Has anyone else noticed otaku culture outside of japan has turned into something of a magnet for people with "alternative life styles"? People who a lot of the time do not have much interest in anything actually otaku related? It's as if at some point, being into anime & manga stopped being about being into anime & manga and turned into being part of a large community of misfit weirdos. Those with a legitimate interest in the material have been phased out and replaced. I used to hide my power level so people wouldn't think I was some embarrassing narutard. Now I hide my power level so people won't think I'm an crazy depraved alternative life style activist furfag. These people... they choose to alienate themselves from society, and now that they can't fit in anywhere they look too fringe nerd and otaku culture and communities. They don't care what it's about, and they don't see fans who like a certain type of media, they only see a bunch of misfit weirdos who surely would welcome any and all other misfit weirdos. At best they might indulge in a bit of whatever is the most popular thing at the time, but that's not what they're there for. They're like squatters. They're uninvited people making themselves at home in a place that doesn't belong to them, and they're getting away with it because no one wants to deal with them or the backlash of trying to kick them out. Now they act like it belongs to them, and start changing things to suit their interests.
I think it's an issue with just about any community. I find the best solution is just to avoid sizable communities in general. Any community, once big enough, loses those finer details which brings in more outsiders which further dilute the initial focus.
Well stated. And it sadly means that people whose only interests have ever been otaku related have no place left to call their own, in the sense that you can't even find proper otaku-related discussion these days.
>>42171 >Now I hide my power level so people won't think I'm an crazy depraved alternative life style activist furfag. Everyday, brother.
>These people... they choose to alienate themselves from society This is kind of an outdated perspective. Society is run by and caters to such people. They have a lot more respect from society than we do.
>>42171 I don't get your point. You want normal people to talk anime with? I'm fine with the misfit weirdos. I'm a misfit weirdo myself. If something, there should be more misfit weirdos; it was like that in the past, so maybe you should be a little more humble before you think you somehow have the right to decide who belongs and who doesn't.
>>42177 You want more misfit weirdos for the sake of misfit weirdos? Why? What does that have to do with Otaku culture? People who are Otaku might be considered weird, but not everyone who is weird is a Otaku.
>>42178 Because weird is interesting, normal isn't. And it's the misfit weirdos who obsess over things, who create an underground culture in the first place, who do the things that require an amount of dedication incompatible with normal life. If you don't like the weirdos that's fine, but don't go gatekeeping and pretending you were there first.
>>42179 What does that have to do with stuff like anime Manga games and so on? This isn't about being normal, this is about people thinking that being "weird" in any shape or form gives them a free pass to any and all communities they consider weird.
>>42180 If you want a sanitized fandom of anime, nothing. If you want "otaku culture", and that means doujinshi and degeneracy in all it's glorious manifestations, everything.
>>42181 >that means doujinshi and degeneracy in all it's glorious manifestations Yes, that is related to Otaku culture. I am talking here about people that have little interest in things such as that, yet still join these places anyway.
>>42182 Those are, almost always, the normals, not the misfits. Even the most clueless misfit have, at least, the potential. I can't seriously think for a second the poor state of imageboards is due to "many misfits", if something it's the absolute opposite.
>>42183 Perhaps they are indeed normals, but they consider themselves misfits. As >>42176 said, many of their alternative life styles are now considered normal anyway.
Part of being an otaku is alienating yourself from society to varying degrees, the term carries this connotation. I think you're referring to homosexual normalfags who appropriate anime "aesthetics" (e.g. sewerslvt, depressed teenagers on discord and sanctioned suicide) because they correlate it with mental illness, without caring much for the medium or japanese media in general, only on a very shallow and vain level and creating communities/relationships around this behaviour.
>>42184 I don't even know what exactly do you mean with "alternative life styles". But I consider otaku an obvious example of alternative life style. If you're talking about, and excuse for my crude language, about getting fucked in the ass or while dressed as a furry, I would say having a regular sexual life means you're not really a misfit in the first place. Nothing really alternative about it.
There are levels to this in my opinion, rather than a black and white mentality of alternative lifestyles and people being misfits or not. It's more about people wanting a place to fit in, trying out anime and realizing they don't like the more obscure otaku aspects of it. Instead of leaving or ignoring what they don't like some adopt an ironic attitude or at worst try to act as an authority to mold the community to their needs. This is hard for them to do because they never saw otaku interests as something to be respected or to take seriously in the first place when they joined. Ironically, I find older normals irl who simply watched SnK or Death Note on Netflix to have more respect and fascination for the culture. They either ignore what they don't like about it or I can explain more about things they might not understand and clear misconceptions they have in my experience with them. I assume they don't have the need to disturb communities like misfits or insecure teenagers because they already have one.
>>42189 I think the dividing line is more plainly whether one watches anime or engages with the medium as an art form on its own right, or watches anime more for the "social" aspect. To take a blatant example, how many people knew about Manga time Kirara before watching Bocchi the Rock and watched it for that sake, compared to watching the show because they saw some funny reactions used somewhere (or because their friends watched it)? This then leads to the phenomenon OP mentioned: if you only engage with otaku culture mainly for the reason of having "some social group" to be a part of, then one likely won't engage with it very deeply. >>42171 >alternative life style activist furfag I find it interesting that perhaps the only group to avoid becoming "diluted" in this sense is the "brony" (i.e. fans of my little pony) community. You'd think that all the anime and furry stuff would naturally bleed over into it, but from what I can see the brony & furry communities remain fairly distinct. Maybe it's a byproduct of the radioactive reputation the former had, so they were forced to create their own more silo'd spaces early on, or something. (Tangentially I've always felt that the brony community partly exists because the west doesn't have anything like CGDCT anime. It's understandable that people who never discovered anime probably went to the only cute/soft/gentle thing that exists in the west. And I never quite understood their radioactive reputation, at least around 2007s or so they didn't seem to invade other communities, at most there were only forum signatures and avatars. In fact I'd say that the "modern" anime community is more invasive in the sense of spamming shounen memes everywhere and generally acting obnoxious).
>>42192 >at least around 2007s or so they didn't seem to invade other communities Bronies existed before "g4" (the start of friendship is magic in 2010), but that's when it really took off and Moot decided to give them their own containment board.
>>42193 >Bronies existed before "g4" (the start of friendship is magic in 2010) No. My Little Pony fans existed before G4, but they were mostly adult women collecting figurines out of a sense of nostalgia. "Bronies" are a phenomenon that is specific to when /co/ decided to ironically start group-watching Friendship is Magic - later kicked out to /b/, later kicked out away from 4chan, later given a containment board back on 4chan which was initially highly distrusted.
>>42185 I also thought the OP was referring to those sort of people, they're just posers at the end of the day
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