Back when I was in college, when I was still basically a liberal (although even then I hated other liberals), I joined my university's Shakespearean acting troupe as a tech guy. There were a few different reasons for this. It got me out of the dorm. It curried favor with the English department (where I ultimately landed for my minor studies). It was worth three very easy 400-level credits a semester. Shakespeare's just cool. I got to learn cool tech stuff -- sound boards, lighting, etc. And so on. But I realized very quickly that I was not like most of the other people "doing the Rudes." For me, it was instrumental: something I enjoyed and which was of material benefit to me. For them, it was like an end in itself. I also noticed that they were generally deviant in other ways. They were screechy, neurotic bisexuals with lip piercings and black clothes. They had sex with each other constantly and went off after practice to have video game parties. One of them would sometimes wear a strange headband with little conical horns attached to them. They wrote anime fanfiction (because apparently animes with romantic subplots always have desperately unsatisfactory endings) and dressed up like anime characters to go to anime conventions. They were anime kids.
I confess to having watched very little anime in the past, most of which I was forced to watch by an anime-loving friend. I've been mixed about what I've seen. Elfenlied was intriguing, Beautiful Dreamer charming and whimsical, Spirited Away weird and incoherent, and Naruto just annoying, with its screechy theatrics and agonizingly long-winded dialogue (my efforts to get into the Pokemon fad when I was in elementary and middle school failed, and for the same reason). I don't get the appeal, perhaps because of my instinctive dislike for the idea of being a grown man sitting around watching cartoons all day. I think what turned me off most was just the casual and unquestioned weirdness of it all. It's not even divergent enough to be surreal, because it takes itself too seriously. People in these shows and movies casually accept the presence of large minorities of vampires, aliens, weird horned half-men half-animal hybrids, people with ESP and other strange powers, and the like. Watching them is like a bad LSD trip.
So I suppose it's a good fit for people who are themselves casually weird, the kind who grow greasy, patchy beards and wear oversized coats with way too many pockets and chains and collars and all that crap. The awkward, out-group dweebs who populate the corner of every college bistro playing Magic: The Gathering. You know the type. (I wonder, does the weirdness of the person derive from their early exposure to the weirdness of anime? Or are they drawn to anime because they're weird people?)
In college, I dated a relatively pretty girl with several friends in this group and every time I stood in their presence, I felt like the brutish jock in a chick flick who steals away the nerdy main character's love interest. Me! At best, I had the build of a second-rate swimmer in college. But their group was so vacuously negative of masculinity that I slid almost by default into the role of alpha horse. I hated being hated by these mewling, oleaginous things.
I feel like I could write a book on this subculture, but I'll content myself for the sake of economy with just a few observations. Their in-group dynamics, such as they are, are disordered almost to the point of psychosis. It seems they can barely even relate to one another in any kind of meaningful fashion; I once saw two anime kids sitting next to each other on a couch, playing the same video game at the same time, but on different consoles attached to different TVs! "Lest you interact with another person?" I thought to myself.
Far from being sexually frustrated, as you might suspect, in my experience they set up these strange sexual covens wherein the women (and certain men; sexual deviancy is not uncommon here) are passed around more than their old pirated copies of Boondock Saints. Strangely, this produces very little drama, like it would in a group of normal people in which one woman slept with multiple men. I have no idea why; maybe an aggressive response is beyond people so totally empty of masculinity, or maybe their stunted souls were never capable of forming meaningful attachments to others in the first place.
I've certainly never had a conversation with an anime kid and thought, afterwards, "Wow, I'm really glad I met that person." Come to think of it, I'm not so sure I've ever had a memorable conversation with one at all. I don't think I've ever seen them read anything that wasn't (a) a comic book or graphic novel, (b) a textbook for class, or (c) some slice of schlocky left-wing cant to make themselves look intelligent, a bookmark always strategically inserted around two-thirds of the way in (because they're so smart!). With few exceptions, dumpiness was the general norm, although I'm not sure if this is just poverty or an intentional snubbing of basic politeness to others. Some things, such as the long, stringy, oily ponytails the men tended to grow, were simply inexcusable; surely they could've borrowed an electric razor from someone, and who would begrudge a grown man the Bruce Willis pate? Pronounced body odor was not the norm but was certainly more evident among them than in the general population.
There are various strata of the subculture that get weirder the deeper you go. At my first school, there was a sub-subculture of people who called themselves furries and who walked around with fake animal tails hanging from their waistband. (All of the furries were anime kids but not all anime kids were furries -- very few were, in fact, and I sort of got the impression that some of the anime kids were "above" the furries and had no social truck with them). I talked with one of them about it, and she evidently believed she had some kind of "animal spirit" dwelling inside her or something and wore her tail as a means of identifying with it. I couldn't help but notice they all identified with foxes, squirrels, and the like. (Of course! Why would your "spirit animal" be a macaque or an alligator or a tapeworm or something? They're gross!)
And, of course, the anime kids were spiritual autists to the last man. The closest thing to religion any of them exhibited was one who was an actual autist and (cafeteria) Catholic; the rest were basically run-of-the-mill atheists possessed of a bitter and irrational hatred of the faith. I gathered from my conversations with several of them that they had all had bad childhoods of some sort which had a vaguely evangelical flavor and which thus soured them forever on the idea of religious. They were pretty much the perfect instantiation of Dr. Charlton's distraction-seeking utilitarian.
Anyway, these anecdotes are just that -- anecdotal -- so I have no idea how well they generalize to other places. That said, I went to school in the mid-Atlantic and my Texas-raised coworker insists my description here matches the anime kids group at each of the three colleges she attended, so I'm inclined to think I'm on to something.
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