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.
While anime fans often bemoan the heavily corporate nature of the production committee model and dismiss it as business interfering with art, that’s a simplistic view that fails to fully understand the purpose of the business model.
It’s a balancing act, where some companies are okay with having a smaller audience if it means that audience will be happier with their product, while other companies try to expand their markets.
In many ways, the subculture is still smarting from the hackjob localizations of the past, which were often poorly translated, poorly dubbed, had content cut for the Western release, or some combination of the three.
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.