Con-Goers - About Being Otaku

What is it like being an otaku? Well, it's mostly like any other type of geek out there, just with a heavy love the Japanese Manga and Anime art style. During the golden times of otaku culture in America, we had so many publishing companies licensing anime and manga properties and bringing them to the States for all of the American otaku to become inspired and fall in love. Anime collecting was considered elite because, instead of just downloading an episode off of the net, you actually contributed to the success of an anime because you had the actual disks in hand.
America began its love of anime early, but the fandom was still quite small and hadn't begun to gain a more mainstream audience. Stories, from the first American otaku, were about bootlegged VHS tapes, with rough subtitles played to a small group. We still have bootleggers these days, but the quality has been improving quite a bit. This actually hurt our industry here, so we had to come up with different ways of making the anime/manga industry create money over here. Online streaming has been our answer and we are still growing it today.
But that is the business side. The influence of anime and manga, to our kids, has been enormous. No longer did we see cartoon just as random commercials made to sell toys, Anime and Manga had stories, made the people feel for the characters and their ideals. Our own cartoons were infected as well, where they are heavily influenced by anime, and it's always those shows that are successful.
Some otaku, though, are strict, die-hard, Japanese only otaku, that only care for the stories from the creators in Japan. This is not a bad thing, it's just a thing, but, as more and more creators become influence by Anime/Manga, that line will soon be blurred and the otaku of the world will finally unite and grow in a full grown under the geek umbrella.
So, grab a fellow otaku, ask for a show or manga recommendation and share it. Grow that love, for this art, and just keep following it.

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