HarbinLights

That sounds about right. I've been trying, and failing, to extinguish the part of me that people told me was wrong and gross years ago. And now I've deeply internalized these accusations of exotification and delusion and such. And feel a lot of guilt and shame over the fact I used to have plans to travel to Japan, learn Japanese, major in Japanese in college, and participate in the JET program.

Having someone like you tell me it's all okay is therapeutic, but nonetheless I still can't shake the feeling that I'm not good enough if I like things about other cultures as other people have said contrary to you.

Not a troll, if we're going by the definition of a troll as someone trying to incite or get a rise out of people.

I am a gigantic idiot and a subnormal, though. As evidenced by the fact I used to be a gigantic weeaboo, and sadly still am on some, slightly more repressed level.

For reference, some of the things that I enjoy that are consider from "Asian" cultures(usually Japanese, but as I've kept an open mind, I've found many things from various other cultures in Northeast and Central Asia I am fond of, such as China, South Korea, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and ect., this isn't me grouping together all Asian cultures as the East, but opening my mind to cultures outside of Japan to learn about).

Of course I like the so called "otaku" stuff that is so looked down upon in these cultures, because I spend so much time escaping reality and that's generally what stuff like anime, manga, video games and light novels are for.

But I've gained an appreciation for a lot of other stuff. I like Japanese and Korean music. Most of my favourite artists I keep up with are Japanese. I also watch both Japanese and Korean dramas. I don't know much about my own pop culture at this point.

But more importantly, there are things beyond the "otaku" pop cultural consumption I enjoy.

I love Japanese language and that has now extended to a wider interest and fascination with Uralic and Altaic languages and the Ural-Altaic language theory. As such, not only do I like how Japanese sounds as a language, but also the various proposed Altaic languages, which Japanese and Korean are sometimes included in.

I really, really like Shinto. Though also Animism and Shamanism as a whole. I'm an Atheist, but feel all sorts of special spiritual fondness about Animistic faiths in general. I guess you could call me a spiritual atheist, just because I like such traditions and spirituality so much. I may not be able to justify a belief in them, but enjoy them immensely regardless. This being the case, Korean Shamanism also greatly interests me.

I really like reading about Ainu culture and have a huge fondness for learning about it.

I like East Asian food, and especially Japanese and Korean food. It isn't the only food I like, but gosh, I could eat it all the time.

I love Japanese architecture.

This is related to shinto, but I love all the little festivals and traditions they have. I wish we had many of the same holidays over here.

There's about a thousand other things I could go into, but they just aren't normalized over here.

What I don't particularly like in Japan is their work culture. The whole karoshi thing. Chilling.

Yes, this topic is stupid and I'm stupid and weird. I know.

Is that a left wing or a right wing opinion? It's neither, isn't it?

Once when I was younger and dumber I once had some pretty stupid aspirations. I thought it would be okay to travel to or live in Japan and that I might have good times taking in and experiencing another culture from my own.

But I was quickly given a lot of harsh truths that, as a white American, it is delusional and disgusting for me to have ever thought it would be okay to go there. When people learned years ago I wanted to do that, I was given a wake up call that to be an American and want to go to Japan is racist and delusional, that I have issues with my own culture if I desire such things, and need to work on my own culture instead of going somewhere else if I long for any such experiences, and that it means there must be something wrong with me. And also that I must be exotifying Asian cultures in order to feel such a way. And I've been told how I'm not Japanese and no Japanese person will ever accept a weeaboo like me.

Since then I've thankfully given up any such cultural or travel aspirations and have become less of a weeaboo as people had awoken to have bad of a person I was being. No longer studying Japanese or have plans to travel there. I know that neither my culture or their culture will ever accept me if I live as a weeaboo. I would never be liked in another culture no matter how hard I tried. And being culturally different would make me unliked here(that is why, as someone with weeb tendencies and desires I haven't been able to cure myself of, I try to avoid people and stick to 2D).

But a little weeb inside of me feels like that, if it's not okay to go to another culture, an East Asian one like Japan, South Korea, or China, or any of the other North Asian cultures. And should focus on my own country and own culture in order to be a good and responsible person as people have told me. Part of me wishes that I could change my own culture to have more of the aspects of East Asian culture I could enjoy.

I'd like to see East Asian culture be normalized here in my own country. And not have to go somewhere else where I don't belong in order to enjoy it. And be able to enjoy it outside of stuff on the internet like video games. Maybe this means I just haven't been able to let go of being a weeb, no matter how hard I've tried and how wrong I know it is.

The problem is that I am just as alone in that. My country, the USA, isn't very accepting of Asian people and Asian culture. We put Japanese people in concentration camps, created the "Chinese exclusion act", and while California is full of Asian people, Hollywood isn't. Asian culture is treated as perpetually exotic and not belonging. And neither the left and the right seem to be interested in the normalization of Asian culture here. And Asian Americans, not wanting to be seen as exotic and non-American, most have disavowed their Asian cultural heritage, and have distanced themselves from it in hopes of being more represented and avoiding racism. And certainly as a whole don't seem interested in sharing their culture within the wider America, keeping American culture still fundamentally European American but with Asian people adhering to it. And the normalization of Asian culture being seen as counterproductive or even appropriation if used or normalized by the wider culture.

