For the last few years been around several anime discussion boards–and attending anime conventions, sobbing at my wallet whenever I see something neat, I have come around nice, friendly and informative anime fans. However, there’s the bad “closet otaku” you should look out for. The “closet otaku” I am describing flames others for liking dubbed anime, is willing to buy merchandise as high as possible, and other mishaps that I will explain.

It was back in 2003. I joined an anime forum, which will remain nameless, that I’ve never seen before from their main website. I checked it out and everyone seemed friendly, and the topics were interesting. So I decided to make an account. I introduced myself in the “Introduction Forum”. Within minutes, I was greeted warmly by the forum dwellers. A few weeks passed by with no incident. I joined a couple of clubs and made some new friends. However, my attendance was going to be cut short by one of “them”. One of the “closet otaku” I was attacked by criticized me for making a joke about an anime character in a game thread, where we would describe our favorite anime characters. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, but I thought I would bring excitement back to the game, since it was falling apart with no posts in the last couple of weeks. I decided to do a little “research” on this poster. Everything that this Otaku was into fits description–perfectly.

This Otaku is a fan of Gackt–one of popular J-Rock idols on my “to avoid” list. One of the anime series that I didn’t really get into was loved by this person: Heat Guy J. That show didn’t make any damn sense. I know, because I watched an episode when it aired on MTV2. It didn’t appeal to me and didn’t want to keep watching, just like Gundam Seed. It was just another anime that look like a modern day Astro Boy–in terms of character design, in my opinion.

Not only that this person was into something that I wouldn’t find interesting, they would often criticize people posting in threads about the plot line of an anime just to raise the post count. The Otaku’s post count was odd–like around 7,000 posts, and all of them were pure disgracefulness. It was enough to get banned, but the moderators weren’t paying attention. Eventually, I faded away from the forums and never looked back. The mods attention were aimed towards the members who were following the rules, like I was.