I don’t think a lot of younger Tumblr users understand what life during the anime boom was like in 1999-2007. How accessible anime was at the time. It was fucking everywhere. It wasn’t even a niche, literally everyone was into it.
Like, Cartoon Network showed stuff like YuYu Hakusho, .hack//sign, Gundam Wing, Outlaw Star, Tenchi Muyo, and Rurouni Kenshin every weekday after school on their Toonami block.
I remember rushing home after school in second grade to watch Rurouni Kenshin. That was 7 year old me’s favorite show.
You think Pokemon is popular now? HA! In the late 90′s, it was every parent’s worst nightmare. It was on the cover of Time Magazine for fucks’s sake. EVERY kid was obsessed with it. No exceptions. At least, until Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh came around…
You could wake up on Saturday mornings and watch highly Americanized butchered versions of Shaman King, Tokyo Mew Mew (”Mew Mew Power”), and most infamously, One Piece thanks to 4kids.
An anime getting an extremely butchered Americanized dub was a very real, legitimate threat that could happen to any show.
Staying up late enough to watch Inuyasha was considered a rite of passage.
Teenage girls flocked to Barnes and Noble to read entire volumes of Fruits Basket and Fushigi Yuugi in the store without paying for them.
All of the kids cartoons tried to cash in on the craze. I’m sure everyone remembers Avatar and Teen Titans, but trust me when I say that you DON’T want to remember Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi and Kappa Mikey.
Hayao Miyazaki won an Academy Award.
Final Fantasy VII was considered the greatest video game ever made.
Some people still called it “Japanimation”.
So many fucking magazines. Off the top of my head: Animerica, Shonen Jump, Shojo Beat, Newtype USA (the best one by far), Anime Insider, Beckett Anime, and Beckett Anime For Girls (The most cringeworthy one. Of course I had every issue!)
Anime was freaking everywhere. The entire country was in its weeb phase. Some people on this website are too young to even remember this.
Teenage girls flocked to Barnes and Noble to read entire volumes of Fruits Basket and Fushigi Yuugi in the store without paying for them.
I am personally attacked
I am thirty-six years old. I graduated high school in 2000.
My siblings and I have matching Fushigi Yuugi tattoos.
It was… a time.
OH GOD FY HOLY SHIT FY
Animax was super popular in India in ye olde 2006, and it was before India became a pussy nation and started censoring TV left right and centre. At the time… all animated media, regardless of the content in it… was rated U by default. This meant that it would air with NO CONTENT WARNINGS.
Imagine 11 year old me’s shock on seeing tits, ass, shirtless bishies, and rape as plot device like every episode. For a sixth grader that shit is practically pornographic. It was the most sexually graphic thing I had ever witnessed in my entire life at the time.
And even though I hated all the characters except Soi (I hated the fact she was in so many explicit scenes, but I felt sorry for her otherwise), Chichiri, Keisuke, and Tetsuya (and absolutely loathed Tamahome with the intensity of a thousand suns), was facepalming at the levels of Idiot Plot even at THAT age, and knew that there was going to be at least one steamy scene that would make me want to gouge my eyes out… I couldn’t stop watching.
It was like being on a roller-coaster ride that you hated, but at the same time didn’t want to get off because you wanted to see it until the end.
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