From local televison!
There's a lot Japanese show include anime and tokusatsu since 90's in Indonesia.
Up until 5 years ago, you could find your monday morning full of anime such as Case Closed, Pokemon, One Piece, Chibi Maruko-chan, Digimon, Rurouni Kenshin, Doraemon , Gegege no Kitaro, Crayon Shin-chan, and more random anime.
On 3 AM you can find shows such as Kiba, Death Note, Eureka Seven, Gintama.
Approx. 300 titles of anime already aired my country.
Well, that's my story.
A friend I used to speak to kept pushing me to try watching a specific show.
This was before I had really had any exposure to anime at all, I was certain I would hate it but I thought I'd at least try it for him.
Anyway I ended up watching the entirety of bleach, all 360 something episodes, and while I thought bleach could be better, it didn't take long to find something I really enjoyed.
And so I've been watching ever since.
Old school toonami.
A close friend of mine had a cousin whom watched anime that recommended him Death Note, he really enjoyed it and recommended it to us skeptics in our clique. Most of us enjoyed it, including me. I dropped it after the 2nd (out of 3) arcs and started watching Ergo Proxy instead which I really enjoyed, then I just started seeking out new anime to watch. Never really thought myself to be someone watching anime or be into that sort of thing, nor did anyone of my friends. We all really like anime, although few would probably suspect it. They used to send anime late at night on television here too, I thought it was interesting but never got into it at that point.
Oh dear, I didn't think I would end up rambling like this. Please excuse my wall of text.
My, my. I had totally forgotten about this over the past few days. Like I said in the OP, I grew up in a house that had satellite TV. I was not a very social child. I was always either in in front of the TV or deep in a book. Cartoon Network played re-runs of things like Voltron and Speed Racer, those were probably my first taste of anime. I was coming home from first grade one day in 1998 or so. Back then, we had a big Sony Trinitron sitting on top of this ancient wood-paneled behemoth of a console TV in the basement at my grandma's house. I would usually run down to the basement and hang out down there until I fell asleep on the pullout couch. But that day, something caught my eye. That something was Dragon Ball Z. Now, I had watched a fair bit of Pokemon, but this was something different. It took me by complete surprise. Fast forward a few years and I was running as fast as my little asthmatic body could take me so I could get home early enough to catch the latter half of a Sailor Moon episode before DBZ came on. Then, I would stay up late to watch Gundam Wing. We moved to a new house in 2001. That meant a new neighborhood with a new school full of new kids. I wasn't very social before, and I was even less social then. Late 2001 struck a chord for me when Adult Swim started airing. We were still pretty new in that house. I didn't even have a bed yet, so I slept on the couch in the living room. The only things in that living room were said couch and a TV much smaller than the one from my grandma's basement. If I wanted to stay up late, I had to park myself right in front of it. That was the first time I had heard the word anime. When I saw Cowboy Bebop for the first time, I knew it was something different. For the first few months, that was a sort of ritual of mine; making sure my mom and my sister were asleep, grabbing some snacks as stealthily as I could, and watching Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Yu Yu Hakusho, and everything else that Adult Swim and TechTV's Anime Unleashed had to offer. In 2003, I met my best friend in sixth grade. We bonded in an English class. The teacher would bring in books every so often to add to the class library. She'd hold the new book up in front of the class and say something about it. The book that brought us together was the first volume of Rave Master. That would launch me into my first taste of otaku culture, but would also set me off to be pretty obnoxious for a few years. I even joined an anime club, though it was a club in name only. Me and three other people would meet in the library after school and pass around a Shonen Jump, play Yu Gi Oh, and talk about games. It got disbanded after a few weeks after someone's deck got stolen. Between high school and college I took a gap year. I became very depressed and did not leave the house or socialize very much. That's when I started watching anime as it was airing, the first of which was K-On!. I would continue to consume anime throughout college. And that leads me to now, where I've been sitting around for a few months. I'm typically a season or two behind, barring a few shows that really catch my attention. Watching anime is one of the few things that brings me genuine enjoyment.
My uncle made me watch howls moving castle after I called him a anime nerd... Im now a anime nerd.
Warning: This is literally like a life story.
Ah, the question. The question that's so small yet can always mean so much. "How did you get into anime". Well, in my case, it was from my family.
I had never really been close to my sister growing up, and I'm even further away now. But despite getting angry at her for always hogging the old Windows XP computer, there's one thing I loved about her. I loved it when I came home just to see her watching some magical girls anime on the computer. I could've been angry since 7 year old Jebbika wanted to play Club Penguin, but instead I was always mesmerized by the cute frilly dresses and the cheesy phrases the characters would say behind the screen.
I could never really understand what they were saying, since my sister mostly watched subtitles. I remember rushing home from school, dumping my bag and running to get a chair to watch the newest anime my sister was watching.
I remember one of the animes I couldn't keep up with, Mew Mew Tokyo, or how I said it was Tokyuo Mew Mew. When the dub finally came out, me and my sister rushed to the sofa to watch it on TV. I could finally understand the anime- Well, part of it anyway.
This routine continued until I was about 10. I wasn't allowed to watch my own anime, I could only watch it after my sister had. I kind of understand now. I mean, at the time I might've ran into School Days.
That'd be bad.
I wasn't crazy for anime, but I enjoyed it.
It wasn't until I no longer lived with my sister that I really got into anime.
Well that's it. When my sister left I was old enough to binge watch my own anime and so I fell into a deep dark hole that I could never climb out of because I'm weak and feeble.
Whatched Ghibli as a kid, but that didn't really push me into the eternal abyss that is weeaboosim.
That happened in about 6th or 7th grade when a friend introduced me to Soul Eater, it was medicore but it sparked a curiousity that led to where I am today.
I watched Devil May Cry on TV and absolutely loved the show and it sparked my interest in drawing manga, not that I draw anymore since I became busy with other things and ended up dropping it.
After that I was recommended Full Metal Alchemist and Death Note from a good friend and it just left me craving more! and thus, I became a loner locked up in my room watching anime and playing games and no longer socializing with the real world.
Anime was a BIG thing back here in hueco mundo back in the 90s. Mostly shonen and mecha shows, but they also aired early Miyazaki stuff, Heidi and Candy Candy. Me and a couple old friends grew up watching Sailor Moon and Sakura Card Captors and are not the least bit ashamed to admit it.
My mother bought for me a VHS of Mazinger Z and she would haver never knew the impact of that anime in my entire life. I watched a lot of cartoons but this I thought it was a cartoon but oh!, the violence the animation the story was so good and different that it really impact me.
