/ya/ - Waifu Culture

I considered a few things for today, and decided to talk about waifus a little before these Valentine's day pictures become any older...

I think the term "waifu" is very easily misunderstood, but it's really due to the etymology of the word in the first place.  It's almost like saying "comfort food" and expecting everyone to imagine the same food.  "Waifu" is one of those concepts, that if taken at all seriously, is wildly different from person to person.  Lots of people treat it as a joke, only have a waifu when a holiday comes around and they want to be in the collages on 4chan, or the word waifu to them only really means 'favorite character,' so it changes every season.  I think that those kinds of definitions are pretty pointless, since there's no need for a special word for things in those categories, it's kind of redundant for waifu to be a synonym for favorite character.  That isn't to say that I am in the camp that intentionally seeks out schitzophrenia by talking to my fumofumo of Suwako and pretending she talks back, but I certainly feel a deeper bond than I would with a character that could be described as simply my favorite character.  Real or imagined, I feel certain obligations in terms of keeping up with her merchandise releases and putting on the show for her at holidays and such that I wouldn't ever really feel with anyone else.  Whether it makes sense of not is kind of irrelevant in my opinion, since it's something personal that I enjoy, so why overexamine it?  I'll leave it at that, since I kind of feel like in these cases less explanation can be more explanation, since it's such a slippery concept in the first place.  Feel free to comment with your thoughts, pictures, or whatever.

In terms of scanlation (since I'm not an interesting person, that's probably why you're here), I'm feeling really good about the amount of momentum we have right now.  My only real concern is that my editing side manager will get tired of 'filling in' on actual cleaning and typesetting if we don't get a couple solid editors, but it's really too early in the game to worry about whether or not recruiting is working out (we haven't even put out our first release (it'll be Mei, and it'll be really soon) to get real distribution of a recruiting page going yet).  I feel slightly split in terms of projects, but in a much better way than before, since I've limited myself personally to three projects, so they're all labors of love rather than things I feel obligated to do.  More tomorrow.