/lain/ - lain.iwakura

I agree that you dont become a bigger fan by buying stuff. This reminds me of these tiktokers showing off their otaku rooms.
They are like: Bitch I am the biggest "02" fan because I got posters/figures/clothing everywhere.
But on the other side. I have nothing against people who dont show off their otaku rooms.
Its only for their viewing purposes only and they dont care about the others.
Everyone has to admit that it looks dope doesnt it.

>Being a true fan of lain is like being a true believer in zen. You represent it by not trying to represent it. You are without trying to be. Or you try to be and minimize your chance of being.
I do not understand that part though.

>>1150
Well I don't use tiktok but I know what you mean, consooming casuals acting tough. ^^
I have actually preordered a 02-Nendoroid just because I know that 'these' kinds of weebs will pay double for it when it's sold out.
Yeah I think these kind of rooms look dope and I've got some showcases and wall scrolls myself. I just never gave anything about decoration until I started realizing that everything can be decoration that I like and not only live-love-laugh tier decoration. So I ended up kinda collecting anime stuff.

>I do not understand that part though.
Have you read or heared anything about zen? By Alan Watts for example?
Zen is this weird thing which's meaning can explicitly not be put into words, so you can only intuitively understand it. In order to make someone understand "it" zen-masters give their students koans which are unsolvable riddles. And the mechanism is something like "you will not find out if you focus on it". Like the toaster that only pops when you're not looking or the way you only breathe naturally, when you are not thinking about your breathing patterns. And I think in exactly this way lain-femdom behaves. By not trying, but by intuitively identifying with it's aesthetics or (self analyzed) meanings and so on.

>>1151
>And I think in exactly this way lain-femdom behaves.
>lain-femdom
mmm yes please

You might be able to justify buying the T-shirt if you actually need a T-shirt, because then you are not just "consuming" something. To me, consuming something means that you use up its value in a short time. For example, the value of a meal only lasts for the few hours of energy it gives you, and the average YT video does not give you any value after you've finished watching it. So you consume food and consume the shit put out by your favourite """content creators""" (anyone else hate how corporate and industrial that phrase sounds?)

If you have loads of shirts already and buy the cheap Lain tee just to satisfy a temporary desire to show how much you love the show, then that's consumption. If the shirt is useful beyond that - i.e. it clothes you regularly for years - I don't see a problem.

Regardless, I think the /lain/ way would be to get your own design printed by an on-demand shirt-printing company, instead of paying some unknown middle-man for being able to use "Color To Alpha" in a photo editor

>>1152
whoops, I meant fandom, but I'll take it that way or another. ^^

>>1153
I like you defintion of consumption and it sounds like a good orientation when in doubt. For me it still doesn't make sense because I explicitly only wear cheap basic black shirts in order to not being able to being catched by fashion corpo psyops that I "need" this or that.

Lol I have actually used that method a few times. Before I switched to all black basic I kinda only wore shirts that I printed "myself" (=via some online printing company).

I don't blame people for wanting things that were designed to be wanted.

>>1155
Indeed, but what does wanting something mean? Where does that desire come from? Is it based on your beliefs or has it been inserted by some kind of marketing move? So I think reflecting on your desires and thinking critically about consume is something one should do from time to time.

>>1156
Case 1
>need shirt
>want shirt thats cool(personal definition) instead of a ugly one
>buy

Case 2:
>do not need shirt
>see cool shirt
>buy

>>1157
Yeah that's 2 very good scenarios. I like that straightforward answer. Still, I think it's important to think about your "needs" to clarify if they are actually yours or media-induced.

>>1158
Need as in, dont have shirt or current shirts make you look like a hobo which makes people treat you like shit.

yea is society induced but we live in a society(lol)

if you live the unabomber life you probably dont want a lain shirt

>>1159
You're not wrong, but that was not was I was meaning. Obviously you need shirts when you're working as a salesman or protection clothes when you're going to ride a motorbike.
I was thinking more about something like this:
>I could use another shirt
>I don't need expensive or flashy shirts, I like basics
>Seeing something that is made by a brand with which's brand identity you can relate yourself to
>You are going to buy this peace for the tripple price than a basic shirt, that you were planing to buy

>>1160
you're paying for the labor, a graphic t shirt needs screen printing labor, a plain one doesnt

add the price of graphic printing + the supulus for the maker + shipping + tax and you can make the calculation yourself,

You want something cool you gotta pay more than something boring because something cool takes more time and labor to turn from boring to cool.

If you feel its worth the price it buy it, if you buy into marketing youre retarded and should buy it anyway because thats another reason keeping you working 9-5 instead of an hero.

you buy a graphic shirt to show off the graphic to others, imagine youre paying for social credit instead of paying for some coked up chinaman, might make you feel better idk

The truest otaku make their own fan merch to a high standard. One step below that is collecting super rare items. You should never buy Chinese bootlegs unless that design was never made available for sale or has been sold out with no restock in sight. If you really want a shirt, I suggest commissioning an artist and having it printed at a local shop. I usually end up buying merch that's at least somewhat useful in daily life. Don't forget that buying nice things indirectly means more nice things will be produced.

>>1149
stop being a pussy and man up.

if you earn your money by labor spend it if you want,(unless its more than like 25 bucks then you're just braindamaged) shit buy crack and smoke it nigga have some some self respect and make your own decisions instead of basing it in barely populated webspaces.

>>1149
>consoomer-tier cringe
I get that, but one thing that occurs to me is the prospect of wearing a shirt like that and someone coming up, out of the blue, with a knowing look in their eyes, and introducing themselves by saying, "present day, present time?". I'd probably do that if I ever saw someone wearing that shirt. Having never met another person IRL who has seen SEL, a moment like that might be nice.
>dao
>zen
One extreme might be to never wear or buy anything that plays into consoomerism, but might that not be just as robotic of a behavior as always wearing and always buying everything that plays into consoomerism? Surely there is a middle path where one can say, without falling into some sort of trap, "Heh, I just like that shirt."
>Alan Watts for example?
I always enjoyed reading Watts, but enjoy listening to recordings of him even more. He was a good teacher and a captivating speaker.

