Did weebs exist before normie internet?

[Screw Danlon]

I was pondering this earlier when I came across someone saying that 2013 was the peak year for weebs.

At first, I disagreed strongly, chocking it up to recency bias. After all, I remember plenty of anime spergs from my school days and early internet days. And I‘m not really even old enough to remember tape-trading and anime laser disc collecting.

But as I thought about it more - there‘s a difference between a lot of the spergs from my day and what I’d call the modern weeb. One is that spergs of my day were mostly ‘closeted’ if you will. They kept to themselves, they hung out together (or at least with like-minded people) and the few that didn’t got mocked by the people they would sperg at. Even online, most of them hung out on anime specific forums or in an anime-specific subforum. I remember idiots who referred to themselves as otaku, but they were mostly mocked even by other people within the community.

I feel like it was around the time Naruto hit it big - maybe a little after - that we really started seeing the modern weeb. That was also around the time 4chan took off, and the time a lot of the foundations of more normie internet took off. And as I think about it, I think that weebery is just anime fans who were allowed out of the ghetto and didn’t realize how exceptional they seemed when coming into contact with normies. People definitely weren’t making anime memes in YT comments back when I started watching anime, that’s for sure.

I know what the literal definition is, but as I think about it more, it makes me ask, are weebs just the anime fans who spoiled it for the rest of us?

 

[crocodilian]

Yes, regardless of how you define 'weeaboo.' Intrigue in Japanese culture by westerners is hundreds of years old, as is vice-versa.

Unrelenting praise of Japan as 'a superior nation' is far more recent (since Japan spent much of its history as a feudal nation, then an Imperialist one, then a bombed-out husk, until finally it joined the first world), and the insistence that anime is God's gift to animation probably didn't kick off until the late 1980's boom of Fist of the North Star-style animated melodrama. (It's not like Disney was offering anything similar.)

 

[KillThemCrackasBabies]

Jesus how young are you OP?

Yeah weeb shit was a thing in the modern sense since at least le 90's. Back when it wasn't as mainstream it still had a significant presence in big FYE type stores. They weren't necessarily importing it, but they collected what was around at the time and made it fairly easy to get. That's where a lot of proto-weebs built their collections pre internet. Obviously there are older versions of this, 80's and early 90's OVAs and shit, but I have no firsthand experience with how that operated. Presumably much the same way, though.

 

[Marissa Moira]

OP probably doesn't know what a VHS, Betamax, or Laserdisc is.

 

[Pickle Inspector]

Nah, weebs existed before but at least in the UK just before the mid 90s (I think) anime was almost synonymous with more adult anime (Usually not outright porn but things like Fist of the North Star or Ninja Scroll that have violence and some nudity), that’s before the time the likes of Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon were the face of anime so if you went in a shop asking for an anime that wasn’t mainstream (Mainstream like Ghost in the Shell or Akira) there’s a good chance they’d think you were some kind of pervert and for similar reasons fans weren’t as open about being fans as they are now.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Just because anime fans existed in the 80s and 90s doesn't mean that "the modern weeb" as we know it was born yet.

I would consider the trifecta of One Piece (2004-2005), Naruto (2005), and Bleach (2006), along with the rise of free video sites and torrent sites around 2005 (YouTube, Megaupload, Nyaa Torrents). That also coincides with 4chan filtering "wapanese" to "weeaboo" in mid-2005.

Weeb 1.0 in 2005, Weeb 2.0 in 2015.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Just because anime fans existed in the 80s and 90s doesn't mean that "the modern weeb" as we know it was born yet.

I would consider the trifecta of One Piece (2004-2005), Naruto (2005), and Bleach (2006), along with the rise of free video sites and torrent sites around 2005 (YouTube, Megaupload, Nyaa Torrents). That also coincides with 4chan filtering "wapanese" to "weeaboo" in mid-2005.

weeaboo came from a PBF comic

But all things that modern weebs are known for existed back in the 60 and 70's

There have people who have lived into their 60's and 70's who have died life long hikamorris.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

weeaboo came from a PBF comic

But it didn't refer to anime fans or japanophiles in that comic.

You could find sad and smelly anime fans before then, but weebs really became a thing in the mid-2000s, and there were orders of magnitude more of them.

 

[Conan O'Barbarian]

Buying Chinese bootleg VHS of anime existed long before online streaming, the oldest web forums for anime have been around since at least the early 90s, people talking about anime and posting cosplay pictures, collecting anything and everything they could, wearing imported or self-screened shirts and making asses of themselves in public. They weren't more closeted, they're just more visible now thanks to social media. Weeaboos as we know them now just have it much easier, with Crunchyroll and Amazon.jp for their weaboo needs. It's much cheaper to get hold of those things now too. Imports and replicas both have dropped in value significantly, that doesn't mean there weren't still people scrambling to get their hands on fan items through whatever channels they could.

Also consider that kung fu and samurai films had their own version of embarassing western superfans have existed since the 50s. Akira Kurosawa's films in particular inspired a lot of people who took up the mantle of "samurai," collecting yukata and katanas, spending thousands of dollars to create the image that they were far more enlightened than their gaijin brethren.

