”I wish my mom would stop trying to make me a boys’ love fan,” laments frustrated son.
While certain popular anime series have had cult followings in Japan since at least the 1970s, until recently being a full-on otaku was something that most people grew out of as they got married and had kids. But with anime being a more prevalent pop culture force than ever before in Japan, as well as an unprecedented number of women in the hard-core fanbase, Japan is starting to see the largely unprecedented phenomenon of otaku parents.
A family where mom and/or dad are seriously into anime makes for a unique upbringing, as highlighted in a recent tweet from Japanese Twitter user @xamethyx.
“The good things about having parents who are otaku:
● You don’t have to hide your otaku merch
● You know they’ll never throw your otaku stuff away when you’re not home
● If you feel like it, you can try to get them into the series you’re following.The difficult thing about having parents who are otaku:
● When your mom (who’s in her 50s) starts singing ‘Bath time♪ Bath time♪ Bath tiiiime♪’ and imitating the voice of [A Certain Magical Index female lead] Index.”
As shown in @xamethyx’s list, there are pros and cons to living with otaku parents. The majority of commenters, though, were happy to focus on the positives, chiming in to mention upsides such as:
“Sometimes when my parents are out and they spot a figure of a character I like, they’ll call me on the phone and say something like ‘Your wife is on sale for just 500 yen [US$4.50]…You want us to pick her up for you?”
“For my 20th birthday [the start of legal adulthood in Japan], my parents bought me a copy of the Nitro Plus porno game Hello World.”
“When my parents and I go to sing karaoke together, it’s pretty much an anime song music festival.”
“These days, it feels more like we’re otaku buddies than parents and child.”
Of course, being an otaku implies a certain level of obsessiveness, which some said they could do without.
“It’s nice having someone to split the cost of otaku merch with and all, but I’m not so crazy about when my dad and I are watching anime together and he keeps shouting out the dialogue along with the characters.”
“My mom (in her 50s) wants to keep the fact that she’s an otaku on the down-low, so she sends me to the store to buy stuff from [handsome man dating simulator maker] Otomate, which is kind of embarrassing.”
“It’s painful to hear my dad imitate [15-year-old Higurashi schoolgirl] Rena Ryugu.”
“I’m glad that my mom and I have anime as a common interest, but I wish she’d stop trying to turn me, her own son, into a boys’ love fan.”
Still, the overall feeling seems to be that having otaku parents is a pretty cool family dynamic, and something that’s likely to become increasingly common as fans who got into anime over the boom of the last decade or so continue to grow up.
Source: Twitter/@xamethyx via Hachima Kiko
Top image ©SoraNews24
Follow Casey on Twitter, where he figures it’s only a matter of time until he has kids and they say they want to be Gundam for Halloween.