I soon realized that I couldn’t possibly become an expert in every single anime or manga or science fiction show or fantasy movie or comic book. Also, there were some works that I absolutely detested despite my friends’ efforts in getting me to like them (Fushigi Yuugi, anyone?).

What I didn’t realize was, as far as being Otaku is concerned, this is all beside the point.

Understand this: I’m never going to claim to be the Voice of All Otaku. I have weird tastes by ‘typical otaku’ standards, if such a thing exists. I like Deep Space Nine better than Voyager. I haven’t seen any Bleach or Naruto. I caught Firefly a few years after it was canceled. I’ve only seen one episode of Heroes. I haven’t seen the new Dr. Who. I haven’t been keeping track of Star Wars Clone Wars. I haven’t read the last Harry Potter book. I haven’t played D&D 4th Ed. seriously. I only watched Lucky Star late last year. And my tolerance for tedium is too low for me to enjoy your typical MMORPG grind long enough to be competitive at it. Sorry, I tried, I really did.

Many trends came and went and I either ignored them, scoffed at them, or was completely unaware of them. Worse, I began to judge the people who were into these things as ‘weird’. Oh, the irony. I became preoccupied with fitting into normal, mainstream society. I downplayed my interest in anime as I finished my college degree and entered law school. I started doing normal things in an effort to belong. I updated my fashion sense — a good thing. I learned how to behave and enjoy myself in clubs and bars — also a good thing. I learned that the ‘normals’, as I so condescendingly called them, were just like anyone else: pretty sharp at some things, pretty lame at others. I wasn’t better than them because I understood computers more; I wasn’t worse than them because I preferred playing video games to getting intoxicated. Besides, I was learning to enjoy that, too.

But I never really did belong. Part of me knew that by using my weirdo friends as punchlines in jokes I told normal people, I was selling them out, and selling myself out. In my efforts to whitewash myself of the loser-geek image I thought I had, I reduced myself to a bad imitation of what I thought a normal person was like.

And I noticed another thing too — normal people were desperately trying to adopt geek characteristics in order to seem cool and edgy. Girls got into photography, guys got into gadgets, and each one claimed to have intimate knowledge about stuff like Transformers and Batman and Harry Potter and CSI and X-Men as each one of these previously geeky preoccupations became cool.

Normal people were looking to the weirdos for cultural guidance. They were looking to otaku. They would badmouth otaku in an attempt to look cooler, just as I sold out my otaku past for cheap laughs, but in the end they needed someone to lead them to the next cool thing.

So they mocked us when they needed to feel better about themselves. They would still watch and read and listen to stuff made by enthusiasts who cared about their craft more than looking normal. They still consumed otaku products. They watched stuff by J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon and enjoyed the new surge of movies based on comic books and science fiction and fantasy stories. They wanted more of our stuff.

So why be ashamed? Why hide it at all? Because I was afraid of what they thought of me, that’s why. I was supposed to be normal. I wanted to fit in.

Plus although normal girls were cute, they liked normal guys. And I was definitely not normal, no matter how hard I tried to be.

(to be continued)

Most English-speaking fans use the word otaku exclusively as a label for fans of Japanese animation or comics. It’s a reasonable conclusion. It’s a Japanese word after all. But that’s not how the Japanese themselves use the word otaku.

Originally a way of referring to another’s family or house, or a really polite way of saying ‘you’ (think ‘thou’), otaku is used by the Japanese to refer to someone who is so into his or her chosen hobby or field of interest that he or she neglects things most other people would consider simple common sense.

Sometimes the normal people are right on the money (have you ever smelled the air at a Magic tourney or Level Up! event? We really could use some more attention to our hygiene, guys, seriously!) and sometimes not so much — consider the strange fact that a person who will listen exclusively to techno or polka or Gregorian chant might consider someone who listens to video game music or anime soundtracks or Korean pop ‘weird’. Taste is truly subjective.

The Japanese usage of otaku is very close to the modern use of the word ‘geek’, except nowadays geek has pretty much been hijacked by all sorts of non-geeks, like jocks who have the latest cellphones they don’t know how to use to airheads who think having an iPod dock makes them geek chic.

Here then is the message of Otaku no Video. An otaku is someone who loves his chosen fandom so much, he no longer thinks like a ‘normal’ person, no longer wants the same things, but instead has a worldview shaped by his fandom, whether that be anime, Star Trek, travel shows, model planes, video games, even porn. (Yes, there are connoisseurs of that too.)

This is not a bad thing. But it’s perceived as a bad thing because the mainstream media likes painting the weird as dangerous, wrong, or just plain ridiculous. Self-defense mechanism I guess. Keeps people focused on the important issues, like which celebrity released a sex tape this week or why it’s a moral imperative to choose one television network over the other. (Meanwhile, here’s TONIGHT’S HEADLINES: video games or children’s fantasy books or Japanese cartoons corrupt our youth. Hypocrisy.)

So let me repeat my point. Otaku are weird. This means they don’t conform to mainstream society’s conventions, because they follow their own subculture. Don’t worry. We live in the Internet Age. Weird is good. I’ll explain this in detail later.

This knowledge hit me like a ton of sumo wrestlers. Not only was I otaku, but I had always been otaku, even before I was into anime. So I was weird. Why fight it?

