for splatoon in general: i somehow didn't get interested in it during splatoon 1 & 2's life cycles, but a good friend of mine convinced me to play the splat3 world premiere demo and it was already over for me, i'd already passed the point of no return
i started out intending to play casually and stay playing casually, but getting more and more into the series led me to seek out all sorts of splatoon-related content... including competitive content. and when i came into the series i kind of had this notion that competitive gaming was some super toxic space dominated by gamer bros itching to call you slurs over VC, but as i got exposed to more competitive content the more i realized that... that's really not true for splatoon. (and i don't think it's as true as the stereotype would have one believe for competitive gaming in general! i have a lot of thoughts about this topic but i won't get into it in this thread.)
but i came away from that thinking "oh yeah i respect comp splatoon players, but i could never get that good," but as i kept playing 'casually' and naturally getting better and picking up tips from the competitive content i watched 'just to get better at turf war and salmon run' i kinda hit a point where i was regularly getting like, 10+ splats in turf. now, at the time i was also convinced that getting kill counts like that in turf war meant i was sweaty and overcompetitive and ruining the game because that's what all the casual players on tumblr were saying about players like that... which is an attitude that annoys me today but one way or another it was the push that made me go "hey, maybe i should try out anarchy battles again, maybe it's not as scary anymore as i felt it was when i first tried it out"
and at first i still wasn't that good at the ranked modes, but i was motivated to learn and improve more than i was when i intended to just be a casual player. and that's when i started looking into where to find the rest of the competitive community, what playing in a team is like, what's going on in the competitive scene... and i was a combination of too shy and too busy for a while to actually make any steps to get into the scene myself, but now i'm trying! slowly.