Moments when a piece of entertainment completely rocked you.

[maglag]

Fun fact, the first english translations of Dragonball were made by fans and had the characters going "SHITFUCKYOUSHITFAGGOTSUCKBARRELDICKS!!!!!".

So when the official translations started airing, a lot of the early english-speaking fans that didn't knew any japanese were quite surprised that the characters weren't swearing all the time after all.

[deaddmwalking]

Anime is the worst example you could have chosen really .

As stated, I can't think of a 'good' example. They're all like that.

'I feel I'm being marginalized because new people have a lower bar to entry into the hobby'.

If you're trying to tell me I can't be a 'fan' of Black Panther because I saw a movie 3 months ago and you've been reading the comic since the 1970s, I say bullshit. And if you say that there is a difference between 'real fans' and 'casual fans', that may be true, but it doesn't detract from the hobby. If anything, it just gives you more options to participate in, some of which may not be to your liking. More options is good. Period.

[hyzmarca]

I've personally never met an actual poseur. I've met people who didn't know much about the subject but were happy to learn. I've met people who didn't know much about the subject but weren't interested in the minutia, but I've never actually met anyone who only pretended to like something in order to meet people. Generally meeting people is a complementary goal. Even the guy who only knows one guitar song usually likes playing that song.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Gatekeeping is one of the reasons I consider nerds to be shitty people in general. My first intro to anime was One Punch Man and my first intro to DBZ was Team Four Star. Fite me irl.

[Chamomile]

If you have an unpopular interest, definitionally finding people will be harder.

I just gave you an example of a situation in which that is not actually true, and it was an example that you came up with. This is not an unsolvable problem, it's just one that you have committed yourself to treating like an inherent good for stupid, petty reasons. Just because someone had an unhealthy reaction to a problem doesn't mean the problem itself is a good thing. When someone suggests a bad house rule to fix the 3.5 Monk, do you start defending the Monk? This isn't just stupid when talking about low stakes, either. When a man is a victim of rape, finds few people take his problem seriously, and becomes an MRA, do you celebrate his rape and/or people's reaction to it? It is bizarre that the concept of opposing both a problem and a specific response to that problem is so difficult for you to wrap your head around, because people coming up with bad solutions for real problems isn't even unusual. It's more common than people coming up with good solutions.

But if the absolute number of people participating in your hobby increases and there are more people you would want to participate with, that is a good thing, even if it's harder to find them.

No. The only thing that actually matters is the number like-minded people that you can find. If the number of like-minded people doesn't go up enough to keep pace with how much more common they'll be, then the number of like-minded people you can actually interact with goes down.

The fact that you're dedicated to your hobby implies you should be able to do the work. If 'committed members' leave because of the influx, it's hard to accept that they're committed - or at least committed for the right reason.

No. This is a total non-sequitir. It's absolute nonsense to say that someone who really likes D&D so much should be willing to spend tedious, frustrating hours sifting through people looking to recreate Critical Role to find someone who actually cares about the rules, or that someone who likes talking about anime with people who know the medium's history are automatically the same kind of people who'd be willing to talk to dozens of people who don't in order to find one, or that people who want a hardcore raiding guild should be thrilled that it takes them days or weeks to find one. Nothing about being dedicated to a hobby suggests that someone should be willing to make a huge time investment in something that isn't actually the hobby in order to enjoy the hobby. It's even more ludicrous to suggest that it is somehow an inherent good that people with niche interests should have to do this, to the point where looking for effective solutions to the problem is wrong. The position that you're arguing for is that if people made a network so that the people with the niche interest could more easily find each other, that would be wrong. I'm half-certain that you think you're arguing against the practice of gatekeeping, but if that's true, it's because you're an idiot. At no point has anyone except Pariah Dog defended the practice of gatekeeping, and you're quoting my posts, not his.

All you're doing here is recognizing that the problem exists and doubling down on the "fuck people with niche interests" position. No, not people who want to keep others out of the hobby, despite your consistent impenetrable stupidity on the subject I am in fact talking about the problem gatekeepers are reacting to and not the problem of gatekeeping itself, which is self-solving - gatekeeping doesn't actually work and gets buried by the problem it's trying to combat, so it's not actually a thing that needs a longterm solution. You really can just spotfix it until it goes away as a result of the same forces that cause it in the first place.

