In Defense of Anime: A Fan Response to Her Stereotypes & Critics

During my first week of college, I spent some time hanging out with a guy I was vaguely interested in, a generically hip art school kid with an attitude of superiority and an eyebrow ring. One day, we were sitting around talking about whatever number of uninteresting things 18- and 19-year-olds talk about, when he noticed the lanyard I was swinging in my hand. My L keychain (showing my favorite detective crouched over, holding an apple) and alchemy circle keychain swung side by side with my mass of other random keychains and keys. “Hey, what’s that?” he asked when he spotted them. “Are you into those cartoons?” he said with a scoff and snickered as I tossed the lanyard aside and changed the subject. Being a nerd is super trendy right now, which is totally fine as long as you’re watching the newest episodes of Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, or wearing your vintage-looking DC Comics crew neck of characters you don’t even know — but hey, it’s stylish, right? But despite the new phenomenon of fly-by-night nerds, there are still areas of nerddom that are inextricably linked with the erroneous assumption that they belong exclusively to fat, lonely man-boys who live in their parents’ basements. With that in mind, let me put this out there now: I like anime and am not a fat, lonely man-boy who lives in his parents’ basement. And no, I’m also not an immature, socially disabled fangirl who shrieks over shojo. (You’d think that’d be clear, but I’ve gotten enough side-eyes in my da…