Perhaps I’m a bit late to this realization, but anime has become mainstream. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed how common anime has become. From Walmart to Hot Topic, from Netflix to libraries, anime has become a part of American mainstream culture. Of course, anime’s been working on becoming mainstream since the 1990s with…
Tag: otaku culture
Is Being an Otaku Cultural Appropriation?
Cultural appropriation is the inappropriate borrowing from another culture. Usually, it happens with a culture that has been oppressed in some way. Think about the Native American cultures in North America as an example. But cultural appropriation has a soft line. It’s hard to know when the line of admiration and appropriation is crossed…
Reveling in the Ridiculous: Anime is Tame
Despite how odd anime and manga appears, with their fan service and visual language and odd stories, they’re tame compared to Japan’s literature. I spend a fair bit of time beating up on fan-service, but fan-service doesn’t compare to shunga and the woodblock print books from the Edo period. Manga has roots in ukiyo-e, or…
What is a NEET?
Anime and manga fans are often accused of being NEETs. In Internet parlance: neck-beards, otaku, slacker, hobo. But what is a NEET? NEET is an acronym for an English (as in British, the acronym started in the UK) expression: Not in Education, Employment, or Training. The acronym started in July 1999 in the report “Bridging…
Am I Addicted to Anime?
Most articles about anime addiction tend to be comedic lists about how everything has to be in Japanese and how you lack money because of all the merchandise you bought. Let’s have a serious discussion instead. We toss around the word addiction in ways that belittle the term. Liking something and enjoying something isn’t addiction….
What does “Please Notice Me, Senpai” Mean?
Few Japanese words dominate otaku lingo as the word senpai. Senpai, also spelled as sempai, sometimes appears more as punctuation to speech than a proper honorific. It also has a distinctive submissive flavor. Senpai (せんぱい or 先輩) is an honorific used to address someone who is superior to you in status. Honorifics are parts of speech…