more mature, good-natured, nurturing and kind to others. The type of characters that remind me of my husband and some of the other male acquaintances in my life. Makoto Tachibana from Free! or Asahi Azumane from Haikyu!! are good examples of what I’m talking about.  Sora Kashiwagi from How to Keep a Mummy, who takes on a pseudo-parental role with the supernatural creatures who surround him and also helps his friends learn to love magical beasts is another great example of what I’m attempting to describe. They’re the type of characters who I would feel pretty okay with putting in the same ballpark as Fred Rogers and all share a kind of paternal quality which gives me a really warm, positive feeling towards the series they inhabit, even if some of those series are otherwise based around hot-blooded competition.

When it comes to my favorite male anime character, though, I have to say that my choice is slightly more complicated than the person just being sweet or “dad-like.” I think one of the best things that anime and other types of storytelling can do is to provide insight into the lives of people who are different from us. Even better, they can also often provide ways to understand our inner selves better and work through our feelings. I think my pick for this topic manages to embody those ideas quite well.

It was nearly ten years ago when I watched the first season of Natsume’s Book of Friends, the story of a teenage boy, Takashi Natsume, who is able to see spirits. While it’s easy to see why this could be considered a talent, for Takashi his ability has resulted in nothing but strife. Many of the spirits seem malevolent because Takashi is the grandson of Reiko, a person who is said to have tricked various spirits into serving her and then died young without releasing them from their service. In the opening episode of the series, we join Takashi as he’s being chased once again by a spirit who mistakes him for Reiko (spirits are very long-lived and don’t have many interactions with humans – humans from the same bloodline seem very similar to them). The sequence is very stressful and we feel Takashi’s terror. It isn’t until the second half, after Takashi learns how to return its name back to the spirit, that the series starts to reveal its true colors. As he breathes his life force into the appropriate page of the Book of Friends, there’s a flashback to the spirit’s interactions with Reiko, as well as its profound loneliness when Reiko never returns. Here a connection is made, and just as Takashi does, we gain empathy toward the creature and its fruitless search for its lost master.

I love the series itself for these moments, and the first episode already had me in tears. But it’s really Takashi’s personal story that makes me feel emotionally-attached to this anime. Takashi’s special talent caused him to be ostracized from the various family members who took him in following the deaths of his parents. He was housed grudgingly by most of them, his strange outbursts and fearfulness towards things that weren’t visible to others causing him to be seen as a troublemaker or incurably strange. While his treatment during these years isn’t what most people would deem abusive, at best I feel that his relatives’ disinterest in providing him with a loving environment constitutes neglect; at worst, possibly emotional abuse. When he’s finally adopted by the Fujiwaras (technically very distant relatives related to his grandmother), it takes him a profoundly long amount of time to open up towards them. They are incredibly kind people, but Takashi’s low self-worth and past experiences make him wary about getting too attached. While Takashi’s quest to empty the Book of Friends constitutes a large narrative part of the series, it’s his emotional development as a person that makes the series interesting and special.

I also really like Takashi in a deeper kind of way related to some of my personal experiences that I’ll try to explain a bit. I read a book a while back when I was going through a tough time that discussed the behavior of abusive men and why they chose to act that way (the book is “Why Does He Do That?” by Lundy Bancroft, in case you’re interested in checking it out). In the book, the author dismantles the myth that unfortunately many people believe, which is that because some men are abused, they’re then doomed to repeat the cycle in their own relationships*. Not only does that remove accountability from the abuser, it serves to excuse their behavior somewhat and shift the blame to the victim, who in the eyes of some may not be doing enough to quell the abuser’s rage. The act of abuse, whether physical or emotional, is always a choice on the part of the abuser, and not the fault of the abused. It’s also true that, while some abusers use their personal history as an excuse, there are many other individuals with similar upbringings who use that upbringing as motivation to become someone different, who doesn’t reach towards abusive behavior to try to control the world around them. The big reason why I love Takashi so much is that, while the scars from his earlier childhood are obvious, he never uses them as an excuse to hurt. His experiences have instead helped him to build empathy with others, including the spirits whose situations he’s looking to fix, as well as with the grandmother who he only knows through brief flashbacks and very minimal evidence. There is something very comforting to me about the person that Takashi is, as well as who he chooses to become as he learns and grows throughout the series’ six seasons.

