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I never did understand why people engaged in the American stereotypical nerd culture when I was growing up in Finland in the 80s and 90s. Sure, I also had nerdy interests like programming, reading fantasy books and the occasional RPG session but I never felt like they defined who I was. They were just things I was interested in or liked to do, the same way some other kids liked to play sports without making that their whole identity.
I see "anime culture" as like that cliche nerd culture: A bunch of people who fail to distinguish between their interest and their identity (quite possibly because they don't much have one) and that leads to all sorts of issues.
They were acceptable minority targets that were easy to abuse and everyone excused said abuse.
That's what it really boils down to.
I feel people have abit of a deformed perspective nowadays when it comes to the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres, what with Marvel movies being such multi-billion dollar cash-cows that they are nowdays, nevermind other things, but at one point all this stiff really was a niche market being enjoyed by niche people. People playing D&D weren't making a good paycheck doing podcast/webstreaming, they were guys in thier basement or thier parent's basement playing make-beleive with rules and havine fun and not really bothering anyone.
I was very much a quiet, 'go away and leave me alone' kind of kid who stuck my nose in a book 90% of the time, and I still got harassed by people and my novels thrown out a window.
The times haven't really changed any, just the targets. I'm sure I could scrounge around for another set of acceptable minority targets people love to shit on as a demonstration.
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As far as I can tell, teenage subcultures are about psychological need to fit in. Be a member of a tribe. Nerdy subcultures are so because the nerdy kids and teenagers have some kind of trouble adjusting to the society of fellow non-nerdy teenagers and start building self-image out of imaginary simulacra found in internet.
Titular characters in Rebel Without A Cause would be weeaboos these days.
(bolded addition mine)
Even with that addition I'm not convinced of that explanation, not least because as far as I can tell, back in my teenager days (ie. the 90s) the only "subcultures" I witnessed were the occasional guys wearing metal band shirts (which amusingly included one Jehovah’s Witness who really loved Helloween and power metal) and a bit later some friends of a friend being into hiphop music and clothes. Even for those people it seemed to be limited purely to music and fashion and as far as I could tell, they didn't fraternize among the group any more than random friends did.
It's possible that (unlike here in Finland) in the US such subcultural cliques really were / are common but this would point towards this not being any inherent aspect of being a western teenager and more something learned via local / national cultural examples (possibly imported ones, in the case of anime nerds). Certainly there were a few "castouts" (in the sense that they were weird in various ways and seemed to keep themselves aloof of the rest of the students) but they didn't hang together either and seemed to be content with being weird loners (the very notion of a clique based on being castout / loner would have been absurd).
Sure. Naturally the discussion is about those affected.
I don't have hard data about any country, I am trying to grasp for psychological explanations why some people with nerdy interests don't turn out well-adjusted people with nerdy interests but as faceh puts it, "nerd nerds". You wrote you don't understand; I am trying to. I certainly never has been quite as well-adjusted as I would have liked. Like, humans are social animals. A need to be part of some crowd is something I can recognize. If you are not having success with real people, imaginary people are better than no people at all. And subculture is better than anything than anything you could make up, because they are real imagined people. Imagined in the sense of word as used by Benedict Anderson, but unlike any fantasy people you could cook up entirely on your own, they indubitably exist.
A maladjusted teenager supposedly typified by James Dean's character in Rebel Without a Cause can at best project his malaise by wearing a leather jacket and lashing out and picking fights. Scriptwriter still needs find him other people to pick fights with: he's oppositional, not self-driven. (After the film came out, the would-be malcontent could perhaps try to be James Dean). But by time we get to the 1990's, a would-be ill-adjusted teenager has something better: real subcultures. A 1990s goth has a script how to be a goth and hopefully a local scene of other goths. After the 00's, you can add widespread availability of internet, which removes the need for "local scene". You can find other people over the internet who can provide some human interaction that scratches the need for socialization, but it's profoundly weird as it's all mediated by the internet. The local scene, if it exists, will be people who spend a large part of their time on the internet, so real interactions become internet-weird, too. Thus, alas, anime weeaboos.
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As Freddie deBoer would say, you aren't the shit you like. It actually explains a lot about modern culture. Sending death threats to a film critic who gives an insufficiently fawning review to the latest Star Wars film is only really explicable if an attack on Star Wars feels like an attack on you, personally. Not that nerds are alone in this regard, as critics of Taylor Swift or BTS can well attest.
While Freddie's post is aspirational, I think it implodes on contact with reality because humans judge each other on what they like all the time.
Liking trucks, wrestling and NASCAR is a cultural and class signal. We may not like that it is, but as long as we continue to use it as a cultural and class signal it will serve that function.
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