This whole blackouts thing is messing up with my posting schedule. Anyway, while I catch up with my writing, please enjoy this scene from Otaku no Video, focusing on future Otaking Kubo’s indoctrination into otakuhood by the members of the Jack-of-All-Trades Club.

I’m eating lunch at Sizzling Pepper Steak when the group of freshmen college kids from Ateneo at the next table start talking about what classic movies they’ve seen. The list is absolutely disheartening to me: The Matrix, Gladiator, The Truman Show. These are classics now?

But their love for the movies despite their ‘age’ is great. One of the boys tells his rapt female audience about the plot of the Truman Show in loving detail, remembering little plot points like Truman’s father being written off the show as ‘lost at sea’. “But the movie is kinda old na,” he qualifies, “nineties pa.”

I remember talking about Star Wars with my law school classmates and one of the girls said, “All I know about Star Wars is like, Yoda. That’s the little guy with the lightsaber, right?”

So, little guy with lightsaber am I?

Indeed.

(more…)

I think people expected me to outgrow my love for animation, for video games, for comic books, for RPGs, for all these frivolous things other people dismiss as shallow entertainment. My parents certainly did. It is, after all, what you’re supposed to do to grow up, isn’t it?

Eventually you move on, learn to hang out with people who occupy their time with sensible things like what brand of clothes you’re wearing, what car you’re driving, what shoes you wear to the golf course, what team is going to make it into the finals, which club you should be seen at on a Friday night. You know, sensible things.

Especially in my case. I’m a lawyer. At this point I should be looking into stocking up on status symbols instead of driving the same car I’ve driven for over a decade, wearing quirky no-name t-shirts and spending my weekends watching anime with my friends. I should probably be looking into looking into paying for some nubile young girl’s college tuition as a friend joked a couple of days ago.

I should. It’s what everyone else is doing.

Except I’m not everyone else. I’m a weirdo. I’m otaku. And most of you reading this are, too.

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A couple of years ago I shot a video of myself spinning around my Anakin AOTC Master Replicas lightsaber, mainly because I thought it looked pretty cool. I used my phone camera to do it and shot about a minute-and-a-half worth of footage.

Then on a whim, I showed it to my geek friend who was also a law school classmate of mine. He ended up showing it to a bunch of our other guy classmates, and I was afraid that they would diss me for being such a Star Wars nerd, especially since this was the height of the Triumph the Insult Comic Dog Star Wars bashing. Instead they asked me where I got it, how much it cost, and if I could show it to them sometime. One classmate blurted out, “Dude, I just came,” when he first saw the blade extend at the beginning of the video.

A few months later I had the chance to show them the lightsaber at my birthday party at my house, which had a very marked delineation in the crowd I’d invited. One half were my college geek friends, happily making obscure sci-fi jokes and playing German board games. The other half were my law school friends, drinking and chatting and basically giving my geek friends dismissive glances.

The law school classmate who came when he saw the lightsaber video was there, with his fiancee, a stylish girl from a wealthy family. I handed him the lightsaber.

He switched it on and off a couple of times, nodded approvingly, and idly said, “Yeah, that’s pretty cool.” Then he handed it back to me.

Why was his reaction so subdued? I found out later that his fiancee disapproved of his geeky ways, his obsession with computers and Star Wars and video games, so he tended to downplay it around her.

I told him my girlfriend (now my wife) gave me the lightsaber. I said she had her own lightsaber (a Darth Vader ROTJ) and that we sometimes had mock-duels for kicks.

He said I was a lucky man.

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I’ve come to accept that my otakuhood isn’t a phase, that it’s here to stay. The reason this blog is called Project Otaking is simple. If I’m going to be otaku anyway, why not live the otaku life to the fullest? If I must drink life to the lees, do I have to drink from the same cup everyone else is drinking from? Why drink beer when you can drink sake, or absinthe, or ayahuasca?

Why be ashamed of it? Why not embrace it? Why not proclaim it proudly to the world? Because some people with pretensions disapprove? Is that a good enough reason?

Why not be the Otaku of Otaku, like Kubo said to Tanaka in Otaku no Video? Why not be the Otaking?

Why not? And why not do it now?

Why not?

This is kind of old, but it’s a goody. Yes I still intend to post a Manifesto entry today, don’t worry.

I rave about Gainax. I am a serious Gainax fanboy. Obviously, considering I call myself an Otaking, which is totally from Otaku no Video. And I think they’re geniuses.

But sometimes… seriously, WTF. Please make sure your head director is taking his meds before you let him anywhere near the studio.

Spike Spencer, the US voice actor for Shinji, made a special, hidden rant as an Easter egg on the Evangelion DVD. It tells us how Shinji really feels about the ‘Omedetou’ ending.

You bastards.

No new Manifesto today. I’ve been through two 8am-8pm continuous law seminars when I should have been enjoying my weekend. That means by the time this gets posted, I will be repaying a long-overdue sleep debt. Even God rested on the 7th day, and I’m just the Otaking.

So to keep you entertained while I recuperate, I present a music video: The theme song of the 1991 Gainax classic, Otaku no Video, entitled Tatakae! Otaking (Fight! Otaking). Any resemblance between me and Kubo is purely coincidental.

Now if you excuse me, I’m going off to Misty Magic Land…

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)