Don't mistake ease of access for actual change. These people have been publicly humiliating themselves for decades.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Don't mistake ease of access for actual change. These people have been publicly humiliating themselves for decades.

You assume that one should care about society's opinion, especially when feminism is allowed to exist.

 

[KillThemCrackasBabies]

But it didn't refer to anime fans or japanophiles in that comic.

You could find sad and smelly anime fans before then, but weebs really became a thing in the mid-2000s, and there were orders of magnitude more of them.

Accurate, but I'd argue irrelevant. "Weeaboo", "wapanese", "otaku", whatever you call them all means the same thing and all have the same stereotypes. "Modern weeb" might have it's own unique flavor, but it's a recipe that's about 30 years old.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Accurate, but I'd argue irrelevant. "Weeaboo", "wapanese", "otaku", whatever you call them all means the same thing and all have the same stereotypes. "Modern weeb" might have it's own uniqure flavor, but it's a recipe that's about 30 years old.

It's 36 years old. Same year as the NES and when Transformers were brought over.

 

[Pokemonquistador2]

Weebs were called "Otaku" in the early 90s; most western otaku weren't aware oif the negative connotation that label had in Japan. I'd say anime really blew up in the 90's during the OVA boom, when media companies began grabbing whatever they could out of Japan, giving it cheap dubs, and shoving it onto the shelves of media stores like SunCoast.

Ranma1/2, Tenchi Muyo and Evangelion were the big series, and Akira and Ghost in the Shell were the big movies of the early/mid-90's. More obscure fare was available, with fantasy and cyberpunk being the big sellers. If you wanted anime that wasn't commercially available, (ie: anime that wasn't fantasy or cyberpunk,) you had to join college "Otaku Clubs" and watch grade Z, 8th generation dubbed fansubs that were recorded on slow-speed archival VHS and mailed from place to place. You kids today have it so good. You'll never know what it's like to have to wait every other month to get 2 episodes of a commercially released series on VHS or have to make the agonizing choice between subs or dubs. Nor do you have to worry about how bad FoxKids will hack up your favorite anime when they bring it to American TV.

 

[Jason Wynn]

Yep, but back in my day we called them Wapanese instead of weebs. I first got internet in the mid 90s, and even back then you'd see spergs who wouldn't shut the fuck up about Pokemon or Astro Boy or Vampire Hunter D ect.... they'd shit up chatrooms and Usenet groups with their weebiness as well. They're not a new thing.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Yep, but back in my day we called them Wapanese instead of weebs. I first got internet in the mid 90s, and even back then you'd see spergs who wouldn't shut the fuck up about Pokemon or Astro Boy or Vampire Hunter D ect.... they'd shit up chatrooms and Usenet groups with their weebiness as well. They're not a new thing.

Yeah they're thousands of years old.

Tarim mummies - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[KillThemCrackasBabies]

Yep, but back in my day we called them Wapanese instead of weebs. I first got internet in the mid 90s, and even back then you'd see spergs who wouldn't shut the fuck up about Pokemon or Astro Boy or Vampire Hunter D ect.... they'd shit up chatrooms and Usenet groups with their weebiness as well. They're not a new thing.

Oh god I forgot all about Vampire Hunter D faggotry.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

“Weeaboos” existed in the U.S. when Pokémon, DBZ, and [adult swim] started playing re-runs of Cowboy Bebop en masse. Japan was filled with weebs since the late 70’s and 80’s.

I have noticed that the term in the past few years has lost its lust, since people are trying to make otaku-ism in America a healthy lifestyle, when most Japanese otaku would not like most of the American otaku in their country.

It’s a main reason why, for me, reading manga was far more superior than watching anime. There’s way too many episodes of it these days to catch up.

 

[Marissa Moira]

I have noticed that the term in the past few years has lost its lust, since people are trying to make otaku-ism in America a healthy lifestyle

All you do is eat steak, watch anime, and lift all day.

 

[Screw Danlon]

Don't mistake ease of access for actual change. These people have been publicly humiliating themselves for decades.

Yeah, I guess that was the point I was trying to work around. I remember “wapanese” and making fun of Japanophiles, but I felt like the weeb concept didn’t come into play till later.

But maybe it’s just a Baader-Meinhoff thing, where you only noticed the two or three wierdos singing Sailor Moon in the library or the creep obsessed with Urutsekodoji, until there was a larger place to see them, rather than it not actually existing.

eta: i think that actually might be it. I had this feeling like before, “weebitude” was an isolated illness, whereas now it feels like a constant plague. But I guess that is, as you say, just an example of access.

 

[Dread First]

They absolutely did exist prior to the 2010s, hell even before the 2000s and the 1990s at that. Have you ever spent any modicum of time on an anime website? Half the people over 40 are the dudes who rented shit like Ninja Scroll, MD Geist, Angel Cop, Genocyber, and a whole host of other ultra-violent OVAS that Central Park Media licensed and then dubbed on the cheap. You'll know this because they won't stop bitching about how modern anime isn't shit in the same ways that their favourite stuff growing up was shit.