Like a lot of things, I think it can also be hard to remember how much effort it took to get into it. Most anime’s pretty off-putting if you don’t know how to

Like a lot of things, I think it can also be hard to remember how much effort it took to get into it. Most anime’s pretty off-putting if you don’t know how to “read” it—you have to get used to all three of: quirks of the medium (e.g. how emotions are expressed visually, confused Engrish intro songs); cultural differences between your culture and Japan’s; and a pile of tropes that are very common in anime but less common elsewhere, which you can use as a way to understand the genre of what you’re watching and how it’s supposed to be read. It’s why Cowboy Bebop is such a popular gateway anime: Ed aside (and even there, only sometimes) there’s minimal reliance on alien-to-Westerners visual expression, the genre is entirely familiar and uses familiar tropes and archetypes, and it’s culturally hardly any more Japanese than Blade Runner. (Plus, I mean, it’s good—but so are a bunch of others that do not work well as gateway anime)