Nobody in 'the hobby' owes anything to anybody else. It's built entirely on mutual-self-interest.

How many fucking times do I have to restate my contempt for the actual practice of gatekeeping before it will sink into your thick skull that I'm not defending it?

I've never seen an example of people who get upset about new people joining their hobby that goes beyond 'I built my identity around this and now I don't feel special'.

Have you looked? Or are you, for some reason, expecting people with a healthy reaction to their hobby going in a direction they don't like to draw attention to themselves in the same manner as people with unhealthy, dysfunctional reactions? Because if it's the latter, you're a fucking idiot! Obviously the people who just sigh and move on with their lives aren't going to be as visible as the ones who harass the newcomers.

Even if you're 'priced out of the hobby' it's hard to make a claim for any type of injury. We vote with our wallets, and if you're outvoted, that's the way things are supposed to work. If there is a market for the things YOU WANT, someone will make it.

The Republicans lied to you. Shocking, I know, but it's true. Markets aren't perfectly optimized omniscient forces that serve up products exactly in proportion to people's ability to pay for them at all times. Sometimes market opportunities go untapped for years or even decades at a time, and talking about how to recognize when that happens and fix it isn't somehow wrong.

[Hiram McDaniels]

Well this has often been my hill to die on discussionwise so:

Oh wow, li'l buddy...there is a whole lot of 100% from concentrate stupid to unpack there.

I mean, this utterly fuck-brained argument fails on first principles, because it describes a social hobby and posits that the beginning of the end began when it included more than like 4 people.

You then say that the OG's take the game and the rules seriously, but that is diluted by the infusion of new blood. If you pay any attention to the grognards, Papa Gary himself basically just made shit up as he went along, no one bothered naming their characters until 5th level, and there is a lot of lament over the fact that the game had only grown MORE codified and rule intensive as time went on. Hell, the people here on the Den take the rules VERY seriously, and I guarantee that most of them weren't playing the game in the 70's, you quarterwit.

Thirdly, women only join games to meet boyfriends? Like I honestly can't tell if you're having a laugh here or if this is some hallucinatory side effect of the black pill you swallowed. How do you explain my married friend, starting a lady's D&D group with all of her married and otherwise involved lady friends? Maybe they just stack up all the books so the male strippers they hire have a place to put their sound system?

[Dogbert]

Funny how the Comicbook Guy stereotype is still alive and well even after decades of Sony and Disney removing social stigma from so much of geekdom. Funny how we're in 2018 and some neckbeards still use the "fake geek girl" term unironically. It gets particularly hilarious when the "alpha/beta" buzzwords are tossed in. Some people just like being their own strawmen I guess.

Without Sony removing the stigma from videogames, we wouldn't have games made with budgets in the seven digits. No Mass Effect, no Final Fantasy 15, no Wolfenstein: The New Order/Colossus.

Without Tim Burton and Sam Raimi's efforts, we'd never have had Robert Downey Jr. giving us an Iron-Man Hollywood actually cared to render right, or glorious Wonder Woman.

Without Peter Jackson, we'd never have had years of Game of Throne tits on HBO, or American Gods, or Dresden Files.

Mainstream money is good, it helps make great things possible (and mediocre things too, I know, for each LotR we get at least 20 Eragorns, but having a LotR is always a net gain).

For the sake of debate, however...

Nobody can change what anime you get.

Tell that to the pokemon generation.

That piece of crap became the new dragonball, and next thing we knew we got a full decade of mainstream anime with nothing but pre-teen protagonists and their pokemon/pokemaids/Megaman NT.

Producers have to bow to market forces. If you were an "edgy early 90s' gory anime" fan, the moment pokemon came round you got de-facto fired from the hobby. Your money is no longer good if no one is making the product you want anyway, so either change your tastes or GTFO.

(and then, in my case, by the poke-era, I had already moved on to mindfuck anime like Lain and FLCL, which pretty much have always been a niche, and while juvenile fighting anime made a comeback later, by the time it did, I had already outgrown the genre).

[Iduno]

Gatekeepers aren't the orcs of Mordor. They aren't crafted by Sauron to blight the free peoples of the internet

Of course not. The orcs were evil because they represented progress and associating with people who weren't like you (filthy outsiders). Gatekeepers are more like the Gondorians, who were good because they feared change because they might be attacked.

