>>13492200I always preferred action so was watching the common anime like pokemon and digimon all through my childhood, but when I got into 'anime' as a genre in the 6th grade there were only a few resources i had to get anime.
On TV we had the basic anime-friendly blocks like KidsWB for kids stuff, Toonami for Teen Stuff, Adult Swim for Adult stuff. I got weirder with it and found a techTV programming block called 'anime unleashed'. This was basically your discount bin of anime, stuff that wasn't even particularly popular in Japan, and the ones that were had more of a 'cult' following. It had some of the more interesting anime from 90s / 2000s.
Serial Experiments Lain is the most well known anime from this block. It also had a comedy called 'Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi', think of it as a more vibrant and silly FLCL. Dual, a weird series long parody of Evangellion. Betterman, which was about a guy who could transform into monsters but each time he transformed into something different, but it was like this really dark scifi series. Geneshaft, which was basically a 90s low budget anime with the same plot as 'prometheus', the american movie that is a prequel to the alien franchise.
All of my friends watched 'fushigi yuugi' on an anime programming block I never really gave much time to. I think it was on scifi channel, but I cannot really find any info on it. It had other similar old anime too.
Lots of anime fan sites existed online. Until I was in 8th grade I didn't know about anything like limewire, so there was no way to watch it for a while, but it could give you information about an anime that you could buy on DVD at a gamestore. When Limewire came out it helped me reconnect with old anime through filesharing, thoguh it was mostly just stuff I had already seen as a kid that I could finally watch again.
When YouTube first started kicking off, a lot of anime were uploaded en masse before copyright restrictions came.
