Do unto others as you would like done unto you. A simple quote from a simple time but the message passes along with the same weight they did millennia ago. I want to apologize for anyone who hates my non-review posts but this is something I feel needs to be said even though it should be inherit. If you are on this blog and you’ve read any of our content, you’ll notice two things. One being I don’t normally do this sort of post and Two being that we really don’t care who you are as long as you are a like minded Otaku Gamer, BAYOG will accept ye unwashed masses. As you may or may not have seen in my article on Black Panther I discussed how that movie offered a great gateway for a demographic of people typically depicted as being against or mocking the Otaku Gamer culture. I cited a few individuals such as our own Blackatron, Michael B. Jordan, Childish Gambino, and Kanye West as individuals of the black community who are Otaku through and through. A terrible even that occurs however, is the Gatekeeping effect, which serves as “the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something.”
While many in this particular community of AniBloggers is probably THE most accepting and chill environment I’ve ever found on the internet, the rest of the world is not the same. With the mainstream world beginning to become more and more aware and accepting of our community, we find people beginning to eschew and ostracize individuals for being “fake fans.” The most common example of this is the “Gamer Girl” trope, where you either have a hot hipster girl doing something stupid like eating an unplugged controller, or as a fat feminist who acts triggered all the time. Just a few weeks ago however, Kim Kardashian recently posted a picture of Best Girl 02 from DARLING In The FRANXX with the caption “My hair inspo” and frankly, I was skeptical of the fact. CmdrCluckCluck did his due diligence and found it was in fact a real post on her Instagram, linked through her Twitter where she mentioned her obsession with anime. We then discussed Kanye West being an anime fan and also having a human sized Zaku, something all of us could respect as a sign of a solid Otaku.
The feedback on her post was a mix on the instagram itself, ranging from people being cool with it, to actually appreciating her open inspiration for her pink hair, to denial. Unfortunately more people were just kind of being internet people on the internet and had a more negative response ranging from outright disparaging comments about her past, to her ruining the fandom of anime or DARLING in the FRANXX. While I don’t approve of Kim Kardashian, there’s no way in hell I’d think to mock her fandom of anime or anything of the like. I feel it shouldn’t need to be said but with all the negativity I felt it was something that should be put out there, if anything to remind people that you should cut that shit out. The fact that comic book nerds and video game fans were mocked and ostracized was something that made comics like X-Men famous, because EVERYONE at some point can sympathize with being odd or an outsider. Even if they are a scumbag celebrity or an arbitrary female, or someone in general you hate, hate them for the things they did, not because they have something in common with you. Our community is something that transcends race, religion, sex, and politics and allows me to have something in common with a Muslim woman from India and a homosexual Russian in Brazil. Regardless of what god you may or may not believe in or what political ideology you have, if you are here and you are an Anime or Gaming fan, that should be enough for you to at least break bread and make peace with someone and I’m fairly certain if we could focus more on interesting fiction, reality would be a damn better place to live. So next time you want to haze that female in Overwatch because she sucks as anything besides support, or bash some YouTuber because they are “ruining your fandom” of TRIGGER! shows, remember that they like what you like, and maybe (just maybe) we can all just try to get along?
