Why I Hide My Love For Anime

When I first browsed through Vocal's challenges and saw the Guilty Pleasure Binge challenge, I didn't have any ideas. No TV show came to mind.

But miraculously, I ended up spending 24 hours in three days watching this one anime called Attack On Titan. After watching the entire show, I thought, "Hey, I just binged watched this show. I can definitely write about it for the Guilty Pleasure Binge challenge."

So that's what I did. I wrote an entire article about my love for Attack On Titan. But when I reviewed the Guilty Pleasure Binge challenge submission guidelines, I realized something wasn't right.

I was supposed to be writing about something that was my guilty pleasure. Attack On Titan wasn't a guilty pleasure. I would recommend this show to anyone any day.

As I was finishing up with my article and getting it ready for submission, my Spotify playlist moved onto a song called Kuchizuke Diamond by WEAVER. I sat back, and my eyes widened.

This was it. This was my real guilty pleasure. This is why for the longest time, I wasn't willing to tell anyone that I liked anime unless they told me first. It's the anime that started it all.

Yamada-Kun and the Seven Witches is one of the first animes I watched and the reason I didn't talk about anime that much. Now I'm about to expose myself.

I Binged This Anime Secretly

When I was younger, around the beginning of middle school, I remember this one night when one of my friends came to my house for a sleepover.

We played games for most of the day, and in the evening we watched a movie. After that, we went to sleep... except me. As soon as I knew my friend fell asleep, I sneaked out of the room and began watching Yamada-Kun and the Seven Witches.

I would watch a few episodes every night in the same manner until I finished the anime.

Why did I sneak out every night to watch this anime?

Well, because it was the stuff I watched before I found out about hentai and porn. Okay, not really. It's mostly in the same sense that at the time, I would be as embarrassed revealing that I watched this anime as I would be admitting that I watch porn.

The anime itself is rated PG-13. The most sexual thing in the anime was a French kiss. Its story is about seven girls and a guy who have powers that activate when they kiss someone. These powers include switching bodies, telepathy, seeing the future, and more.

The anime itself isn't rated as one of the best animes globally, and I wouldn't consider it one of the best shows I watched objectively speaking. The anime is okay. The story is decent, the characters are cool, and the show is funny. But it isn't a particular stand-out.

When I was younger, though, I didn't have much of an appreciation for cinematics, so I didn't really care. All I knew was that I liked the blonde girl in the anime and wished that I could date someone like her.

If any of my friends knew that I liked watching this show, they would think I'm a weirdo. Boys in middle school were supposed to like the fighting stuff and the badass fighting stuff. Here I was saying that I liked a comedy-romance. This was the stuff girls watched.

The fear was that if anybody found out, I wouldn't have any friends anymore. I bet this is what one of my friends feared when a friend and I caught him watching My Little Pony. I remember walking into his room with a friend one day, and my friend asked him, "Bro, what are you watching?"

He looked back at us with a surprised look on his face and nervously told us not to tell anybody. Luckily for him, my friend and I were two years younger and didn't go to the same school.

It's a good thing that I'm quiet. Nobody ever found out that Yamada-Kun and the Seven Witches was my favorite show. I've only recently told two people that I watched the anime, and that's because I found out they watched the anime first.

An Overall Fear Of Telling People I Like Anime

Nowadays, I don't fear telling people that I enjoy anime. It's mostly because I don't seem like a weirdo if I did say that. Anime has grown significantly in the last couple of years and is more widely accepted.

But if I were really to talk to someone about anime, I never talk about what I genuinely like. I always talk about some of my favorite mainstream animes, such as Attack On Titan and Naruto.

But my all-time favorite anime genres are a combination of romance, ecchi, and harems. The animes in these categories always have elements of a guy that every girl eventually falls in love with and a ton of sexual interactions but no actual sex.

My love for these animes all started with Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches. There are only 12 episodes in the anime, and that's too short.

I wanted more after watching all 12 episodes, so I searched for similar animes. I found a ton of them, and many of them were particularly more sexual than Yamada-Kun and the Seven Witches.

I watched pretty much all of them and enjoyed it. But I wouldn't tell anyone that that was what I preferred to watch.

It all started with Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches, my true guilty pleasure show.