Alright, this is how and why I'm an anime fan.

Yearssss ago, when I was a little kid, I was introduced to anime. I started out (like most other people here) watching Toonami. On Toonami they had all sorts of anime; most introduced new concepts and such that were quite different from what you'd see in western cartoons. This intrigued me. At this point, I really wasn't able to tell "good" movies/shows from "bad" ones, so I just ended up watching whatever was on TV. If an anime was on TV, I'd most likely switch to it. Although, at this time, I really didn't find anime to be amazing or anything, I found it entertaining. While I was still at this age, I also watched this really good anime with my brother called "Cowboy Bebop". Really liked it at the time, and still do.

So, skip forward a few years to the 3rd grade. Right now, I have a friend named Ethan. We're both pretty interested in anime and talk about it every now and then, but anime was probably still secondary on my list of interests to video games. I was still casually watching anime on TV every now and then, still no real interest. One day Ethan invited me over to his house, telling me he had this new "Naruto" anime. (Keep in mind this was years before the word Naruto was commonly known in America)

It was completely in Japanese, had subtitles, and was very interesting to me. It was completely uncut, they said words like "damn" and "shit". It was surprisingly gorey as well. The whole time I was thinking, "Wow, they can't do this on TV, this is actiony!" or probably some other shit like that. I was also able to notice that the voice acting was at least more believable. He also introduced this thing called manga to me, which was like comics, but anime style! (z0r) This was probably something that lead me in the direction of being a fan.

I then bought the first season of Naruto at a store called "Toy Mandala" which sold overpriced Japanese imports. This is a bit of a side note, but although these DVDs were from Japan they had rather primitive, poor, English subtitles. Regardless of the subtitles, I was happy and watched the first season with my brother. We both wowed and decided to buy more. Another side note, we ended up buying like 6 seasons of illegally sold fansubs off ebay in DVD form lol. When we received them, we of course, became even more addicted and were impressed that the DVDs were so cheap! (Heh) I soon discovered what fansubs, in their proper form were. I started torrenting every week. We later discovered Bleach, watched the hell out of that as well. Now here's the actually relevant part of this section. At this point, I thought anime was cool, liked it, but it really wasn't that big of a deal.

I eventually introduced anime in this form to my friends. At first, they really didn't care that much, but they later ended up getting into Naruto. They were addicted as my brother and I and started following it as actively as myself. Trevor, or SexyTime, as many of you know him, decided to deviate from us a bit. Rather than just watching Naruto/Bleach/Inuyasha, whatever horrible shit we watched back then, he decided to branch out and watch all sorts of anime. Although I had watched some anime at this point other from the shonen shit (all that bullcrap I mentioned earlier) I still wasn't at a point that I liked it a lot.

This, however, was about to change.

One day, when Trevor was doing a routine search on www.animenewsnetwork.com to find what anime to watch next, he found an anime with rather high ratings. That anime was called "When they Cry - Higurashi". He decided to get the series and on a whim, I did as well. When I got it, I decided to watch an episode to see how it was.

This was when my entire idea of anime changed.

This anime was far different from the others I had seen before. This anime was a compelling tale of people, their own faults, and their mistakes. The character's emotions of love and care were clouded by the characters themselves. Through madness their own original intentions of friendship were gone and were replaced by... hate, envy, disgust, terrible emotions. The result... a schism. Murder and distrust... all because they had forgotten the true intentions of their own ambitions.

This anime had left me speechless. Its message and emotional power had been enough to move a mountain. It was this anime that led me to realize what true anime was, what its real purpose was. Real anime, has meaning.

Stuff like Naruto and Bleach is fun as long as you don't take it seriously, but you really don't gain anything out of it. The one thing if I had to say anything I learned about anime, was that anime had the abillity to be incredibly expressive of emotion.

... And that concludes my school paper.
Owait.