Change can bring lowered quality and profiteering, but it can also progress and keep everything from stagnating. Probably it will do both. Cautious optimism seems like a better decision than gatekeeping, but still has the problem that the people who want to determine who is good enough are terrible.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I have a more accurate depiction of what is happening than the comic that whatshisface posted:

Anyhow I finally finished the storyline in FF12. All in all, it was pretty good. I wish I hadn't had the "it's different so it sucks" reaction when it first came out, I actually enjoy programming my character's actions. Vaan didn't bother me like he seems to bother most people. Last boss went down quick but that's pretty normal for FF bosses if you've already done the sidequests and optional content.

[Pseudo Stupidity]

Oh man another place where I can stick my competitive Smash Brothers dick even though it's only kinda related? I'll take it.

So there was/is this great game called Super Smash Brothers: Melee, and it was wildly popular and people ran lots of tournaments for it. It was fun, everything was beautiful, all the people were beautiful, and you couldn't wavedash without sliding into/onto an attractive person's genitals.

Then this piece of shit trash game called Super Smash Brothers: Brawl (may its name forever be cursed) came out, and it was terrible and catered to the hated casual market (in particular was the developer outright saying it was meant to fuck with tournament players, with mechanics like tripping where your character would randomly trip for having the audacity to attempt to run). These fake nerds couldn't even wavedash and weren't interested in installing cybernetic enhancements to play Fox at even half his capacity. Melee tournament attendance went down, and a bunch of people like me were pissed about it.

Fast forward to now. Another awful Smash game has come out, but Melee tournament attendance has gone through the roof yet again. Even though a bunch of filthy casuals have joined the hobby I love my hobby has only gotten better. The filthy casuals can either be ignored or embraced (I like playing casually too, but don't tell anyone), but being a dickhead gatekeeper who argues about Brawl/Sm4sh on forums or even harassing them in person at their own events is stupid.

My story is a happy one because Melee survived and is better than ever, but maybe if a different way of playing is killing your hobby it's because your hobby is bad or you just aren't doing a good job of marketing it.

No. This is a total non-sequitir. It's absolute nonsense to say that someone who really likes D&D so much should be willing to spend tedious, frustrating hours sifting through people looking to recreate Critical Role to find someone who actually cares about the rules, or that someone who likes talking about anime with people who know the medium's history are automatically the same kind of people who'd be willing to talk to dozens of people who don't in order to find one, or that people who want a hardcore raiding guild should be thrilled that it takes them days or weeks to find one. Nothing about being dedicated to a hobby suggests that someone should be willing to make a huge time investment in something that isn't actually the hobby in order to enjoy the hobby. It's even more ludicrous to suggest that it is somehow an inherent good that people with niche interests should have to do this, to the point where looking for effective solutions to the problem is wrong. The position that you're arguing for is that if people made a network so that the people with the niche interest could more easily find each other, that would be wrong. I'm half-certain that you think you're arguing against the practice of gatekeeping, but if that's true, it's because you're an idiot. At no point has anyone except Pariah Dog defended the practice of gatekeeping, and you're quoting my posts, not his.

This is the age of the Internet. It's so easy to find somebody with whatever incredibly niche interests you have that I could probably find a dom poly furry foot fetishist in less time than it took me to the make this post. To suggest that it's hard to find some dork to talk about the history of Anime with, or someone who's really hardcore about D&D, is ridiculous in the face of the Internet.

And if you really like something you will spend tedious hours finding people like you. That's what you do when you really like something. It's how hobbies get started in the fucking first place.

[Chamomile]

This is the age of the Internet. It's so easy to find somebody with whatever incredibly niche interests you have that I could probably find a dom poly furry foot fetishist in less time than it took me to the make this post.

Oh, wow, you can find someone at the intersection of a couple of the most common niches of a hobby (such that it is) with the most well-developed networking infrastructure of any hobby in all of existence? What a surprise. The reason why it's easy to find a dom poly furry foot fetishist is because someone made websites like f-list and FetLife that attract large numbers of people with relevant interests and provide them the tools both to tag themselves by specific interests and to quickly and easily search for and communicate with one another. Far from being the last hobby to get this attention, hook-ups and erotica were of course amongst the first. Most hobbies do not have this level of infrastructure.