Takashi is not perfectly serene in his convictions and he’s certainly not shy to show his frustrations, especially with Nyanko-Sensei/Madara’s antics or the incomprehensible ways in which some of the local spirits act, but I think the fact that he yells and gets a little mad sometimes endears him to me even further. All of us get angry and frustrated sometimes, and to ignore that for the sake of peacefulness would be unrealistic. What makes Takashi a great character is that he doesn’t take his frustrations and weaponize them in ways that puts others down or causes pain. He instead gets motivated to solve the mystery of the moment, or learn more how he can help those around him.

If I had to pick one of the character’s faults to talk about, it would be the issue that Takashi has with trusting other people. Growing up, there was no assurance that the family members dealing with his presence at any particular moment would be the same ones taking care of him long term, so on the flip side Takashi doesn’t always start off giving a lot of consideration to the feelings of his current caretakers and friends. This manifests mostly when he goes off for hours dealing with spiritual situations without giving his family a heads-up that he’ll be away and they become worried. It’s hard work on his part, but as the series goes along he learns to have faith in his family, makes friends with people whose situations are more similar to his than he might have guessed, and starts to become a more considerate person. It’s possibly a little more than one would bargain for when checking out a cute series with quirky magical creatures, but it really speaks well to the heart and soul of the story. The focus on love, family, and repairing broken bonds definitely helps make Takashi’s character arc very compelling. I’m thankful that I was an anime fan at the right time to be able to watch his tale unfold.

So, who are your favorite male characters in anime? Do you agree with me, or are there other traits that really draw you into someone’s story? Let me know in the comments!

*The book references abusive men for the most part. I understand fully that not only men are abusers and the book acknowledges this fact, but the author’s experience working with abusers has revealed that the proportion of abusive men is much higher than that of abusive women, which is why I’ve kept the gender distinction here. Yes, I know, “Not All Men…” etc. Don’t come after me.

Once I feel comfortable around someone, I usually start letting things slip about my anime-related activities. In my day-to-day life I’m usually preparing to attend or coming back from an anime convention or some anime-related event, so it’s difficult to avoid revealing the nature of my activities if someone happens to ask what I’m doing over the weekend or if I have any vacations coming up. Once I reveal myself, If they’re familiar with anime at all often times they’ll ask me what my favorite anime is.

Do you know how difficult it is for me to answer that question?

I’ve been in the anime fandom a long time – more than twenty years, at least. In that time I’ve watched all or part of more anime than I can count (and my MAL and Kitsu profiles are not complete or up-to-date, so don’t go looking there for answers). If my watch-list were smaller, it might be possible to narrow it down to one clear favorite. As it stands, though, there are so many anime out there that I love for different reasons and my feelings about them change and re-form as I continue to journey through life. Below are just a few of my top selections, as well as some reasons why I fell in love with them. I’ve linked to their streaming location when available, and to their ANN Encyclopedia entry if they’re not.

Nichijou: My Ordinary Life – Anime comedies are really hit-or-miss with me. I tend to like a little bit of physical comedy mixed with some absurdity, and I find that the majority of anime comedies are either straight-up slapstick, extremely culture-specific, or just downright mean-spirited or fanservice-y to the point where I feel too bad about how the characters are treated to laugh at the gags. It seems like my “best fit” anime comedies are slice-of-life series that have some element of humor, or comedies whose humor are based on their strangeness or comic timing. I was a big fan of Azumanga Daioh way back in the day (it was one of the first digital fansubs I sought out when I got a decent internet connection, as well as one of the first anime boxed-sets I bought when it became available officially), and for a long time it felt like it was really the pinnacle of the anime comedy genre for me. It didn’t help that it was one of the first shows to feature a group of high school girls doing nothing in particular and thus spawned a ton of inferior copycats in the years following. Despite some elements that, in hindsight, were really problematic (the creepy male teacher, in particular), I still held onto very fond memories of the show.

