I was just a kid having fun

Kids are going to be weird and use their imagination. They'll pretend to be an NFL player breaking tackles as they run through a crowded school hallway. They'll pretend to be Optimus Prime and pretend to transform into a truck. Or they'll pretend to be iron man blasting bad guys with their lazer palms.
The issue is when your friends have aged out of that behavior and you think it's still cool to Naruto run up to them all the time.
- I remember when I was a kid I used to pretend the weirdest stuff. Once I was sitting on a picnic table behind the school and I pretended I was loved and safe.
  I did stop pretending like that pretty early though because I was afraid of being seen as weird.
  
  Can you feel me hugging you in our hearts?
  
  Me too soul family. If we pretend together enough, we'll jump timelines. Want to?
- Maybe the ones who aged out are the issue.
  
  At age 16, you shouldn’t be playing pretend
- Tangentially related but your comment made me remember that I had the most random daydreams of slaying dragons and shit when I was a kid. And that it's been such a long time since I had any real imaginative thoughts.
  
  Try to have offline days with minimal to no screen time and let your brain be bored :)
- I don't see any issue, honestly

There were definitely kids naruto running and doing kamehamehas at recess, but by high school, if it was ever known you watch even some mainstream ass anime, kiss that social life goodbye. Other anime nerds went way too weeb with it, so the only option is to hide your enjoyment and never make any references to anime in order to have some kind of normal experience. These days it's super normal to watch anime because it was our parents generation that didn't grow up with it. Now everyone is familiar with it.
- That's what tends to happen when something you like is ostracized. Either you double down and get even more into it, or you hide it in shame.
- I remember in school a few kids had older parents that didn't want their kids watching anime because they saw it as propaganda from an enemy country
- The older generations "other" it by calling it by its foreign, non-english anime. Our generation that grew up with it just calls it "cartoons", and it's normal.
  
  Anime as a whole has elements that differentiate it from animation from other regions, so the distinction seems useful.
  Should we also stop using the terms gyro, kebab, burrito, schawarma, and kati, and just say wrap instead?

- extwitter
  It's spelled "Xitter", and pronounced "Shitter"
- hatsune miku :)
  
  I agree :D
- "oh no, people are calling me a pedophile for liking lolis" As they should. Lolis are why I hate most anime because I know they're catering to the weirdos that buy their products. The whole "It's ok guys! This character is 1000 years old but looks like a child" is always and will always be sus.
  
  So just because someone likes something, it has to be for a sexual reason. Alright. I'm not saying there's no one who's like that, but it certainly isn't everyone.
  
  There are irl women who look like lolis do, should one be called a pedophile for being attracted to them?
  Loli =/= child
  (I don't care for Loli myself but let's not label people an extreme thing off of 0 evidence)
- Fine, act like there isn't a good reason for that.
- Anime is child beauty pageants for cowards.
  
  Well that tells us all what kind of anime you watch, creep.
  
  My man out here talking about the parallels between One Piece and Honey Boo Boo 🙄
  Seek help, brother
  
  Hey JamesStallion, did we have the same version of Mushishi?
  
  COLD HARD FACTS

You make fun of me now.... Wait till I'm able to turn Super Saiyan. We'll see who is laughing then!
- That's it, you really done it now.
  (Screams for 47 minutes until hair glows)
  
  Ha! I'll let you know that this isn't even my final form!
  
  3 episodes of screaming later - hair begins to glow
- 🎶Imma charging my attack🎶

If you've never tried to go super saiyan, you're not a real anime fan.
- Oh good, as long as I don't watch Dragon Ball Z I'm not a loser... Whelp, back to Rent-A-Girlfriend!
- you are no match for my complicated hand gestures jutsu
- Ok, so because I don't like DBZ, I am not allowed to like other anime?
  What kind of dumb gatekeeping is this?
  DBZ is shit, slow and boring. The battles all look the same, just different things exploding. It freaking takes forever for something to happen.
  God, I saw an entire episode where the only thing to have happened was them drawing names to see who they were going to fight in the tournament in the next episodes. 20 minutes with absolutely nothing happening. How can people even enjoy that shit? Any other form of media would get blasted with people calling it boring. But yet anime and DBZ get a pass?
  
  It was clearly a joke.
  
  You seem to have been really triggered by that innocent and random comment. Would you like some mint tea?
  
  Can I offer you an egg in this trying time?
  
  This is the kind of thing that people get made fun of for in school
  
  Woah there, I'm pretty sure that was a joke.
  
  “I’d like to speak to the manager. Now.”
  
  Yep, this is it
  
  I want to upvote you for disliking anime, but must downvote you for abusing the word gatekeeping.

Also, "everybody"? No, it's just a slightly larger percentage of nerds
- And there's also a difference between liking Akira and Studio Ghibli movies, and wanting to watch a billion episodes of Naruto.
  
  or half of One Piece
- We got the boomer at work to watch some anime, and he is pretty far from being a nerd. It's becoming slightly more mainstream.
  
  Helps that mainstream Hollywood media is complete trash too
  
  "Willing to watch" is very different from "watches". You can get most people to watch an episode or two if you frame it well/ to their interests.

Its a little wierd for me as nerdy. geeky, fen. Being part of a subcluture had become part of my identity but now they are just normal ole things.
- Dude so many of the wierd nerdy subcultures are mainstream now! So many of the things that made me uncool when I was in school are now trendy, and trends that appear to be here to stay at that!
  
  I've managed to remain uncool.
  
  Here's a short comedy bit from the late great Patrice O'Neal about typing: https://youtu.be/0PBtEPiPlrQ and how it was for him.
  
