Beeing a geek is cool if you're pretty

Hello, this is a small reflection based on my own experience about how having these interests that I love so much can make your social life a little harder.

(English is not my first language, so sorry if some things are written awkwardly or sound unnatural.)

let’s say I’ve been a huge fan of anime, video games, animation, and yt for as long as I can remember — or at least since before “The Big Shift” (being an anime fan before 2020). at first, my classmates and people around me didn’t really care much about it, and sometimes people would even say “me too!”. after all, you’re a kid — who doesn’t like cartoons? but once I started high school, things slowly started getting worse. though that’s something I’ll talk about on another blog.

about two years ago, I had two friends, two people I genuinely cared about and eventually became very close with. but I feel like that new school somehow made them hide or downplay their interests, treating them like “nerdy” things, and they even started making jokes or comments that honestly didn’t sit right with me. for example, one time I posted a story on my private instagram acc making a joke with a Japanese song (a pretty famous one at the time — the “ruby-chan! haii! nani ga suki?” one, which was exactly why I used it), and one of them replied: "This is why you don't have a bf ” since I wasn’t expecting a comment like that, I couldn’t help but feel hurt.

these two friends also had another friend they had known for much longer, and you could say she’s way more of a geek than I am. I mean, while I own a decent amount of manga and a few posters, she literally has all her shelves filled with them, plus posters, figures, stickers… and she constantly posts anime rankings, favorite characters, unboxings — basically, she’s clearly not just a casual fan. and I know her, she’s actually really nice. what I didn’t understand was how those girls — who were ALSO MY friends — could make such mean comments or jokes behind my back when they had another friend who was, by their own standards, an “even bigger case.”

another time, in our friend chat group, they started talking about how there are “good otakus” and “bad otakus,” and with absolutely no tact, they told me that they, that other friend, and the rest of the group were “normal otakus,” while I was a “weird otaku.” that time, since I was already tired of their comments, I decided to speak up and say that I didn’t understand why, if they really saw me as “weird,” they felt the need to point it out in such a hurtful way. once they noticed I was getting upset or taking it seriously, they immediately brushed it off, saying “it’s not that deep” and “it’s not even a bad thing.” but if it’s not bad, then why present it in such a harmful way?

one of the last things they did before I stopped being friends with them was making jokes behind my back with other girls in the group about how “geeky” I was, laughing in that mocking way, as if they themselves had never watched anime or been K-pop fans in their lives.

after all that, and after spending some time thinking about those experiences, I realized something I used to see online all the time but that is actually true in real life too:

 you can be as geeky as you want, as long as you’re pretty. 

as long as you don’t “look” like it. As long as you do your best to hide parts of yourself. then people will accept you. 

but if you like expressing it more openly, if you don’t want to have a completely “normal” aesthetic (not that I even look alternative), and if you’re not pretty — which, personally, I don’t consider myself to be —

 then suddenly you’re weird, cringe, a nerd, a “bad otaku.”

That’s why being a geek is considered cool… until you’re not pretty.