Righto, I'm making an executive decision: I'm gonna watch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Thanks for your help everybody!
Glad you found something. Glad to have been of service.
Ah **** I forgot, I am posting in the bad part of hardlight, time to bail.
You know what you did wrong (and it's not what you think), right?
(Too much coffee, dear colleague?)
You don't.
[cut the reasoing - note of the Editor]
Sounds like you fell into the same trap I did back in my teens ... because most networks were just interested in filling their lunch-time slots with "kid friendly"-stuff that could reliably fill those slots for years, many networks just get the franchises that retained audiences the longest regardless of the reason why. It's simple economics.
This doesn't make your tastes any less valid; Taste is taste and mine is probabily less healthy than yours anyway
But to offer a disenting point of view:
I had the fortune having the Networks like Viva or MTV Germany who would air more niche and shorter fair as part of their midnight programmes - but that didn't keep me from dismissing most anime for years.
But then in my early 20s I got back because a friend of mine went into an artistic profession and she wanted to build me as a conversation partner ('cause her job intersected with one of my main interests), so she subjected me to many of her childhood influences, most of which were french-language comics. Esspecially arists like Moebius got me around to reconsider my bias against comics and animation.
If you apply a bit of knowledge and discerning logic to it you can find something to good in the sea of averageness - anime is there no different than any other media.
I have never taken heroin and peer pressure is getting to me please help.
Legal opiods do the same but have lower dosage. If you ever got pain-medication in hospital you already expirenced it - no big wup.
(Speaking purely theoretical, both have essentially the same chemical "root)
Where should I start?
What genre are you generally interested in, considering your usual media diet?
This is really the way to go. You're gonna get any of a few hundred "must watch nao!" shows depending on who's talking to you
Well yes and no...
Who suggests what might be a good piece of information to have, esspeically if you are asking content creators - like Spoon (sorry for singleing you out)-
Some of the people who could concieveably post here also have well documented pet peeves, likes and dislikes, in case of Spoon they are quite obvious through is work. So combing that knowledge with the recommendation could be quite helping. Esspecially in cases when consensus is building from very different people.