Nichijou showed up in 2011, and it was only then that I felt like Azumanga had been supplanted in my heart as my favorite anime comedy. The show hits all of my buttons in the best possible way. It’s got moments that are incredibly absurd – an early favorite that people might be familiar with through memes or fandom osmosis is when Yuuko witnesses the school principal wrestling a wayward deer in the courtyard and then decides that no one would possibly believe what she just saw. At its core, though, it’s also a very weird story of different people learning to celebrate their own eccentricities and develop friendships with people whose personalities are often at odds with their own. There are probably some people out there who would advise me not to take a comedy anime so seriously, but the series causes me to feel much more than just the urge to laugh or the desire to get pumped-up over the great animation. It’s the human part of the show that really makes it stand out.

Mononoke – I fell in love with Mononoke the first time I laid eyes on it, though at the time I couldn’t have explained just why. The series came out right around when I was starting to get really serious about my anime fandom, and with its unique look and very Japanese aesthetic, it felt like a serious piece of art. I had one very bad experience trying to share that art with some friends at the time, though, and not having the words to respond to their criticisms, I kept my love to myself for a long time. It wasn’t until I was poking around YouTube several years later and found someone’s review of the series that I finally realized what it was about the show that touched me so deeply. The review was quite critical, identifying that all of the stories in the show seemed to hinge on the women in them suffering. It then dawned on me that the reviewer was sort-of half correct in their assessment, but I was interpreting things from a drastically different angle.

The premise of Mononoke is that the main character, the Medicine Seller, travels across Japan and uses his mysterious powers to exorcise malignant spiritual presences. He can only do so, however, after identifying the creature’s origins – origins which are never as straightforward as they may seem. Through investigation (and often also interrogation), the Medicine Seller gets people to reveal the circumstances that likely caused the mononoke to manifest. In all cases, the hauntings are the result of some injustice being committed against a woman, and often while the woman has been acting in some role that society has forced her to perform.

I was having a conversation with someone about the series recently, and we both agreed that “Bakeneko,” the original story arc which was actually a part of another anthology series called Ayakashi – Samurai Horror Tales is probably the “best” out of the series; it’s a classic sort of he-said-she-said story in which the man imagines that the woman he brought home came somewhat willingly, when in reality she was kidnapped by him, raped, and then starved herself in captivity, thus releasing her anger as a mononoke. Other story arcs deal with forced abortions in a brother, men fighting over the right to marry a woman because of her connection to a powerful family heirloom, and a sister who sacrifices herself in place of her brother (and the brother who goes on to act as though he is somehow virtuous). My favorite story arc, however, is called “Noppera-Bou” or “Faceless One,” in which a woman, who is accused of murdering her husband and his family, spends her entire life denying her own sense of self so that she can marry into a rich family for the sake of her gold-digging, status-hungry mother. In that case, the mononoke is revealed to be the woman herself, who in actuality has only “murdered” her own identity. I didn’t realize it at the time I first watched it, exactly, but that story in particular ended up being almost too relateable to my own life – it’s no wonder it made me break down in tears every time. I love the show for its ability to capture those feelings through beautiful and profound imagery. I hope maybe that reviewer will be able to take a second look sometime.

Kaiba – It’s not a secret that I love director Masaaki Yuasa’s work, and honestly I could have put anything he’s directed on this list. But if not for Kaiba, I’m not sure I would have been aware that he existed, so that’s why I chose to feature it here.

