Beyond Selidor

Honestly, I blame (thank?) imprinting at an early age. Because I was watching Belgian and Japanese animated tv shows before I could read they were hugely impactful to the kind of storytelling that resonated with me - especially the Japanese series I watched as a tween I felt took me seriously in a way that shows aimed for kids my age in my home country did not. (I watched Japanese shows on French TV and thought they were French until...pretty much until I got the internet and could look things up when I was already in my later teens.)

There's tropes (narrative and character) that show up in anime that I grew to love, and I never found those in live action TV for kids. (Mainly: lots of danger and injuries and even death. Those stakes!) And those plots that stretched out forever! I was hooked.

As an adult I still find the animated medium deeply gratifying because there's no need to suspend disbelief by overlooking poor CGI or terrible costumes - in animated stories, everything is real, and only the animators' imagination sets the limits.

And again with the imprinting - I'm not a fan of a lot of prestige TV (much of it goes too dark for me), and the particular tropes I am a sucker for happens...okay, at this point I'll say "in non-Western" TV rather than animated shows because clearly the Chinese dramas know how to get me!