Back when I was younger and back when the internet was also younger, I love to save a lot of stuff from the shows I love–art, fan art, music, etc., and I’ve made a ton of CD-R and DVD-R archives (a lot of them are gone due to disc rot). My internet activities back then were usually me flooding image board threads with pictures of characters I like, and I often react to posts using reaction images of characters I like (and then get banned for it because I’m avatarfagging). Apart from those, I actively join in conversations of shows I follow, and even joined part of communities, and the first biggest community I joined was the Lucky Star community. It was fun.
Now that I’m older now, and practically have experienced “half” of what “life” is, I mostly stopped doing those things I used to do. I still save a couple of art of my favorite characters here and there, talk about an old anime I used to watch on occasion, discuss new shows when I feel like it, but gone are me saving art in bulk, saving music of anime shows I follow, and being part of communities.
Except Aikatsu!.
I’m still painstakingly saving every Aikatsu! art on image boards, Twitter and Pixiv since 2012. I’m still collecting Aikatsu! music, though while we haven’t translated in a while, we’re still collecting and sharing Aikatsu! doujinshi, and while I’m not part of an actual Aikatsu! “community”, Lazy Lily Fansubs has a small group to talk Aikatsu! with. I think I’ve said this before, right? Point is, I’m at the point where I’ve lost interest in being part of other anime communities or fanbases, I’ve lost interest in doing things I used to do, so from the looks of it, I’m stuck with Aikatsu! if ever the series will no longer be around in the next decade or so. That also means I’m with Aoi forever, and that will never change, even if there’s a new Aikatsu! series around, or an idol anime series that is “superior” than Aikatsu!. Did you know idol anime isn’t my thing and was never my thing at all? Aikatsu! is a wonderful anomaly that I’m very happy to experience.
Happy Birthday, Aoi! And thank you for making Aikatsu! a fun anime to watch, and a great anime to spend more years with.
–SHiN @ Lazy Lily Fansubs
Lazy Lily Fansubs 
The first anime to “influence” you will always stay with you! For me — it was two anime.
It is difficult to say which was first, Chobits or Evangelion – Eva was recommended by a person in my highschool electronic ed. class, back when VHS was a thing – he shared with me a few tapes and I was HOOKED. He tried to get me on a different anime (Bubblegum Riot?) but Evangelion trumped everything! But there was also Chobits – – which would forever change and shape my collection landscape! I don’t remember how or who told me about this series or CLAMP, but I was an immediate fan – and would go on to feverishly collect everything CLAMP related! And from there… well let’s just say I’ve run out of HDD space to store what I’ve tried to collect ^__^
LikeLike