How Did You start Watching Anime?

Like most I technically started with the Pokemon anime but since that was the Cartoon Network dub I don't count it. So my actually start was at a 8th grade birthday party for my friend James where he showed me SAO. The death gun arc had just wrapped up so that night he showed me all of the Aincrad arc and about half of the Fairy Dance. I was so hyped that wen I got home I watched the rest of Fairy Dance and all of Death Gun. From there it was a pretty slow drip... watched over the course of a couple years all of the mainstream shows (Attack on Titan, Death Note, etc) while regretting that my first was SAO. But then last Nov I got into the seasonal anime game and I havent had a life sense.

Besides 4kids shows, a friend of mine introduced me to this game called SuperSmashFlash2(online smaller version of SSBros) and using Ichigo to fight was pretty cool. My friend introduced Bleach to me. I remember watching it in Crunchyroll and later on some pirate sites(when I didn't afford subscribing at like 10 yo to watch new episodes). I kinda knew what anime was before cuz I bought many Shonen Jumps at like 25 cents each(with Bleach, Psyren, Gintama, Ultimo, etc...in it) back then but never actually watched it. Those were the good days.

I started when I was pretty young. My older brothers watched Gundam Wing and I watched digimon. I got hooked on DBZ then found naruto, then fell down the rabbit hole of anime after that. :D I actually hated anime at first, but by the time I was in 3rd grade I fell in love with it.

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Naruto was definitely my first anime. To be fair, way before that, i remember seeing Doraemon and Shin-chan on local TV when i was a kid. Then i saw Ranma 1/2 and Sgt Keroro at 9 years old but i still thought all of them were the same as Cartoon Network shows, ya feel me?

Then came 2009 and i found out what anime is. I went with Naruto after pondering on which of the big 3 (DBZ, OP, Naruto) should i start with. I didnt regret ever since

Toonami

My gateway into the weebdom was Code Geass. Super fun and perfect for 15yr old me at the time; I suspect I'd be really mad nitpicking the crazy stuff that happens if I first watched it today.
I then watched the usual popular titles on-and-off; Death Note, Steins; Gate, FMAB, all that good stuff. That phase went on for about two years, and I was never really invested in the medium until then. One day my friends begged me to watch Oregairu and I haven't really stopped since

When I was a kid I watched anime like Beyblade and Pokemon but when I was 9 years old I watched anime like Naruto and Dragon ball and a year and a half later I started watching other anime.

I watched DBZ as a kid, but then I got tired of that and wanted to find better anime. I remember watching shows like KLK and Drrr after that.

i got a weeby nickname in one game when i was 12 because i thought it sounded cool and soon people would ask me what my favorite anime is so i felt obligated to watch it

One of my classmates was into anime and she recommended me Hetalia, which I did enjoy, but I don't know if that counts as "started watching", because I'd only seen like 3 other anime in the 2 years that followed.
My descent down the rabbit hole began with Sakura-sou no Pet na Kanojo, when I finished it I started binge watching school-themed anime one after another.

I'm very new to anime, Demon slayer was my first anime, I was scrolling through instagram and and a fan art sparked my interest. I used to watch Doraemon, Pokemon on local TV when I was a kid but didn't know they were called anime.

I went to a convention thinking there would be a lot of book related stuff bc I was really into reading but I was really disapponted but I was really weird out aout al the anime related stuf ( like yeah dude you went to an anime convention! what were you expecting lol) but one anime catch my eye and it was death note! that when I started watching anime as I am right now! 6 month after that convention there was another one bigger this time and when I went I knew a lot of animes and was really proud! lol

I used to watch a lot of anime unknowingly, as cartoons which were broadcasted on TV in Hindi dub, since I was 4-5 years old, I was not much of an extrovert child and used to watch TV a lot. I used to watch

Beyblade(OG series), Dragon ball series, Blue Dragon, Digimon, pokemon series, Gon, Inazuma Eleven, Kiteretsu, Transformers (Armada series), Duel Masters, Ultimate Muscle, Sonic X, Anpanman, Hagemaru, The Jungle Book, Atashin'chi, Mighty Cat Masked Niyander, doraemon, shinchan, ninja hattori, KochiKame, heroman, Ojamajo Doremi, Powerpuff girls Z and a lot of movies (Some rare ones too)

I have even watched multiple english dubs on Animax like
Yu Yu Hakusho, Inuyasha, naruto (But only few episodes of these)

I paused for few years from 2012 to 2016 for my studies (Animax was banned and Indian media didn't show much anime), One day I saw a friend watching anime on his smart phone, I asked him what was it, and then he introduced again to anime, then I started watching anime again starting with Death Note, I have included all the anime I have watched since then on my list. I look back to those days and just think how much impact anime had on my life.

This was all before cheap Indian animation started to take over Indian television

There were a few shows I watched before I really knew what anime was.

