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The guy at the VHS swap in Columbus handed me a subbed copy of Akira and it wrecked how I pick shows
Back around 2004 I went to a VHS swap meet at a hotel ballroom in Columbus, mostly hunting old pro wrestling tapes. A guy at a folding table had a fan subbed copy of Akira with yellow sticky notes taped to the box for the episode breaks. He let me watch 10 minutes on his little 13 inch TV and I had no clue what was happening but I couldn't look away. Before that I only grabbed whatever dub was on the shelf at Suncoast, and I honestly thought subs were for people trying to look smart. After that tape I started hunting fansubs at cons and trading burned discs through the mail, which sounds insane now. It changed the way I give a show a chance, because the first 10 minutes rarely tell you the whole thing. These days everything is streaming same day and I still give weird stuff three episodes before I drop it. Anyone got a show that took them way longer than expected to get into?
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thompson.brian1mo ago
I mean it's a cool story but the way people talk about stuff like this makes me laugh, like a beat up VHS tape rewired your whole brain and now you have a system. Everyone I know who watched one weird thing as a kid acts like it changed their life forever, when really you just liked a movie and kept watching more stuff. Giving a show three episodes before you quit isn't some big life lesson either, that's just being patient, which most people manage without a fan sub tape from Ohio to teach them. If a show needs three hours before it gets good, sometimes that just means it's boring and you're forcing it out of habit. Also the whole subs vs dubs thing being a marker of taste has always been kind of silly, plenty of dubs are fine and plenty of subs are trash. People want a simple tape swap to mean more than it does, but sometimes you just grabbed a cool bootleg and that's the whole story.
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