What started you on the life long journey of Otaku

The hentai section in the video rental place so many years ago. Seriously. Well it helped anyway. Actually, the first thing I ever watched that got me interested in it, but not really knowing what I was watching, was when SCI-FI CHANNEL was cool and showed an anime movie before MST3K came on. Officially, it was 'Vampire Hunter D' and not seeing that before sparked my interest enough. Definitely wasn't Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show, and Soul Train wasn't coming on until noon. Still wasn't sure what style it was called. Then the video rental place. Back when we knew it as "Japanimation" they had a tiny section of videos labeled 'Definitely not for children under 18' so of course I wanted to check it out. First anime I officially watched was The Slayers with the English dub (got to meet Lisa Ortiz last October, VA that voices Lina Inverse) and that got me hooked officially. Oh yeah, second video I officially watched knowing what it was was Fatal Fury the movie, and what always got me was that they had to censor out Mai Shiranui's ass with a big black box. And second video I officially rented was called 'F3: Frantic, Frustrated, and Female' which was also my first hentai and yuri experience.

i watched dbz and naruto in tv before i even knew they were "anime" to me it was just like any other normal show that i liked, then one day many years ago i was on the web and i saw this add for naruto shippuden, and i was like wtf is that and thats how it all started

I'd been a fan of anime such as Pokemon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and a few others before I was aware of what anime was and this effected my drawings as a kid. Later, when I finally got internet access I happened to get into Death Note and Fruits Basket and from then on I've been hooked, which also made me want to learn to draw in the style of anime / manga. It also got me wanting to learn about Japan, it's history, culture and language - so thank you anime for opening my eyes to a fascinating country :D

I'd say Cardcaptor Sakura and Digimon got me started. Then I ended up watching more Anime on Adult Swim and Toonami like Kikaider (If anyone remembers that), Rurouni Kenshin, Zatch Bell, Cowboy Bebop, and it pretty much escalated from there.

Well... Like 17 years ago most of Mexico's TV programming was anime so I pretty much grew up watching anime, playing Nintendo and Playstation games. Around 7 years ago they stopped aring it for some mysterious reason but well I stopped watching tv before that due to the internet, but I only saw flavor of the month anime around that time... I also went trough a weird "no anime I hate otakus phase, but damn I love me some fan arts and doujins" but well that's another story haha. Like 4 years ago I evolved from "gamer and closet low level otaku" to "full blown otaku/geek/whatever

I was watching Toonami back when Moltar was switching off between Robotech or Sailor Moon and just thought about them as cartoons. Never really giving much thought that they were anime until a friend of mine got me into a few shows like Slayers, Evangelion, Angel Sanctuary, and X. I've went from VHS rentals at Blockbuster to streaming and it's so much easier to get into anime now than it was back then.