An outlier doesn't mean it isn't true in general, there was nothing more nerdy and outcast thing you could do than like anime in the states in the 90s. Europe and LatinAmerica had plenty of anime exports for decades so it was synonymous with cartoons there. Now that geek culture is mainstream people are having revisionist history of how things used to be, there's a reason there's a movie called revenge of the nerds.
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