I started off with Cowboy Bebop and Evangelion, oddly it wasn't until I started watching Card Captor Sakura that I knew I had found something I loved. For manga, a girl I liked got me into Rave Master/Groove Adventure Rave and I went from there.
What about you guys and girls? What series got you hooked?
I started with Evangelion too! At first, the last part seemed to me a lil' bit crazy, but now is my all-time favourite show!
Evangelion is a definite favourite for me too. It wasn't my first though, but has left an indelible imprint on me though. It is quite a mindful when it was watched, and left more questions than answers after the viewing.
And was much heralded before its terrestrial broadcast. After 2 months of "Coming Soon" trailers, I rang the TV station for a 'definition' of "Coming Soon", it turned out to be 6 months.
I wouldn't say it wasn't worth the wait, but still….
As a kid i read Dragonball at my cousins place everytime i visited.
Kinda got me into anime.
Later i started watching One piece, Dragonball, Digimon, the usual stuff.
I kinda stopped watching anime for some years after that.
What got me back into anime was Attack on Titan. I wanted to give anime a try again and picked AoT up when it only had 2 episodes.
I guess it was a good pick :)
For me it was Blast of Tempest
While I'd drifted in some with Fairy Tail as my first anime, this was the one that made me commit. The first half in particular were completely addictive.
First title I saw in early childhood:
Blue Sonnet
A bit later this solidified my anime addiction:
Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon
Grew up with Sailor Moon and went on this magical girl anime marathon until my cousin recommended me Ouran High School Host Club and from there I pretty much went through the entire shoujo genre, ran out so I went to shounen, psychological, horror, had another shoujo craving, and before I knew it, I ended up just watching anything the anime season had to offer.
I don't really feel like any series "hooked" me and even though SM was my "intro" to anime, it never really felt like I stumbled onto something new since it was always there from the beginning.
Ouran might have solidified what was already there from Sailor Moon + opened me up to new genres though, so maybe without it I would've stopped at the magical girl genre when I was 11 and moved away from anime lmao
Like many I grew up watching Pokemon, Digimon and Dragon Ball.
At the time I had no clue what anime was, but I knew that I heavily prefered it over american cartoons, as many of the common shows airing at the time were drawn in a way that either made me feel really uncomfortable to the point of being sick to my stomach, or outright scared me.
It was kind of like a feeling of there being more to these characters than was let on, like they'd jump out of the screen and viciously murder me or something (lol). These were shows like Ed, Edd and Eddy, Cow and Chicken, Oggy and the Cockroaches, and to the point where I had nightmares of it; Courage the Cowardly dog.
So I was immediately drawn to the more calming and happy shows with the big childlike fantasies of adventure and friendship. Also stuff like pokemon and dragon ball had a story to follow along with, which I think helped fuel the obsession of never wanting to miss an episode. Whereas many american cartoons were more episodic. Pokemon was my favorite ofcourse :).
It wasnt until Naruto came much later that I found out that anime was essentially japanese style cartoons, and that there was a whole world of series out there.
At that point the Dragon Ball manga was starting to get translated to my local language, so my mother bought me a few volumes and I ended up collecting the whole series eventually, but I never collected other series as a kid. Recently I've been getting back into manga.
Did I just write a whole essay?... I'm sorry...
Don't be sorry, I like reading about personal experiences like this. I was also somewhat frightened by western cartoons as a kid, although it didn't stop me from watching them. Courage the Cowardly Dog definitely gave me some nightmares. Thanks to having a T.V. in my room I was able to watch late night content, shows like Ren & Stimpy had some scenes that ended up giving me some mental scars for a while.
Same here, I knew as a kid I liked anime better than American animation because of how grotesque many American cartoon characters looked, like the Rugrats and Ren and Stimpy, while anime had pretty 2D girls, sparkles and good taste, even if it also had Warner Brothers levels of interpersonal violence. I couldn't stomach the gross-out humor shows like Rocko's Modern Life would use frequently. I remember I dry heaved a lot as a kid from consuming stuff made "for kids." '90s cartoons were mostly disgusting and it's really amazing to watch something made for kids today like Gravity Falls or Regular Show, there's a tremendous difference in quality and taste.
