Back in the day you had to wait a year or years for a high quality official release or settle for a low quality VHS or online fansub, now there's less of a need for physical anime clubs where you have the one guy that either had the connections for the fansubs or is willing to drop the bucks on expensive DVD sets so the whole club can watch.
More or less what happened is a lot of the mystery surrounding anime, manga and Japan itself that made it intriguing to westerners went away, even in the earlier days of the internet there was still an element of mystery, but the advancement of technology has brought along a lot more knowledge more easily accessible than ever before and sadly some of the mystery goes away, which is what made it interesting in the first place, that sense of discovery where you found an entirely new medium and culture that you knew little to nothing about before.
I think people forget how edgy and ground breaking anime was back in the day.
The only other adult animation kind of like anime I had seen prior to more adult anime was the movie Heavy Metal, first cartoon nudity I ever saw lol, but you always knew Heavy Metal was a bit of an outlier when it comes to western animation, the realization that there was a lot more "adult" anime than there was "adult" western animation was mind blowing, I remember how shocked I was to see something like Gunsmith Cats where you see the girls in their undies, this was after I saw Heavy Metal, but since most of the anime I had seen up to that point had been stuff like Pokemon and DBZ it was still a bit of a shock to see anime with blatant sexual content.
Heavy Metal always had that very late 70s/early 80s "bongwater" smell that you knew was very much of it's time, but seeing anime more recently carry on the idea of adult animation that wasn't a comedy like South Park was mind blowing.
I kind of agree and disagree. As someone from Rurouni Kenshin said, "It is not the tools the make the age, but the people who wield them." Anime was practically everywhere post 1995 if you looked hard enough, and again, it wasn't merely the anime. There wasn't just anime on UPN and basic local providers on the antenna and even to Toonami on CN, but video games, like from the Super Nintendo, Sega CD and Playstation. Yeah, everything was a bit niche because anime was just getting into the mainstream outside of sci fi conventions, but along with how the US was going big on alternative media, sticking it to the Morality in Media fuckers and Congress and The Man and the PTA, The Simpsons and MTV even spearheading animation that wasn't stricted for the kiddies, and with the Comics Crash of 1996 and the US comics industry literally sucking a fat one because they couldn't write morally "gray" or more realistic/human dimensional characters and stories, you couldn't have more of a perfect cultural and social climate for anime to proliferate into the mainstream.
Sure, it is not as prolific as it was today, but man, anime was practically around on a national level by 2000 in the US. Again, the main problem is what people do with it. Either I've long lived in a hole or something's up with the world, because I can feel the mystery and magic still is there, it's just that it's all now latent like metals and minerals stored up after being sediment and cycled back into the earth. Again, I've long lived with anime since I could remember how to walk; anime was something special for me when I was growing up, but I wouldn't say it was something alien. It had mystery, but it didn't feel out of reach, like to chase the moon or was another planet. I feel the biggest problem why this mystery appears to be gone is merely because of the inescapable aspect of the changing world, as well as to how the situation is because, no offense, the lot of fans failing to go beyond boundaries and borders to a basic human level, and that the worst of the fans are now in the reigns, and they are spoiled, myopic, and stupid, and don't even appreciate what they've been given. It's practically 10-20 years since the anime boom, and I still have that inspiration with me. I think there's something wrong with them if they up and give up and let the world fuck them up the ass and walk all over them to lose that hope, let alone do anything with it.
There are still a lot of fans who enjoy looking up and finding out older stuff. I don't blame technology, I blame the fact that the fans that could do something just didn't years before. Anime and manga, it is not an easy path, but in this world of pampered instant media access fast food spontaneity, and even for manga known for being a day in and day out medium where artists toil every week to come up with 30 some pages for magazines and Tokyo being the NYC of Japan where everyone is on a path to blaze, no one wants to do the hard work and personal development to be a mangaka or an anime artist by their own power, and that doesn't just have to do with going out to Japan. We live in one of the greatest countries in the world, where there are How To Draw Manga publications straight from Japan translated out to us, practically the Prime Codex of anime at our fingertips, professional grade digital tools and programs on an affordable cost with our currency, where anime was practically on national fucking television and in bookstores and video game stores and movie theaters, and still, no one has done anything with that. Sorry for rambling on like that, but inspiration is a big fucking deal, and it has now said a lot that even since when Malibu Comics back in the 1980s were trying to make their own manga based comics, that something is fucking wrong at an intrinsic level.
Life still goes on. The clocks still move, the plants still grow, the clouds still float about the skies, the seas and oceans still ebb and flow. Yet in the human world, anime is still thought that it can't be produced outside of Japan. What the fuck is this shit? The mystery should still be going on, yet no one wants to keep it going, except a very determined few. I hope something comes of that, but yeah, I can see where you're coming from, but the journey doesn't end here, and it shouldn't, and especially to a bunch of fuckfaces who run a pathetic excuse for an anime news website and their lackeys.
I've seen worse. I wasn't even a weeb when Toonami aired anime. Most times I was too scared to look up anime outside of Pokemon and DBZ cause I thought they were like horror movies or porn flicks. (Which most anime are) And other times they feel like pedo bait made by the FBI to catch a predator. Like old anime back in the day when the 90s and 2000s were bombing with anime was basically high schooler anime crap or horror shows that just scare you out of nowhere. I remember when anime dubbing companies made YouTube channels. Their sub counts suck so many balls compare to channels that don't relate to anime like Pewdiepie or comedy videos. Like for real. Do people feel like the animes that were made at the time were testing grounds to catch child predators or is it just me? Someone once told me that most anime made in Japan were commissioned by the FBI and CIA to test if child predators would harm kids or prevent them from harming them. Feel like anime itself is a honey pot and that is why the Weeaboos that used to exist in the late 90s to the 2000s either killed themselves, end up in prison, or just quit anime cause it is too much for their brains.
ngl man, you got fed some shit man.
