I love Hazel's highly idiosyncratic and personal video-making style. The feeling I get from watching her vids gives the same nostalgic feeling I get from watching haydenluvsanime's videos. Her new vid dissecting the success of Elfen Lied is a good big one.

"Retroactive nostalgia" hits the nail on the head for defining my inspiration for watching a bunch of 2000s anime in a single term I'll probably use forever now.

While I can kinda get away with calling myself a 2000s kid, the media I consumed then was mostly cartoons and video games, and even then my most formative media experiences really came in the 2010s, with the first one of those being at the start of the decade with Adventure Time.

The only reason I ended up watching anime nostalgia staples of the 2000s like Haruhi and Lucky Star so early into my own anime fan experience was because I was recommended them through channels like Anime America, run by people who actually grew up in the midst of that zeitgeist.

Now I have a completely different kind of nostalgia for those shows, because since I wasn't watching them in the 2000s, their extremely meta-referrential nature flew almost completely over my head, even as I recognized that they were clearly referencing something.

Now I'm going back to watch all these anime from the 2000s that people who grew then are hyping up/nostalgic over now, which is going to make eventually rewatching Haruhi and Lucky Star extremely surreal, because now I'll actually know what the hell all the references meant.

Ahhh fuck, I think I messed up this thread's structure! Ah well.