I watched Sonic X when I was a kid (I even had some episodes on DVD!), and then watched Hoshi no Kirby a few years later. At one point in-between, I also watched Gake no Ue no Ponyo by mistake, my dad picked it up by accident but we watched it anyway. I ended up being the only one that enjoyed it. I watched the Night of the WereHog sometime after that. Sometime between 2012 and 2015 I rewatched Sonic X and Hoshi no Kirby. I've rewatched Sonic X a number of times, and watched a lot of the show through rewatching random episodes over those years (and even afterwards). That was my time before I really watched it knowing about anime.

Sometime around 2014 I gained an awareness of anime, but didn't know I had watched it before. I had a friend in 2016 that was a self-proclaimed weeb and when we talked about anime, he asked if I wanted to watch Re:Zero with him. It was airing still airing at the time. I said sure, not knowing what to expect, and we both really enjoyed it! After that, I watched a couple of episodes of KonoSuba but I didn't stick with it. I wouldn't pick up watching anime again until April 2018 when I finally watched Kill la Kill.

After that, I watched Kiznaiver, then picked up KonoSuba again and loved it, and now here we are in 2020 and I've watched more shows in half of this year than all the other years put together - Not to mention knocking some big ones off my backlog.

Sonic X
Gake no Ue no Ponyo
Hoshi no Kirby
Sonic Night of the WereHog Sonic Chip Kyoufu no Kan

ReZero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu
Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo

Kill la Kill
Kill la Kill Special
Kiznaiver

The first time I saw an anime was in the 3rd grade, during an hour of substitute teaching because I hadn't gone on a trip.
So me and 2 other friends (together with the teacher of course) turned on the projector and watched Code Geass.
It was love at first sight.

My Cousin showed me Spirited Away when I was really young and it scared the shit out of me, neither of us knew what anime was at the time, it was just a good cartoon movie back then, so I didn't know anything else until alot later when I started watching Toonami on Adult Swim and that's how I found out about anime, I then proceeded to watch tons of shows on YouTube way longer than I needed to before discovering other ways to watch anime.

I watched stuff like naruto, shaman king, dbz, etc a lot as a kid but didn't know they were anime.

The first show that I knew was anime and also made me an anime fan is death note

I really love instrumental music, specifically piano music. So once I got this video in my recommendation.

I really loved the song and then I scrolled down and saw people talking bout anime. I looked it up and watched one of those watchmojo videos on top 10 anime or something. Decided to watch Parasyte and the rest is history.

I started watching Anime when i was a child watching TV stuff. So I watched Anime like Classic Naruto, Pokemon, Bakugan, Dinosour King and surely some that I don't remember right now aswell.
Activly and also with the mindset "ok, I am watching Anime and not some Cartoon", I started in 2013 because a friend showed me some Anime like SAO and Angel Beats, and that was also the time when i started watching Anime every week when they were aired, my first Anime i watched aired was Golden Time btw

Sailor moon!

It aired on the local channel for "kids/preteens" (the dubbed version) and I watched it religiously every time it aired as much as I could.. then shortly after that I had cousins that loved dragon ball z and got me sort of into that (again the dubbed which aired on the local channel too), also Pokemon aired every morning before school started for me, it wasn't until years later that I got back into anime and wondered if there was more like Sailor Moon so I did a bit of research thanks to the nice thing we call the internet and google and found out the whole anime community and the Sailor Moon is so much better in Japanese (in terms of translation no offence English Dub). And yep that's it xD

OOH I also played hamtaro on the gameboy advance and didn't realize it's source was anime till years later too so theres that

My First "Anime" was Soul Eater and I stumbled upon it sometime in 2015/2016 on Netflix. I conisder that my first anime because up until that point I had just grouped shows such as Pokemon and Bakugon as my Saturday Morning Cartoons. I was in Middle School and I think one of my friends recommended it to me, introducing me to the world of anime. Flash forward to right before quarantine in the U.S., I had seen about 8 anime at that point. Until, I watched Jojo's and with a rekindled love for anime and a lot of time on my hands I've nearly trippled that lol.
Soul Eater

I randomly stumbled across a YouTube video about FMA, so I watched FMA.

Like many others that would be Toonami. The first one I remember seeing on it was Bobobo. What a classic.

when i was younger (around 8,9 yo) i used to watch a lot of pokemon and dragon ball on cartoon network or other channel and stuff like that but i didn't know it was anime or what anime was untill later on

but recently i decided to take an an actual dive into anime and now im here i guess

I actually discovered anime when I was like 5 through Cartoon Network when shows like Naruto and Fairy Tale were airing (Doraemon also but on a different channel) but I wasn't interested in it up until I was 12 when I played Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 and was blown away by how cool it was. When I wanted to watch the anime (Gundam Seed), I didn't know there were streaming services so I went and bought the cd box.

By playing OSU! I saw a song called "Harumachi Clover" and I told myself that the girl in the background was cute and then I found her anime and started watching it

when i was like 11 or something i was on netflix, found glitter force, watched it, and found out it was a anime and not just a cartoon. ever since my life has went down in a good way

with your mom

How can I start watching an anime? I mean I know how to save it in the favourite animes and blah blah but I don't know how to start watching it