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Gen Z, Please Touch Some Grass. Toonami Did Not ‘Put Everyone Onto Anime’
Gen X cultivated anime fandom before you were even born.
In the 1995 cult fav’ film Usual Suspects, a line from the French poet Charles Baudelaire was now famously quoted. It’s a line declaring that the “greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”[1]
Gen Xers like myself were somewhere in our twenties when Usual Suspects came out, and it seems as though, perhaps by way of osmosis, we universally made that line our modus operandi.
You see, as adults, Gen Xers apparently ‘Keyser Söze’d’ the generation before ours and the ones after into forgetting that we even exist. And this seemingly so that we could set about running the world on the DL, as noted in a New York Post op-ed back in 2022.[2]
And since becoming the generation with the most cultural power and influence in America[3], we don’t tend to get worked up over much.
I mean, what do you expect?
When you grew up as a “latchkey kid” of working parents — often divorced — doing laundry and making dinner in the microwave by age 9, programming computers by age 14, making translated subtitles for anime on bootlegged VHS tapes by 17 (see fansubs), and networking with…
