But there's literally not a single normal person even mentioned in this thread.
People making youtube thumbnails usually aren't normal, and I barely ever see hentai thumbnails except among retards and internet scuzzballs. As far as I'm aware there aren't cooking channels for 40 year old facebook moms with hentai in their thumbnails. And in terms of retards and tryhards, they've been cropping porn as a gag for ages, like 0 2 said.
anime IS for normies, it IS mainstream entertainment
It is not mainstream entertainment, most average Americans probably doesn't even know what anime is.
Anime people have this very curious, persistent disorder where they vastly,
vastly overestimate how common anime is.
I think maybe because it's baked into a certain segment of internet culture, anime people think it's just like that as a whole. It isn't, anime isn't mainstream, it's just that the small number of people it appeals to completely integrate it into their life.
And the funny thing is that you can tell irl too, because the once in a blue moon you do encounter an anime fan in the wild, they've just got anime shit hanging up in their house like regular people are going to see that and think "Ah yes, what fantastic taste" rather than "why does this person have art and memorabilia of weird sexualized cartoons in their lounge?"