The right wing sees this as a lack of pride on my part. Back when I was learning Japanese in my larger weeb phase, I was called a race traitor. And told that because of my heritage, this was inappropriate and wrong, I have no place among Asians, and Asian culture has no place here. But on the Left, there seems to be no greater interested in this. The Left views the spread of Asian culture here as "problematic". That the normalization of East Asian culture is "fetishization" and thus dehumanizing to Asian people, exotifying, and appropriation. And that non-Asian people should stick to their culture, and that doing otherwise is fetishistic oppression.

I want to stick to and be proud of my own country as I'm told and harbor absolutely no desire to go to another one or act or think inappropriately. But deep down I wish I had some way to at least enjoy the aspects of foreign cultures that I do. And I wish that it were easy to do rather than obscure. Instead, where I live, there is almost no such culture here. Almost only white people and black people live here, and are fairly segregated from each other. At least in my town in my part of the country they are. There are no Korean restaurants, no Shinto shrines, not even Buddhist shrines of any flavor, no architecture, no festival, no one who speaks such a language. And I'm told that Asian American communities want people like me to stay away from them and their culture. I couldn't afford to move to someplace like Hawaii or California where such people and such culture actually lives. And I would be unwelcome if I tried.

As bad as it is to be a weeaboo and think it's okay to travel to East Asia and burden them there with my unwanted presence, I feel no hope of East/North Asian culture being normalized here in the near future. I don't know of any movement that supports it, political or otherwise. Certainly neither the left or right wing are supportive of it. Or so it seems? And unless I were to move to another country, I fear I would never be able to experience such cultures.

Sadly, despite the fact I have given up on any hopes of going to East Asia long ago and have realized how much of a sick delusional weeb I was being. Part of me still craves such cultural experiences. And so, at least personally, if I can't go there, I wish they would at least bring their culture to us. But that's not happening. And it means that, even though I've tried to cure and suppress it, deep down I have some gross desires that aren't right.

Is there any movement towards the normalization of other cultures besides European ones here in the West? And is there anywhere this fits on the political spectrum? I would have thought the Left would have been that. But more and more I'm seeing opposition to that idea as racist, exotifying and appropriating.

It honestly just makes me want to stay online and play video games rather than engage with the outside world. At least in video games nobody calls me a wapanese race traitor who is appropriating cultures I think are exotic. Japanese video games and Japanese music allows me to engage with their culture from the safety of my own home. I can shut myself in and enjoy it all I want, at least. And that's probably going to be what I'll continue doing. Thank goodness for video games to replace real life.

It's a pure comedy show, with idol elements. And a great one at that.

Well, I guess humor is subjective.

Please recommend me anime about robots, cyborgs, and virtual reality, that presents it in an intriguing, inspirational, or intellectual fashion.

I've long been a very big fan of anime like Ghost in the Shell, .hack//Sign, Serial Experiments Lain, Dennou Coil, Log Horizon, Cyborg 009, Mega Man X: Day of Sigma, Eve no Jikan/Time of Eve, I even really like Dr. Slump, just because it stars a cute robot girl. Though that's a totally silly and unrealistic outlier.

Basically, the posthuman and virtuality side of science fiction is my favourite part. Cyberpunk is okay, but is usually second to my fascination with Singularitarian type stuff in fiction, robots and wetware and computer technology.

Am hoping to find more similar shows or similar themes.

I'm not too fond of what Nintendo does, either, even though they're more morally in the right.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbped/nintendos-offensive-tragic-and-totally-legal-erasure-of-rom-sites

"As a professor, I very frequently see students spinning their tires trying to solve problems that were already solved in 1985," Bennett Foddy, who teaches at New York University’s Game Center and is the developer of games like QWOP and Getting Over It, told me in an email. "And just as you would if you were teaching painting or music (or math), what you do as a teacher is you send them to the library to study the old classics, to see what they did right and wrong. That’s the only way we can make progress in the sciences, the humanities, or in the creative arts."

The problem is that even though NYU has a good collection of classic console hardware and games, it only covers a minuscule proportion of the total history of games. It doesn't include 8- and 16-bit computer games, which were distributed on magnetic media which has long since been corrupted. It doesn't include coin-operated games, which are prohibitively expensive for a library even today, and which are harder to access than ever now that arcades are practically gone. And, of course, most people who are getting into games don’t have access to NYU’s library at all.

"If I was teaching poetry, I could send a student to read nearly any poem written since the invention of the printing press, but in games my legal options limit me to, I would guess, less than 1 percent of the important games from history," Foddy said.

Michael Moffitt, a 25-year-old software engineer in California, told me in an email that he spent most of his time with ROMs as a kid making weird graphics mods for Super Mario Bros, Dig Dug, and Pac-Man using a VROM editor built into NESticle, a groundbreaking emulator that, as Motherboard wrote in 2017, helped turn retro gaming into a modern cultural force.

What is really beyond the pale, according to Foddy, is that Nintendo's lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits is shutting down sites or forcing them to remove all ROMs from their site, even though Nintendo ROMs make up only a tiny fraction of the content on those sites.

"Most of what Emuparadise was hosting was work by companies that are now defunct and which have little or no chance of being sold legally," Foddy said. "This is one of those situations where copyright law just seems busted—though I assume they’re legally in the right, the companies bringing these takedowns are just committing massive cultural vandalism, in my view."

https://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#good

Seiken Densetsu 3's Powell gives me intense nostalgic feels.

That's exactly who I was talking about! That is messed up!

Hope South Africa's Olympic committee wins this!