Anime Across Generations – This Week in Anime

today24h24_x91uezسبتمبر 30, 2025

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Coop and Lucas look at the ways different generations got into anime and remind us that we’re all fans in the same fandom.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Executive editor Lynzee Loveridge is a judge for the American Manga Awards.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Dogsred is available on the VIZ/Shonen Jump app. New Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon. Bad Girl is available on HIDIVE. My Hero Academia, Danganronpa, Demon Slayer, Code Geass, Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, and SPY x FAMILY are available on Crunchyroll.

Lucas

Coop, I don’t know about you, but more often than not, I see anime and the community around it framed as a medium and space for mostly young people. As a recently minted 30-year-old who somehow turned this nerdy hobby into a career, this often has me feeling like a teenager drawn by Satoru Noda amidst a sea of fresh faces.

That being said, the framing of anime being a hobby to Zoomers and down isn’t entirely accurate! Millennials, Gen Xers, and even Boomers played a huge role in both bringing anime to the US and establishing the community built up around the medium!

So today I’d love it if we could talk about these different generations of anime fans, how they express their anime fandom, the beliefs and misconceptions around them, and how we all fit under this big tent of a community.

Coop

As someone who’s not far off from celebrating 32 years on this spinning rock, I can confidently say that we’re not that old in the grand scheme of things, Lucas. Regardless of whatever generational cohort we might belong to, I continue to hear the same story whenever someone shares how they got into anime—”I randomly caught this one cartoon on TV and quickly realized something was different about it. It wasn’t until later on that I learned it was from Japan and that it’s something called ‘anime.'”

But within the past decade and change, there’s a better chance that new viewers might’ve watched that random cartoon on a streaming platform or have been recommended series x or y by the latest internet personality. With that in mind, we sure have come a long way since the earliest days of tape trading and hoping that your local TV station ran Star Blazers, Voltron, or Robotech. Those were firmly the days of late-Boomers and Gen Xers, but incredibly foundational to where we are now. People have their feelings (as do I) about folks like Carl Macek and conditions that brought many of these early series to the West, but for better or worse, the North American anime industry (and community by extension) wouldn’t exist without them.

I cannot believe the way the New Panty and Stocking finale absolutely RIPPED a laugh out of me when a Gen Alpha character showed up and unironically said “Sup, Chat?” as a greeting. Hiroyuki Imaishi and company know America and American culture better than we do, and season three can’t come soon enough!

To your point, though, I love that getting into anime accidentally is an intergenerational experience. Even if anime has become trendier over the years and gatekeepers have become a more prominent issue, it’s still nice to see that the elements that made anime feel distinct to me as a kid still draw in younger folks.

This phenomenon also speaks to a side of the dubs vs subs conversation that’s rarely discussed. That being said, dubs are vitally important to getting new blood into this scene, as I don’t think many people in any age group are going to casually check out media that requires them to read subtitles and prevents them from more passively experiencing parts of the show.

Following Parasite‘s Best Picture win in 2020, there’s been a bit more general willingness to engage with subtitles when it comes to international media.

© Golden Globes, LLC. All rights reserved

But as you said, dubs make titles way more accessible than they would be otherwise. I know a few folks who have dubbed series on in the background as they work or exercise because it’s easier on their mental load. Some people have difficulties reading the subtitles, including those with learning disabilities or young children who aren’t all that great at reading yet. Looking at today, I have a feeling that the presence of a dub will become even more paramount in the future, given the scuttlebutt around Generation Alpha’s difficulties with literacy. Personally, I’m a big fan of turning on the closed captions whenever my young nephews are around so they can see the words in addition to hearing them.

While I understand the connotation of subtitled anime being viewed as more legit due to subs being the ONLY way to watch a lot of anime for much of the medium’s history in the US, it wasn’t until dubs became more commonplace that the medium broke free of its niche subculture status in any meaningful way. Though I do appreciate HIDIVE continuing to use the distinctive yellow hue for their subtitles, which was often used in early pirate translations.

Though I haven’t seen any statistical or even anecdotal evidence that shows that a given generation of anime fans prefers one viewing format to another. I only watch dubs when I can because simuldubs are still rare enough that they feel like a treat every time we get one. Similarly, I think most anime viewers are motivated to watch a show based on positive word of mouth or it being tied to a reputable source material or studio rather than if it has a dub in their native language.

