41 year oldfag here. I was sorting pictures on my drive and came across this one I save a year or two ago. It stuck me then as it does now, and I thought I'd tell you about it.
It may come as a surprise to you, but anime wasn't always popular. (Hold on mods, this is political! But feel free to move it to /bant/ if you disagree) Anyways, this picture is so shocking to me because these people look like your standard issue normies and I think you know exactly what I mean. "Back in my day" people that looked like this weren't into anime. My day being "teen in the late 90s" ordering VHS tapes from the early internet to get stoned and watch with my friends. In my small town, I was basically the first person to know anything about anime and probably the only reason anybody from my friend group knew about it. But I'm not here to brag about that...
I went to an anime con in 2001 and it was fucking horrifying; coke-bottle glasses nerds, obese hamplanets, shrieking autists... You name it. Not a normie in sight and especially not too many women. So what happened? How and why did society shift not only to "this is acceptable" but "this is cool enough that I'm going to wear it as a costume to a party full of other hip, popular college kids?" How the FUCK did we get here so quickly? It confounds and astonishes me.
Why is it political? It just reminds me of normies/women/SJWs infiltrating every traditionally nerdy white male interest and appropriating it for themselves. You see it with everything from comics to anime to TRPGs. "B-but anime is Japanese!" Of course, but that isn't to say that it wasn't embraced in the US by dorky (mostly white) guys and a few autistic women. Not these kinds of literal fluoride stare NPC normies like you see in this pic... Do you think these bitches even know the first thing about an Evan-Jelly-On?
Anime is cartoons for adults. Each generation looks younger than the previous ones and so our society is become more and more infantile.
Parker Edwards
>noooo you can't enjoy what I enjoy because you're a noooormie! Oh no how could this happen!? What shall we do animebros?
Ethan King
do you have political pics of their nairskinned bareskinned labias? like full razor wax edges?
Luis Cook
I didn't read your blogpost but i am quite surprised at those two boys wearing these suits not 3 sizes smaller like they usually do but rather too large for their body. Most of the times they have to be careful that their ass or tits are not destroying the whole suitt because its too small.
Parker Davis
Same here. As an oldfag and a con-goer I remember shy kids not webcam thots running it. It's okay for people to have fun and stuff tho so I welcome everybody but at the same time whole cosplay thing became so centered on looks that many girls do surgeries which they are financing from onlyfans (before sanctions) or boosty.
Camden Rogers
The females aren't experiencing the same feelings of fun and nostalgia, they are craving attention and money
Anthony Lopez
Thanks for the actual replies. Normies and attention seeking clout chasers fucking suck.
What is the point of your thread. Summarize in 5 words or less.
Ian Jenkins
thicc bush on rei tho
It's a complicated thing user, but think of it this way. You have a small subculture, that culture either grows or it shrinks. If it grows, normies eventually dress like your culture. If it shrinks, it disappears and maybe you never even hear about it at all.
So it's just a confirmation bias.
Also maybe MK Ultra and we were guinea pigs because vaccines caused our autism or something who knows.
I went to Otakon from 01-06 or something like that (couldn't go to the Any Forums pannels because underage b& at the time) but even in that period I saw the demographics of the con changing and there were a FEW attention-starved qts willing to submerge themselves in the con funk even in 01. There were hot cosplayers in the 90s.
Jaxon Lopez
Normies ruin obscure interests.
Jaxon Butler
They grew up with pokemon you tard.
Hunter Hernandez
Might be different because anime was always widespread in France since the 80s, but I remember that in high school (about ten years ago) anime was already embraced by normies. Maybe not by chads and stacies, but your average normalfag would talk about fairy tail or one piece without any shame. Of course they didnt watch anime other than mainstream shounen stuff, but it wasn't taboo because everybody grew up watching anime.
I guess it didn't help that my first con was Jafax in Michigan, kind of an obscure location but I was meeting up with an online friend and we went there.
Yeah, true... OG anime fans in the 80s and 90s cut a path and walked so that zoomers could fucking fly.
Yeah, 10 years ago anime was already mainstream... I'm talking 20 years ago though, it was still pretty niche.
Jackson Ward
Alot of kids at the school I teach at like anime, manga and kpop. It's because they haven't been infected by the woke virus yet. Women will find a way to ruin it though.
Ian Wright
>costume wrinkled as fuck >fridge-shaped western female body from years of birth control and psychiatric medicine american women are so fucking disgusting
Jaxson Cooper
Women ruin everything by inserting themselves into the hobby
Did you also have all girls playing dota and lol from the start and not eeeewing at mention of it? Or was it suddenly boom and every zoomer chick is now a gaymer.
Jaxon Miller
The problem is that normies don't have a real appreciation for the thing they infect and inevitably shit up both the thing itself and the community around it. I don't like anime, but it applies to every subculture.
Sebastian Baker
>ten years ago only edgy teens were into anime >now normal adults are cosplaying and doind nerd stuff
Hmmmm, if only there was a reason for that…..
Jeremiah Sullivan
Yeah, pretty much this. If you dialed things back 20 years and put these girls in the same situation, I guarantee they would not be dressed up as anime characters even though Evangelion was booming in popularity with OG otakus. These girls would probably just be at parties in wide leg pants, a bead bracelet, and short cut hair with their midriffs out. It's so hard to even think of what normies would be having for their costume party back then; probably something generic like "dress like another ethnicity" or "dress like you're from an early time period" or a character from an (((Adam Sandler))) movie.
Back in the 90s normies just kind of ended up in jock or prep circles, but those circles were maybe 40% of the entire demographic. Shit was way more balanced back then because you had several subgroups coexisting. It wasn't normie NPCs versus a fringe of weirdoes like now. I think that's the political nail I was looking to hit on the head with this thread, and this is insight to a much bigger issue:
Subcultures have been divided and there only exists two dominant demographics now: The fringe and the status quo.
Parker Jenkins
Of course normies didn’t go to cons but anime has always been popular
Pretty much every kid from ‘95 onward played pokemon, watched dragon ball, and probably read some manga at some point too thanks to capeshit being awful. scholastic had deals with Konami to publish yugioh manga in the US and it was in school libraries there
SNK games were basically in all American arcades too, which from what I remember were turbo-normie and usually at amusement parks for some reason
Kayden Jackson
Studio Ghibli movies and Toonami / Adult Swim made anime mainstream in America, prior to that it was only viewed by hentai fetishists. Naruto is the show that really made it popular.
Evan Wood
34 year old here, I was mocked terribly for liking anime in high school, and it was quite painful to be so autistically obsessed and infatuated with anime/manga while also being ashamed of it. There aren't many other hobbies where I'd face that same dillemma. This one time I was doodling in class a drawing of an anime chick that I'd just made-up as I went, and a classmate leaned over to look and asked with dripping disgust "Is that Yugioh???" and I had no idea what to say. His tone was so contemptuous, but the question was also ridiculous because obviously no, my drawing of a chick I invented on the spot is not an animated cartoon about the king of games. My relationship with anime is a lot more casual these days. It's a relief to no longer have to be embarrassed by a hobby that I was/am so deeply entrenched in. However, I largely avoided anime fans back in the day because I'm a sedate, serious person and couldn't handle the cringe and freakish behavior from the average weeb, and I avoid them today because on top of the standard weeb behavior now they're also all LGBTQ, as well as NPC normies. Definitely hard to find good people to click with.
Caleb Reed
Fella, I am a animefag and we with other animefags bullied a kid for watching pokemon back then because pokemon was the retard normie title. I say bring back the 80s sci-fi gore OVAs.
