I feel the same way. Grew up in "the country" and got my hands on whatever I could, but in those days the pickings were scarce and of course no one else was into it. Just meeting someone else who knew what Akira was was pretty miraculous, but at the same time it certainly wasn't enough to bond over or anything like that.ZephyrStar wrote:Sometimes I think I was born 10 years too early for the hobby. Seems like every high schoo/college has a club or a group of cosplay kids or at least some people who are into it. It was very lonely when I was starting HS (1994) and was the only kid that I knew of that knew what anime was. Course, I did live out in the country, and I did find a club at my college (which I chose not to attend very often because of some of the fans there.)
My college had no anime club (or any clubs at all to speak of, really), the closest we came to this was the semi-regular group of students that would gather in the commons in the late afternoon to watch Dragonball, Gundam, or whatever was being shown on Toonami before the dining hall would open at 5:00. I really don't know how many people there would watch because they were "into anime" and how many were just watching it to be "ironic" or because they had nothing else to do. Anyway, I didn't really embrace my love for it until I'd left there, and now I find myself dabbling in a troublingly young scene and feeling a little jealous of how teens & tweens have it today.
By the time that I was out of college and working a part time job, I started to meet lots of other people who were really into anime and cosplaying. Unfortunately, they were mostly all just out of high school and the tiny but nevertheless tangible sense of maturity and personal responsibility that I'd built up in myself made it very difficult to socialize or identify with them, much less "join" their group. No disrespect to them or anything. We were just at different points in our lives and outside of enjoying a few DDR/Karaoke Revolution parties with them -- I was possibly only invited to bring alcohol but that's fine -- we just didn't have much in common.
I don't meant to sound bitter or anything. It's just that I really would like to have a core of friends into the same things as I am. I guess that's part of the reason I joined this site but even now, it seems like making that happen at this point is probably not very likely.
Maybe I'm just lucky
