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.
It’s very easy, especially in the Western anime community, to portray modern Japanese otaku as bad because their habits seem so different from our own.
Within the anti-otaku sentiment cultivated by the media, there is no room for a portrayal of otaku as politically-active, socially-liberal, and generally not evil.
If you’ve been around to different anime conventions, chances are you’ve seen one or more anime cons where the programming wasn’t completely based around anime and Japanese culture.
But the event was still nominally an “anime convention.”
When we see coverage of otaku from Western fan-media, and especially from Western mainstream media, it almost always has a particular slant to it. They’re portrayed as creepy, lonely, antisocial, often overweight, and always male.