Well, I watched numerous anime prior getting INTO it. The anime that probably started me on my path towards becoming an "anime fan" was Fairy Tail. Its got a large and active fanbase and is just so easily consumable prior to hitting the point where they were actually creating entire filler arcs for the show.
I started with Pokemon, and I wanted to watch Sailor Moon, but I felt ashamed that I liked something "for girls" and didn't want to make it known that I wanted to watch it (since my parents had the knowledge of how to set the VCR!) or be seen watching it on the living room television (the only TV in the house).
After the Orange Islands arc I lost interest in Pokemon and didn't look at anime again until Death Note went on Adult Swim back in 2007, which set me back on the path lol
I wonder if I would actually like Death Note if I were to go back and watch it again today, but I was super impressed with it at the time. Like 'wow, this is adult animation!'
Technically, it would have to be Science Ninja Team Gatchaman which was known at the time as 'Battle of the Planets' which I watched during its broadcast on TV back in the 70's. It wasn't known as an 'Anime' back then, but the art style alone set it aside from the usual fare of the American animation houses.
It was probably Robotech which had its broadcast in the 80's where 'Anime' as a term really started to more broadly known. Also around the same time, others started to appear like Harlock and Ranma ½.
The "Golden Age" had begun, and Manga was hot on its tail with Studios Viz, Proteus, Dark Horse and others pushing out translations of many titles. 3×3 Eyes, Appleseed, Area 88, Sanctuary and many others being top favourites.
I started out with Pokemon 2000 the movie, Yugioh/5d's/Zexal and DBZ Kai from the usual Saturday morning 4kids/CW11 channel. I've rewatched all of them at least 10 times through and still never got tired of it back then.
Although I didn't know what anime was until I was introduced years later by a friend of mine who showed me a melee game online called SuperSmashFlash 2. I saw Ichigo on it and I had to find out where he was from. So, I watched Bleach and I learned what anime was. Bleach is what technically got me hooked on anime. I loved the story and found something even better than the 4kids stuff. But for some reason the 2nd anime I watched was Elfen Lied which scared me as a middle schooler back then.
My first was Attack on Titan, but I didn't watch any anime at all for close to a year after that, so it's not what hooked me. I had no interest in anything else.
I guess it might have been Tokyo Ghoul. October 2015.
2014: 1 Completed entry (SNK)
2015: 7
2016: 11 (or maybe it was Yuri on Ice at the end of this year? or the 200 years of my life spent watching Bleach?)
2017: 78
I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED IN 2017
Ahh. The good old days. Well what originally got me "hooked" would be Naruto Shippuden. Interestingly enough it wasn't a anime or manga that got me interested either, it was the games. Specifically the Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 game which I ended up buying one day because I was sick for a long time and needed something new to do with my life.
I didn't get into anime or manga that much (kid shows like Pokemon aside) until a few years ago when I started watching some out of interest. The first shows I've watched around that time were Kill la Kill and Ouran High School Host Club when they available were on Netflix.
However, the show that got me hooked into anime in general was Love, Chunibyou, & Other Delusions!. I enjoyed that show so much that it got me fascinated in the romance and comedy genre. From there, I just started watching seasonal anime.
As for manga, Jitsu wa Watashi wa / My Monster Secret was a very good manga to read, and followed that up until it was finished. I then got curious and looked into more manga after that.
2009-2011(?) I started watching Naruto Shippuden
2016: I watched Death Note
2017: I finished Naruto Shippuden
2018: I got bored from watching TV shows, so I tried Nanatsu no Taizai then i registered 151 completed entries, but technically speaking Nanatsu no Taizai didn't hooked me up but rather that I had consumed so much content on different platforms that the only one left that wasn't boring was anime