>>10 "a fundamentally different point of departure" is such a good way to put it. i've felt what you're saying first hand. trying to interact or even lurk in online communities for anime/whatever i'm an otaku of is rough bc our mindsets are simply different. it's how i got so good at ignoring normies in the first place. there's ppl who i wouldn't call otaku but what they got to say is at least interesting. i feel what op is going through.

I might be getting too philosophical here, but I feel like in the west we just have this view on the corrupting power of images which doesn't have as much of a hold in japan and with otaku. there are all sorts of people who will try to turn which images you engage with into some sort of metaphysical force with corrupting power. Since all that exists is spectacle, how you interact with certain images becomes the only thing remaining to critique. And then even that sort of judgement becomes a simulacra of let's say political action for example. What's strange is there's an image of the delusional otaku (or maybe chuuni) who can't tell the difference between anime and real life, but it's really the anti-otaku who can't seem to understand "c'est ne pas une pipe". Like >>10 says about certain twitter illustrators, there are certain people who are desperate to seperate the signifier from the signified, recouperating the image of a certain artstyle or characters (especially to tie it back with 2000s nostalgia that's so trendy now). This ought to be considered a form of violence. For a time, I thought a way to escape from this was to go into deeper parts of the subculture (in the west at least) like eroge. I thought, no one who isn't already a hardcore otaku is going to read 50 hour long eroge. But I think that it doesn't matter, because they don't need to read it. See how many normans are posting azudaioh memes without ever having seen the show. To them this is not a shameful act, and that's very confusing to me.