Like everyone else, I have a long list of bookmarks of Twitter posts because believe it or not, people out there still have interesting things to say.
However, it is cumbersome to have them in Twitter’s super inefficient and user-unfriendly “folder”, and some of the posts don’t really have enough to be their own blogpost for. I’ll be offloading the more interesting ones into posts like these.
Japan’s FGC plays everything
Japan’s scene has always felt more interesting because they appear to have fewer public squabbles and a greater focus on team and small but numerous community events, which is probably a second-order effect of just wanting to play and give that same opportunity to others.
As someone who was both a “fuck the competitive sweat losers” public server casual and a “so tired of the pubbers who don’t get it” competitive player at different points in my life, I try to be aware of my tribal aspects for gaming. While I haven’t explored any of these deeply and they’re mostly just conjecture from prior experiences, I think for the west:
People are turned off by anime-leaning fighting game visuals
Engaging with Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken players, I’ve found that they’re more “normie” leaning nerds. Their interaction with anime tends to be nonexistent or surface level, where mentions of it will earn anywhere from “I’m not into that shit” response to “Yo man I love [currently popular broad appeal shounen series]”.
They’ll have trouble either looking past or understanding the inspirations for various visual designs of characters in UNI2, Blazblue, or Guilty Gear; to the modern gamer anime designs are either ridiculous or comically sexualized (goonerbait).
This is typically enough to create a division by itself because to the “normie” leaning nerds, playing a game with anime stylization is weird and thus not worth engaging with. This may be a second-order effect of school-age socialization: interest in weird things makes you weird and a target for ridicule and/or ostracization.
The fighting game played by an individual tends to be their fighting game identity
I think there are few out there who would really label themselves as genre enthusiasts. Everyone tends to have a series or two within the genre that they like the most in terms of design, visual and gameplay. Personally, tag fighters like DBFZ, Power Rangers BFTG, Skullgirls, etc. are cool to watch but I don’t have the innate finesse for that kind of game and I don’t have the patience (anymore) to spend weeks and weeks learning subgenres I’m not immediately interested in. I stick to what I can juggle in my life, which is another form of comfort.
Additionally, a singular game or series tends to be worn on an individual’s sleeve as an aspect of their personality. I think tends to be where the most vocal lashouts against other games (“poverty” games) originate from.
For a group called the Fighting Game Community, I’ve noticed there isn’t really a lot of it. There are things like streamer discords and there are obviously locals for the lucky, but while arcades were fading away in the 90s, PC gamers had been developing online communities for years.
By the 2000s, it was cheap and easy for a gaming clan to form: Invisionfree php forums had free tiers, sites like 50Webs offered what were basically free landing pages and guestbooks, XFire offered IM specifically for gamers, and console gaming would introduce party systems.
You don’t really see clans in fighting games due to the 1v1 nature of the game, but I think a reason you see Japanese players able to play a multitude of fighting games is that they have the networks for it. They have established nooks and crannies for offline scenes and the JR enables easy access to them. I’ve talked about how you have to be crazy to start a local in the west and I think anyone babbling about “support your locals” and “just go to your local” is completely unserious.
I think one of the reasons Street Fighter 6 has maintained its population is that it took the “lobby as interactive space” concept that anime fighters pioneered and implemented it successfully via the Battle Hub. It’s a functioning community: you can go there and see the same names over and over again while encountering new ones consistently, there are lots of things to do in the Battle Hub between emulator cabinets, Extreme Battle, and avatar dress-up.
Lessons from Team Fortress 2 are portable
As a TF2 OG, it’s cathartic seeing the Valve developer commentary come up in discussion over and over again. The silhouettes of the TF2 cast let you pick out what class you’re fighting even through all the cosmetic sludge they’ve added, even though some of the cosmetics have gotten pretty bad about violating the recognition principle.
One of the unspoken comical bits of this post is that a lot of VTubers are both indistinct and given consistent costumes and makeovers over time. Mori Calliope is probably one of the better examples: I’m bombarded with knowledge of her existence but her constant is pink hair and a skull motif somewhere, with pink hair being almost a memetic anime character trait. She’s basically unrecognizable unless it’s explicitly stated that it’s her.
Meanwhile, I’ll always recognize this bastard:
Consumerism vs Consumerism, Japan
One thing that I’ve learned is that events like Comiket are a celebration of hobbyists. Anime/manga “parody” has sizable representation at Comiket but there’s also indie games and music, not to mention books on trains, tanks, and fashion. Most prices at Comiket have built in limits of $5~$20 depending on the medium to both foster an environment of hobbyist creativity and to avoid conflict with media conglomerates that own the IPs that some panels are “parodying”. Everyone is buying and consuming content but no one is getting rich at Comiket.
Anime cons in the west are more about consumerism. Everyone wants to own some item or artwork of the series they’re currently consuming so they feel like a “real fan”, and this group that desires to be a “real fan” becomes the outset market for every artist at a western convention. With the vice grip that indistinguishable Hoyoslop characters from Zenless Genshin Waves and indistinguishable VTubers have on anime, artists who want to make their own thing (in this case, original creation) have to have a preexisting fanbase to drive both sales and curiosity from con attendees.
At Otakon 2025, there was a massive falloff in interesting import content and a spike in plastic crap and whatever’s popular at the moment. For 2025, Umamusume finally made it overseas so all the booths stocked up on Umamusume stuff.
The markup wasn’t crazy and I was willing to pay the “con tax” on an out-of-production prize fig of Gold Ship, but I’ve been seeing the Anime Expo posts for 2026 and Umamusume stuff there is getting huge markups in price: stuff that’d normally be $25~$30 if you bought it in Japan getting marked up to $135+.
Additionally, there were a lot of booths with cheap ABS plastic molds of weapons from Halo, Gears of War, Warhammer 40k, and others. A lot, to the point where you could move between rows of booths and see another booth with the same ABS plastic weaponry.
Unseriousness
This is a shorter one. Despite this post being two years old, the term “unserious” has stuck with me as an excellent way to describe a certain type of person with one word. Those who are unserious:
- Have a lot to say about a given topic, but don’t have sufficient experience with it
- Have grand ambitious and fantasies of fame and adoration, but don’t have the attitude and work ethic required
I think this shares territory with the repurposing of the acronym LARP as a way to describe someone pretending to like or do something for the social recognition and benefits associated with that something.