by SarahtheBoring » Wed Jul 27, 2005 10:58 pm
I'll skip the joke part, because I feel like being all Jerry's Thought of the Day right now.
Ultimately it's about feeling justified for having a hobby that is stupidly expensive, childish, weird, and not understood by the vast majority of people around you. It gets tiring to brush off this form of entertainment that you sincerely enjoy as "that stuff, you know, the stuff I like, it's weird, never mind." It gets tiring to try to duck the subject of why you're taking that long weekend off again this year. Or to wonder what the postal carrier thinks of all those tacky catalogs and mail-order packages. Or to get excited about seeing something that's actually out in a theater (even if it is a dub) only to realize that nobody wants to go with you.
For that few days, people actually have one shred of a clue what you're talking about when you go off on tangents about this, that and the other thing. And that makes the other 362 days in the year a little less depressing.
I go to watch AMVs on big giant screens. To crowd-watch. To buy things that I could probably buy online anyway, especially in huge chunks of, like, a whole box set or ten volumes of manga because HEY, it's a special occasion. To sift through those tables of random junk and wonder why the world needs so many pencil cases and be surprised that somebody out there still remembers some series/game that I thought only I remembered. To marvel at the enthusiasm of the painfully newbie costumers who probably slaved over their duct-tape swords for months but who are REALLY PSYCHED to finally get to do it. To explain the finer points of scary fandom to people, hoping to make some sort of cracked sense out of it. Maybe to check out a screening if I can be bothered to sit still for more than half an hour at a stretch.
But mostly to feel like I'm not the only idiot on the planet who likes this junk. It's very childish and Bee Girl and predictable. But that's how it is. I don't think there's any great brotherhood of otaku. The fandom is very wide and the people in it are very different, all over the spectrum. But there's that one thing in common, and that's pretty cool.
That's why.