“That’s why my favorite sci-fi movie of all time is Star Wars. Er, Star Trek.” I’m confused — and this video should help explain why.
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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.

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Before I uploaded my lightsaber-wielding picture to my About Page a few days ago, I thought about it for a very long time.

What was the worst that could happen?

When I was a kid, I quickly learned that being different in any way meant that the people you were different from were going to pick on you, sooner or later. Sometimes the picking was for harmless fun, like a joke between friends. (I’ve always made fun of my martial artist friend’s bald head, knowing full well that if he really felt that I was dissing him just to diss him, he could kick my butt so hard I can taste his shoe. He’s cool with it. Plus it makes him look like a badass.)

Every now and then in any kid’s life, the picking becomes mean-spirited and vicious, a way for kids to show other kids who’s top dog of the playground. This is fine if you realize that the name-calling is all just a kid’s game, even if it’s one that’s played for keeps. It’s not so good when you start letting the insults wound you.

Ever been made to feel ashamed for being intelligent? For reading books? For liking the wrong color? For watching the wrong cartoons? For not knowing a song? For speaking the wrong language? For having a funny-sounding name? What is particularly different about you doesn’t really matter to kids who want to pick on you. They will pick the first thing they can see and throw that against you. So the key is to realize that it’s all a silly little kid’s game, even if it’s dead serious.

Some kids keep playing this game till they’re older, when they’ve become Important People with Important Opinions, people other people listen to. And they hurt other older kids who don’t realize that they’re still playing the same old tired kid’s game, when there are better games to play now.

Some adults still like to play the ‘Loser’ game they learned in the playground when they were two and a half. It’s simple: pick a kid you don’t like and call him a loser. If the other kids laugh, you win.

Sound familiar?

Like the About Page says, I’m pretty much a professional weirdo. True story: in elementary I once brought a lunch box to school with nothing in it but red kiamoy and a thermos full of iced tea. I got picked on for it. I can see why.

In college I nearly got beat up by a frat guy for giving his girlfriend the ‘wrong’ tarot reading. (The cards don’t lie, sir.)

My favorite authors include a German who liked to write about Eastern philosophy and chicks breaking out of eggs, a mousy Japanese woman whose idea of romantic tension is years of tragicomedy puncutated by a motel room scene, an American ultravagabond who funds his country-hopping with a sports supplement company he runs entirely over the Internet, a postmodern Macchiavelli who collaborates with rap stars, and a dodgy chap from Northampton who looks like Captain Caveman’s evil brother.

I like the Star Wars Universe more than I like the Star Wars movies. Wrap your head around that for a bit.

So this is what I realized: If any kid wanted to make fun of me just because of what makes me different, they already have a lot of ammunition.

I stared at the screen for a moment.

Then I clicked ‘upload’.

Happy Father’s Day everyone! Just spending the day with my family. I’ll be posting the next Manifesto soon! For now, always remember…

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?

To some of you it may sound like I still am bashing ‘normals’ and glorifying otaku, even if I’ve taken a lot of precautions to show that I don’t think one group is inherently superior to the other.

Picture a little community populated entirely by otaku, answerable only to otaku. Imagine that they’re free to dress as they please, like starfleet officers or mecha pilots or Japanese schoolgirls or elves or vampires. Imagine little otaku grouping themselves according to interests, to fandoms, to fetishes.

Does it sound like heaven to you? Well, it isn’t. Let me explain.

People like to join factions and pledge loyalty to groups because they believe that their interests are best served by joining a group. These interests may be completely selfish, or more altruistic in increasing degrees. It could be for seizing power, it could be for helping malnourished children, it could be for sharing the latest information on PVC figures. The interest itself doesn’t matter. What matters is that affiliation with your chosen group serves your purposes.

But those groups aren’t homogenous, even if you all share a name or title, like Atenean or Christian or Filipino or sophomore. Or even otaku.

Think of a group that you belong to. Any sizeable group, your school, your job, your prayer group, your fraternity, your weekly Magic: the Gathering tournament group, your country. Any group will do although less than ten is probably too small to be illustrative.

Picture yourself. Now picture the people closest to you in the group. They don’t have to hang out with you, they just have to be trusted completely to align with you on a vote.

It isn’t the whole group is it?

There’s your group (the good guys) and then there’s probably a group opposed to your interests (the jerks). It can be something as simple as ‘We want our guy to lead and they want their guy to lead’. It can be something that sounds reasonable like ‘They want to focus on education, but national defense is our top priority in these troubled times’. Or it could be something dumb like ‘our fandom is cooler than your fandom’.

You know what I’m talking about. No? Let me point you to two very well-known examples of otaku persecution: Furries and Twilight.

I am not a fan of either of these fandoms. In fact I find them disturbing in places in my brain I am afraid to venture. But I recognize bigotry when I see it. Yes, I know, many furries and Twilight fans are either extremely irritating or complete nutjobs.

Why does that make them unique as far as groups go? They are into something the rest of us find distasteful. That puts them in the same august group as durian-lovers, telenovela fans, body modders, professional wrestling ‘smart-marks’, adults who still watch ‘looney toons’, and people who dress up as fictional characters.

For the majority of geekdom, ‘Us’ means ‘furry-bashers’ or ‘Twilight-haters’. We point to the infantile-Oedipal nature of stuffed toys having sex and how Lestat or Angel or Alucard is the much-better vampire protagonist, because we like having reasons for hating. Even if the hate itself is completely knee-jerk and irrational.

For a vocal minority, ‘Us’ means furries or Twilight or Draco-in-leather-pants-fanfic. People like what they like. You like coffee, I like lemonade. Why does one have to be superior to the other? Can’t you leave us alone?

I’m sure you can relate this to your own experience. Star Trek vs. Star Wars. DC vs. Marvel. Harry Potter vs. Tim Hunter. Lord of the Rings vs. the Lord of the Rings movies. Shonen vs. Shoujo. Poseable vs. non-poseable vinyl figurines. Think of how irrational this factional bickering can get.

Imagine that the Trekkies are wrestling with the Star Wars fans for the office of the mayor. Imagine that the model-gun otaku are demanding the use of the park at the same time as the MMA otaku. Imagine that the princess-kei have decided that since the head goth stole one of their boyfriends, they’ll spread rumors about what a slut she is at the next fashion show.

Now imagine this on a national scale.

Now try it on a world scale.

I am not saying that all otaku are better than all normal people. What I am saying is that there is no reason to start hating on one another because of our differences. I mean, how boring would it be if we were all the same? If we were all equally into the same thing? If there was nothing left to learn from one another?

And to my otaku brethren: Take a chill pill. Hug a furry today.

Just don’t let them yiff you.