Anime - The Cons

This time, Geek Boy is actually taking a journey! He's finally crawling out from under that rock (for real this time). Read all about it!

(Note: don't be fooled. Cons means cons, not cons.)

They were everywhere. No matter where I looked – left, right, up, down, behind – they were there: people. People who all looked so much more experienced than me, so much more advanced. People who all had these nonchalantly pleased looks on their faces, like they were indirectly mocking me. People who came in groups, talking amongst themselves as if smearing my own fear to speak in my face. People were all dressed in fancy clothes, dressed like warriors, robots, students, maids, monsters, and more.

People who were all so open about it, too.

I stood in the convention center alone, surrounded by people everywhere who, like me, had come to celebrate all things otaku – video games, manga, anime, music, and more. Unlike me, however, these people looked like they were actually celebrating. But how?

If I acted anything like them, my friends would shun me for being weird, my family would disown me for not embracing the Chinese culture they never even really bothered to pass down to me. I would be an outcast, accepted only by these people who must have also been outcasts.

In my solitude, I dreaded these things until reason finally pulled me back to reality. It’s logically impossible for these people to survive if society discards them and all they do was the stuff they did at the convention – one cannot live simply by playing video games, watching cartoons, and reading comics, unfortunate as that may be. Therefore, an equilibrium must exist between society and self: society must accept these people and their interests, but at the same time these people must repress their interests and keep them at a level that society can accept.

There was something I still didn’t understand, though. It made no sense to me that these people could be so open with their love of otaku culture, because as I saw them now, they were clearly not falling within society’s range of acceptance of this culture.

Then I realized that the answer was bustling all around me. I was at the convention, the place where once a year, people like the ones around me – no, people like me could gather and be open about otaku culture. I realized that at the convention, society was just as in love with warriors, robots, students, maids, and monsters as I was.

The next day, I went to the convention dressed in fancy clothes, with a nonchalantly pleased look on my face, knowing that there, it was okay.