Do you consider people who only watched Toonami and AS anime back in the day to be anime fans? As in, if they watched Gundam Wing, Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Samurai Champloo, FMA, Big O, Eureka 7, Gundam Seed, FLCL, Kenshin, YYH but not much else but still liked them because they were anime, were they anime fans in the 2000s?
>>283591821sure, why not
>>283591821being fanatical has more to do with how you behave
>>283591821If you like anime, you're a fan. There's different types of anime fans.
>>283591874well for the longest time, I just assumed you could only consider yourself a fan in the 2000s if you downloaded fansubs, meaning I didn't really become a fan until like 2006 when I downloaded Haruhi. but back in the 90s there were a few shows I was watching on vhs, i even owned gundam wing and zoids toys in the early 2000s and owned a video game for gundam specifically because it was gundam lol
>>283591922the anime i watched on VHS were dubs but I think I watched the first few episodes of NGE it was like 1997 i think.
>>283591821Anime fan shouldn't be a thing more than movie fan or music fan is a thing. You should like select shows and pieces that speak to you.If anything identifying as an anime fan is a redflag that someone is stupid.
>>283591821what about Tenchi?
>>283591821watching dubshit as a kid is fine when your standards are lower, as an adult you should really be watching these either as subs or raws
>>283591821Yeah. This is how most people consumed anime before the internet was as big as it was. I would divide anime in the west into 4 eras. Each one getting bigger than the last and bringing in more normies.First was the VHS era. You have movies like Akira and Ninja Scroll, and fansubbed VHS tapes that were made from laser disc copies and passed around. Then you had the cable boom. Pokemon, DBZ, Yugioh, Digimon, Sailor Moon. Toonami and all the Adult Swim stuff you mentioned, all aired on TV. Third as the internet became a bigger thing and more people had access to broadband in the mid 2000s you started to see the fansub era, where people were downloading shows for the first time, and places like 4chan started to pick up. Shows like Haruhi, Lucky Star, K-On, ect. Also Bleach were huge at the same time as was Naruto. Both of those aired on cable. This is also when people actually started watching one peice, because what aired here on TV was that 4kids dub. Although there was a second dub by funamation that I remember watching on toonami that came much later.Speaking of dubs and subs this is when that whole debate started. Because you had people who had been watching all the cable dubs for years, and then newer fans who had just gotten into watching everything subbed when internet downloads became big. Then there was the 4th era, which we're in now. This started when streaming became big. Specifically crunchyroll. The shows that defined this era at it's start were SAO, Attack On Titan, MHA and that's continued growing with more and more normies pouring in. And you could say we had another huge boom during the pandemic with shows like JJK, Demon Slayer, Chainsaw Man. And I remember the first season of One Punch Man being huge.And I'm not just naming normie shows like they are the only things to watch. These are just what I remember being super popular at the time.
>>283593819>First was the VHS era. You have movies like Akira and Ninja Scroll, and fansubbed VHS tapes that were made from laser disc copies and passed around. Then you had the cable boom. Pokemon, DBZ, Yugioh, Digimon, Sailor Moon. Toonami and all the Adult Swim stuff you mentioned, all aired on TV.I never watched the fansub vhs stuff, but I did watch some non-english dubs of anime in the 90s. Mecha stuff. Not much of it but I'd have been introduced to anime without toonami or pokemon. The issue i feel insecure for only downloading subs from 2006, even though I knew slayers had subs on tv in 2003 or so
>>283592289Very true
>>283591821The majority of old /a/ before the 2016 invasion were toonamifags. Now it's just subhuman normgroid zoomers who have no respect for the culture, they are not people nor do I consider them fans. It's just consoom and move on to next popular thing. I hate social media so much it's unreal.
>>283591821Yea, kinda. To be a true anime fan, you must go to japan and wonder around like a dumbass.
>>283593819i've been mulling over the same analysis for a while now, nice to see others feel the same.I also think this is one of the many reasons why Crunchyroll has been so detrimental to anime in the west (controversial take, I know).Eras 1-3 had some overlap, and could be a nice transition to slowly onboard fans, filtering out normies from the more "inaccessible" content while still maintaining interest in the industry.but now CR is the gatekeeper for most people, and we are subject to their whims.
