No offense but when are these takes trying to provide some “defense” for bullying because the objects of the bullying were “too weird” going to stop. Like people don’t usually develop these kinds of “strange” 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 wouldn’t 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 “weird” things/having “weird” interests than it was to have inherit facts about herself mocked.

Like I know some Anime Kids in school were invariably dicks but you still can’t ultimately use odd or “cringy” 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 it’s funny and that the kids deserve bullying for being weird?

And this shit was also just like an excuse to even more safely pick on people who were already on the ‘to-bully’ 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 would’ve gotten bullied even if they weren’t into anime/doing These Particular Weird Things because that’s what bullies do. That’s what bullies were doing before they “got into weird stuff” and it’s what they would’ve 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 “abnormal” fun or having “abnormal” ways of dealing with harassment.