Autobiography of How I Became an Anime Fan (2009 edition): chapter 5

Chapter 5 of my newly revised anime autobiography…

I didn’t get my first computer with Internet until early 2001. Back then, I was still a fairly hardcore Pokemon fan and used the computer mostly to look up Pokemon and Rocketshipping fan sites. As my years in high school went by and I discovered many new anime, I used the computer to look up info and pictures from different series. I’ll admit that I was barely computer literate when I got my first computer – I didn’t even know how to save things from the Internet to my hard drive. But it didn’t take long for me to learn from experience and help from friends how to gain the above-average computer knowledge I have today.

I had dial-up Internet access for the first four years I had a computer, which made downloading things like music and short video clips a pain (and downloading fansub episodes was out of the question). But despite this, I was able to make a simple, dial-up friendly, anime web site that still exists today.

Autobiography of How I Became an Anime Fan

Chapter 5 – The Birth of Anime Yume, and Beyond

HTML Although anime fan sites are scarce nowadays, they were flourishing during my high school years. Eventually I decided that I wanted to make my own anime site too, but I had no idea how. Luckily, I made a friend from one of the Rocketshipping sites I used to visit, and she showed me how to use basic HTML to create simple web pages. Finally, in June 2002, I made an account with (the late) Geocities, bought a domain name called animeyume.com, and thus my anime web site was born.

Anime Yume After playing around with HTML codes and uploading files to my server, I made Anime Yume public on June 30th, 2002. I decided to make it a fundamental anime site, even for people who don’t know much about anime. It has individual sections on it for different series that I like, as well as information about anime in general. Like a lot of new fan sites, Anime Yume was very small when I first made it – it had less than 15MB of material and the only anime sections it had at the beginning were for Cardcaptor Sakura, Pokemon, Digimon, Mon Colle Knights, Slayers, Trigun, and Tenchi Muyo!. But as time went by, I continued to spend many hours working on it. Over the years I added new pages and anime sections, kept updating old ones, added a layout with frames, added media files, and always tried to put as much of a unique, individual feel in it as I could. I would write all the pages of the site myself, including the synopsis and character bios for the different anime sections. Though some of them could use improvement, I’m actually pretty proud of certain ones.

Unfortunately, I never had a good picture editing program like Photoshop so, as you can see in the example below, my early banners looked pretty crappy.


All I could do was crop and paste…

Eventually I decided to hold a banner creating contest and let my visitors with better programs make banners for me.


The splash banner that a visitor made for me, which I used on the site for many years

Anime Yume never became one of the really popular anime fan sites, though I was always looking at the once extremely popular but now closed LELOLA for inspiration. It had the majority of its success in 2003 to 2005, which were the years when I got the most hits and most e-mails from visitors. Once I added an Inuyasha section, it became especially popular for fans of that series, as most of the e-mails I received were about Inuyasha. Eventually I had to upgrade from Geocities to Yahoo! Web Hosting in order to get more space and bandwidth (which worked out fine now that Geocities is closed).

Working on Anime Yume was definitely a big part of my high school/early college years. I’ve even shown it to friends, family, and teachers. Currently it has 44 anime sections and 6GB of content. As I’ll discuss in chapter 6, for the past three years I’ve given up work on it in favor of the blog. But I’m still keeping it open and I still update it once in a while.


How Anime Yume looks now (click on the image to visit)

Getting into Japanese Throughout my years of schooling, I always thought I wanted to pursue a career in animation or cartooning. I was totally into drawing since I was in elementary school – I have folders full of past drawings I made from kindergarten up until high school. And of course, most of the TV shows and movies I watched were anime or cartoons. I had taken a drawing elective class in middle school and a computer animation class in high school. When I became an anime fan, I even started developing ideas for my own manga series.


I was really into drawing pokemon in middle school…


…and fantasy creatures like dragons in high school

I graduated high school in 2004 (my last major high school anime was Fruits Basket), but since I lacked the money for a 4-year university, I decided to pursue an A.A. in art at a local community college. My college also offered Japanese classes, which I signed up for as well. However, my first Japanese class was actually a short extension course I took that summer via another college. I loved learning Japanese right away. I even taught myself hiragana and katakana (I practiced by writing the names of anime characters) before I started my first college Japanese class.


My first Japanese textbook

As I went through my first semester of college, I realized that I loved my Japanese class, but not my art class. I simply wasn’t good at, nor did I like, drawing realistically, such as with still life, which is what college art classes required. Thus, I decided to change my career path from art to Japanese, for other reasons too. I can draw a limited amount of things well, but I’m completely amateurish compared to much of the talent on pixiv or deviantART.


One of my better drawings – good but not great

I never learned how to draw correct human anatomy, nor did I have the means to draw or color properly on the computer.


My best attempt at scanning and coloring on a (crappy) paint program

I also know that cartoonists, especially manga artists, are always buried in deadlines and have to draw fast and come up with ideas on the spot. Drawing is not something I like to do all the time and I can’t do a good job unless I’m in the mood. Even when I am in the mood, it takes me forever to draw something until it looks right. Compared to some people I know who can whip up a masterpiece in 10 minutes, it takes me much longer to draw something that will come out less good. So basically, with all the competition out there and all my drawing limitations, I decided to go along the career path for my other passion – Japan and Japanese.

Next time, as my early college years go by, I’ll discuss my breakthrough in finally getting high-speed Internet, cable TV, as well as a better computer. Also, my first anime convention, my first trip to Japan, creating Mainichi Anime Yume, and how I finally started watching the latest anime via fansubs.

Click here to return to chapter 4.

Click here to go on to chapter 6.

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