Age: 19
Location: Massachusetts
When did you discover anime? Share as much as you remember. It was in seventh grade that my best friend showed me Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan. Trashy as it was, I somehow found it entertaining enough to watch the entire thing. I didn’t start looking for more anime until a year later, though. When a particular Avatar: The Last Airbender YouTube guy mentioned Inuyasha in one of his videos, I started watching that show just for the hell of it (in three parts on Youtube, as the kiddos were wont to do in 2011). From there I started taking my friends’ recommendations of Death Note, Fullmetal Alchemist ’03, Ouran High School Host Club, and Soul Eater. It all went downhill from there.
What appealed to you about anime when you first discovered it? Around 2008, I discovered Avatar: The Last Airbender and got really into it. But if you’ll remember, that was the year it concluded. For several years I contented myself with watching ATLA reruns on Nicktoons, but eventually I started craving more animated serials. Anime was the closest thing to that, so I ran with it. And there was no shortage of anime fans in ATLA fandom to give me recommendations (some better than others, of course). That was how I wound up watching Cowboy Bebop and Baka and Test basically concurrently.
What would you say was the most popular anime at the time? Among my friends, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood was all the rage. It might have just been my particular friend group, but that was the show most often recommended to me. (Also: there was one girl who was Extremely Into Death Note, and another who was Diehard Hetalia. Boy, middle school 2011 sure was something.) Poking around Avatar fan forums I’d catch bits of seasonal anime discussion. I think it was mostly Madoka Magica talk, since that show was nearing its conclusion (and hiatus?) just then.
What was it like to be a part of anime fandom at the time? Most of my exposure to anime fandom was through my friends, all of whom were chuuni as heck. We were a bit behind in adopting weeb memes, so I’d imagine it was more akin to the con scene circa ’07 than anything else. “Cake is a lie,” Hare Hare Yukai, that sort of thing. Not a far cry from current anime fandom. Pretty sure there were more anime blogs around then, though.
Would love to hear a chuuni story from middle school. (For example, I only responded to “Ren-chan” in middle school. I’m sorry.) At some point I got a few friends to call me Micchan, but I think the most embarrassing thing I did was do the Hare Hare Yukai in public at a school dance. This was in 2011 or so, a while after Haruhi Suzumiya stopped being a huge deal iirc. I blame its extensive TVTropes documentation for making me believe otherwise.
I also waxed poetic a LOT about the three-act tragedy I was writing. (Inspired by FMA and Black Butler, naturally.) It was mostly an excuse for me to make strange dying-cow noises at lunch, being little more than a string of hopelessly tryhard “emo” cliches. For the record though, I never had a Linkin Park phase or anything similar.
Was the Internet a part of fandom at the time? I was part of the “three parts on YouTube” generation of anime fans, so yeah, absolutely. It was just a bit before legal streaming got really ubiquitous, so I got all my anime through sketchy pirate sites. There was no real shortage of people to talk to about anime, though. The trouble was finding a forum that didn’t hella suck.
Back in your middle school days, did you find out about anime mostly from YouTube or from anime blogs? You mentioned both and I am wondering if the landscape was transitioning more to vloggers by then. Vlogging wasn’t as much of a thing circa 2010 as it got to be a few years later. Instead, I found out about “must-see” anime by (lol) reading comments on the three-part YouTube videos. Most notably I remember getting into an argument with somebody over the merits of FMA ’03 vs. Brotherhood, during which somebody yelled at me to watch Cowboy Bebop, Evangelion, and Ghost in the Shell already. (I wound up watching and loving the first two, after which I went back to reevaluate my hardline pro-Brotherhood stance. To this day I still haven’t watched Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, though. Sue me.)
After getting a little experience with said “essentials” I started looking to TVTropes (lol) and a bunch of anime blogs for “Top [x] Anime” lists, paying most attention to people who seemed to share my pretentious-ass taste.
Do you remember your first convention? What was it, and what was it like?
My first con was a tiny local con in the Detroit area. It was mostly a day of my friends and I wandering around the dealer’s hall and goofing off in really awkward FMA cosplay. I don’t remember much besides going home in the early afternoon because there was nothing to do there.
I wound up going to Youmacon 2012 the year after that. I remember going to a few panels, but mostly I wandered around like the clueless 14-year-old I was. Bought a few tchotchkes, that sort of thing. There was lots of Slenderman cosplay. Also, a pair of Mawaru Penguindrum HHH cosplayers whom I later wound up following on Tumblr. That’s about all that sticks out in my memory.
