I like how you say 'exposed' as though anime were some kind of virus or contagion. Very fitting
First time I saw anime was 1997. One of the first episodes of Dragonball Z came on late at night on Cartoon Network. I thought it was just another new show they had and it seemed cool so I started watching it. Piccolo best girl. Cartoon Network started showing more new shows that all had the same general art style, which is why I took notice of them. Not because I particularly liked that style but because I found it unusual for so many different cartoons to look so similar without coming from the same studio, like Hannah-Barbera cartoons did. The two anime that I recall most clearly were Tenchi Muyo and Ultimate Muscle.
Ultimate Muscle was a dumb show about alien professional wrestlers, and I watched it because it was like a goofier version of Dragonball Z. It has a pretty cool opening song, too. Tenchi Muyo was very different. It was about some high school kid and one day two alien women show up, one trying to escape the other, and they both end up living in this kid's house. One of the aliens was called Ryoko and she was the first cartoon woman I ever remember thinking was pretty. Every episode after that, a new alien woman would arrive at the house and start living with Tenchi, and I never really understood what the **** the show even was. Then I missed about two episodes and when I returned some of them were dead or gone or something and they were all in space and Ryoko was evil or something. I completely lost the thread of it all and just gave up. Turns out Tenchi Muyo falls under the umbrella of 'harem anime' so it's fun thinking that Cartoon Network showed such a thing to me when I was seven.
Pokémon came along after that and I watched it because everyone watched it. Pokémon was, to quote the kids', "the ****" and if you didn't watch the show you basically got bullied in school. So it was more or less required viewing, and I ****ing hated it. The Pokémon anime is so bad. Ash is such an unlikeable little ****, he's so goddamn bad at being a trainer, and it wasn't even funny like Dragonball Z or Ultimate Muscle were. I hated Pokémon and when the craze for the series was done I promptly never watched it ever again.
I think this is where the seed of my general dislike of anime stems from. Tenchi was meandering and impossible to comprehend if you missed anything at all, and Pokémon was boring, stuffed with filler, and often tried way too hard to be profound or emotional without doing any leg work to actually deliver. Because these shows all looked so similar in terms of art, I became wary of any anime. There was also the fact that most anime available to me was the likes of Yu-Gi-Oh, Digimon (sorry Spirit), and Beyblade which all nakedly served to sell toys and card games I absolutely had no interest in ever touching. Anime was just some dumb, weird type of cartoon that existed to sell crap toys and games.
The only show I remember from that time that wasn't associated with a toy (at least, not to my knowledge) was CardCaptors, which I only watched a few episodes of, but for whatever reason I still recall one about The Loop card, in which the characters end up running down the same street over and over without ever reaching the end. Again, it was weird and spent a lot of time on flashy effects and I much preferred things like Courage the Cowardly Dog or Ed, Edd, n Eddy. I gave shows like Big O, Shin Chan, and Mobile Suit Gundam a chance but I don't think I ever saw more than two episodes of any of them.
In my teens a friend lent some DVDs to me of Escaflowne, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Cowboy Bebop. I watched maybe half of Bebop and didn't like it at all, and I gave them all back without even watching the other two. At some point, I don't recall exactly when, I watched Akira and thought the first half was fine, but the second half dropped off a ****ing cliff. Dragonball was decent, but Dragonball GT was really bad, and I'd even stopped watching Dragonball Z by the time Buu was turning people into chocolate. I saw some of One Piece, didn't like it, and made a point of avoiding Naruto and Bleach when they were big. I had made up my mind. Anime bad.
I still mainly think of anime as 'all flash, no substance' and I would say that I generally don't like it. It's rare that I see an anime which actually earns any of its emotional payoffs, or even tells a coherent story a lot of the time. Many of the common tropes are cringey and I think the main appeal of most of it is purely in the artwork, which isn't a selling point if you don't think 'anime' is a particularly good style.
In recent years, though, I have softened somewhat and opened myself up to the idea that each anime should be judged on its own merits and not as some ubiquitous whole. In that spirit I actually went to a cinema screening of Perfect Blue a couple of Halloweens ago. And it was great. It's a really good movie that made me feel uncomfortable and I would recommend it.
But yeah, that's the end of my 'It's 4am and I feel alone so I'm going to type a lot' autobiography. Keep it strong, ZD
