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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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