Well, my family never owned any sort of cable or satellite TV, and I've always been pretty nocturnal, even when I was a kid. On the rare occasion that one of our 20ish channels did show cartoons, it was only once a week (saturdays) and always in the mornings, so I always missed them. I saw a bit of pokemon, and eventually I got some VHS tapes with the first-season episodes on them. I loved that series, and I still like pokemon today - the games don't even entertain me anymore, but I still get them, simply for nostalgia's sake. In a childhood that only exposed me to pokemon and the boringness of real life, it's easy to see how one could develop fanboyism.