Yo lmao they really were weirdos and some still are. I had couple of friends who I used to ball with and they were obsessed with Naruto, Bleach, DBZ, and I'm sure other animes.
I remember watching Dragon Ball Z back in the day but I didn't think much of it. It's crazy how mainstream it has become.
But Attack is def worth checking out. Just know you're starting at the top when it comes to animes IMO. Everything will be downhill after AoT lol.
It def. has become more mainstream. Admittedly, I was in to Pokemon in 99 and still dabble in the new releases. I stopped when the Switch had the Sword and Shield thing, but I still only played the games and have probably only seen like a dozen episodes of the show.
But while Pokemon was still big in middle school for me, DBZ was big only within a certain few demographics. Really it was the black and latino students that went all out on it, but they still weren't weird about it. Most of them tried to draw the characters so they'd find images on the internet and start drawing them.
The anime weirdos were really just an issue on the internet. Back then, when 500 kbps was considered fast as fuck, people would download like 5 GB files over the span of a few days and would just go nuts in the discussions over it. I had 56k lol so I'd get a few episodes a week, if I tried. But so many forums had people with anime profile pics that were weird as fuck, and it looks like the trend continues today and it ends up being some weird as fuck people. But that's a different discussion.
But it looks like anime is so big today that streaming services are going all-in on them. Like Sony buying up Crunchyroll and HBO and Hulu signing big deals with anime studios for new stuff and rights to old stuff.