To suggest that it's hard to find some dork to talk about the history of Anime with, or someone who's really hardcore about D&D, is ridiculous in the face of the Internet.

How long would it take you to find 3-6 people willing to play a rules-heavy game of D&D without advance knowledge of the Den? If your answer is anything less than a double digit number of man hours, you are delusionally optimistic.

You don't need the internet. If you live in the Age of fucking Sail, you can, in theory, find any number of fellow enthusiasts who exist in the world so long as you are willing to invest enough time and resources into doing so and get lucky. "Hobby enthusiast" doesn't mean "willing to dedicate my entire life to a quest to find others who share my interest and possibly fail anyway," and it doesn't mean "willing to sink an entire weekend into finding one guy to have a conversation with, who I may or may not enjoy as a person for factors unrelated to the hobby" either.

And if you really like something you will spend tedious hours finding people like you.

"Gatekeeping is okay when I'm doing it!"

That's what you do when you really like something. It's how hobbies get started in the fucking first place.

Are you going to be the kind of idiot that holds up the necessity of such a search as an inherent good? If not, what exactly is your objection to creating a world where people don't have to spend hours to accomplish that, other than a kneejerk reaction that anything which makes gatekeepers sad must automatically be good, because as we all know, everything that ever happens in the entire world is neatly and cleanly divided between good and evil and there is no such thing as a circumstance that could simultaneously be harmful to both sides?

[shinimasu]

I've had several likes/interests/hobbies that took a sharp nosedive in quality post popularity boom, but upon self examination the reason for the nosedive had basically nothing to do with the community itself, and everything to do with the property in question being bought out by someone else and then mismanaged into the ground.

I feel like entities with dollar signs spinning in their eyes are generally more of a threat than an influx of casuals. Does the influx attract them? Yeah but that's hardly the participant's fault. It's not really reasonable to go "Stop liking my thing you fool, if you put us over capacity it attracts the wolves!"

[Pseudo Stupidity]

Oh, wow, you can find someone at the intersection of a couple of the most common niches of a hobby (such that it is) with the most well-developed networking infrastructure of any hobby in all of existence? What a surprise. The reason why it's easy to find a dom poly furry foot fetishist is because someone made websites like f-list and FetLife that attract large numbers of people with relevant interests and provide them the tools both to tag themselves by specific interests and to quickly and easily search for and communicate with one another. Far from being the last hobby to get this attention, hook-ups and erotica were of course amongst the first. Most hobbies do not have this level of infrastructure.

I'm genuinely surprised you put this much thought into a throwaway reference to how easy it is to get access to people with very, very specific interests.

How long would it take you to find 3-6 people willing to play a rules-heavy game of D&D without advance knowledge of the Den? If your answer is anything less than a double digit number of man hours, you are delusionally optimistic.

I did actually get a local D&D group together pretty recently, it took a couple hours of effort, nothing to do with the Den, and then a bunch of waiting (because I did it through Facebook). It didn't stick together because personalities didn't jive, but it was actually much easier than I thought it would be. To specifically find people interested in rules-heavy D&D might take longer, but the effort will be pretty much the same. I just need to post on Facebook and hobby sites.

My first D&D group came from making a profile on some random site, then I got a group invite and I joined it. My experiences aren't everyone's experiences, but I have never had trouble with finding D&D when I felt like it. I have a harder time setting up my schedule so I can consistently play D&D.

You don't need the internet. If you live in the Age of fucking Sail, you can, in theory, find any number of fellow enthusiasts who exist in the world so long as you are willing to invest enough time and resources into doing so and get lucky. "Hobby enthusiast" doesn't mean "willing to dedicate my entire life to a quest to find others who share my interest and possibly fail anyway," and it doesn't mean "willing to sink an entire weekend into finding one guy to have a conversation with, who I may or may not enjoy as a person for factors unrelated to the hobby" either.

The Internet helps a lot, because I can access tons of people with specific interests in a short time. If you can't find somebody to talk about <thing> with you just aren't very good at the Internet. It takes very little effort to use search engines, so I'm baffled when you think it's hard to find somebody to talk about Anime.

"Gatekeeping is okay when I'm doing it!"

