THERE NOW FOLLOWS AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR ALL OTAKU…

Take off the cat ears. Put away the Chobits hugging pillow that you spent a month’s rent on. Look sombre. We have something very important to announce to all obsessed followers of the visual medium known as anime.

Are you sitting comfortably? Good.

Your chosen hobby hates you.

But how can it hate me, you may be asking? Well, to be fair, it’s a trait common to all hobbies that once you start getting overly fixated on them, they begin to show their hatred for you by making you look like an utter twonk. It’s just that anime is more vicious in its hatred than most other obsessions.

How so, you may now be asking? Allow me to elaborate.

It makes you believe the sky is a lovely shade of green. I love anime and get a great deal of enjoyment out of it… but most of it is deeply sexist. Admittedly there is a gradual leaning towards atypical female roles in anime (as in Japanese society), but most of the old favourites still feature women as perpetually happy cooks, homemakers, nurses, mothers or wives. And if they aren’t already at least one of the above, that’s what they desperately strive to be more than anything else.

Granted, this is perhaps a reflection of Japanese social attitudes, which are rather sexist themselves (academic types, working women and women who postpone marriage are looked down on as being “abnormal”). But point this out to many otaku and you’ll be met with irate cries of “IT’S NOT SEXIST!! There are LOTS of strong female role models in anime!”

No, no there aren’t. The “strong” women most otaku talk about tend to fit into two categories; either they traipse about in bikinis (or equally revealing clothing), or they don’t set their ambitions much higher than finding and keeping a man.

While I’m on this train of discussion, a quick note to all the Shampoo fanboys out there; if it were real life, Ranma would have slapped a restraining order on that girl’s ass and she’d be thrown in the nuthouse and given anti-psychotics. Last time I checked, you weren’t meant to model your life around a raging psychopath.

Basically; once your obsession reaches a certain point, you’ll blindly argue the merits of anime and completely gloss over any evidence - however damning - that there might be something negative in there. When you reach the stage of shouting “strong female role models” and then toddling off to whichever video room is showing La Blue Girl, there truly is no hope for you.

It makes you think you don’t need to look after yourself to get a woman. Wet paper bag Keiichi meets beautiful goddess Belldandy, who will willingly do anything for him with no thought given to her own desires, and a wonderful romance ensues.

Get real, people! Grasp that Belldandy/Kasumi Tendou/whoever IS NOT REAL. Once you’ve done that, grasp that WOMEN LIKE THAT ARE RARE IN REAL LIFE. I have yet to meet a woman whose sole ambition is to find a man to fawn over and wait on hand and foot, and the only ones I’ve ever heard of have been snapped up and are now looking after six kids - including the husband.

There is the misapprehension among otaku that, should they ever meet this dream woman, she’ll instantly fall in love with them completely unconditionally. None of them ever think that she might have STANDARDS. Not even ultra-basic ones, like having a shower now and again, or washing your hair when it needs it, or using the odd spray of deodorant. If you do stumble your way through life seeking out your dream girl, you’ll invariably wind up frustrated and alone, cursing the fact that every girl you meet has “set her standards too damn high.” Chances are that a lot of them have relatively normal standards. And you don’t even get close. This sort quickly turns into a “Nice Guy.” (Furthermore, maybe your standards are too high.)

It makes you think persistence will pay off. How long did Rumiko Takahashi drag out the absurdly convoluted romance between tenant and landlady in Maison Ikkoku? It was an enormous exercise in playing hard-to-get, and in the end, all Blokey’s hard work finally pays off and he gets to marry What’s-Her-Face. Awww, so sweet and romantic. And this pattern is repeated in many long-running anime series; guy takes an interest in girl, girl laughs it off, guy keeps showing his interest, girl eventually comes round to him and they all live happily ever after. THIS IS NOT HOW IT WORKS IN REAL LIFE.

If you like a girl, making overblown romantic gestures and continually reminding her that you’re “always there if she needs to talk” (especially through the constant phone calls, e-mails and mournful gazing at her bedroom window) is only going to scare the hell out of her, or worse, make her laugh coldly at you. Either way, you ain’t getting a girlfriend out of it, so you’re better off saving your effort. The most attention you’ll get will be if and when she gets a restraining order, or perhaps a tall, muscular friend to give you your marching orders. It’s not sweet and endearing, it’s annoying and pathetic.

This sort frequently becomes a “Nice Guy” too, moaning about how she took them for everything they had and then heartlessly dropped them. Here’s a question for all those “Nice Guys” out there: did she ask to be put on that pedestal and be bombarded with flowers, chocolate and the latest Love Hina DVD? No? Then she never wanted it in the first place, understand?

It makes you think you can speak Japanese. You can’t. Being able to say “kawaii” and “baka” does not a Japanese fluency make. Even if you do pick up any decent smattering of the language, chances are it’s either highly informal (and will get you funny looks from any real Japanese people), or it’s effeminate (and will get you funny looks from any real Japanese people). Similarly, randomly inserting Japanese words into standard English sentences is not the same as adequately communicating in Japanese.

Just ask yourself, should you ever find yourself in Japan, which of the following phrases is most likely to be useful to you:

A) Excuse me, how much are the cup noodles?
B) One day, all the world will be mine!
C) OMG THIS IS JUST KAWAIIEST PLUSHIE EVER!!! NEKO NEKO!!!!

Now think about which ones you’re most likely to pick up from watching anime. I rest my case.

It hypnotises you into spending money you don’t really have to spare. At one convention here in Britain, in 2002, a life-size Chii hugging pillow was put up for auction. The winning bid was for £400 (about $725 US at time of writing). Whoever it was that bought that hugging pillow has become a running joke in British fandom. Do you want that to be you?

Many otaku complain that their hobby is expensive. The rest of us say that it’s only expensive because they don’t have jobs, or they’ll spend more than they have on their hobby because it’s not enough to own the media itself; they have to have the plushies, the pencil boards, the price-gouged hentai doujinshi, the raw and translated versions of the manga, the limited-edition region-2 DVD box set in raw Japanese, a Hong Kong DVD player to play said DVDs, and so forth. Like any hobby, you have to do it within your means; if you’re unemployed and barely eating, yet willing to spend thousands of dollars (perhaps on a credit card) on a package trip to AX Tokyo, there’s something wrong with you.

It makes you look like an idiot, so everyone else laughs at you. That’s the basic upshot of this. There’s liking anime and there’s building your entire sense of self on it. One is healthy. The other is not. And everyone knows that except you.