Thanksgiving is one of the best times of the year for bringing together families over food and festivities, except for when me-maw starts hitting the eggnog a little too hard and starts angrily reminding you every few minutes on how you only get re-written into the inheritance if you get married “to a real 3D girl”. We get it, election years can be so divisive. But here at Anime Maru we want to make sure that all of our readers can have a happy Thanksgiving, so we compiled a checklist of explaining your anime fandom to your various family members.

Mom and Dad:

Chances are your parents are already disgusted with your hobby, but in case anime is something you’ve gotten into while you’ve been away in college or you just became nocturnal like the average anime consumer as you got deeper into the hobby, here’s some tips:

Show them a clip of Spirited Away and say “it’s like Japanese Walt Disney!”

Pretend your body pillow and figurines were always there.

Understand that this is for the better, they were hoping to find a concrete reason for justifying the lingering feeling of disappointment that they’ve associated with you since you hit puberty. This is their reason now.

Aunts and Uncles:

Your Uncle isn’t allowed within 500 feet of your residence and your Aunt “doesn’t believe in perpetuatin’ a holiday invented by and for the Illuminati to inject our minds with brain-eating organisms through genetically modified turkey”, so unless your family has ham for Thanksgiving you’re in the clear!

Younger Cousins:

Show them Porter Robinson’s Shelter and say “haha isn’t anime ‘lit’?”

Grandma and Grandpa

This is the hard one, Grandma and Grandpa are not only notoriously cranky on Thanksgiving but have been worried about you ever since the noodle incident from Thanksgiving 2004. You can tell Grandpa’s starting to slip a little but Grandma still pretends to know how to use a computer and knows about the anime avatar you have as your Facebook profile picture. Here are some tips:

Explain it as “something a lot of young people are into now!” By now after watching Shelter your cousins have probably switched into their skimpiest outfits and have learned how to shuffle to head to an EDM festival; use them as reference.

Whatever you do, don’t mention that it’s Japanese. Grandpa’s from a different time and will be shouting curses at an imaginary George Takei once he gets some booze in him as it is.

When Grandma asks if you could pass the cranberry dressing, try to avoid mentioning how thanksgiving reminds you of your favorite episode of HenCheffu xxx2!! when your waifu Akari-chan has an orgasm intense enough to water the yam fields after she has a taste of the self-insert Chef MC’s cranberry dressing. I can assure you that this will not go well and you will be taken out of Grandma’s Will.

Hopefully this gave you some insight on sharing your hobby with the rest of your family. From the Anime Maru family, Happy Thanksgiving!

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