No offense but when are these takes trying to provide some âdefenseâ for bullying because the objects of the bullying were âtoo weirdâ going to stop. Like people donât usually develop these kinds of âstrangeâ or anti-social behaviors in a vacuum anyways. I knew a girl in middle school who did the growling thing and she had been bullied since the 3rd grade, long before she got into anime. She did the growling thing because kids would physically harass her and teachers wouldnât do anything about it, but they stopped when she started doing that. She told me it was easier to stomach getting made fun of for doing âweirdâ things/having âweirdâ interests than it was to have inherit facts about herself mocked. Â
Like I know some Anime Kids in school were invariably dicks but you still canât ultimately use odd or âcringyâ behavior to justify the cruel choices of other people to mock and torment others. So many of these kids have tons of trauma from being mocked just for having a particular interest or sense of style. Was a kid wearing a raccoon tail to school because they thought it was fun and cute really worth mocking them to the point of self-hatred? If kids were getting bullied to the point of tears in this year because they liked to do Fornite Dances in the lunchroom would you think itâs funny and that the kids deserve bullying for being weird?Â
And this shit was also just like an excuse to even more safely pick on people who were already on the âto-bullyâ list. Think about how many people from this group were fat or not white or gay or neurodivergent and how that played into how they were ostracized in the first place. A lot of these kids wouldâve gotten bullied even if they werenât into anime/doing These Particular Weird Things because thatâs what bullies do. Thatâs what bullies were doing before they âgot into weird stuffâ and itâs what they wouldâve continued doing. Stop trying to make it a funny joke that people decided to traumatize their classmates because their classmates tried to commit the crime of having âabnormalâ fun or having âabnormalâ ways of dealing with harassment.Â
And sometimes you just get mocked for your interests while behaving completely normal and non-cringy. I never did any of typical weeb shit in elementary school, I sat quietly and read manga or was drawing and Iâd get mocked just for that and being told to stop doing that.
Same with video games, I constantly got ridiculed by my female peers for playing vidya and told that my interests were worthless. That Iâm wasting time while I could do [insert another hobby here].
People are dicks and they donât need a reason to bully people. Usually the âreasonâ is bullshit anyway.
Like, what, youâll gonna bully a goddamn child for doing ninja run? Get over yourself.
