Weeb Story #3: "The Anime Club of Mixed Feelings" "I myself am half Filipino and half white. I was born and raised in the states, most of my asian family lives in hawaii so I don’t see them often. But I’ve never really identified with the asian side of my heritage. That was until I met other Filipino people. I met these three girls during middle school, and they were into anime and manga and eventually got me into it too. It was nice. We occasionally cosplayed for fun, watched anime together sometimes and drew comics. It was all fun and games until we got into high school. About a month into school, the four of us heard of a club: The anime club. We all wanted to join it because we thought it would be a really great place to meet other asians like us that just appreciated japanese art without going overboard. But none of us ever had the guts to go. And then I met another Filipino girl, let’s call her “Amy”. Amy was in one of my science classes and saw me drawing in a manga style and said it was pretty good. We started talking about animes we both watched and after that day, I think she considered me her friend. She seemed pretty normal. The next day, Amy found me at my locker and showed me this origami ball she had made. I said it looked nice and she asked me if I knew how to make one. I said no, and she flipped out. She was spouting out all these reasons why I should know how to make it, ending with the reason: “because you’re asian.” uh. Wow. I explained to her how I grew up here and had no connections to my ancestral country, and she said her situation was the same but she knew all these things I didn’t. Basically, she made me feel bad that I was asain, something I didn’t expect from her. I stopped being friends with her after a bit and went back to my three original friends. One of them, “Risa”, went to one of the anime club meetings in my friend absence and said it wasn’t good at all. I had to see for myself, so I went to the next anime club meeting. There were no asians in the room except for me. They were all enthralled that I was joining their club. I was listening to broken japanese, one too many “kawaii”s and “desu”s and I was going crazy. The leader, let’s call her “Nora”, was learning the japanese language, so she was the closest thing to asian that any of them had got. She cosplayed in school, wore color contacts all the time, dyed her hair neon colors until it wouldn’t take dye anymore and she just bleached it white, and pretended to be a cat whenever you talked to her. She made me really uncomfortable because she always looked like she was flirting with me (I’m gay guy for one thing), so I never wanted to be alone with her. Thank god anime club was the only reason we had to interact with one another. But the thing was, I kept going back. They wanted to go to the nearest anime convention, and I wanted to go too. So I stayed. I went to the anime convention with them, in cosplay, and then I dropped out of the club. I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I was getting so close to being fetishized in that club, I didn’t want to go back. They were committing so many crimes of the weeboo and there was no one to tell them. Their personal relationship problems were destroying the club that I thought was going to be about anime and manga, not about boyfriends and girlfriends I had no interest in. But that wasn’t the problem, because then the next school year, the anime club members brought the club to me. I didn’t know anyone in my art classes except for the anime club people. They expected me to keep drawing in my manga style, when I was quickly slipping out of it because of inspiration from more home based sources. I was constantly being put down for this new style of art that I was excelling at. I was forced to look at all these people’s sketchbooks and comics that were honestly, emo and way over dramatic. I said nothing. Even post-club, I was still being fetishized for being asian because I was the only asian person that associated with them. But the next semester of school started, and the art class ended and I lost touch with the weebs of the burning anime club. I was glad I got out when I could. I returned to my other asian friends once again. I told them about what had happened and they promised to protect me from the weebs. And it worked. Another semester of school, completely free of this asian obsession that had followed me. The four of us went back to just appreciating our common interest, but a little less intense as it once was back when we were younger. The four of us occasionally talked about rebuilding a new and better anime club, but decided against it, due to the fact we could attract those weeboos again and then we’d all face the problems I had to deal with. We’re glad that conversation was dropped after the cons out weighed the benefits."
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000