In recent years, anime has become one of the most consumed entertainment media worldwide, being that the productions of this type of works are bigger every day with millionaire budgets aiming not only to Japan or part of the Asian territory, but also to the whole world with an increasingly greater variety. But this good image was not always so, being that a terrible moment in Japanese history marginalized the “otakus” and their tastes for manga and anime, so for many years they were seen as weirdos, but now this seems to have changed a bit.
Anime and otaku culture seems to be more accepted nowadays.
The fact of how otakus are qualified in today’s culture became relevant again due to the definition that can be seen in the Japanese version of Wikipedia, which mentions the beginnings of this word and how it was used in a derogatory way in many cases, but apparently this has changed. And there is a fact that marked for a long time for lovers of anime culture to be labeled as outcasts, weirdos or even unpleasant people.
According to Wikipedia itself, in the beginning the word “Otaku” emerged as a term to name fans, originally popularized in the 1980s. But it was at the end of that decade when a horrible event shook Japan, involving the abduction of several girls in that country, having the worst ending imagined. What changed people’s view of otaku was the fact that the culprit of these acts, Tsutomu Miyazaki, was an avid collector of manga, anime and different objects of this culture. In view of this, the media used his tastes to label him as the main motive for the act.
Being such an important fact, the term “otaku” would be affected forever, but one of the present paragraphs was what surprised many, and is that the term would have begun to be much more accepted today, attributing in this case from the same Wikipedia to different factors that achieved this. Since the expansion of the internet in the late 1990s and the increase of the social status of anime, manga, video games or even idols, have helped to change the negative connotation, to only remain today as someone “fan” or “enthusiast”.
As we mentioned, the fact had a lot of repercussion in the networks, especially in Japan, where users showed their feelings about this, being that you can see the messages of a large part of “otakus” from the past or from the 1990s, where it was really seen as something bad. Many of them agree on how these tastes were something that was kept secret, being that not even many of the series that today are considered as the best of all times, such as Evangelion, could clean this bad image.
This new definition of the word “otaku” only shows the great growth that this culture has had, not only in that country, but also worldwide, and although in many territories it is still used as an insult or as a joke, more and more people are getting into these media. This has also been boosted thanks to the massification of projects, which in many cases not only seek to target the Japanese audience, but also everywhere, with large Western companies such as DC aiming to create some anime of their most popular franchises.
