The somewhat mundane adventures of a guy who keeps ending up in Asia... and his random musings.

I have a rather eclectic personality and a this can be witnessed in my entertainment tastes. I try not to let trends guide my decisions so much as I simply like what I like. As a result when anime was first becoming popular in America, I was all over it. The style and storytelling were like nothing I had seen, and the artwork was reminiscent of the video games that I had been playing my entire life. I was obsessive about anime from the time I was about 12 years old right up until my early 20's, but then I started to notice some changes.

I started attending conventions in around 1999 to meet like minded people and find out what was new in the world of anime. Almost immediately I noticed how annoying most other anime fans were. I assumed that I was obsessive, but I hadn't taken into consideration just what obsession entails. Some of these people would, prior to the convention, create elaborate costumes so they could look exactly identical to their favorite character. Others would, during the convention, go the entire time with little to no sleep and, much to the chagrin of other con-goers, never bathing.

I've never been a big fan of other people ("Hell is other people", after all - Satre)  so finding out that anime people are just as hard to get along with as everyone else fit quite nicely into my world view. What bothered me was how these annoying nerds could control what was available.

Like I said, my taste is eclectic, so I grow bored of things on a superficial level quite easily. After about two years of anime conventions I started to notice that while the titles available grew in number, the actual variety was becoming slimmer and slimmer. The artwork was slowly becoming homogeneous and the  stories where all essentially the same. Certain themes had been judged superior to the anime crowd at large, and anime that featured these themes was overwhelmingly available. At this point I had long grown weary of the same old story lines, especially those involving an embarrassed boy and his would-be lover (a scenario played out all to often in popular anime series). There were still some things that I found new and interesting, such as Trigun and Cowboy Bebop, but these too became popular and subsequently copied ad nauseum. The anime crowd was eating up what was out there, despite the dearth of new material.

The other big problem is that nerds are notoriously sexually deviant. Once anime started getting really big in the states sub-culture-esque fandoms such as yaoi (boy-boy love, but not necessarily sex) started becoming very popular. If talking to anime fans was annoying in the past, it was downright impossible now. No conversation could go any length of time, regardless of topic, without switching to what anime characters were having sex, wanted to have sex, or who the person you had the misfortune of talking to wanted to have sex with. It was mildly disturbing,

In the meantime I started to think of anime as cartoons. Yes, they are cartoons, but fans are elitist, so they like to put anime in it's own special category. I still watch anime these days, but I generally call it "cartoons" and continue to watch what I like... and that is rarely what is popular.

For awhile, I actually tried to get into all the things anime fans were into. I tried listening to J-pop (I hate regular pop music... don't know what I was thinking with that one), I tried to watch all the new anime that was comming out, I even tried to cos-play (usurped Japanese word from a usurped English word, short for costume play), but none of it appealed to me anymore. I sort of liked the feeling of belonging at first... being a part of such a large movement and having similar interests with so many other people, but in the end, I just couldn't shake this one thought. A nagging thought that, as far as I can tell, is the real reason that I can't really ever be an official geek or nerd.

"These people really need to get a life".

I have nerdy and geeky interests. I watch cartoons and children's shows, I play video games, I love computers, I like to read and I have a collage degree (that must count for some nerd points). Despite all this, and although I could easily be labeled a nerd, I don't think I make a very good one. I suppose I'll just have to learn to live with that.

-Maru!