Social and political movements eventually reach a point where they cease being about helping people and shift focus toward perpetuating the movement itself. In addition to making them more extreme, this causes them to be more insular and less accepting of people who don’t fit the mold of the ideal member of the movement.

Otaku have endured decades as a social and political scapegoat. Ever since the Tsutomu Miyazaki killings of 1988 and 1989, it’s been a back-and-forth between vilifying otaku and using their culture and cultural products to help the Japanese economy. This occurs on both sides of the Pacific, where Western anime fans are quick to inaccurately assert that “otaku” is a heinous insult in Japan, while continuing to consume media made by and for Japanese otaku.

In today’s politicized world, the habit of politicizing everything has found its way into many niche spaces, including anime. This manifests in many ways, from the political outspoken-ness of prominent figures and the birth of outlets with clear social and political agendas, to the rise of opposition movements and websites, taking opposite political views.

In reality, anime and the culture surrounding it contain plenty of reasons for both ends of the political spectrum to find them objectionable. What’s more, both ends of the spectrum can find enough useful elements of anime culture to use the medium to recruit for their side.

As a result, subcultures external to anime are willing to use it on a surface level in order to advance their own subcultures, but are unwilling to give anything back to anime. Further, political interests, in particular, are especially fickle, as they’ll use the anime subculture to the extent of its usefulness, only to turn around an attack it once it does something that disagrees with the ideology.