Do you ever ask yourself why is that you love to watch so many cool movies, tv shows, comics or (like me) anime, and then you decided that the show “works” well for me to enjoy further? You like them so much, you started to talk more about them, you want to share your favourite heroes, characters with your friends, you want to learn everything else about this new found hobby, and get yourself a little wee bit obsessed with them. In other words, you’ve just turned yourself as a fan.

Becoming a mecha fan is no different to the rest of mainstream we all see in this modern pop culture of anime. The question remains now for you is that how do you become mecha fan in the process when there’s plenty of young ‘guns’ out there who’s never heard of the word “mecha” but they do wish to get into it.  Well,  to the reader of this source, your answers lies here.

Here are the 5 best ways you can start to become a mecha fan.  Here are the 5 best ways you can start to become a mecha fan.

1. Watch mecha anime. Lots of them.

   That’s right. The first and foremost step in developing your interests in mecha anime is watch them. That’s the simplest thing you can do to begin with. I watched several mecha anime on TV in my early childhood life and I must say I dearly enjoyed them and I’m glad to be a fan of many of their shows. Go to Youtube.com and search for “mecha”, and you find there’s hundreds or thousands of Youtube link videos of countless mecha from the 70s, 80s and 90s. Most of them are either opening scenes or closing of the mecha episodes. If there’s too many to choose from, start from Transformers cause the most common and blatantly obvious for many fans to get interested into mecha, so get into it, learn about their characters and then purchase any dvd releases once they’re on sale such as Amazon.com, Play-asia.com etc.

2. Buy robot toylines from any toy store, offline and online. (And it doesn’t have to be Transformers)

   Well you can, if you want. So if you do see any Transformers toy stand in the stores, buy them, regardless of your age. That’s right. You heard me. Buy them regardless of your age. I don’t care how crazy you think this idea is to you but you just have to get it. (I have done it. And I feel proud of owning my 1/36 scale Transformer vehicle. Did I mention it’s yellow?) Doing so will encourage you to appreciate the ownership of small scale models and understand why ‘true’ fans do pursue mecha merchandising as a hobby.

3. Attend anime/sci-fi/comic book convention centres

   Pretty straightforward. Just go to any public relations places where they announced the next wave of sc-fi/comic book convention centres to be held at your locality just like ours in NZ. The major advantage you get from this is that you will have greater exposure on several mecha anime figurines and merchandise and more than 70% of the time you will have easier access to them as compared to buying them online. If you like me, living in New Zealand, check out this Armaggedon website for more details on the functions services catered on the days of the convention centre. Otherwise, check out Animecons.com on http://www.animecons.com/ where you can find other convention centres around the world, and pick the ones that’s closest to you. You can also submit the convention centres through there as well, if you couldn’t find any.

4. Join any mecha-related forums or blogs

   I recently started doing this a few weeks ago on MechaTalk.net forum. After signing up, I started to learn more about the common topics people discuss in relation to mecha as a hobby. From there, you will pick up more and more areas on mecha not many newbie are aware of such as modelling, crafting, painting, artworks, your favourite mecha, etc etc. And best of all, they’re free for you to sign up, and doesn’t cost you anything to go online and start making comments on anything you could think of regarding mecha.

5. Start your own mecha-theme collection

   This is new to me. But I thought it would make sense to pursue this area of fandom, as I notice websites like Collectiondx.com that offers wide-range of mecha toys, most of them come as die-cast metal alloy (aka Soul of Chogokin) that I used to like having them around during my childhood years. Now having bumped into them, you’ll find that websites catered for people in my age group (currently in my late 20s) wanting to buy mecha toys, but only for colleciton purposes. I like that idea and I’ll start planning to make purchases on all the old (and new) mech toys in the long run.

That’s it. Those five simple and easy ways to get into mecha fandom should get you a bit of an idea. And the most important thing during this process is that you get to have fun them. With fun, you’ll enjoy your time more with time and you let yourself know why you’re enjoying this in the first place.

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