What was your first anime-related purchase and why did you get it? If it’s bizarre I’d love a photo. The first thing I ever got was a keychain with the Death Note inscription on it. Like, it was this steel rectangle with the logo stamped on one side and the Death Note instructions on the other. Completely cheap and useless, but I remember freaking the shit out over just finding merch of a thing I liked. Any way to show my enthusiasm, I guess? Of course, I strung it up on a chain and wore it around my neck like the nerd I was, showing it off to anyone who recognized it. Now that I think of it though, that thing was probably a bootleg; there were at least two typos on it.
The second thing I bought was a trading figure of Mari from the second Rebuild of Evangelion movie, in part to show off my snobbish nerd cred (“look, I like smart anime like EVA!”) but in truth, mostly to look at her underwear, not that I would’ve admitted it. It came in a little box with all of its parts individually wrapped in plastic: torso, skirt, legs, arm, and stand. I probably took a bit longer to put her together than I should have (goddang queer denial) despite being mildly disappointed that her underpants were plain white (“it’s ironic, I swear!”). I kept her anyway, and to this day Mari Shikinami remains on my desk judging the crimes of 14-year-old me.
Today your shitposts are such a big part of the anisphere. How did you first discover Twitter, especially Anitwitter, and decide to start using it? While some folks start out as normal Twitter users that slowly get sucked into the Anitwitter black hole, I was born smack dab in the middle of it. I first got on Twitter to follow @ANNJakeH‘s streams and started using it extensively when I realized some of the anibloggers I liked were far more active there than on their own sites. Surrounded by constantly shitposting anime-likers, I inevitably became one myself. Since then it’s been a gradual devolution of my typing skills. And inhibitions, frankly. In 2013, I had no idea that in four years I would become known primarily for watching bad children’s cartoons and bragging about licking exploding puppets, but here I am. I’m sorry, 2013-Micchy. You deserve a better future than me.
You have a column with Nick on Anime News Network. How did becoming an anime reviewer/writer change the way you interact in the fandom? Honestly, it didn’t! I’ve been shying away from hardcore property-specific fandom in favor of being an anime fan in general for years now, so that hasn’t changed at all. The column in question is really relaxed and casual for “anime journalism,” so to speak, so in practice it’s more an extension of what I do on Twitter (i.e. occasionally make observations between the terrible jokes) than anything else. I imagine that might change if I ever decide to do more formal(ish) long-form anime writing, but right now it’s pretty chill. The only thing that’s really changed is that I occasionally feel remorse for retweeting disgusting memes, because professionalism or something. (Then I decide I don’t really care and go back to retweeting unholy Minion/Heybot fanart crossovers.)
Since you’re one of the community’s prominent queer voices, I’d like to know if anime fandom had anything to do with you exploring your sexuality? Pretty early on, I started chatting with a friend of a friend about anime. One of our favorite activities was to share cute anime fanart with each other for each other’s approval. Over time said images got more and more risque (as a joke, of course!) until eventually I realized, shoot, this wasn’t actually ironic? Girls were… really cute? It took following several queer people on Anitwitter (@composerose in particular) and talking it through to get fully comfortable with the idea of being queer, but after I figured out I wasn’t weird for really liking Sayo Yamamoto’s version of Fujiko Mine it kinda started to make sense. Not that it all clicked instantly! It took a while for me to figure it out. But now that I think about it, I wish I could go back and tell teenage me to quit stressing about it and just enjoy whatever the hell I wanted. After all, who cares about labels when there are cute anime boys and girls to retweet? That’s my biggest takeaway from it all, to ｃｈｉｌｌ and be whomever I want with these heaps of fellow anime weirdos. Anime fandom can be great that way.
What’s the biggest contrast between anime fandom back then and anime fandom today? It’s so much bigger! Thanks to Crunchyroll (and other services, but mostly Crunchyroll, shoutout to my boi Miles) it seems like everyone and their dog is at least vaguely familiar with anime now. Plus, now that I’ve found a nice pocket of people who share my artsy-fartsy taste, it feels a lot easier to connect with and hang out with people who like discussing the stuff. It’s so easy to share my favorite new shows with people and go, “Hey, you know you can watch all this stuff for free and then scream about it with me afterwards?” Whereas even five or six years ago it was a pain in the rear to get people to watch anime like Mononoke without going, “Okay, it’s hard to find on most sketchy pirate sites but keep looking!”
Micchy can be reached on Twitter.