No.221
Back around 2013, I was a little brat, 8 years old, right in the middle of elementary school. Too normal, too ordinary. Up until then, I didn't know that the "cartoons" I consumed on TV, like Dragon Ball or Knights of the Zodiac (Saint Seiya), came from the other side of the Pacific, from a country called Japan.
Everything changed one night when I saw my 17-year-old brother watching something interesting on a toaster we called a PC — one of those cream-colored ones. I peeked over his shoulder as much as I could and saw an animation of some kids fleeing from zombies along a school, and a girl screaming the name "Takashi." I remember laughing at it, thinking they had said "Kakashi," since I knew Naruto because my older brothers were fans. But going back to the same thing, I didn't know it wasn't just a regular cartoon. My brother paused it, got mad at me, corrected the name, and kicked me out of the room.
At the time, I didn't know that had been my first contact with an anime outside the conventional.