At first, I hated Pokémon because I watched some episodes from the anime and thougth it to be bad. At this time, I didn't knew that there were Pokémon games. I actually stopped hating, though I didn't care about Pokémon until I discovered the games. This was a long time ago (and I do not remember when): My neighbor was having a birthday party when I got to his house, looked at his computer, and discovered that he had many games; including Pokémon Sapphire, Pokémon FireRed, and Pokémon Emerald. Then I asked him to put those games on a CD so I could play them at my own PC. Then, I started playing the games and have not stopped since. I discovered that there were other, older and newer games, and I discovered there were Pokémon communities; however, I have not yet discovered there were competitive Pokémon. I've become a big Pokémon fan, though there were a few people to which I could talk about Pokémon.
I got to a Pokémon brazilian forum. At this time, the gen IV was still starting. I was there when they revealed the first details of the "new" Pokémon: the starters, Weavile, Mime Jr. and many others. However I had problems at this brazilian community, and the situations have made me get discouraged of playing Pokémon. This was at 2009. Since then, I stopped again to care about Pokémon. This changed again at 2011, when I met a friend (unfortunately this guy no longer is my friend, but this is a personal matter that I shouldn't discuss there) on a comedy site. This friend was a big Pokémon fan and made me like Pokémon again. Thogether, I wrote many funny and humorous articles about Pokémon so that he could give me a score for each of those articles.
During the time that I was his friend, I discovered Smogon. Then, my friend unfortunately disappeared. However, during the time he disappeared, I have read many Smogon articles about Pokémon analysis and strategies, and started to understand them and learn about competitive battling. Then, I created the account that now you see.
Since then, I have made many friends on the Pokémon universe, and I am very happy for that (in fact, almost all my friends like Pokémon). Sometimes I think that Pokémon had a real and impactful influence on my life. Because of this I think that I will never stop playing again, unless Game Freak stops the franchise and the game starts to become boring.
I also learned to battle competitively and I even tried to write my own analysis on Smogon. However, at this moment only Thundurus-T and Tentacruel are my creation. I have tried to write analysis for Heatran, Keldeo, Gliscor, and Starmie, but due to internet problems, these analysis were handed over to other people, and now it's too late to take them back. I am now going to wait until the 6th generation metagame comes to write new analysis, because I do not want to risk this happening again, and I want to write fresh new analysis should OU pokémon become unviable and lower tier Pokémon become viable.
The funny thing is that despite all this, I still didn't watched a single episode of the anime since my childhood and all that I know about Pokémon I learned through the games.