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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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."
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 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.
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.
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.
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.