Whenever your tastes and hobbies fall out of the norm, you run the risk of being called out by those who don’t approve of anything “different.” Anime, being the niche medium that it is, is a likely thing to be put down about by classmates, family members, coworkers, etc., who, in all likelihood, have a distorted, ignorant view of what anime is. Luckily I haven’t had to experience any extreme pressure at school, work, or home about my anime obsession, but I have had a few incidents that I wanted to share…

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Being a big fan of anime and other things, I always feel the need to have something on my person that shows it, whether it’s a keychain, pins on my bag, or an anime T-shirt. A few years ago I actually wrote all about how I “wear” anime on my person all the time in a past post. There I described how, over the years, I’ve always kept little fan trinkets on me, like pictures on my school notebook or charms on my phone – the “how” of advertising my fandom if you will. But today, I wanted to look at the “why” and “why not” of people who like to publicly show that they’re anime fans and people who don’t…

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Since I got into anime in the early 2000s when the Internet culture was just taking off, I can’t comment on how fans stayed up-to-date with anime and connected with each other in the years before then. But it’s very obvious that the medium and its fandom would not be as universally accessible as it is today without the Internet. Thanks to the World Wide Web we can now converse with and share things with fellow fans from all over the world, any time, anywhere, as well as stay up to date on all the latest happenings of the anime world. So for today’s topic, I want to discuss my personal routine for staying connected with the anime community and see how other people’s routines differ…

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Three years ago I wrote a post discussing how, over the years as I’ve watched more and more anime at a given time than I used to in my early years as a fan, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to remember every single one. Recently czai over on the Blacksheep Project wrote a post dealing with a similar topic about how she remembers some of the 200 anime she’s watched more than others and why that is. So today I was inspired to revisit this topic of how well we’re able to remember all the anime we’ve ever watched…

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