  For me the one that feels the weirdest is electronic music, whenever I hear drum and bass in a commercial or some mainstream video game or something it just feels wrong. For me it was something deeply counter-current that involved a whole lifestyle and philosophy and placed you in fringe of society, and now I just saw doctor who raving it out in the last Christmas special, a family friendly household show. I don't necessarily hate that it's happening or anything but it's just bizarre haha.

I laugh at the ones that have anime girls pasted all over their cars.
- Funny thing is, the whole subculture is called “Itasha”, which literally translates to “Pain Car”/“Cringe Car”. They’re cringe, they know it, and they’re proud.
  
  Damn respect. I've seen a couple of those in LA.
- I laugh at the ones.
  
  I laugh

And look at what's happening now. Entire cosplays at school when it's not even Halloween.
- That is still the weird kids

this guy in college would masturbate to sailor moon
- Plot twist, this was the US Naval War College, and “Sailor Moon” was the nickname for the obese cadet that liked anime and had plumber-crack.
  
  One downvote came from a navy , apparently.

I didn't like anime for so long because the fans of it in the 00's had some very eccentric behavior.

I've been into Anime since the 90s, always had friends and wasn't ostracized for it. Some people asked questions about tentacle hentai and Akira, but since was I never found any intereet in either all I could talk about was stuff I'd seen and I'd just tell em that.
I guess the closest thing to a real negative reaction was my mom walking in on the opening scene of Ranma 1/2 Movie 2, where Ranma, having been at the beach as a guy, was now running around topless as a woman. She didn't accept "that's really a guy who just got splashed with water."

Nice subculture you got there, would be a shame if it was commodomified for mass appeal.

Anime kinda polarized itself by the time I stopped watching like 5-7ish years ago. Idk if it's changed now.
But back when I stopped watching your options were:
Shonen Reboot/Continuation
Generic Candy-Colored anime girls at high school show.
Rare 10-60 Episode mini-series that had no right existing in that era.
Jojo.
- Now you have "fantasy isekai with a protagonist that's so overpowered it removes all conflict or stakes from the story."
  I seriously don't get the appeal. I know it's wish-fulfillment, but can't our wish-fulfillment include overcoming challenges?
  
  That requires effort, so probably not.

I still dont get anime. There are like 2 or 3 that I've watched, but I can't really get into it.
- That's like saying you don't get movies, or cartoons. You're just not watching the genres you'd like.
  
  Ok, what would you recommend? If it helps, the stuff I did like was the promised neverland, chainsaw man, and some of full metal alchemist.
- Because modern anime has a lot of mass produced trash. It's no ranma 1/2 or utena or Saint seya or macross, Gundam, cowboy bebop, outlaw star, cat's eye, lupin iii, etc... there are ton of well produced anime before 2000 that are actually good. Some are confusing messes but at least look amazing. I tried watching bleach and the newer stuff is just so boring and cringey.
  
  I mean... there's plenty of good stuff post-2000.
  And plenty of stuff pre-2000 sucked, you just didn't hear about it because only the big hits got imported.
- I feel it's same way with people that enjoy series for example, different strokes for different folks, I grew with dbz it was huge where I lived to the point kids would skip classes to watch it, so watching anime grew from that, I don't enjoy shows like Game of Thrones or things like Family Guy, but there's others of the same genre that I do watch, again preferences do matter, maybe you won't enjoy an anime series but maybe you will just a movie something like Redline, Spirited Away...
  What I'm trying to say is don't feel pressured into liking it, do you.
  
  I don't feel pressured, ive just tried it a few times and could really get what made people like it so much.
- You probably aren't autistic enough. The way anime is directed, and more often then not the main content tend to be quite autistic. I especially always found romance in anime to make no sense, but after seeing autistic people in my social circle get into relationships it was almost identical to what I was struggling to understand. The cast of cutesy characters in anime of that sort almost always have a few characters that are autistic. Key for example had a semi non verbal girl in one of their works, and the recurring chuunibyou has gotten a "holy shit that character is me as a kid" from a few people with Asperger's that I know.
  
  They hated you because you spoke the truth lul.
  No but seriously, besides your use of those terms you're not wrong. The characters in a lot of anime don't act like regular people (I get it they're in non realistic situations). Especially in romance, it's one of my pet peeves actually. You helped this girl up from a fall/defended her once/said something nice about her/is your childhood friend once, whan yall were kids and now she's in love with you and wants to marry you forever. It all stems from the nature and target audience of anime, they're aimed at kids/teens mostly and have to be relatively simple and they have to repeat key info relatively often which makes them seem autistic sometimes. I'm not saying all anime is like this, just most of them plus I've noticed it's been getting better and better since I graduated high-school a decade ago.

Kage no bunshin Jitsu

You are still weird if you like anime
- I like anime because I'm weird.

I have a family member with a kid about to enter middle school who is very likely going to end up being this guy. We've been trying to de-weeb him, but it's not going great. I think when the ninjutsu sinks its kunai in at such a young age, it's a lost cause. My only hope now is to just make sure he knows how to run properly.

- Ofc this is a dumb take, because it's absolute and those are mostly dumb. But I'll admit that hardcore anime fans are weirdos.
  
  Not to mention "death to weebs" is just an abhorrent take in the first place.
  
  A hardcore fan of anything is going to be a little weird. If they're not weird, they're not hardcore.
- You're seriously wishing death to people for being weird?
  
  If you're moderately weird, you'll find that there's plenty of people like this offline.
- No death threats, even in jest. THis is your only warning.