Deconstructing Otaku Culture Through One Tweet

(Originally posted on 7-12-2011)

So today I got an @-message on my "Fullmetal Alchemist" based Twitter account, @AwkwardAlchemy, that delighted and confused me so I have to break it down in order to understand what exactly I'm reading:

"Hola @AwkwardAlchemy, Do you have been watch FMA new movie "the sacred star of milos"? Can you share it to me, nyan? :) Onegai."

I am not going to comment on the English grammar because I have a lot of followers from foreign lands where English is not their first language. I say it's not a problem unless English is your first language or if I can't understand you and I can understand this message, no problem.

Let's talk about the foreign language parts.

First of all, I don't know why she (guessing it's a she) chose to address me in Spanish. I'm not sure how prevalent the knowledge of "Hello" in Spanish is. I know it is in America because of the immigration but is it that obvious that I am American? I mean, it probably is and I just don't notice except when me, Sarah, and Zeyd start with the home land jokes and Revolutionary War reenactments.

Now let's talk about the Japanese. "Onegai" is Japanese for "please" and is a shortened, colloquialism of "Onegaishimasu" although most otaku don't know that. They only know the short version. Now, in Japan, it would probably be considered kind of weird and rude to use the colloquial on someone you have not spoken to before. Perhaps internet culture is different but I wanted to point that out anyway.

There are worse things she could have said in terms of politeness confused in otaku culture. Note that she didn't try to use an honorific on me and for that I am thankful. Most otaku end up using the honorifics of "-kun" or "-chan" both of which would be highly inappropriate to use with me. "-kun" is used for boys the same age or younger than the speaker and being that I am neither male nor younger than any of my followers that I know of, this would be very wrong. "-chan" is usually used for girls the same age or younger than the speaker but holds a connotation of cuteness. Age thing aside, this would be a really weird one to use on someone you don't know because it's so cutsy. "-san" is always a safe bet. Once on fanfiction.net I was referred to as "Sweet-sama" which was amusing since "-sama" is used for someone of a higher position than you and has a tone of respect.

(I also wonder why my followers are mostly teenagers. FMA has been around since 2001 in manga form and in real life you end up encountering FMA fans of all ages, many who are my age and older. Maybe they just don't use Twitter)

Ignoring my tangent, the weirdest thing of this message was definitely the "nyan." "Nyan" is literally the noise a cat makes; the Japanese meow if you will. Aside from the fact that it is so weird to throw a cat noise into your speech, the "nyan" here appears to be a place-holder for an actual Japanese grammar point. In Japanese one way of forming a question is to essentially say a statement and add "ne?" for example "We're going to the mall, ne?" It would be like adding the Canadian "eh" or a "yes?" which I actually used to do a lot before I ever took a Japanese class. Here however the question is already a question before you add the ending. So is the "nyan" just to be cute? Is there an anime character who does that?

Now the last thing is, the question itself. My response was this:

"The movie only entered Japanese theaters 10 days ago. There aren't any copies floating around yet but when there are, I will say so."

Did she not know that it just came out? Being an internet gangster, I know a thing or two about torrents and such and this is how it breaks down.

Being that the movie just entered JAPANESE theaters 10 days ago, there probably aren't any copies of it online at all yet and there probably won't be for another week at least and when there are they will only be searchable and available on Japanese torrent sites in crappy quality. Better quality will come in a few months at around the same time as fan-subs which vary in quality and this will be the best you could get for a while.

Because Funimation will be dubbing it and having a limited theater release in early 2012, I doubt they will be releasing an official subtitled version of it beforehand as it will probably decrease sales. The Funimation channel doesn't even have more than four subtitled episodes of "Brotherhood" on anymore so I doubt they will release a subtitled version anywhere but on the actual DVD.

Now I'm not saying all this to pick on this girl. I just saw this comment as the perfect example of otaku culture, a culture I am very fascinated by, especially the tendency to pepper one's speech with Japanese. I also wanted to rationalize to myself how long it will be until I can finally see this damn movie because, like her, I want to see it.