Thank you, gin! I was about to double-post to get this on the front page so people could actually see it!
RakkaKaze wrote...
Can someone possibly explain how this word was formed?
As far as I know, 4chan took the word from the comic blackfoxninj4 posted and decided to use it to refer to people who are way too obsessed with anime (and are lacking brain cells).
Moving on, I'm not going to name names, but in a thread a while back, I argued for using honorifics in translating manga, and I got called a weeaboo. Or my actions were called weeaboo, which is strange. Anyways, the way I see it, honorifics are very tricky, and it can be impossible to correctly translate them into English, so it's better to leave them in with a footnote about them. That makes sense to me; when translating from one language into another, some things are going to be lost, and footnotes can help with some of that. That discussion aside, my view was based on wanting to know as much as possible, something that extends to anything from a foreign culture, not just Japanese. When people used the term "weeaboo," it seemed to me that it was being used as a simple way to end the discussion: "You're being weeaboo, stop it."
I've used the term weeaboo quite a lot in the past, and I've always liked the term. It helped to keep me grounded, make sure I didn't get crazy thoughts from watching anime and reading manga. But now, I think the term has outgrown any usefulness it once had. It's just an insult now. On the other hand, it always was a kind of insult, but it was (at least to me) like the term "asshole." It can be used the right way, and when done, the person called an asshole will hopefully learn something.
I'm not organizing my thoughts too well right now, but hopefully people will be able to get what I mean. Maybe we should stop using the word weeaboo and set it aside.
Now, let's set aside whether the word is useful or not and get to something else. If we define weeaboo as being too obsessed with Japanese culture, how far do we go with that? Very simply, is using the terms "shonen," "shojo," "tsundere," etc. weeaboo? There are English words for them (kind of for tsundere, though it wouldn't be just one word), so isn't it weeaboo to use the Japanese terms? If so, then does any anime fan have a right to call any other a weeaboo?