A new breed of weeaboo

Most people who use the Internet in some capacity are aware of what a weeaboo is, but for those who don’t, it’s basically someone who’s obsessed with Japanese culture. Anime, manga, some sort of incorrect image of old glorious Japan – these are the sort of things they go crazy for. If you’ve ever seen a picture of some white kids with an anime messenger bag, a Dragonball Z T-shirt and are trying to use words like kawaii or neko in their sentences, those are weeaboos. You can go look them up on Dramatica or something if you really want to, but you may go insane.

Anyway, as it turns out there’s a group that’s actually worse than the weeaboos. I don’t have a term for it, but it’s basically people who are obsessed with Irish culture. My girlfriend and I have been taking a basic class on the Irish language, and the people in the class are horrendous – far worse than those in our Japanese class. It’s funny how you can change the subject of a class but the people pretty much stay the same. There’s the one or two overly zealous people that chime in all the time because they know Irish from that guy at that bar; the guy who doesn’t say much but then out of nowhere goes on a ten minute tangent and tries to prove the teacher wrong; and of course, the deer caught in headlights.

It probably has to do with them having a cultural connection that others don’t have with Japanese. Someone’s mother or family was from County Mayo or County Cork or something like that – so that means that they have to reconnect with that culture somehow. It’s funny how these people instantly start using the term ‘we’ (i.e. inclusively) to describe ‘the Irish’. Learning how to properly pronounce “céad míle fáilte” or how to say “I’m drunk” in Irish doesn’t grant you that right. Similarly, that doesn’t mean that you get to blather on about the one part of Irish culture you read about on Wikipedia.

Urgh.