"Weeb 101"

[kane_magus]

"Dragon Ball was probably the gateway drug of many weebs."

It was Sailor Moon for me.[1] I mean, sure, I'd also watched Voltron and Tranzor Z several years before that, but those weren't "anime" to me. They were, as far as I was aware at the time, just "normal" cartoons, like any other, such as He-Man or Thundercats or whatever. I'd never even heard the term "anime" (or "Japanimation" or whatever the fuck) at all until I started researching Sailor Moon online around 1997-1998 or whenever. (And we know where that led... ^^;)

As for Dragon Ball, I still haven't seen all the way through Dragon Ball Z to this day. I've seen to the end of the Cell Saga via DBZ Abridged, but I've only seen through... maybe half of the Cell Saga on the actual anime... I stopped before the Cell Games began, anyway, mainly because the version I was watching literally decades ago was in RealPlayer format (remember that shit, fellow olds?), and I never bothered to pick it back up again when better versions were available.

And I actually haven't seen any of the original, pre-Z Dragon Ball. (And, obviously, haven't seen anything of GT or Super or whatever, aside from whatever bits and pieces on Youtube, and whatever bits TeamFourStar may have parodied of it.)

[1] - The very first episode of the DiC dub of Sailor Moon that I ever saw was the one where Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask revealed their identities to each other.

Comments

[owsf2000]

Would have been Sailor Moon for me as well, although pretty sure I started the DiC dub at the first episode. There were other anime prior to that growing up (robotech, astro boy, etc) but again didn't know they were anime.

From Sailor Moon I quickly jumped to Oh My Goddess for manga and it's OAV and Slayers. I also revisited Robotech as the original Macross and I'd rent various VHS tapes of random anime here and there. I eventually found out there was an anime club at uni and started going there where we basically watched anime on the overhead projector in the bigger lecture halls. They also lent out tapes between meetings.

[kane_magus]

I think most of the earliest anime I got was from you, via CDs you had mailed to me, though the only ones I definitely remember now from that was at least a few eps of Ayashi no Ceres and Star Ocean EX. Maybe I got the Dragonball Z eps from you as well? I can't remember now. Maybe also .hack//Sign (which I'd say was probably around the time I was playing the first series of video games)? (EDIT) *rereads your comment* Oh, and at least the first season of Slayers, I'm pretty sure I got that from you, too. (/EDIT)

I'm pretty sure the first anime I ever downloaded on my own and watched fully was Haibane Renmei. Since then, I've seen quite a bit at this point, though I still wouldn't consider myself extremely well versed in anime or anything. Of the top of my head, I've seen stuff like Neon Genesis Evangelion (the original, not any of the Rebuild stuff yet), Hellsing (again, the original "different from the manga" version, not Ultimate [unless you count TeamFourStar's Abridged version]), Death Note (just the anime, none of the live action stuff or whatever), some Street Fighter stuff, Persona 4, One Punch Man (the first season, anyway), JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (up through the end of Stardust Crusaders, though I've read the manga up until partway through Stone Ocean) and such. I'm pretty sure I've seen more than just that, and I kind of wish I'd made a list of what I've seen up to now, but there is, of course, far more that I haven't seen yet. Also, I've got quite a bit of anime and manga (mostly manga) that I've downloaded from BakaBT that I haven't read/watched yet.

And it wasn't until years later that I finally watched all of Sailor Moon, either. At the time I started in the OW! and wrote that Castlevania crossover fanfic, I think all I had seen of SM at that point was, like, eight or so episodes of the dub. >_>; Still haven't watched the live action thing or the new Crystal stuff, though it's among the stuff I've gotten from BakaBT.