Kaiba is from the same general time period as Mononoke, a time when I personally was searching for general uniqueness in my anime entertainment. I’m more aware now that just because something looks different doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good or special, but to be honest it often means that some amount of care and planning was put into making it stand out and appear original and in many cases that can translate into how good or cohesive the series feels as a whole package. Kaiba is definitely visually-unique from its anime contemporaries. It has the look of an old Osamu Tezuka property, with its sort of cutesy, cartoonish character designs. One thing I’ll never forget is that in the ANN forum discussion thread for the series, one *very intelligent person* (*cough*) remarked that they didn’t believe the series should be classified as an anime, since it didn’t “look like an anime.” Okay. As is Yuasa’s way, the look of the characters was intentional on his part, mainly to avoid the audience developing preconceived notions about the characters. This was in part because the moé craze was coming into full effect at that time, and defining character types by their specific looks was starting to become a nuisance (nowadays I think we’ve just accepted it as a thing that exists and are okay with characters being developed in their own ways, but back then it was very annoying to many people). The other reason really has to do with the core of the story, which deals with whether or not the shape of one’s body defines the essence of one’s self.

The show takes place in some distant future where people store their memories and personalities on little storage chips that can be moved from body to body; as long as the chips are intact, that person could be “alive” indefinitely. The main character is someone who’s had his memories erased and is left with very few clues as to his identity. The first half of the series is episodic and helps to build the world and define the “rules” surrounding what people can and cannot do with their memory essence. It also reveals that, as one would expect, there’s a sharp class divide between people who can afford to switch bodies as they want, and people who can’t afford to store them in the first place and are priced out of immortality. The antagonist of the series belongs to a cult that shuns body-swapping all together, but who is hiding the shame of having transferred himself from his sickly childhood body to a more robust one, all at the cost of his mother’s physical existence. That’s a lot to take in, but in addition to all that there’s also a very compelling love story to pull the various threads together. I’m not certain I’d call this series Yuasa’s “best,” as it has some problems with pacing near the end and a lot of things are easily-missed. But it opened the door for me to experience his other projects and I am definitely a better anime fan for it.

Revolutionary Girl Utena – It honestly wouldn’t be a list of my favorite anime without including Revolutionary Girl Utena.

I’ve had an extremely lucky anime fandom life. I’ve loved anime for a long time, but a problem I had in my earlier years was getting access to watch more than a little of it. We didn’t have Cartoon Network in our cable package during the early Toonami days, so I missed out on a lot of what other anime fans had seen during my high school days. I also didn’t get into the VHS fansub scene until that was starting to go out of style. I did, however, start college in the early 2000’s, and in doing so happened to discover the existence of the University’s anime club. The first semester I started attending the club, they were watching Revolutionary Girl Utena. I’d shown up three or four weeks into the semester, though, so I had literally no idea what was going on in this weird, ritualistic pseudo-magical-girl rose-covered drug trip. Luckily my mind was blown in the most wonderful of ways. Even luckier, a friend in my Japanese class owned the first set of DVDs and loaned them to me so I could catch up in time for the next meeting. Over the course of the rest of the year, I soaked up the show in any way I could. I suffered along with the rest of the anime club through a set of VHS fansubs of the Black Rose Arc that buzzed every couple of seconds. I stomped my feet with everyone to the beat of “Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku.” And I gasped in shared shock at many of the revelations near the end of the series. Utena is profoundly unique in so many ways, and that first watch-through taught me that anime could be more than just fun and action-packed; it could also be art.

It wasn’t until later viewings that I began to realize just how much depth of meaning there was to the story, though. I’m not even talking about a lot of the visual symbolism throughout the series, though that too is worth the price of admission and will reveal to you a bit more insight into the show every time you watch it. What became clear to me, and what I (unfortunately?) related to much more on subsequent viewings, is how accurately the series portrays the situation of an assault and abuse survivor. I imagine that I’ll be talking a lot more about this show in particular as I plow through these daily topics, so I’ll refrain from going into much more detail than that. But for how much the show is lauded for its critical look at gender roles (as it should be), for me its story of a person leaving a life of sexual abuse is so resonant. There’s really nothing else like it in anime, as far as I have seen.

