Earth to Jaden. Page 5 preview, The Vigilant Issue #1

This is addressed to all of the following, although this is by no means an exhaustive list:

1. Gamers (console, PC, handheld, tabletop, interactive fiction, miniature, CCG, MMOG, LARPers, board);
2. Weeaboo (anime, manga, light novels, niconico, traditional Japanese martial arts otaku, people who only know Japan through samurai films, Zen Buddhists);
3. Genre otaku (fantasy, sci-fi, Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Lord of the Rings, the various D&D campaign settings, superhero, Vertigo, gothic horror, mystery, pulp, fanfic, K-Dramas, reverse harems, musical theater);
4. Head-in-Cloud-Types (poets, artists, dreamers, philosophers, theoretical scientists, sages, mystics, shamans, prophets);
5. People who play with toys (scale models, dolls, figurines, phones with excessive arrays of features we don’t use, pretend guitars and drum kits connected to consoles, lightsabers, limited edition custom-painted Stitch statues)
6. Any subculture or group I have forgotten to mention that prefers to spend time in imaginary worlds.

Hi. Nice to meet you.

We have something in common: We have vivid imaginations and enjoy spending time in imaginary worlds.

These worlds are off the six-lane highway of the shared world of the monoculture, that bland soup of the mainstream. Some are right off the exit ramp, others take convoluted side streets to get to.

Let’s stop being in denial and just accept ourselves: We’re weird.

We do things that ‘normal people’ would never do. We watch ‘cartoons’. We like to pretend we’re Jedi or magicians or two-dimensional characters or elves or vampires or pirates or ninjas. We roll kinds of dice most people have never seen. Our dialects are incomprehensible to outsiders, and there are so many.

We’re weird.

They don’t understand us. That’s what it means when they say “That person is so weird.” It’s the only way they can deal with us. Sometimes it’s a sign of disapproval. Sometimes it’s simply a sign that someone cannot comprehend our motivations or behavior because they have no cultural context. Weird. Doesn’t make sense – at least sense the way the ‘people who see the world for what it really is’ see it,  the self-proclaimed realists.

We’re the imagination subculture. We’re weird. It’s okay.

We need to stop thinking that we need approval for everything we do. Even different imagination subcultures disagree with each other, sometimes vehemently. We need to accept the fact that we aren’t going to please everybody – and that the monoculture isn’t everybody. Even entire scenes have little tribes that skirmish every now and then. Fine.

Let’s stop trying so hard to make everyone accept us, we lose our identities in the process, our cultures. If everyone was like us, acted like us, thought like us, talked and dressed and hung out in the same places as us, then we would be normal.

And we don’t want that now, do we?

One of my favorite anime of all time is the beloved Azumanga Daioh! Demonstrating how a simple slice-of-life setup, clean, expressive art, and great characters can add up to a classic package that could make you both laugh and cry, Azumanga Daioh had two characters that stood out most of all: The cute child genius Chiyo and the spacy Osaka, both beloved of otaku all over the world.

Azumanga Da--!

Kiyohiko Azuma, the mangaka for Azumanga Daioh, followed it up with the ongoing series Yotsuba&!, another slice-of-life manga starring a five-year-old girl named Yotsuba, who is best described as a combination of Chiyo and Osaka. Considering what happens in the following video, the results are as bizarre as they sound:

In fact, Yotsuba is so weird, when she wandered off, her father told the person who volunteered to look for her, “If you see a weirdo, that’s her.” Maybe that’s why she’s the unofficial mascot of 4chan. Well, that and since the Japanese imageboard 2chan is called ‘Futaba’ (2 leaves), 4chan is therefore ‘Yotsuba’ (4 leaves). Mame Chishiki!

Do not let the cuteness fool you. This is the face of a weirdo.

Unfortunately Azuma says there are no plans of turning the Yotsuba&! manga into an anime, because he believes the stories and pacing of the manga are not well-suited for an anime. Still, one can dream, especially since fans have already created their own Yotsuba&! Daioh opening credits sequence!

Weirdos!

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)