[PREV - OTAKU_FED]    [TOP]

OTAKU_REBELS

                                                 August 30, 2012
                                         Rev: September  5, 2012

One view of the Otaku is that
they're essentially drop-outs:
they see no point in struggling         It's an interesting thought
for Success-- or are unable to          that the increasing
believe in it as a possibility--        strangeness of Japanese pop
and retreat to a life of minimal        culture is a result of it's
material prosperity, engaged            "lost decade" of extended
solely with worlds of imagination,      economic doldrums.
game playing, etc.
                                                    And whither the
    They are not anti-materialistic                 United States?
    by any means, but they are not
    materialistic in the approved
    "normal" way...

      The otaku, then,
      is a beatnik of
      consumerism.       Edonian hedonists, residents of
                         the latter day floating world.        OTAKU_CONSUMED
                                                                  
                                                               DEMATERIALIZE





   From Scialabba's article on
   Dwight Macdonald, p.46:                     SCIALABBA

   "An increase in scale does not always entail reductiveness:
   one effect of the best of mass culture is to trace or
   forge the connections among the unprecedentedly diverse
   experiences of its experience, however fleeting, of so
   enormous a community is visionary and exalting.  When they
   fail, they can retreat into an irony that thrives in the
   vast range and dense detail of American consumer culture."






--------
[NEXT - FEDERATION]