Monday, February 02, 2004

Since a trip to Anime Central is on the table, I was perusing their site today. On the registration form, there's a section for ordering con t-shirts. There are the expected sizes - you know; S, M, L, XL. Then there's XXL. And XXXL. And XXXXXL. What exactly is this saying about anime fans? Either a bunch of them are huge fatasses, enough that there's a demand for 5XL, or they're a bunch of cheap bastards who will buy one t-shirt to be simultaneously shared by five people. Since I know just how costly an anime habit can be, even for the fiscally responsible (as another t-shirt says, drugs would be cheaper), it must be the former.

I'm still in kind of an anime backlash mode. I'm not really watching anything, and I'm not buying anything. There are a couple of series that have some kind of priority, but I just don't care all that much right now. It's not so much that I'm back in the days where I thought anime was stupid, and therefore lashing out against that particular form of entertainment. It's more of a lashing out against anime fans. I've made no secret as to how big of a fucking nerd I am. Furthermore, I'm not ashamed of being a nerd. I'm just not one of those people.

This, again, sounds hypocritical. But as I said a couple of posts back, I don't wanna fucking talk about that, so get off it already. It also smacks of bullshit elitist posturing, but it's not like you weren't warned about that the moment you got to this site.

I think the backlash started when I realized that pretty much every time I got together with friends, we wouldn't even watch much anime. We'd spend all our time talking about shit we'd bought and crap we were going to buy. Great. I hate myself. I'm the biggest perpetrator of this and, yeah, this is pretty much what I've done for 24 years. So yeah, in oh so many ways, I'm one of those people.

I'm working on not being such a prick, but I don't think there's any escaping being "one of them." After all, I'm talking about crossing state lines to go to a fucking anime con. No escaping that stigma, even if, as ETP pointed out, we're pretty much going there just to shop. See? I am so much better than those people.

No comments: