Are we all, anime fans, insane?

Cosplay: The act of dressing up as characters from anime, video games, from films, and from that sort of thing to parade around in front of cameras (particularly popular at conventions). To any member of the general public, it could seem like an event of attention-seeking madness, or so at least in the West. To be honest, I always assumed it was some weird Japanese culture thing, so imagine my surprise to discover that it originated in the United States! It seems it was triggered by a Japanese journalist visiting a sci-fi convention in 1984. Yet, it makes perfect sense; how possible is the sight of geeks dressing up as Star Wars or Star Trek characters? It's perfectly normal and acceptable. Well, so it's not really, but it's assumed as something they do that's all right. The Japanese pick it up, and lo! it becomes a subject that most anime fans are familiar with. Cosplay is weird quite frankly, but it gets better.

The first time I had any real discussion on the subject of anime was on Google Groups. There isn't really much folk to discuss such things in detail with around there. One thing I did notice on the groups was that some of the members were very interesting, or weird, for the lack of a better word. We're talking "good-weird" here, but weird nonetheless. Foolishly I took this to be a minority thing, but when the Tokyopop forums opened a few months ago, I realized my mistake. I'm hesitant to use the word otaku here, after seeing the huge raging debate over whether it's an insult or not. But just this once, I'll be horribly unpolitically-correct: otaku are freaks. Now before you take offense, let me explain: By freaks I mean quite frankly nutters (at least on the surface). What we're seeing is that the vast majority of these people are obsessed with shounen-ai and "kittyboys". Heck, there were even a few members purporting to be kittyboys. I can't for the life of me see what the point is here, which immediately leads to the conclusion: there's a rather large furry subculture amongst anime fans. There's also a rather impressive number of "Japanophiles". Almost everyone seems to want to live in Japan, or go to university there. What's so special about Japan to these people? It's a country like any other, surely. Well.

Let's look a little deeper, past the obvious, extroverted, loud, and minority. The rather obviously mad folk are in fact not quite totally representative. Sure you have your obsessives, but then again, we have some really intelligent, normal seeming anime fans who wouldn't be out of place running for Parliament. Some of them would probably make better MPs than the current lot. One sees no signs of mental illness, no obsessions with schoolchildren wearing cat ears and licking their hands, and no patriotic love of a culture they aren't part of (and there never truly will be). They are your bunch of normal, everyday people, but it's not something you might notice straight away coming from fans.

The balance of the weird and the sane is a true representation of society. Although the TokyoPop message boards, and anime message boards in general, may not be representative of anime fan culture as a whole, they are representative of the diversity of fans from many countries, various cultures, different personalities, ages, genders, abilities, etc.

As was stated earlier, some things would be seen by Joe public as complete insanity. Others might be seen as a bit odd, slightly deviant, or maybe a tad worrying. Freud would have a field day over some things. Yet in others, it's just not the case. A fan culture maybe, but one just like any other. No different to fans of anything else; we just have slightly different ways of doing things. Are we insane? No. Just different is all.