The Impurity of the Impoverished Otaku

/stain: “practicality” ≠ “impurity” ≠ “corruption“

I was visiting the Moritheil Review when I stumbled upon this site. Well, it’s not really a site. It’s an “otaku purity test” that tells if you really are an otaku at heart, and how pure or impure are you in being one. It’s got questions mostly aimed at the American audience, but I took it anyway. The result:

This is what you get for hitting the submit button after forgetting you haven’t answered any questions yet.

While I was “taking” this test, I thought: This is somewhat expected, so why the hell am I taking this test? You’ve got the OEG guys doing us the favor, manually and painstakingly plucking the bad weeds off our Garden of Eden, even though they’re starting to have cases of bad judgment. You’ve got yourself to talk to if you are somehow unaware of how you’re doing so far in the world of fandom. You’ve got the whole visual culture society, whom you can ask for constructive criticism anytime. So what’s the point of taking the test, then?

perhaps this will provide a necessary frame of reference: there has always been, and probably always will be, a normative force in any subculture that seeks “purity.”

Moritheil (12/10/2009)

People say a lot of things when it comes to being otaku. People say a lot more when it comes to how otaku you are. As if correcting itself, or at least keeping itself in check, the visual culture continuously spawns entities that categorize, divide, and prosecute the populace. And boy, how grand they are in terms of popularity, insufficiency, and eventual failure. Now, you do know where this talk is going to, yes? Well, that’s just a tiny little part of the post. The other parts are going to be as heavy as artillery bullets.

Watch out for this question. If you checked the box, and the OEG guys get a hold of your purity test results while they’re deliberating on your blog, you’re dead. And it’s going to be overkill if you retaliated using the Wikipedia entry.

Elitism on otaku can be a very bad thing. It can make you stupid and one-sided, and it can do that with a force that can equal or even overwhelm your elitist ideals and beliefs. I’m not going to elaborate further on examples like the trying-hard otaku = weeaboo thing, or the fansub = piracy thing, or the scanlation = piracy thing, or the Gundam fan ≠ sci-fi fan ≠ mecha otaku thing. Japanese visual culture is always evolving, always changing according to how it is perceived by more than one audience, and we need to consider our own evolution as fans if this is the case. But let’s try to take one thing that I’d really like to take out of my system: Practicality.

Decide.

If you’re asked to pick between a complete manga library of an “officially translated” title, and an external hard drive to put fansubs and scanlations of the same title, you’ll most likely pick the manga library, right? After all, it’s “legit” paperback, and you don’t get to have these often unless you’re fine with chasing volume availability or steep book prices or complete but expensive library purchases. However, the poor and the practical would choose the latter choice, or a cheaper and more viable alternative (an external DVD-RW drive and a stack of DVD-RWs, anyone?). And who wins in the end? Who gets their money’s worth? Who gets enough material and hard drive space for more stuff to jam in? In the end, it’s like normal practicality, where you can decide to buy the brand name of a pair of shoes, or just buy the same functionality from a cheap, brandless pair.

I’m not exactly poor, but I’m exactly as practical as I can get. Screw purity, screw corruption. It’s not what makes me an otaku anyway.