RIP Jared Nandin, creator of the Vintage Anime Fans FB Group

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usamimi
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RIP Jared Nandin, creator of the Vintage Anime Fans FB Group

Post by usamimi »

https://www.facebook.com/groups/Vintage ... 533443184/

Always sad to lose one of our own. He unfortunately is one of the latest to pass away due to COVID. :cry:
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Re: RIP Jared Nandin, creator of the Vintage Anime Fans FB Group

Post by Drew_Sutton »

I had a huge post written up, but missed posting due to auth time-out... so I'll try again.

I first met Jared in 2002, through a mutual friend. In the late 90s and early 2000s, he was a pillar of the AnimeExpo staff community, very active in the burgeoning cosplay.com community and known as one of the biggest Giant Robo fans, if not THE fan. He was always promoting positive cosplay - getting people to cosplay whatever characters they wanted, which there was a fairly vocal part of the community against that at the time. Our mutual friend met him online, specifically through GR, and Jared being super friendly and out-going, invited him out to AX. My friend went out to LA that summer, hung with Jared and his crew and had a blast. He extended an invite to Jared to join us for AWA in the fall that year. Jared flew out to Atlanta and my friend and I went to pick him up from the airport. I asked my friend what Jared looked like so I could help look for him. "Tetsugyu." he replied. I kinda laughed it off but there at baggage claim, we found him, and he looked a lot like Tetsugyu from Giant Robo.

He met a bunch of our local friends and hung around us for the convention all weekend. He was pretty quick to make fast friends with a lot of people like me. He was very social, very outgoing and very passionate about anime. He ran into some AMV folks he knew from AX (Brad DeMoss, I think Hsien Lee and maybe a few others), we wound up hitting room parties with them and a late night run to Waffle House. Jared and I got into a bit of a debate about Cowboy Bebop where we disagreed; he was passionate and kept on it and I wound up with a new nickname that weekend but whatever, he didn't mean any harm by it. He flew back to LA after the show, we'd exchanged AIM/ICQ/MSN names and just kept up over late night chats.

The following year, Jared found out we were attending a lecture by Yasuhiro Imagawa, who directed G Gundam, and of course, Giant Robo. He shipped a box of merch to my friend to get signed if we could. It was a large box, packed pretty tightly, and we weren't known to plan well ahead, so he must have rushed shipment on it. Imagawa was there promoting G Gundam on Toonami, and 7 of 7(Shichinin no Nana) which was just licensed by Bandai, I think. We all grabbed something from the merch box when the time came for signatures and he graciously signed a mountain of GR stuff when he was there promoting other things. Jared later had ambitions for an online community called Infinitely Excellent (heavy anime bent, but hodgepodge of nerd socializing and discourse) and he got me to sign up for it; I was fairly active there but most of the other people there were a lot of SoCal folks.

Jared really got into WoW. I was doing more intensive studying. We were both dis-satisfied with what was going on in the anime scene in the mid-2000s, and the idea of "vintage" or "retro" anime fandom hadn't really occurred to us. We just kinda drifted apart. It wasn't until I joined a couple of these Vintage/classic/retro anime facebook groups that I saw him pop up again but we never really re-connected, despite being incredibly close for a few years. But some people just leave an impact on you.

Jared always found the positivity in something and never held it against anyone who didn't. He was passionate about his interests and hobbies, and passionate about those involved in those hobbies. We should all try to be a little more like Jared.

Rest well, Tetsugyu.
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Re: RIP Jared Nandin, creator of the Vintage Anime Fans FB Group

Post by davemerrill »

You know, I was thinking I'd never met him in person, but if he was at AWA and hanging out with you, then I probably did? It's a tragic loss. He was rich in friends, that's for certain.
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