When you’re flying around DCS World in the Weebjet 5000, you don’t get to take yourself seriously, no matter how much money you spent on your flight sim setup.
That’s a good thing.
We’ve discussed in the past about how nicheing yourself in the subculture can help you find more like-minded people. Put simply, as anime became easier to get into, finding other super-committed people became more difficult, and anime nerds started to dig deeper in terms of their engagement with the subculture.
It takes a special sort of anime fan to habitually spend $150+ on anime figures, for example. On some level, however, the concept is missing a crucial part.
Anime, especially when you get to the deeper levels, is an expensive hobby. One problem about expensive hobbies is that they create elitists. In any expensive hobby, there will be people who think they’re better than others because they spent the most money on their hobby.
The airsoft community has these people. The flight simulator community has these people. People who think that, because they spent however many hundreds or thousands of dollars on their stuff, people should take them super-seriously and they should have some sort of increased status in the community.
But when you add anime into the mix, and hang out with others who do the same, you avoid those people. Two expensive hobbies. It doesn’t matter if you spent $400 on a plate carrier from LBT for your airsoft loadout if you’re also running around with cat ears on your helmet. And if you expect to be taking seriously because you spent the money, both sides, the weebs and the elitists, will look at you sideways.
The elitists don't respect you because you're not playing their status game of “who spent the most money?” with your cat ears. You’re, in fact, making a mockery of their entire paradigm.
The weebs don't respect you because they're trying to have fun. You’re their weird one for expecting to be given all sorts of undue respect for how much you spent on equipment for your play-pretend military game with a pair of stupid cat ears on your head.
The way to avoid troublemakers is to find people who don’t take themselves too seriously. People who can laugh at themselves and laugh with each other and have a good time without the posturing. People who do what they do because they enjoy it, and not because it lets them project their insecurities onto others.
There is no reason why cute anime girls need to be involved with flight sims, or airsoft, or automotive endeavours. That’s exactly what makes people into things like itasha or moe military such cool people to be around. They’re willing to do something as patently unnecessary as flying around in a fighter jet with Mori Calliope painted on the tail in their computer game.
That’s the kind of thing you only even do because you enjoy it. There’s no status in it. It’s pure passion. Passion without status creates environments that scare off troublemakers, and as a result, those become some of the best environments in the subculture.
And what’s even better is that even when you mix anime with another expensive hobby like that, the expensive part matters less. If you and your buddies are anime weeb airsoft people, it doesn’t matter if you spent $900 or $90 on your loadout. It isn’t about the money anymore. It’s about the community.
And when it’s about the community, when you eliminate all of the ways to gain status except for “provide value” and “be a cool person to hang out with,” you prevent the vast majority of people only there to cause trouble from gaining any leverage.