>>283593819One Piece got super huge when the pandemic hit too. Now that people had the time to catch up with the series, the fanbase ballooned tremendously, and Shueisha started to capitalize on it after decades of it trudging along in the background.
>if they watched Gundam Wing, Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Samurai Champloo, FMA, Big O, Eureka 7, Gundam Seed, FLCL, Kenshin, YYHIf they watched all those, they'd have a better palate than most anime fans these days. Straight-up. Maybe 10 years ago I would have been more faggy and elitist about this, and been all like , "Nah, you only watched what aired on Toonami," but you know what? That's a nice little spectrum.Plus, that includes stuff like Big O and Eureka 7. Do you know how KINO I would consider your taste to be if you bought up either of those series?Let's expand it and give Toonami some fucking credit here. That list of shows you gave covered multiple decades and skipped a lot. Eureka 7 was on in like 2008-2009 and some of the other stuff was late 90's/early 2000's. If you watched all the anime broadcast on Toonami from when Sailor Moon was on after school up until the mid-2020's, you would have seen:>One Piece>Naruto>.hack//sign>Black Lagoon>Ghost In the Shell>Lupin III>Made In Abyss>Parasyte >Food Wars>HxH>Paranoia Agent>Hamtaro (I REMEMBER LOOK IT UP)>Sword Art Online>Soul Eater>Attack on Titan>FMA>Kill la Kill>Pop Team Epic>Tenchi Muyo>Zoids>Cardcaptor Sakura >Sailor Moon >an entire BUNCH of Gundam franchises>OG Dragon Ball AND GT plus DBZ>Bleach>Inuyasha>fucking Boboboboboboboon top of what you mentioned. That's respectable AS FUCK. Like, okay, maybe you think one or two of these are mid, but to their tremendous fucking credit, this is a GOOD lineup overall and covers A LOT.
>>283591821I think you underestimate just how difficult it was to get anime at all before a certain point. And it didn't help that the internet wasn't that ubiquitous either. So yes. I think people who watched Toonami were true fans. It was a very different time and other anime broadcasters weren't exactly reliable with their schedules. I saw some stuff on sci fi channel but one week you might watch an kick ass OVA episode but next week is was some other crap.
>>283591821No because they only watched dubs. If they watched those exact shows but subbed then they would be animefags.
>>283591821that just means they have good taste
>>283596836Don't forget Space Dandy
>>283591821I made a thread about today(yesterday when i made it) being blue submarine no.6 initial broadcast on toonami 25 years ago but apparently the thread never showed up on the board despite existing, not even ignored and slid down the log just hidden away so nobody could even see it.
>>283591821I miss the era when anime used to be all over television back in the 2000s.Stumbling upon Sailor Victory on the International Channel back in 2001 was my first exposure to raw, unfiltered anime that you couldn't get from watching Toonami.It was a different time period from a bygone era. Being able to catch up on Cowboy Bebop and Yuyu Hakusho on Saturday night, then watch The Slayers and DBZ that's one arc ahead on Sunday night will never be replicated with the shit show we have right now.
>>283591821That's how most of us 30+'ers found out about anime in the first place, we have a lot to thank them for. At 6 years old I wasn't even aware pokemon and digimon were called "anime". After watching bebop I got my parents to order ninja scroll from a specialist shop. Little did I know..Anyway between pokemon, toonami, and ghibli, there is no doubt in my mind anime wouldn't be 1/4 as popular in the west as it is today.
>>283597843This is not true at all. Right now we still have better access to anime on TV with free streaming television services like Tubi.
>>283591821Entry level anime has been vindicated. I swear /a/ were being annoying little faggots about this shit. Where the fuck were those annoying niggers back in 2010 who kept complaining about this shit. Who gives a fuck, funniest shit is that things like FMA/Death Note/etc are iconic even up to today in Japan itself and you had people here being too embarrassed to even talk about it and instead chose to glaze shitty romcom adaptations of LNs
>>283597948Was it dubbed or subbed?
