when i was 4… (or at least in elementary school)
i loved pokemon. in san diego, the kids who lived in my trailer park needed constant entertainment—we were those kids who loved making mud pies, running around the park and watching saturday cartoons. some of them, mainly the boys, started collecting pokemon and yugioh cards and showing them off to their friends. i started collecting them myself (i still have all of my 600+ cards in a folder at home), but i didn’t know how to play the card games at all. i just liked looking at them and adding to my collection. i remember one time i gave away a really rare card to someone on the school bus because i didn’t like the drawing of the pokemon on the card—i found out later that it was a mewtwo card, a legendary pokemon that was kind of rare for its time. i still regret giving away that card, but i hope the kid i gave it to got some use out of it. in any case, i preferred watching the pokemon show as well as yugioh on the 4kids channel instead of playing the card games. this was probably my first and earliest exposure to japanese animation or anime, but due to the censorship from 4kids (ex. ash holding a sandwich instead of a rice ball in one episode), i never knew these weren’t american cartoons until i was a teenager.
when i was 16…
i watched a lot of shows on cartoon network, nickelodeon, disney channel, toonami, jetix, as well as various animes (mostly on Click!On Demand until i got my first laptop) very regularly. this time period was the height of my cartoon and anime consumption. i used to have my clunky gray box of a tv on at almost all times; i often used my tv as background noise and a nightlight because of my intense fear of the dark. all my friends in high school were nerds like me, and we would always talk about the latest episode of our favorites shows and even watch them together whenever we would hang out. some of the most memorable ones from this time were hetalia: axis powers, adventure time, naruto, haikyuu!!, avatar: the last airbender, avatar: the legend of korra, attack on titan… the list goes on. the only thing, though, was that most of my friends at this time were either white, latinx, black, or multiracial like me. i was really into asian media and culture without really understanding my place in all of these things.
(i cut off right about here because i couldn’t figure out what i was trying to say after this. gotta love getting stuck in the middle of ur writing process. at least it’s a start? haha)