I've looked up "Otaku" on Wiki, ect.. what I had found was pretty
disturbing.. and I also found other meanings. I'm just confused as to
why people still call anime or a collection of it "Otaku".
(Someone who likes Otaku)
What I found:
Otaku is a Japanese slang word which means someone who is crazy about something, especially anime and manga. Originally, otaku was a word to speak to someone from another family with respect.
In Japan, otaku is generally considered a rude word. Calling someone an otaku in Japan would be a very bad insult. However, in America, otaku is often used to refer to fans of anime and manga. In America, calling someone an otaku is not necessarily rude. In Australia the term "otkau" is seen not only as not rude but in a lot of anime fans cases as a thing to be very proud of being called. The term "otaku" being used as very knowledgeable geek, obsessed with anime, extreme fan of anime and manga.
(History of the term Otaku)
Otaku is derived from a Japanese term for another's house or family .
(More History.. only disturbing)
[edit] Nakamori's publication
The term entered general use in Japan around 1989, and may have been popularized by Nakamori's publication in that year of The Generation of M – We and Mr.Miyazaki (Mの世代-ぼくらとミヤザキ君, M no Sedai – Bokura to Miyazaki-kun?). It applied the term to the (then) recently caught serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki (宮崎 勤), who turned out to be a recluse obsessed with pornographic anime and manga and who lived out his rape fantasies on young girls, thus attaching a huge taboo to a formerly innocuous term.
[edit] As pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit
The term was popularized in the English speaking world in William Gibson's 1996 novel Idoru, which has several references to otaku. In particular, the term was defined as 'pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit'. In an April 2001 edition of The Observer, William Gibson explained his view of the term:The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku -hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.[2]
[edit] From the May 2006 issue of EX Taishuu magazine
Another potential etymology for the term comes from the May 2006 issue of EX Taishuu magazine, which claims that use of the term started among the fanbase of the 1982 – 1983 TV series Super Dimension Fortress Macross, as the main character of the show had a habit of addressing others as "otaku", which fans started to emulate.
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So what is everyone's opinion on the term "Otaku"?
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