The fact that the “subs vs. dubs” debate continues to rage on within the community shows that the preference is highly personal once a viewer is firmly in. I feel that word of mouth is also the biggest driver of discovery among fans of all generations. If your bestie or the streamer you dig is talking about a certain series, you might be more likely to check it out rather than not. Speaking for myself, I recently got into honse gorls because the series breached containment in a way that caught my eye. I have two shirts now.

But for older fans, specifically the tape traders of yore, they got into a series because that one guy showed up with a tape, and he was like, “This is the coolest stuff ever.” Then that word kept going around…along with those tapes. I’d recommend checking out Dawn’s The Anime Nostalgia Podcast and AnimEigo‘s The Anime Business for a larger perspective on that era of fandom. A couple years back on my own podcast, my cohost Dylan and I had a rad conversation with the Happy Console Gamer, Johnny Millenium, as we compared and contrasted our millennial fandom experiences with his own from the Robotech era.

Speaking of millennials, I think that generation is maybe the most responsible for forever connecting much of the anime community to the digital landscape and related cultural signifiers. Both the internet and anime got big in America at around the same time, and it makes sense that the two would become linked for newcomers and casual folks in either space.

Speaking as a cuspy zillenial who grew up in the middle of nowhere, the internet was pretty much the only way I could watch all but the most popular of shows. There were no second-hand shops or import opportunities for me to take advantage of, like some of the folks of a certain age who grew up in more metropolitan areas.

My experiences growing up were fairly similar. While in school, I’d be shocked whenever someone mentioned they’d like anime too, which either left me anxious to reply or obnoxiously chatty. There was no in between. Many of my peers were pretty quiet about it, too, outside of their small groups of friends, probably mostly because the adults around us didn’t understand it. I did run into those kids on occasion at the local anime convention. The false perception that “all anime is just porn” hung heavy over us, too. I didn’t feel a shift until 2012, when I started college and not long before Attack on Titan hit the scene. Now, that was a turning point.

Feels like the anime memes really exploded around that time as well.

I was in college from 2014-2018, largely only interacted with people around my age during that time, and then I left, and suddenly 1 in every 20 teenagers were wearing a My Hero Academia or Danganronpa t-shirt! That’s probably been the most striking change for me as either the youngest Millennial or the oldest Zoomer; how anime is just casually a part of the media diet of people in their mid-twenties and below.

Sure, it’s still “nerd stuff” but we’re in a post Big Bang Theory and MCU world where nerd stuff is just a part of culture now.

I’m reminded of a person I knew back then who once told me, “Oh yeah, I just randomly found this Code Geass show on TV and got hooked on it.” To my knowledge, she hasn’t really talked about anime since then.

As with many other things, college was a good place to meet folks who were either passingly interested or down bad for the Japanese cartoons.

But considering that I’ve been out of college for almost a decade now, it’s fascinating to see how my direct cohorts and more elder millennials are keeping anime around as they’re starting families. I’ve heard more than a few passing anecdotes that anime is a family activity, with titles like Demon Slayer and SPY x FAMILY becoming prime appointment viewing. Heck, I’m sure I’ve heard talk of families cosplaying as a group when they saw Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle.

But I have absolutely seen families of anime fans walking the halls of conventions such as Otakon and Animazement. At Otakon, there’s a whole dedicated track of activities for children and their families to enjoy together. In fact, ANN’s own Lauren Orsini wrote about how great this programming is along with her own experiences as a parent at a con. And while at Animazement, I saw families of all generations coming together to celebrate their love of the medium. I even saw a 12-year-old standing in line with his parents to get an autograph from Masao Maruyama, and the kid was just as excited as his folks were. Most 12-year-olds don’t know who Masao Maruyama is.

Those entire family cosplays (which I think sprang up alongside SPY x FAMILY‘s ubiquity) I see at conventions are nothing short of the most adorable thing I can imagine, and it’s wild to think how many kids can bond with their parents today over something as niche and nerdy as anime.

That being said, I think that’s also created one of the biggest generational rifts in anime that I don’t see getting mended anytime soon. If y’all will forgive me for referencing my own work, there is some now enduring tension over who anime spaces are for, with many adults clamoring for adult content to be featured more prominently at anime conventions, which directly clashes with anime conventions being a family activity.