Den-noh Coil – I wanted to end this post with the series that I usually mention when someone presses me to pick just one anime series as my favorite. It’s not really the most artful series on this list, nor would I say it’s the “deepest.” It’s also got some pacing issues in its second half and an antagonist that I’ve never felt was developed very well. As a whole package, though, this series alone has managed to combine so many specific things that I love into one very wonderful, cohesive story, and so it’s always had a very special place in my heart despite its few flaws.

Den-noh Coil is still surprisingly timely, despite having come out more than ten years ago (and been in development for several years prior to that, from my understanding). In its near-future setting, the characters utilize special glasses that interface with an augmented-reality system. This system is used for many functional purposes, like sending emails or accessing the web, but is also used to interact with virtual pets and other items that don’t have any physical presence. The characters are mostly children whose lives are permeated by the activities they do within the virtual world. Much of the story revolves around the urban legends they have about supposed obsolete spaces and mythical objects that might exist there. There’s also the very haunting idea that bad things might happen when one’s virtual presence becomes de-synched with one’s physical body.

Besides the obvious comparison to the defunct “Google Glass” and the fact that augmented reality using smartphones is currently beginning to come into fashion, the show also sort of correctly speculates about the existence of self-navigating vehicle systems (in fact, a main plot point in the show is that one of these systems malfunctioned and there’s been a subsequent cover up because of the resulting accident), as well as the strong bonds that can be formed between human beings and non-physical entities. In this case those entities are cute virtual pets, one of the primary reasons why I think the series hit me, an animal lover, as deeply as it has. There’s a point in the series where one of the protagonists is left to mourn the “death” of her virtual pet, and her parent questions whether those feelings are real or worthwhile since the pet wasn’t “real” to begin with. I think my reaction to that speaks a lot to the time in which I came of age, because upon reaching that point in the series I realized that I’ve always had feelings for fictional characters (as in, I’ve related to their experiences and felt empathy for them), and those feelings are so incredibly real to me despite the fact that the characters are nothing more than people imagined in my mind from a book or viewed on a TV screen. I think it compliments how intense fandom culture has become that many people would tend to agree that those feelings are as valid as any others. Once I arrived there, that revelation moved me deeply and is a treasure that I continue to hold onto. Den-noh Coil is the rare series aimed at kids that actually seems to respect the fact that they have emotional and complicated internal lives. It’s something that I can recommend to most people without caveats, too. And, in a petty way, it’s a great series to have in my back pocket for responding to gatekeeping asshats – it’s a relatively obscure anime, so I can throw it out there and there’s a good chance they haven’t heard of it, and will then leave me alone!

There were so many other “runners-up” that I could have added to this list. Puella Magi Madoka Magica for its total reformulation of the magical girl genre. Princess Tutu for being a wonderful examination of fairy tales and a series that I came around to very late. From the New World for its harsh reflection on humanity’s ability to discriminate and hate, as well as its hopeful take on our ability to eventually learn the truth and try to do better. Natsume’s Book of Friends for its ability to demonstrate empathy and the bond between friends and family. There is so much wonderful anime out there that’s shaped my views as a person, that it’s literally impossible for me to pick just one above all others.

Does anyone else out there have this same issue, or do you have a clear favorite? Let me know in the comments, and I hope all of my praise might have gotten you interested in some of these great anime series!

Ever since stumbling into anime blogging many years ago, I’ve always been fascinated by writers who can keep up a regular posting schedule and not leave their blogs to languish for months on end. I tend to write when the mood strikes me, and sometimes I simply have trouble coming up with something useful to say. One tool that writers use to get their brain juices flowing are writing prompts; simple thoughts and challenges to get into a creative state of mind. Well, bloggers have plenty of prompt-lists too, and I’ve decided to try one! I’m not sure if I can keep to a one-a-day schedule (I’m already late a day, since I wanted to do this for the month of June…) but hopefully this will help keep my mind nimble and ready to write about all those other ideas that bounce in and out of my mind randomly.

