sakura says:

Well at least we’re above the ‘Fur­ries’ right? ;)

Hubby and I just buy stuff because we think it looks cool, or we really were a fan of the show. I get my model kits because I really do enjoy putting them together. The first kit I ever put together was a model of the USS Enter­prise NCC-1701-A from Star Trek, so its not a hobby that is lim­ited to anime itself.

I put pic­tures of my kits up because I know that there are few other blog­gers other than myself that will find them inter­est­ing since they are also Macross fans.

As that arti­cle points out if you are really obses­sive over it, then you can really be con­sid­ered a geek of any­thing. I guess as you say that’s the point. Get your enjoy­ment out of it, but don’t let it become your life.

I’ll take a day out with hubby over build­ing a model kit or watch­ing a show any time!
sakura´s last blog ..I didn’t expect that

relentlessflame says:

@Aorii
I com­mented on mt-i’s blog and I think it largely addresses the issue you’re point­ing out. Although he’s out­go­ing and a bit in-your-face, I guess I hadn’t really con­sid­ered Danny Choo to be an exam­ple of an “extreme case”. OEG actu­ally keeps say­ing that he, and his “fol­low­ers”, are not “Otaku enough”. What you’re sort of allud­ing to here is that you find his unabashed pro­mo­tion of the more ques­tion­able aspects of this hobby to be embar­rass­ing, and you wish he (and his “kind”) would just keep things to them­selves a bit more in order to not make “the rest of us” look bad. But yeah… on this point I sort of think that if some peo­ple didn’t stand out in front and take the “hits”, we’d have no mid­dle ground to cling to either. Any­way… it’s a good dis­cus­sion to be hav­ing, I think.
relentlessflame´s last blog ..Today from around the anime blo­gos­phere…

Netto says:

Every­one has their own fair share of fandom-ism or some­thing like that, so it’s nat­ural for them to express in ways that they like. Some­times, of course, things tends to get out of hand, thus you’ll see peo­ple walk­ing around the streets with those daki­makura and even that mar­riage with Love Plus like you’ve mentioned!

After all, blog­ging is a plat­form for many to share their views about things, and anime prod­ucts such as fig­urines and (ugh) daki­makura are often one of the eas­i­est way for any­one to blog about, sim­ply because they just requires pic­tures and lit­tle words. It isn’t too bad, unless the whole post is about them hug­ging those daki­makuras or filled with “AHHH I LOVE THIS!!” etc etc. In fact, those posts about fig­urines are most of the time infor­ma­tive, as it allows the read­ers to have a clearer view on the fig­urine before decid­ing on such a heavy invest­ment! I’m not sure about daki­makura, since I’ve yet to see one post about it out­side Danny’s site.

At the end of the day, humans are still social beings. The desire to share and (maybe) brag and stuffs like that is always in every sin­gle per­son, so it would be rather dif­fi­cult to actu­ally “end” all of these. There’s still the issue of “degrad­ing of the com­mu­nity by otaku” as many would put it, but what can you truly do asides from talk­ing about it? Attack them so that they will dis­ap­pear from the face of the inter­net? That would only fuel revenge.

Best solu­tion? Just leave them be, like they are affect­ing any­thing you’re doing in your daily life! Sooner or later, they will adapt bet­ter ways, or even stop entirely!
Netto´s last blog ..“Work­ing!!” Slice-Of-Life Anime Trailer Released!

Crystal says:

Well, the most we can do is just let them be them­selves. Some peo­ple can spend a lot on their hob­bies, and some don’t. Peo­ple find dif­fer­ent val­ues in things. I myself don’t like daki­makuras but I do like some fig­urines, but not a whole room full. The peo­ple on the news for crazy things prob­a­bly don’t care how they appear in pub­lic, they just wanna do what they wanna do. [You could also say one of the awk­ward things about anime too is most of the pop­u­la­tion is male dom­i­nated watch­ing cute shows. But noth­ing stops them and they enjoy it any­ways.] Being happy themselves.

Of course, there are peo­ple who don’t have anime as a hobby/obsession but have other hobbies/obessions as well. Peo­ple that play video games a lot, talk and watch about sports a lot, addicted to drinking/gambling/shopping, that sort of thing. It’s just that anime and manga is still a recent thing, but in the west it’s not that famil­iar. But slowly…the manga selec­tion at my book­store grows each year.

Anime/manga cul­ture is becom­ing more pop­u­lar all over the world. There’s no doubt it’ll keep increase in pop­u­lar­ity and peo­ple get­ting inter­est­ing in it. Some­times humans don’t really like change at first. Maybe one day it’ll be com­mon to see anime being open­ing talked about in pub­lic, rather than peo­ple hid­ing it in their rooms. Every­one has a pref­er­ence on what they want to do with their hobby, whether it’s col­lect­ing, cos­play­ing, blog­ging, or just marathon­ing your favorite dvds. You should enjoy what makes you happy rather than focus­ing on what other peo­ple do.
Crystal´s last blog ..Crap weekend-Update