Now the easy answer here is for there to be more anime conventions that cater to different kinds of anime fans, but this does feel like an anime specific microcosm of broader discussions around how prominently sex and sexuality should be displayed in culture, with different generations having remarkably different attitudes towards that act and subject matter.

There have been a handful of conventions popping up to address these adult tastes, and while that’s great for those audiences, I just don’t know if the larger cons will ever budge on that. At the very least, there could be larger black curtain spaces. As you pointed out in the piece, there’s no consensus on what pushes the envelope. But with the political climate these days, there’s a genuine concern regarding who’s laying down the rules and if their decisions are the best for all parties involved.

Agreed. Though another generational split I’m noticing, thanks to the convention scene, relates to cosplay. As it’s become more popular and premade costumes have become more readily available, I’m starting to see more and more young people engage with it as a physical act, where older cosplayers view it as more of a craft and develop related skillsets to further that craft.

This is once again an instance of different strokes for different folks, although I have talked to some old head cosplayers who lament that the face of cosplay is now largely the most approachable version of the hobby rather than the folks and works that take the most time and expertise to create.

Among groups of older fans, there’s this feeling that our hobby was this one special thing that was all our own. Despite the potentially gatekeep-y reads on that sentiment, it’s anything but that. I’ve spoken with folks who are thrilled that anime is taking off in such a big way, but are sad to see what initially drew them into the medium fade away. Be it the random get-together at a pizza place, the handmade cosplays, or the crafty ways people got their hands on series stuck in limbo, there’s always a fuzzy feeling attached. However, I think it breaks down into this core idea: anime is more than just a product; it’s a jumping-off point for making lifelong friends and expressing your own creativity. Don’t get it twisted, anime has always been a product, but for many, it’s more than something you just pick up off the shelf.

All this junk on my shelf is cool and all, but it means nothing compared to the people I’ve met through this hobby. Heck, most of the stuff I’ve ended up with makes me think of those people more than anything else.

If there’s one thing that I am going to stress to every generation of anime fans, it’s that the community is distinct from the capitalism and even commerce that it’s built around. Watching more shows or stacking up more collectables doesn’t make you a “better fan” than anyone else, and people should instead strive to turn this interest into more meaningful experiences and relationships.

Practicing this philosophy was definitely easier for older generations of anime fans when there was simply less stuff to spend money on, but I want to make sure that the youths know that there will always be space for them in the anime community, even if they aren’t breaking the bank in the process.

And if anime is just another thing you watch on occasion, that’s absolutely fine. Those who call you a “tourist” are really just gatekeeping. Any talk of “anime tourists” is honestly a misplaced form of anger towards internet personalities who are in the business of milking interest for content. While I’m not a fan of some of the larger personalities, they don’t affect my life at all. Not a big reason to be all flustered about it, even if they don’t fully grasp the magnitude of their platforms at times.

My only legitimate concern around the generational shift is the idea that series like Jujutsu Kaisen, Demon Slayer, Chainsaw Man, and the big flashy isekai of the season are leaving viewers with a skewed perception of anime on the whole—what it looks like, what it sounds like, ect. When there are 300 to 400 series produced a year and animators are already at their breaking point, the expectation that everything looks like a Demon Slayer is frankly dangerous to the industry’s health. This has been on my mind a lot since talking to the Animator Supporters crew a few months back.

This idea might not be very exciting to younger viewers, but I care too much about the people who make anime happen. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them. No one in this community would be either.

And that’s where our role as anime elders comes into play. (Oh god, does being 30 and in the anime scene make me an elder??? Probably.) It’s our responsibility to get younger folks up to speed on the history, nomenclature, and issues of this space so that they have the information to navigate it and advocate for changes that can improve it.

I know that “you have to watch X number of anime to be a real fan” has been an arbitrary talking point on the internet for a while now, but I’m begging anime fans of all generations, especially young folks, to watch stuff beyond the most popular releases of a given season. There are works out there that are interesting, if not important, and figuring out what makes them work will give you a deeper understanding of this medium as a whole.

Also, just watch what appeals to you! If you end up wanting to dig a little deeper into the history, go right ahead! But no worries if not. For all of our old man (we’re not really that old) grousing, there’s no “right way” to be an anime fan.