My problem with the anime community

I’m a 26 year old man, I’m from North-Africa, I have grown up in Europe. I like anime, comic books, video games, fantasy, sci-fi, rock music, etc. I always loved it and I have always felt that I had to hide it or be ashamed. I never really knew why, I just felt like I had to. When I grew older I became more confident and I wasn’t afraid to tell other people that I liked this stuff. I usually got weird stares and people would move on or laugh, but I didn’t give a shit anymore. I thought that as time went on, more and more people would be accepting of these things, but it just never happens. <br><br>When I went to university, people would sometimes see my backpack or my phone case and would ask me if I liked anime or dragon ball or something. I would happily confirm and they would just laugh and call me a weirdo or a loser, right to my face. It didn’t even bother me that much anymore, I just thought “fuck it, i don’t care what you think”. <br><br>I met a few friends in university that also liked anime. They weren’t as open as I was about it, but they would watch it when they were alone. We could talk about anime and share the things we liked.<br><br>I joined a few anime related chambers so I could easily discuss things with other people. You would think it’s just people talking about anime here, but it’s not really. To me, this seems like a social circle, where people talk about anything. It usually goes from anime to video games to movies to random random stuff. But that’s okay, since it’s just an open discussion place and there’s a lot of people. You can talk about anything and people will respond. <br><br>I joined the discord server for this sub. I didn’t really talk a lot on it, but it was fun. There were a lot of nice people on it, but i didn’t really connect with them as much, since I was mostly active on the chambers sub. I would usually ask people if they could recommend me some animes, and people were usually happy to do so. There were also a few people who were completely opposed to recommendations. If I asked them, they would say “go look it up yourself”. To me, this seems like a waste of time. You could see what people liked it and what they recommended and then you could just watch it.<br><br>Now for the part where I’ll talk about the problems. Everytime I would bring up the topic of anime, someone would immediately say “is that that Japanese cartoon stuff with the big eyes and tits?”. No, it’s not. It’s just cartoons. So a lot of people just immediately think of big eyes and tits when they hear anime and don’t give it a chance. I know that this isn’t really a problem with the anime community, but just with the common opinion of anime. It could go either way. <br><br>A lot of people in the anime community are elitist. This is when they say “you don’t know this anime? are you stupid? you call yourself an anime fan? you don’t know that anime? what the fuck?”. Alright, fuck you, buddy. I don’t know everything, okay? I like anime, but I don’t have a list of all the animes ever made on my mind. I know a lot of animes, but I don’t know all of them. I can’t just watch everything. I have other things to do, like school, work and personal stuff, I don’t have time to watch all the animes. I like anime, okay? I just like it, that’s all. I don’t have to know every single anime. <br><br>Whenever I talk about anime, the only things that people talk about are big eyes, big tits and hentai. Okay, I get it, hentai exists, big tits exist, big eyes exist. Yes, so do anime tiddies. But anime is so much more than that. But I don’t think a lot of people in the anime community know that. <br><br>And for people who do know and like other animes, they usually only talk about their favorites. They never want to recommend anything else, they never want to try anything else. If someone asked me what was my favorite anime, I would just say attack on titan. But if they asked me for recommendations, I would give them them. I don’t want to watch the same shit forever, I want to try new things and see what I like. But a lot of people in the anime community just watch the same thing over and over again. <br><br>I was talking to some people in the discord server and they were all recommending me the same animes. But then some guy jumped in and said “just watch your Garten”. I was like “what? no, I’m talking about anime, not your Garten”. But he just said “yeah, it’s the best one”. And then I started watching it. And it was really good! It was a lot of fun and the story was really interesting! I felt very immersed in it. So I asked him again, what was it? he just said “your Garten”. I asked again, what anime is that? is it german? no, just your Garten. Finally, after 10 minutes of asking, he said “I just call it your Garten, but the real name is Gartena”. I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, so I decided to show him. So I googled Gartena and it was a german word for a lot of different words. But none of them were related to anime. He started laughing his ass off and said “it’s not a german word, it’s an anime”. So I typed all the letters on my keyboard to try and find what he meant and I finally found it. It was “Haganai”. That is a real anime! I just started watching it and I love it so much! It’s really fun and the characters are all so lovable, I just can’t get enough of them! But what really bothers me is that a lot of the people who recommended me animes didn’t even know this existed. That may not seem like a lot, but this is the third time that that happened. Whenever someone told me to watch an anime, I would look it up and realize that it was super popular and I had already heard of it. But when someone who actually knows about less well known animes recommends me something, it’s always a nice surprise. I just wish more people would care about the actual quality of something instead of just what is popular or what they know. <br><br>So this is my problem with the anime community.