@tiltswitch: One time is one thing, but this time I actually couldn't understand what you were saying at some points. This time, I won't feel a shred of pity if RenDiz flames you. In fact, I hope he does, because maybe a lesson can still be drilled into you. Please speak a language that everyone, or at least someone else can understand.
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On topic, now, I guess... Let's see... I never watched anime on TV. I never even watched Cartoon Network. I sort of frowned upon my friends that did, and consequentially I thought that all anime was really stupid childish stuff like DBZ. I also sort of frowned upon manga (and graphic novels in general) as a perversion of the printed form, and as a completely inferior substitute for regular books. Basically, I thought people who read and watched cartoons were dumb. I'm a little arrogant, in case you couldn't tell.
So, this is actually going to be a pretty long story, it seems... anyway, that whole sphere of ideas started to change as I got older. I respected my friends, who I all saw as being very intelligent and respectable,. even though many of them watched and read cartoons, including plenty of anime and manga.
Now, my actual conversion took place only very recently (I only started watching anime about a month ago). In preparation for the Watchmen movie, I read the graphic novel, with it having been highly recommended to me. I completely appreciated it, and interpreted it as the pinnacle of it's form. Just as the works of Shakespeare are seen as the epitome of drama, how the greatest works of literature are so revered, I came to understand the cartoon form as its own medium with its own masterpieces. Of course, at this point, I still wasn't watching anime or reading manga.
So now, about a month ago, I was aimlessly browsing youtube from my ipod, lying in bed. I usually avoided AMVs at all costs (most of them suck, anyway, from what I understand), but for some reason, I clicked on and watched one using footage from the anime Onegai! Teacher. After watching the video, when the related videos started to appear, I saw one titled something like "Please! Teacher Ep 13 ~ Final Episode." I was a little surprised to see that the show had only had 13 episodes, since I was used to American sitcoms and such that usually run on for hundreds of episodes. I wondered, "was it canceled before it was finished, or something?" I simply had no idea that there was such a thing as a complete story on TV anymore. Most shows that I had seen were episodic and had little continuous plot between episodes.
Intrigued by this idea of short series, I started to watch it from the begging. I ended up watching the whole show on the tiny screen of my ipod touch, barely able to read the subtitles. From there, I was hooked. What I had just seen, although far from being the pinnacle of the animated form, was unlike anything I had understood to exist. The combination of romance, comedy, drama, sci-fi, and fanservice only left me desperate for more. After I had finished it, I searched frantically for something else similar I could watched. I felt as though I had discovered a vein of diamonds amidst a sea of DragonBall and Naruto infested mud. Searching for "romantic comedy anime" and looking through the results for recommendations that also recommended Onegai! Teacher, I began to generate a list of similar shows I could watch.
The next thing I watched was Ai Yori Aoshi. Once again, plenty of Romance, Drama, Comedy, and fanservice, this time with a hilarious harem to screw things up even more. The deeper emotions of the show really got through to me, and solidified my preference for emotional, romantic anime. Since this show was much longer in total (two seasons, one large and the other small, making this three times longer than my first), I had to watch it over the course of several days. I found my mind drifting during the day, thinking about the show. Now I really had the bug. I am still greatly moved when I think about this anime, and I think I always will be with it having been such a powerful experience so early in my exposure.
That was the last anime I watched on my tiny ipod screen, though. After that, I began to look for torrents that I could use instead. I downloaded and watched a few, but the terrible speeds were frustrating. One of the torrents I downloaded had a tracker in it that refused to work. It turns out that the uploader had accidentally left their boxtorrents tracker on it but had since disabled it. When I visited the URL and discovered that Bxt was completely free, I joined right away and started downloading at literally ten times the speed. Now I like to think that I'm well on my way to otakudom! (In the less negative, American sense, that is...)
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Hmm... That was a long story. But it felt good to tell it. I've sort of been keeping my newest obsession a bit of a secret, you see...
