Inititially Code Geass in like 2013, but I stopped after the 1st episode. I think the style put me off. Haven’t given it a try since (but I should). Then to give anime another shot: SAO. It’s a cliché 1st anime but after that I was hooked.

The wild thing is, I believe my 2nd anime (I guess technically 3rd) was High School DxD. Or at least I dove into ecchi anime pretty soon after beginning to watch anime.

I did not expect to be alone on this, but I scrolled through and didn’t see it:

Record of Lodoss War from 1990. I had an older cousin who had fansubs of the series on VHS in '92 or '93. We watched through the whole thing probably a dozen times.

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Probably Voltron, though I didn’t know what anime was at that time. Probably saw some Sailor Moon. Nickelodeon used to show some random stuff.

As a teen my first deliberate move towards finding more anime to watch was after seeing Ninja Scroll and Neo-Tokyo on VHS. Both of those blew my mind and I knew then there were much better shows out there than what was being produced in the States.

This is a tough one… the first anime I saw was Space Battleship Yamato, imported into the US as Star Blazers, but outside of thinking that it was completely different from other cartoons I didn’t know anything else about it.

Eventually I caught some episodes of Harlock and saw that there was more than one show with this style, but didn’t realize they both came from an entirely different industry.

Through the next 5~6 years I came to recognize the “anime look” in various other media - many American cartoons farmed their intros out to TMS or Toei and it was obvious that there was something different going on - and Japan was constantly in the news as their economy (actually The Bubble) took off and big American businesses reacted to that “threat”.

Around this time I saw the Galaxy Express 999 movie on VHS, partly because it looked cool but mostly because I knew by then that Lieji Matsumoto was the artist behind Yamato and Harlock and wanted more of that.

So that might be the first anime I watched because I knew what it was. But “anime” wasn’t really in the vernacular then; it was still “Japanese cartoons”, or maybe “Japanimation”.

The first anime that I watched because I knew it was “anime” was probably Bubblegum Crisis: a friend’s brother got fansub tapes at the big local university and brought them back to share around over summer break.

He also brought Urotsukidoji, but that’s a story for another time…

My first anime (i.e. “cartoon”) in childhood times is probably Pokemon or Digimon.

Excluding those, it should be The Familiar of Zero or Infinite Stratos. I simply watched whatever my friends were watching / recommended back in my school days.

But the first anime in recent times - the one that kickstarted my 700+ anime journey? It’s Gundam: The Witch from Mercury.

It’s one of those 3:

• Heidi, Girl of the Alps
• Maya the Bee
• Captain Future

I don’t remember which one of those was actually the first (most likely Heidi or Maya, just going by the kid-friendliness), but all three are in my earliest core childhood memories.

YuYu Hakusho, Dragonball Z, and Gundam Wing were airing around the same time when I watched them.

• Spirited Away and various other studio Ghibli Movies - first anime movies i watched and first type of anime content I ever saw, as a young child.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion. First anime series i watched, and first I chose to watch independently. ~ 16 years old.

I watched a lot growing up, probably my first one ever was Sailor Moon or My Neighbour Totoro when I was around 5, then as I aged my anime choices slowly evolved (and I was also limited to what was on the TV until around 2003/2004 and started watching streams on whatever site I could find. My first ones that I guess I thought of differently than as an after school cartoon would’ve been Escaflowne in 2002 and Inuyasha in 2003.

Born in the 70’s so technically battle for the planets or astroboy. But first conscious choice was Eva on SBS

Gonna feel old here but:

“Voltron: Defender of the Universe”

Dragon ball, because they streamed it on the open channels on the tv. After that it was Naruto, Pokemon, Hunter vs Hunter and One piece

First “anime” was Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Second one I think was Death Note, then Attack on Titan. Haven’t watched much outside of those, ngl. Not a big anime guy.

Bleach, probably? My friends in school dragged me into an anime club they were running back when the first season was airing.

I definitely saw other shows before that – Pokemon, of course, and bits and pieces of Ranma, Speed Racer, and other shows that occasionally made it to broadcast TV – but I didn’t distinguish them from other cartoons.