Here's a quote from Terrance McKenna, another captivating speaker from the hippy era counter culture. I always think of this quote when I see pictures of heavily decorated rooms like pictures of some anon's otaku hideouts…

"Technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization, we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles… This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects."

The idea of a highly decorated room as a coral reef composed of psychic objects is an interesting idea.

.>>1196
>and someone coming up, out of the blue, with a knowing look in their eyes, and introducing themselves by saying, "present day, present time?"
bruh this is some "the narwhal bacons at midnight" shit, embarrassing, i can't believe you wrote that, looked at it, and posted it instead of erasing it out of overwhelming shame

>>1197
I honestly don't see that as being any different then dropping that line in a thread, which happens all the time. Nothing to be taken seriously. Just an off the cuff joke. In all likelihood, it would probably play out more like when you see someone wearing a t-shirt of a band, who's music you know inside and out, so you mention a song lyric to them as an inside joke to test the waters, only to find out that they have no idea what you're talking about because they only thought the t-shirt looked cool and vaguely projected an image they wanted to uphold for whatever reason. An approach like that can have it's benifits in that it screens out posers from those who have sincere interest. Not so much a secret handshake as a flippant joke to see if you're talking to someone who you'd have to explain the punchline to, like…
>the narwhal bacons at midnight
Had to look up the details on that one up. Not so familiar with Reddit in jokes. Maybe I'm not the only one in this thread who has no sense of shame? I don't really get what you're getting at with that, because you could probably throw a rock into any random crowd and hit a dozen Redditors, while SEL fans are a fringe group within an already fringe group.

>>1198
>SEL fans are a fringe group within an already fringe group.
wrong

>>1149
if you want buy it if you dont dont buy it stop letting the internet make decisions about your life

>>1198

wtf are you going on about, you did something retarded on a completely anonymous board, stop trying to justify your actions to the glowing screen move on faggot

>>1199
ok. if that is wrong, let's consider the opposite…
>SEL fans are a mainstream group within an already mainstream group
but that doesn't seem to make any sense…
can you elaborate on that one word reply?

>>1201
Someone who thinks Lain is not just underground but fringe of fringe is not in touch with reality, this is not a sikrit club, anime is nearly as mainstream as it could ever get (in the west) and SEL gets more new fans every day, faster than it used to. One out of five times I check the comments on a YouTube video I see a Lain profile picture, too.

>>1202
I think lain is still underground within anime. Out of 20 anime enjoyers, 15 are casuals and 1-2 know lain. That's not fringe within fringe, but it still is a very autistic - in a positive sense - genre and story.
You probably just watch videos that have a lot of overlapping to that /cyber/-genre

So there is no misunderstanding and no one has to continue talking past one another in regards to this, what I was trying to communicate with…
>fringe within fringe
Is that I consider anime to be a fringe interest. Nearly 8 billion people in the world. How many watch anime regularly? If you don't think, when looking at it in that way, that anime is not a fringe interest among people then I don't know what to tell you. And SEL is not an anime that even the majority of anime fans have watched in it's entirety. Again, not a majority, but a fringe group of enthusiasts. Fringe of a fringe or whatever. Here's an example, consider that Touhou fandom is lager then SEL fandom, then go outside and ask random people who their favorite Touhou character is. You're going to get a majority of people responding… Could you repeat that? What's a Touhou? I used that phrase to make an objective point, not a subjective distinction like…
>Someone who thinks Lain is not just underground but fringe of fringe is not in touch with reality
Whatever that might subjectively mean from one person to another, I couldn't presume to say, but objectively speaking there are more people, by a large margin, that haven't seen SEL and don't know what itis, then there are people who have. That's the point.
and as far as…
>One out of five times I check the comments on a YouTube video I see a Lain profile picture, too.
I think that anyone that could even reflect in detail about the avatars accompanying youtube commenters could be considered in the minority, or to put it another way, in a demographic fringe group.

>>1198
>>1205
ROFL i made you type a lot

>>1208
Of course, odds are you were larping the hur-hurrrrrrr-i-was-just-pretending-to-be- retarded shtick. Nothing new there. Inevitable aspect of anonymous posting that isn't likely to surprise anyone who visits smaller homespun image boards. An anon either finds decent conversation with like minds or engages in a writing exercise for themselves or the sake of a thread they're interested in seeing develop. One can never be completely certain, because there are legitimately functional illiterates who are all thumbs and mistake a brief moments worth of downtime keyboard mashing, that one wishes to engage in, with…
>ROFL i made you type a lot
Curious if you ever break character and what you get out of trying to portray yourself as someone making anons do what it is that they have already set out to do? I've seen that approach instituted as policy on different /b/ boards to drive muh pph, but, not only is that usually unsuccessful, I can't see that approach having much utility on a slow niche board like this.

>>1195
I must've overlooked that one. My thread has nothing to do with me needing someone else decide for me, just with curiosity over how other people get along with the thin line between buying and consooming.

>>1210
theres no thin line, they're both the same, buying and coomsuming its what you believe it its, buying anime figures might seem like just a buying hobby for one, but as degenerate coomsuming to others, same with guns, clothes, and women.

its only bad if it takes over a part of your life, but theyre one in the same.

>>1209
nigga i wrote a single word besides quoting you and you wrote an essay, you are not even responding to anything anyone did

>>1149
It's a fucking shirt. Just buy it!

>>1149
yes i also make my decisions based on the internet hivemind