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Comment on Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 36]

Before I went to college and had reliable access to (relatively) high speed internet, watching anime was…difficult. I remember passing around both VHS tapes and DVDs with friends at school (this was around the time most of us had a dual VHS/DVD player at home). Often I would just get to watch a couple episodes of a show, maybe or maybe not in the right order since they were basically all unofficial. I remember watching random episodes of lots of shows during this period in my life and not fully understanding the story, but just thinking it was cool or having a friend that knew what was going on and could catch me up (Ranma, Trigun, Fushigi Yuugi, Urusei Yatsura, Rose of Versailles, and many others I don’t even remember).

Some of those Toonami shows (in the US) were really the first ones that I could reliably count on watching in the right order and through a whole series. So those kinds of shows were really formative for a whole generation of us. I have fond memories of talking about shows like DBZ and Yu Yu Hakusho (in addition to Bebop and Gundam Wing which you mentioned) with friends at the time.

These days, even if you run across another anime fan irl, with 50+ shows coming out every season and broadly available, it is not too likely you are even watching any of the same shows. That’s not a bad thing per se, but it is a very different vibe than how it used to be when anime was much more niche.

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Unboxious@ani.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

These days, even if you run across another anime fan irl, with 50+ shows coming out every season and broadly available, it is not too likely you are even watching any of the same shows

PC Gaming has the same issue. Just 15 years ago if you were a PC gamer you were probably aware of 90%+ of the games on PC that were worth playing, and you’d probably played a significant percentage of them. If you had a friend who was also a PC gamer the odds were extremely high that you played some of the same games. These days it feels like you really have to go out of your way to make the same thing happen.

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Rottcodd@ani.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

VHS

That was a lot of the thing. There was such a limited number of anime released on VHS that all of us that were fans then tended to have seen the same things, so conversations naturally went to Akira and Vampire Hunter D and Bubblegum Crisis and Ninja Scroll and Hellsing and so on.

And as you note, another part of that was just seeing parts of series. Like I had a tape with the first four episodes of Trigun, so for years, that was all I knew of it. (Imagine the impact when I finally saw the rest - it’s mood whiplash enough when you watch it straight through).

Toonami opened things up and exposed a lot more people and provided a dependable way to watch a series all the way through, but it was still a relatively limited set of shows - Gundam Wing and Cowboy Bebop and Tenchi Muyo and so on.

And yeah - it’s a whole different world now. Now there are so many choices available any time that the biggest issue I face is option paralysis.

And on the topic of the VHS era of anime - a video I’ve always liked - a barrage of anime from that era, set to music: SR-71 - Let It Whip

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- nyan@lemmy.cafe ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  There was such a limited number of anime released on VHS that all of us that were fans then tended to have seen the same things, so conversations naturally went to Akira and Vampire Hunter D and Bubblegum Crisis and Ninja Scroll and Hellsing and so on.
  
  Unless you had connections to the VHS fansub scene, in which case you were able to get your hands on stuff no one you talked to had ever heard of. Except that it could take years for anyone to sub the next four episodes, because sub groups back then actually had to do their own translations from scratch, by ear, and then use an Amiga to burn the subtitles into the video.
  
  (Also, Hellsing was DVD era—I’m not sure it was officially released on VHS, but I still have the DVDs.)
  
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