People wrap their social acceptance (or lack thereof) up with various forms of identity, and hobbies are no exception. This is the wrong foot to start off on, as it binds social acceptance to your engagement with your hobby. Suddenly, being accepted socially becomes a function of whether or not you’re “too into” this or that.

This works both ways, too. Just as many people connect being an otaku with low social acceptance, many otaku see low social acceptance as part of being an otaku, and thus internalize their own social ostracism. It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of social rejection.

The key is to disconnect social acceptance from your hobby entirely. It’s possible to be a perfectly socially-acceptable person who ­also reads Kodomo no Jikan. These two details of your life are completely different and there’s no need to link them.

The impulse to link hobbies with social acceptance is partially passive, as a background radiation of fan society, and partially active, as a socially-reinforced thought pattern. The idea is that you “trade” social skills for fandom expertise, so that the most knowledgeable, most highly-committed people in the subculture happen to also be the least adept at engaging with anyone but each other.