Akihabara Liberation Protest!

I didn’t know Akihabara was being occupied. Liberate it from whom or what?

Sorry to rain on the parade with my strong views, but this “protest” is just plain retarded IMO.

I think it was supposed to be that they were “protesting” for things like more respect and recognition for otakus, more respect for them in the media and such, but this mish-mash of around 400 people only loosely associated by the ever-hard-to-define label of “otaku” were protesting anything from train fanatics demanding some restoration of their beloved railway lines to demanding the withdrawal of the Yodobashi Camera electronics mega-store from Akihabara, down to demanding respect for sexual minorities. With healthy doses of 2ch internet slang and Haruhi cliches, of course.

I think that “liberation” meant for the preservation of Akihabara as their Sacred District of Anime, which is nonsense to people who knew Akihabara as a district where small electronics stores gathered long before it became the magnet for Anime/Manga related things.

The current trend in the Japanese media (likely kicked off by the Train Man craze) is to try to make “otakus” out to be something similar to animals in a zoo, where “normal” people point and gawk at how funny or weird they are. It’s better than the stereotype of the sociopathic pedophile which was jump-started by the Miyazaki Tsutomu case, but I see how the current trend is still unpleasant, and it sort of parallels how gamers have been portrayed as an exaggerated stereotype in the American media. I also understand the desire for more respect, or at least wanting to be left alone.

But, by parading around and making a show, they’re actually doing what the media has been trying to do all along… presenting themselves and gathering attention as freaks and queers.

…man, all this ranting sounds like I’m taking this way too seriously:)