As you can probably tell from the title of this post, prompt #1 is “What is the very first anime you watched?” For me this is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, because I grew up in a time when a lot of what we would call “anime” nowadays was repackaged for Western audiences and thoroughly scrubbed of anything that could identify it as Japanese. One of my favorite recent discoveries is that Inspector Gadget, which was one of my favorite TV shows as a kid, was animated by TMS in Japan and existed partly due to a proposed Lupin sequel series that had failed to materialize. Besides that, my past is sprinkled with half-memories of one-off TV broadcasts of movies like Galaxy Express 999 and some of the fairy tale collections that used to air on Nickelodeon, which I realized long after the fact were produced in Japan.

It wasn’t until I was in about third or fourth grade that I started to get a sense of what Japanese animation was and what it looked like due to, of all things, comments on my drawing style from some savvy friends who were somehow more in-the-know than I was (clearly my weeb instincts were developed even if I didn’t quite realize it yet). I was too young at the time to really participate in the anime fandom that I now realize did exist, at sci-fi conventions I couldn’t have attended as a solo kid. Also, the internet didn’t exist in anything close to the form it does now, so online fandom networking was completely out of the question. Strike three was that I didn’t live anywhere near the coasts where being exposed to foreign entertainment would have been much more likely as a matter of course. It wasn’t until I was in middle school in the mid-1990s that I can definitively say my knowledge of anime’s existence and my still-limited access to it allowed me to anticipate the US release of a series that is probably the “first anime” of many people my age – Sailor Moon. I have to give partial credit where it’s due – I’m pretty sure that TV Guide had a mention of the show in one of their articles, and I read that magazine every week since, as a geeky kid, TV was my life. Obviously once I actually watched the show, goofy English dub and edited episodes and all, it was love at first sight.

Sailor Moon appealed to me because it offered me something different and unique; it was a cartoon series made for girls that allowed its characters to have different personalities and interests in addition to their heroic exploits. This sometimes lead to personality conflicts (both comical and serious) but almost always demonstrated how individuals with differing sensibilities can still function as a team. Usagi, the protagonist (known as Serena in the original US release, yikes) was a complete disaster in many (most) life situations, but ultimately saved the world with her earnestness and pure heart. As someone who was kind of a disaster in adolescence, too, it was comforting to know, with examples, that even without performing very well in school or being the “perfect” friend I still had worth as a person. I also loved that the show’s various story arcs always contained romantic sub-plots in addition to the exciting monster-of-the-week action; in an age when the term “chick flick” was thrown around as a derogatory term and “strong female character” meant an emotionless male action hero painted over with a female body, it was empowering to see that experiencing and prioritizing love and relationships didn’t detract from the heroism of the characters. In fact, it often served as their motivation and source of strength. I feel very lucky to have been in the right place at the right time in my life for the show to affect me in the deep ways that it did. Judging by how many women my age seem to have similar feelings towards the show, I know it wasn’t an isolated phenomenon.

After being thunderstruck by Sailor Moon I became a devotee of The Sci-Fi Channel’s Saturday morning anime programming block, where they showed some really varied (and at times shockingly violent and risque) stuff like Robot Carnival, Akira, Project A-ko (both the surprisingly entertaining first movie and the later, weirder ones), and Dominion Tank Police. Eventually I became friends with other people my age who were into anime, the internet caught up with fandom (and then began facilitating and supplementing it), and now I can’t even keep up with the amount of anime I would like to watch that’s easily-available. I now consider myself a life-long anime fan, or at least for as long as anime is still being produced. But it was my lucky chance meeting with Sailor Moon in the wee hours of each weekday morning that gave me an inkling of the wonderful things I could seek out from animation from Japan, and it’s the memory of that early fandom passion that’s kept me devoted for so long.

How about you? What was your first anime? Let me know in the comments if you have any special memories you’re willing to share!