He may very well be the biggest, highest-level otaku in the Genshiken, but he’s also somehow the most stylish, most sociable, and most conventionally attractive.
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.
Obviously, otaku pursuits can be life-encompassing endeavours. The 17 Sustainable Otaku Goals serve to help otaku integrate their passion into a healthy lifestyle, thus avoiding burnout and conflicts both inside and outside the subculture.
When otaku get together, however, magical things can happen. Combine plenty of time to develop a talent with the undying passion and drive to see one’s dreams come true and we get things like the Daicon IV animation.
Gearheads with anime girls on their cars, photographers obsessed with anime figures, academics who study anime and anime culture, all kinds of people whose passion for anime transcends anime itself and slips into other hobbies and unrelated parts of life.
It seems natural for products to come in multiple sizes, but dakimakura have the odd distinction of their two primary size options being only 10cm apart from each other.
In a world where being able to merchandise a show can be a determining factor in that show’s fate, it’s counterproductive that so many outspoken anime fans in the West seem disdainful of anime made to appeal to people and sell.
There’s a cycle that plays out in anime fandom that, on the surface, looks benign, and mostly is benign. Despite that, however, there are subtle issues with it that bother me in that it tends to prevent a real discussion from occurring.
It’s surprising how easy it can be to push a false narrative to the level where it becomes accepted by default by many within a population, despite not representing reality.
A series of selfishly-made bad decisions. A downward spiral of people treating other people badly to satisfy their own ends. A tragic story of people callously taking advantage of one another.
For what’s portrayed by so many as a wish-fulfillment genre for lonely men, harem anime protagonists seem to have a penchant for choosing some pretty hostile women.
They build an identity around how antisocial they are, making themselves feel superior and absolving themselves of responsibility for being unable to make friends or form and maintain relationships.
Fictional characters can make good role models, as their existence is as a set of boiled-down concepts, making them free from the many intricate shortcomings of being human.