What was it like to be an Anime fan before the internet?

It required being social, because you were either spending dosh at a con, or bartering for fansubs.

Pretty awesome, to be honest.

I remember being SO excited to go to the mall to buy new a new anime VHS at Suncoast. Discovered DBZ before toonami when it used to come on at like 6am on Saturday morning and the wait between weeks killing me with anticipation as a 10 year old. Getting cable and discovering the anime on Sci-Fi channel on saturday mornings (e.g. Demon City Shinjuku, Iria, Macross Plus, etc.). Building my own shitty DBZ website full of Super Butouden gifs on Geocities. It was a lot fun back when anime was rare and you felt like you were one of the few in the know about how awesome it was.

But nostalgia glasses aside, that period pales in comparison to beginning of it being widely available via torrenting. Being able to watch anime basically as it was airing in Japan and the sheer volume of stuff we suddenly got easy access to in the early 2000s have life-changing. That was back when I was still on Gamefaqs board before coming over here.

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You and your friends had to buy VHS's of poor quality badly dubbed hyper violent anime.
They all had these trailers.
youtube.com/watch?v=eCfDxZxTBW4
You made sure you all got a different VHS so you watched different ones. One of your friends would end up getting Urotsukidōji and struggle to explain it to his parents, this most often happened when a parent would walked in on you and your friends watching a tentacle rape scene.

Good times.

Much worse unless you think badly dubbed anime on TV, low quality VHS you had to buy from the one place in town that might have them or being unable to just quickly get what you wanted at any time was a good thing. You also flat out wouldn't know about most anime out there at all because just getting any info was a lot of work.

>but western anime conventions were strictly for college-age men to share and copy tapes; no broads, no cosplayers, no SJW bullshit about inclusion.

>It was a lot fun back when anime was rare and you felt like you were one of the few in the know about how awesome it was.

Normal fags ruined everything

Something can be broadcast on Japanese television and someone will sub it and re-upload it somewhere within an hour for the whole world to see. That's an unbelievable convenience, even if the quality is often wonky.

That said, the petty drama you see between fansub groups is retarded. We used to come together as fans to enjoy these weird foreign cartoons, but now a lot of western anime fans are egotistical twats, attention whores, and scammers.

I miss the trigun shirt I used to wear to school. Unironically got lots of genuine compliments on it.

german here, watching anime on RTL2 all day was pretty comfy

>but now a lot of western anime fans are egotistical twats, attention whores, and scammers.

What changed between then and now?

I blame social media.

I'm another older weeb and I largely agree with There was still IRC drama back in the day, but it there was not nearly as much as there is today. But that said, I just ignore it all and enjoy the fact that I can get a sub within 24 hours of a episode premiere. I would have killed for that back in 2000.

Smartphones in general are the problem since they gave stupid people easy access to the internet.

You could really only get anime at conventions or specialty shops. This was back in the day of fansubs. There was also Sailor Moon on fox kids. There was nobody to talk to about anime back then. I think I was the only one in my school who knew what anime was. In hindsight, it was much better that today.

I remember a tv network in Lithuania licensed DBZ in the early 2000's. Literally every single kid in the country would run home from school to watch 2 back-to-back episodes and then discuss it with friends. It wasn't pre-internet, but no one there had it yet.

based