It logically follows that if you really enjoy something you will seek out that thing, and since D&D involves groups of people you will naturally seek out groups of people to play your preferred flavor of D&D. Saying that people who like D&D will try to play D&D is not gatekeeping any more than saying that people who like Mexican food will seek out Mexican restaurants to eat at. Of course you'll make an effort to do a thing if you like a thing. D&D involves finding people to play D&D with, so people who like D&D will attempt to do that.

Are you going to be the kind of idiot that holds up the necessity of such a search as an inherent good? If not, what exactly is your objection to creating a world where people don't have to spend hours to accomplish that, other than a kneejerk reaction that anything which makes gatekeepers sad must automatically be good, because as we all know, everything that ever happens in the entire world is neatly and cleanly divided between good and evil and there is no such thing as a circumstance that could simultaneously be harmful to both sides?

This is aimed at nothing I ever said or even hinted at. I love niche communities, I am happy when niche communities like gaming get bigger because it means it just got easier for me to find people and it means more people are enjoying the thing I enjoy.

Sure it can be harder to find my exact flavor of nerd when a group grows before now there are more nerds of other flavors involved, but golly I guess I just don't give a fuck about meeting people, learning we aren't interested in the same shit, and then going our separate ways. What exactly is the problem here?

[deaddmwalking]

Chamomile is arguing that trying to keep people out of the hobby (gatekeeping) is bad, but people joining the hobby is also bad, so it'd be nice if there was a solution that kept people out of the hobby without keeping people out of the hobby. Some kind of 'both sides' argument that seem popular today.

Edit -

Cracked has an article about Ready Player One that touches on these themes.

At what point does your enthusiasm for a game or movie franchise, or a celebrity, or political candidate, or firearms, or anything else suddenly bring out the worst in your personality? At what level does your love turn into bitter defensiveness and petty gatekeeping? At what point are you engaging in behaviors so awful that your persecution fantasies become a reality just as a natural consequence?

[Mistborn]

Tell that to the pokemon generation.

That piece of crap became the new dragonball, and next thing we knew we got a full decade of mainstream anime with nothing but pre-teen protagonists and their pokemon/pokemaids/Megaman NT.

Producers have to bow to market forces. If you were an "edgy early 90s' gory anime" fan, the moment pokemon came round you got de-facto fired from the hobby. Your money is no longer good if no one is making the product you want anyway, so either change your tastes or GTFO.

(and then, in my case, by the poke-era, I had already moved on to mindfuck anime like Lain and FLCL, which pretty much have always been a niche, and while juvenile fighting anime made a comeback later, by the time it did, I had already outgrown the genre).

Given my knowledge of anime history that sounds much like an accurate understanding of what anime was getting made in the late 90s/00s and why. More like something a younger dogbert read into whatever dubs were airing in his region.

[Stahlseele]

When the pokemon problem started over here (remember, germany, we are a bit behind when it comes to these things) i found myself friends with the same taste in anime as me at that point. Turns out, they were already way deeper down the rabbit hole and so i became the newbie into their hobby. And i learned a bit about their hobby. And i asked them about anime they liked and would recommend for me and my tastes. And when they watched anime i did not like? i watched something else instead!
I did not demand they watch something i like.
I gave their anime a go as they had broadly the same taste as me in those things and when i decided that no, that stuff was not for me, i accepted that.
And i watched something else and recommended it to them if i thought they might enjoy it as well.
But neither did they try to make me watch the stuff they liked to watch at any given moment, nor did i try to make them stop watching what they did and watch what i wanted to watch.
THIS is what i consider a positive influx into a hobby.
Hell even when we came to an about 90% overlap of taste in anime (sci-fi, mecha) we still did not like everything the others liked.
For me, even if it is touted by some as THE MECHA ANIME PERIOD . . i never got into Gundamn . .
And i never got into the expanded Macross universe stuff either, even if i loved the Do You Remember Love Movie.
In return, they never got into things like MD Geist. Too schlocky for them.
Juust about right for me.

[Josh_Kablack]

Fuck all things ready player one related.

I should write a book about 1980s sports fans who talk about how exciting is was to watch Mary Lou Retton get the first perfect 10 in gymnastics and then get excited about whether Joe Montana can get more Super Bowl rings than Bart Star's 5 championships. Then I'll just dismiss anyone who fact-checks those tidbits as a toxic gatekeeper who's holding sports trivia/history away from the unwashed masses.

