Conventional Wisdom

When Hideaki Anno had his first big falling out with anime, he had some particularly unkind words about Otaku and mental illness that I won’t repeat here, but can see where he was coming from.  Ask anybody to share their cringiest weeb stories, and you will too.  And honestly, it isn’t even an Anime Fan Thing.  Any fandom has those people who are so deeply cocooned within their own bubble that they try to process everything in life according to that extremely limited context.  The first draft of these comments has a looooong list of examples, but I’ve chosen to spare you most of that grumpy rant.  Besides, you already know exact who I’m talking about.  Don’t even try to deny it, you all know that one person.  In fact, you probably know several.  The ones who always tries to hijack the conversation and redirect it to that one topic.  The ones who can watch/read/hear/play ANYTHING and somehow interpret it ways that clearly don’t exist anywhere outside their own heads.  The ones who have to stop everything and explain in EXCRUCIATING detail if somebody has the audacity to not be obsessed with the same things they are.  The ones who think they can just shout that one meme and everyone will laugh, never considering that somebody might not have watched the extensive library of YouTube videos necessary to give it context… okay, I’m drifting into that rant I said I wouldn’t do, but you get the point, right?

And look, I’m not about to sit here and pretend I’m NOT thoroughly entrenched in a bubble of my own.  I just did a whole comic about it.  But that’s the thing: I KNOW I’m living on some other planet, and have fully accepted the fact that I’m the weird one.  I don’t spend all day reciting Geek Pride mantras to myself until I genuinely believe it’s everybody ELSE who’s weird for not being into the same stuff I am.  I have a very low tolerance for people just presuming to know what’s “really” going on in a situation (and it somehow always managed to be the one thing they’re already thinking about) and that myopic attitude is even worse in geek fandoms than it is just in everyday life.  Heck, I didn’t even make up the bit in the first panel, that’s word for word a conversation I heard at a con once.  It was demonstrably untrue, but they were Japanophiles at an anime convention, so of COURSE the only possibility they considered was the one that conformed to what they were already thinking about.  Guys, every so often, at least CONSIDER the possibility that there might be things going on in the world outside of your limited range of interests.  Just because YOUR world revolves around something doesn’t mean THE world does.

On an unrelated note: since I’ve being going back over so much old Conventional Wisdom stuff lately, I couldn’t help but remember the weird creation of these characters.  Years and years ago, I drew up these three to be the bad, annoying counterparts to Those Three Kids… then decided against ever using them on the grounds that having characters who only existed to be wrong about everything was too mean spirited.  I have since used them in comics multiple times.  Clearly, my soul as gotten a lot meaner over the years.