Animisery – A Blog About Living Miserably with Anime (Among Other Things)

Get ready for some overindulgent rambling in this blog post, boys and girls and everything else, because that’s what I’m on about today.

For those of you who may not know (like all two of you who didn’t come from my incessant plugging on said show), I host a podcast called the Anime Brothers where Earthworm, a good friend of mine, and I discuss anime and anime related topics every single week. Link below to check it out if you haven’t!

https://open.spotify.com/show/4Gu5PH6hquTYPZ8z79hmJT?si=7279c75f140a4db7

We have a great time and I’m honestly very appreciative to have met him since we come from opposite side of the United States and it’s by a series of chance incidents that we even got to hang out! I truly believe that there is nothing that makes an internet forged friendship less valuable and worth cherishing as compared to a friendship that you started in real life.

As it stands, we regularly have a block as part of the podcast where we answer questions sent to us courtesy of those who financially support us on Patreon and I also really enjoy getting the chance since so many of our supporters offer really insightful questions that leave me honestly wanting to stretch the discussion into whole episodes. They’re great peeps and I’m beyond thrilled to have them there to give us their time (and also their money too I guess).

Anyways, a question was recently asked by one patron and it is as follows:

This is actually a question that perplexed me to an almost vexing degree. The term “weeaboo” is just a nothing term now to me. It’s thrown around to such extremes to any person who so much as has an anime sticker on their water bottle that I’ve never even thought about what defines a weeb and what that piece of slang has for the hobby of anime now.

Weeaboo, or weeb for short, is commonly defined as someone having an obsessive level interest in Japan and not just in the media of anime alone. I’m talking about the kind of person who tries to delve into learning the Japanese while possibly wearing a yukata or owning maybe even a katana while they drown themselves in ramune every night. That’s kind of a vague notion of what it means but I think it’s commonly understood that’s what it is. Something, however, has changed. The term has become so reclaimed by people who just watch anime that “weeb” is no longer just a derogatory term to throw out at someone with an anime profile picture on Twitter. It’s something to proudly proclaim to your family and friends like a trophy from a hard fought ball game that you didn’t sit on the bench for! There’s an entire line of alternate fashion and street wear dedicated to sharing your interest in anime under the guise of you being the hugest weeb out there! It’s insane to me when I was watching anime in 2011 that a new generation of watchers would just take that title and flaunt it. It was something my classmates in college would use to lambast the kid with the anime decal or the guy with a Dragon Ball shirt on and now it’s just a flex to some. It’s truly wild to me to witness this evolution.

It’s kind of cringe but I used to think otaku was the only defining term for the folks who loved anime but now it grates my ears. No one would have the audacity to proclaim themselves an otaku. That would probably be the biggest weeb thing to even do really. The question that Mystery Patreon Supporter X asked though is: how would you define it in this day and age and are regular anime fans applicable to the term?

My personal thoughts are that there are anime fans and then there are weebs and there is a thin line between them all: do you hunt out opportunities to put anime in every facet of your life? When given a chance would you have an anime background on your phone with an anime decal on your personal laptop in a room filled with anime merch while you gratuitously talk anime in every possible conversation? I think if the answer is yes then you’d be a weeb. I think when you’re always trying to find that extra step to indulge just a little bit more then you become a real weeaboo. Maybe that means by my definition that when anime is your major and primary hobby then you’ve crossed into Weeaboo City with a grand population of “you”. Anime fan, though, is such a loose term by comparison. I don’t need to tell you (but I’ll do it anyways because I love you but only as a friend) that fan is short for fanatic. The word fanatic, to me, elicits an image of someone decked out from head to toe in gear ready to give their life like a crusader en route to the holy land. That would be a weeb though by my vague wording, yeah? I don’t know.

See, we have to have a sliding scale for this kind of thing. An anime fanatic and a weeb, by the revised definition, could be the same thing. Maybe a weeb is a little bit more of an anime fan who does in fact indulge in more than justanime (like manga and light novels)? Maybe a weeb really should be someone who is learning Japanese on Duolingo while they blast Atarashii Gakko from their Naruto bluetooth speaker that they got at Five Below? Maybe there’s a powerscaling to weebs? Do we need a Super Saiyan 1 to 4 level of power for these anime aficionados? Weeb and anime fan are just too vague to be effective. Why does this matter though? It really shouldn’t.

I think it does though. I don’t know how many times I have to tell and reiterate to my coworkers just how far gone I am in this anime crap. They approach me with a song in their heart about some anime they’ve just watched and want my humble thoughts on and they do so with nothing but praise over a show like Hunter x Hunter. Admittedly, it’s a great show (one that I swear I’ll finish some day) but it’s not something that I’m just itching to re-explore and I’m not really craving to indulge a conversation in. It’s not because I’m a dick (for once) but because it’s not the kind of anime I want to discuss. I want that seasonal hype where I have other enjoyers proclaim what the best of the season past, present, and future are so I can dive with them and protest that they all had shit taste and I was right and you should’ve checked out the show I said was great. They’re different sides to the same hobby but honestly one is more into the deep dives of isekai dumpster fires and harem hang-ups that I don’t think is a great conversation for my co-worker, Hector from accounting.

So what to do about Hector from accounting? Is Hector from accounting a weeb for watching thirty-six episodes of Hunter x Hunter one night courtesy of a Netflix binge inflicted on him because his wife took the kids and the dog? I don’t think Hector from accounting is but he’s certainly watched anime. What do we call Hector from accounting outside of lonely and deserving of seeing his kids and dog? I don’t know. Hector from accounting is alone once again.

But hey, guess what? I’m rambling again. Weeb can’t be an all inclusive term for every fan of anime because some don’t want to be called that because of the aforementioned Naruto bluetooth speaker enjoyer. Some just want to be coined “anime watchers” because what else could you call them? I know a few people from my own private Discord loathe being associated with what they deem weebs and that’s fair. I don’t want to be associated with Sonic fans but I have a bunch of Sonic merch on my desk so my damnation is nigh unavoidable.

At the end of the day, maybe the English language has failed us. Weeb is such a crass and massive term nowadays with what you can use to call it. Back in my younger years, it was the guy with an anime body pillow who practiced Japanese on message boards while eating Pocky. Nowadays, it could just be a guy with a Bleach sweatshirt on. Weeb is a title self inflicted at the end of the day. You can be called a weeb but you don’t really take the mantle until you put it on yourself. I still call myself an otaku and we all know what that makes me.

It makes me a huge freaking weeb.

I’m always looking forward your feedback on these posts! Thank you to everyone who has given me comments and e-mails! What do you think it means to be a weeb? I’m always curious to know what your thoughts and opinions are!