[Chamomile]

I'm genuinely surprised you put this much thought into a throwaway reference to how easy it is to get access to people with very, very specific interests.

Because the "throwaway comment" is deeply misleading. It's not easy to get access to people with very, very specific interests unless the infrastructure for finding them has already been built. Using the example of an interest with infrastructure on par with professional networking is deceptive. Almost no hobby has that level of advanced search feature. Roleplaying games have to rely on Roll20, whose search features pale in comparison to F-List's. On F-List, there are hundreds of incredibly specific tags you can attach to your profile to be searched by. On Roll20, you list what game system (or family of game systems) your game uses and then have to put the rest in your description. If Roll20 had F-List's functionality, there would be established tags for tone of plot, style of GMing, popular settings, and a bunch of stuff I can't even think of, because I sure as Hell didn't know that barbed penises were a fetish until I got linked to an F-List profile containing them in a "worst OCs" thread and saw it was a standard option, not a custom one built for that profile specifically.

I did actually get a local D&D group together pretty recently, it took a couple hours of effort, nothing to do with the Den, and then a bunch of waiting (because I did it through Facebook). It didn't stick together because personalities didn't jive, but it was actually much easier than I thought it would be. To specifically find people interested in rules-heavy D&D might take longer, but the effort will be pretty much the same. I just need to post on Facebook and hobby sites.

"I haven't actually done this, but I have failed at doing something easier, therefore it is easy" is the most bizarre argument I could possibly imagine as a response. I'm sure you could come up with something stupider if you tried. I have confidence in you like that. Like, if you hadn't flat-out ignored the actual niche part of the niche, that would be one thing. If you had found a group that actually wanted to do the hobby together, that also would've made sense. Instead, you have a story where you drew only on the population that the existing infrastructure is capable of serving and still failed. The group didn't dissolve because of scheduling conflicts or technical issues, but because the people involved didn't actually want to play D&D together. That's not successfully finding people you want to partake in a hobby with! That is the opposite of that!

It logically follows that if you really enjoy something you will seek out that thing, and since D&D involves groups of people you will naturally seek out groups of people to play your preferred flavor of D&D.

And it logically follows that someone who really likes Green Lantern would enjoy consuming more Green Lantern fiction until they know enough Green Lantern trivia to pass a dumb quiz. Claiming that your gate successfully keeps out the people you don't like doesn't actually change the fact that you are gatekeeping.

This is aimed at nothing I ever said or even hinted at.

It's an if/else statement, you dumbass. If the if doesn't apply, then the else does.

golly I guess I just don't give a fuck about meeting people, learning we aren't interested in the same shit, and then going our separate ways. What exactly is the problem here?

That you still haven't actually found the thing you are looking for. The position you are arguing for - whether or not you're smart enough to have parsed it - is that people with niche interests should not be able to easily find one another. The idea that I am defending is that it is good when people have the infrastructure to find people with similar interests and bad when people whose infrastructure used to be sufficient suddenly isn't because it's now serving a far larger demographic and needs far more precise tools in order to connect people who used to be dominant in the hobby. Arguing against that position means arguing against the idea that it would be good if people with similar niche interests could find each other without going to hours and hours of effort.

Chamomile is arguing that trying to keep people out of the hobby (gatekeeping) is bad, but people joining the hobby is also bad, so it'd be nice if there was a solution that kept people out of the hobby without keeping people out of the hobby. Some kind of 'both sides' argument that seem popular today.

No, I am not. I am not even going to bother to explain what my actual argument is to you, because I have no confidence in your ability to parse it. If you really want to know, reread the posts I have already written for you and this time leave your dumbass assumptions that empathy for people who do shitty things automatically makes me a monster and just read the words I actually wrote. Just those words. Don't make up any bullshit to append to them or make any assumptions about what hideous character defects surely must be driving me to consider the humanity of your outgroup, just read the actual words that I actually wrote on the subject.

EDIT: Ready Player One was not a good book, but I've heard that the movie only shares vague similarities, so I'm optimistic that it might turn out alright.

[Iduno]

I just watched the first few minutes of Kill la Kill. It hits just the right combination of violence and hilarity so far.

And i never got into the expanded Macross universe stuff either, even if i loved the Do You Remember Love Movie.

I remember watching it back when I was in elementary school, and it was still pretty good when I rewatched it. Anything that gets kids hooked on giant robots is pretty good in my book.

