Watch Parties, Discord Servers, and Why 'Anime Friends' Are Becoming Your Actual Best Friends

Marcus, 26, didn't expect to make his closest friends at a Demon Slayer watch party in a rented community room in Columbus, Ohio. He'd shown up mostly because the event was free and he'd just moved to the city. Three years later, he's the co-organizer of a 200-person local anime club, and two of his groomsmen are guys he met that night.

"I came in not knowing anyone," he says. "I left with a group chat that still hasn't stopped."

Stories like Marcus's are becoming less of a rarity and more of a pattern across the United States. What was once a deeply solitary hobby — streaming late at night, lurking on Reddit, watching seasonal charts alone — is transforming into something genuinely communal. And the numbers back it up: anime viewership in the US hit record highs in 2023 and has continued climbing, while fan-organized events, local clubs, and online communities have multiplied at a pace that even dedicated fans are finding hard to track.

So what's driving this shift? And what does it mean that so many Americans are finding their people through a Japanese art form?

The Pandemic Planted a Seed

It would be hard to tell this story without acknowledging where a lot of it started: 2020. When the world locked down, streaming went through the roof, and anime — already growing steadily in Western markets — saw a massive surge. Attack on Titan's final season, Jujutsu Kaisen's debut, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train becoming the highest-grossing anime film ever — all of this happened during a period when people were desperately looking for something to connect over.

Discord servers that had been small and quiet suddenly exploded. Watch parties on platforms like Teleparty and Crunchyroll's built-in features gave isolated fans a way to experience episodes together in real time. People who had never talked about anime out loud started finding whole communities of people who spoke the same language.

When restrictions lifted, something interesting happened: those online friendships wanted to go offline.

Local Communities Are Having a Moment

Across the country, fan-organized anime clubs and watch party groups have been popping up in cities big and small. You'll find them in Chicago coffee shops, Houston library meeting rooms, Los Angeles rooftop bars, and yes, community centers in Columbus, Ohio.

Many of these groups aren't affiliated with any major organization — they're just fans who found each other through Meetup, Reddit, or word of mouth and decided to make something real. The format varies: some are casual viewing nights where you vote on what to watch, others are more structured with themed events, cosplay nights, or charity fundraisers tied to fandom.

Jasmine, 31, runs an anime watch party group in Atlanta that started with seven people in her apartment and now regularly draws 40 to 60 attendees to a local bar that reserves space for them on Thursday nights.

"The bar loves us because we're consistent and we tip well," she laughs. "But honestly, what keeps people coming back isn't the anime. It's each other. The anime is just the excuse."

That framing — anime as an excuse for human connection — comes up again and again when you talk to community organizers. The show is the entry point, but the bond is the destination.

Discord: Where Kizuna Lives Online

For every local group that meets in person, there are dozens of thriving online communities doing the same work in digital spaces. Discord has become the de facto home for anime fan communities in the US, and the ecosystem is vast. There are servers dedicated to specific series, seasonal anime discussions, general fan culture, and increasingly, servers built explicitly around the idea of community and friendship rather than just content discussion.

Some of these servers have tens of thousands of members. Others are intentionally small — capped at a few hundred to preserve an intimate feel. The moderation culture in the most successful ones tends to be remarkably thoughtful, with rules around inclusivity, safe discussion, and genuine community-building that go well beyond typical internet forum norms.

Derek, 23, is a moderator for a 12,000-member server focused on shonen anime. He spends around 10 hours a week on moderation and community programming — AMAs with fan artists, watch-along events, monthly themed discussions.

"People ask me why I do it for free," he says. "But I've met some of my best friends through this server. I flew to meet one of my co-mods in person last summer. That's not nothing. That's real."

The Parasocial-to-Real Pipeline

There's an interesting psychological journey that happens for a lot of anime fans, and researchers who study fandom have started paying attention to it. It goes something like this: you get emotionally invested in a character, you seek out others who feel the same way, you form connections with those people, and eventually the human connection eclipses the fictional one.

This isn't unique to anime, but anime seems particularly effective at catalyzing it. Part of that is the sheer emotional depth of many series — the themes of friendship, sacrifice, and belonging that run through everything from Naruto to Violet Evergarden give fans a shared emotional vocabulary that makes it easier to connect quickly and genuinely.

There's also something about the concept of kizuna itself — that idea of deep, meaningful bonds — that seems to attract fans who are specifically looking for that kind of connection. People who love anime about friendship and community aren't just passive consumers of that content. They're often actively seeking to build those things in their own lives.

What This Means in 2024

The American anime fan community in 2024 looks genuinely different than it did even five years ago. It's more diverse, more organized, more visible, and more intentional about community-building. Major conventions like Anime Expo and Otakon continue to grow, but the more meaningful shift might be happening at the local level — in the small watch parties, the Discord voice chats, the fan meetups that don't make the news but change people's lives anyway.

For Marcus in Columbus, the kizuna he found in that community room wasn't just about Demon Slayer. It was about walking into a room full of strangers and discovering that shared passion is a surprisingly fast track to genuine friendship.

"Anime gets you in the door," he says. "But it's the people that make you stay."

If that's not the whole point of kizuna, we don't know what is.