Concept
The anime and manga fandom is a worldwide community of fans of anime and manga. Anime includes animated series, films and videos, while manga includes manga, graphic novels, drawings, and related artworks. The anime and manga fandom traces back to the 1970s, with numerous countries such as the United States,United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan, China, and Malaysia participating in it. Otaku Otaku is a Japanese term for people with obsessive interests, including anime or manga. In its original context, the term otaku is derived from a Japanese term for another's house or family (お宅, otaku), which is also used as an honorific second-person pronoun. The modern slang form, which is distinguished from the older usage by being written only in hiragana (おたく) or katakana (オタク or, less frequently, ヲタク), or rarely in rōmaji, appeared in the 1980s. In the anime Macross, first aired in 1982, the term was used by Lynn Minmay as an honorific term. It appears to have been coined by the humorist and essayist Akio Nakamori in his 1983 series An Investigation of "Otaku", printed in the lolicon magazine Manga Burikko. Animators like Haruhiko Mikimoto and Shōji Kawamori used the term among themselves as an honorific second-person pronoun since the late 1970s. After its wild spread usage by other Japanese people, however, it became pejorative and increasingly offensive in the 1990s, implying that a person is socially inept. Otaku can be seen as being similar to the English terms geek or nerd. However, the term started to be used by anime and manga fans themselves again starting in the 2000s, in a more general and positive way, and today it is often used by those outside of the fandom to refer to fans of anime or manga. However, older generation otaku, like Otaking (King of Otakus) Toshio Okada, in his book Otaku Wa Sude Ni Shindeiru (オタクはすでに死んでいる) said the newer generation of self-proclaimed otakus are not real otakus, as they lack the passion and research sense into a particular sub-culture subject and are only common fans which only overspent in buying products.