[Stahlseele]

Kill la Kill . . i just can't handle the art style in that one <.<
FLCL took a bit getting used to, but i still enjoyed that one.

I still watch DYRL every few weeks or months. Reminds me, time is up again.
Yeah, giant Robots are Awesome. Well, the AWS Series at least.

[maglag]

When the pokemon problem started over here (remember, germany, we are a bit behind when it comes to these things) i found myself friends with the same taste in anime as me at that point. Turns out, they were already way deeper down the rabbit hole and so i became the newbie into their hobby. And i learned a bit about their hobby. And i asked them about anime they liked and would recommend for me and my tastes. And when they watched anime i did not like? i watched something else instead!
I did not demand they watch something i like.
I gave their anime a go as they had broadly the same taste as me in those things and when i decided that no, that stuff was not for me, i accepted that.
And i watched something else and recommended it to them if i thought they might enjoy it as well.
But neither did they try to make me watch the stuff they liked to watch at any given moment, nor did i try to make them stop watching what they did and watch what i wanted to watch.
THIS is what i consider a positive influx into a hobby.

It was not just positive for that particular hobby, pokemon popularity also made both anime and videogames as a whole a lot more mainstream. You no longer were the weird kid out for bringing a portable console to the playground!

Hell even when we came to an about 90% overlap of taste in anime (sci-fi, mecha) we still did not like everything the others liked.
For me, even if it is touted by some as THE MECHA ANIME PERIOD . . i never got into Gundamn . .

Ahem, Gundam is THE REAL MECHA ANIME PERIOD, do not confuse with super mecha anime like Mazinger and Getter Robo. Tomino basically spawned a whole new subgenre where mechas are mass-produced machines that anybody can use and there's a lot more grey than black and white, politics are just as important as having the biggest mecha and it's possible to end the war by signing an armistice instead of needing to blow up all the bad guys to the last.

Even then the original Gundam is infamous for having really poor view ratings to the point the original company owning it told Tomino they were cutting the anime short and he would need to wrap up the story in fewer episodes than he originally intended.

What saved the franchise back then was Bandai buying the rights and coming up with the first Gunpla that sold like crazy, reviving interest. Add in the compilation movies where they cut out a lot of filler crap and added a bunch of extra new stuff and you've got a winner.

Still Gundam is without a doubt the longest running mecha series, with a lot of animes and games/toys. It also helped up start big cosplay events thanks to the variety of characters and military uniforms. They even built a real-scale replica in Japan.

It also helped the whole mecha genre was that Gundam showed you could make a mecha series with a complex plot instead of just a glorified 30 minutes toy commercial, which was basically what mecha anime was back in the day (trivia, Tomino wanted the Gundam itself to be a fully white/grey machine, but the producers ordered that the main mecha had to have bright colors to look good for kids and Tomino was forced to add the now classic blue/red/yellow bits to the Gundam's design, however the Zaku survived with its military green pattern). Macross would not exist without Gundam.

Heck, it got so popular they made a manga about how Gundam came to be, and it's awesome.

Also notice that although several of the Gundam animes follow a common main timeline, there are also a bunch of alternate universes that play by quite different rules, so even if you don't like one others may catch your fancy. In particular G-Gundam is a lot closer to super robot, with hotblooded pilots riding exotic machines and shouting their special moves.

[Shrapnel]

Bah, Gundam is just a knock-off of Trans-- nah, just kidding.

This whole thing on gatekeeping just keeps reminding me of the old "TRUKK NOT MUNKY" arguments and how people who liked Beast Wars ruined Transformers FOREVER.


Pull when hobby is threatened.


As an aside, could this whole gate-keeping shitdoggery get split into a new thread? Onegai and arigatogozaimasu.

[Username17]

Ready Player Two: Girl Stuff

He handed me a beanie baby. “You know, I don’t think I ever got to thank you for saving my life, and the world, with your knowledge of the Sailor Moon dub.”

-Username17

[Maj]

I am so having fun with Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir on Netflix. It's like an emotional hit of superhero crossed with Sailor Moon. I like the computer animation, I like the characters, I like stories, I like the humor, I like the word de-evilize.

[Prak]

Gundam is THE REAL MECHA ANIME PERIOD

*ahem*