Like Kubo from Otaku no Video, that day I decided to be the Otaku of all Otaku: The Otaking. I would take pride in my weirdness. I would pursue my dream of making the world a safe place for all otaku, and like our pragmatic Osakan role models Gainax, make a tidy profit in the process.

Well, at least that’s how I started. Slowly, though, as I needed to face the ‘real life’ concerns of finishing my studies and finding a respectable job, I forgot that I made that decision. It wasn’t all at once. It was a slow, creeping amnesia, like forgetting who I really was.

(to be continued)

I would have to say that the radical downturn in my academic career beginning in college coincided neatly with the rise of three influences in my life: access to anime, access to Magic: the Gathering and RPGs, and access to the Internet.

All of these things would be supplemented by a community of geeks known simply as The Hill. The Hill alumni are many. You might actually know someone who was part of the Hill. We were, for all intents and purposes, a catch-all otaku group just like in Otaku no Video or Genshiken. Some specialized in anime, some in CCGs, some in RPGs, some in comic books, science fiction, tarot card reading, and so on.

We contributed to each other’s academic demise. Going to class man? Nah, just stay for ten more minutes and have one more duel. If you come with us we’re going to So-and-So’s place to watch the new Ranma OVA. Hey, study later, read this Oh! My Goddess fanfic I wrote and tell me if it’s good enough to submit to the FFML or if it needs work. Captain, I detect no intelligent life on this planet. So roll the dice already. You’re already late for class anyway.

I took more pride in my knowledge of trivia like voice actresses and opening themes and animation directors than, say, in how fashionably I dressed or if I had actually studied for the midterm I had that afternoon that I only found out about that morning.

During this unglamorous but necessary period in my life, I watched Gainax’s masterpiece, Otaku no Video. For those of you who can’t be bothered to check Wikipedia, Otaku no Video was Gainax’s last anime before doing underground, triumphantly emerging from its own ashes three years later with Neon Genesis Evangelion.

This would be the first time I had a word that described I was, encapsulates it so completely. I had always been that way, but had no name for until now.

I was otaku.

(to be continued)

It began early in my life. I just didn’t know what its name was yet. I’m bad with names, you see.

I was a toddler raised by Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny and Tom and that bastard Jerry. Well no, back then it was Jerry and that bastard Tom, but I digress. I loved cartoons. Bright colors, crazy sounds, a blatant disregard for the laws of Newtonian physics.

Anyone else feel sorry for Wile E. Coyote?

I could spend an entire afternoon watching cartoons. Forget afternoon, a whole morning. Waking up for Saturday morning cartoons would get me up at 7 in the morning. On a Saturday.

I was addicted. And I loved talking about cartoons. I would tell kids who hadn’t seen the one where Chip n Dale play that insane ‘Apple-Core-Baltimore’ game with Donald and they would listen, very patiently, not really understand what I was explaining to them because the source material itself was incomprehensible.

Before we go on, I confess. Most of my knowledge of Classical Music is because of its use in animation and motion pictures and references in books. So pay no attention if I make any pretentions.

By the way, that’s an emoticon I just used. I’m not gonna draw any more attention to the fact that I use them. Get used to them.

Anyway, cartoons. And Muppets too. Stuffed toy puppets with real heart. Moment of silence for Jim Henson. I hope you found your Rainbow Connection.

Pause.

So moving on, I next tuned into the Superfriends. Sorry Marvel, grew up with the JLA. After that, Heathcliff and the Junkyard Cats. (That Cleo. So… confusingly hot.)

Then my grandfather dropped the bomb on my developing mind. He bought me an original Betamax copy of the English dub of Galaxy Express 999. I was in preschool. It changed me forever. Stunning production values, mature, melancholic storyline, a galactic railway, and oh my God a shower scene. I was surprised my parents let me watch it at all.

I watched as much animation as I could. I had a taste for Japanese animation but any good animation would do. The Mysterious Cities of Gold. Voltes V and Voltron. The Smurfs and the Care Bears movies. Yes, I admit it. I watched the sissy stuff too. And in case of the Care Bear movies, considering the somewhat dark themes, I enjoyed it too, aside from the songs. (Seriously, few cartoons do song numbers right. The Little Mermaid-Beauty and the Beast-Aladdin trilogy with that songwriter who died. Very sharp, witty, insightful lyrics. I’ll check later.)

I started to draw my own little cartoons on the corners of my notebooks, with simple slapstick plots fought between Stick Figure White and Stick Figure Black. The animation was simple at best (I’m not much of a cartoonist even today) but the plots and characterization were complicated for a flipbook. Stick Figure White was more by the book, Stick Figure Black was sneaky, underhanded, but kept winning through unorthodox methods, like pulling a lightsaber on White. Being bored in class meant I had a lot of time on my hands to draw.

All this time I just kept watching. I saw He-Man and G.I JOE and Transformers and stuff everyone else saw. I saw Centurions. I saw Flight of Dragons. I saw Dungeons & Dragons and Visionaries and The Last Unicorn. I saw both versions of Lensman and still don’t remember the actual plot to this day, except for the fact that there were these aliens called the Boskone Empire and these Lensmen protecting the galaxy, a premise that Green Lantern totally ripped off. I saw Macross & Robotech (and recall that I actually preferred Robotech because the dub was better and the story made more sense).

It didn’t matter what I watched, just as long as I watched more and I watched better. I got by with videotapes from the local rental shop and TV specials like Sword of the Talisman and Once Upon a Time (aka Windaria).

And then, college happened.

(to be continued)