Man, all this while I’ve been disliking conlitas and it turns out I’ve been thinking about a different breed of conlitas than “lolitas who only wear lolita to a convention”.
The kind of conlitas I’ve run into seem to display different characteristics, they tend not to have a favorite brand, or follow brand news, or actually sometimes they don’t even know what they’re wearing. They’re happy to dig up the shop link for you (usually taobao or some reseller), but it seems they have no thought of returning to the shop to check for new dresses, they seem to think buying lolita is like buying chicken or milk, just go to “taobao”, find a random dress that’s cute, and that’s that. If you want to chat about their outfit(s), that’s fine, and they’ll compliment you on your dress, too, but they have zero knowledge of other dresses outside of their own collection.
Replicas are another thing, it’s not whether they know they’re wearing a replica, they get a blank look when you tell them about the original. It’s like it doesn’t matter to them, maybe they can’t figure out why original vs replica is important when they’ve already worn the dress and won’t be re-wearing it anyway, idk.
They also tend not to be in any lolita comms. Not just ocal comms, they don’t seem to know CoF, Rufflechat, lolita amino, anything. I’d point them towards these places, but they never seem to join either. As for shared interests, none of them know Kamikaze Girls/Shimotsuma Monogatari, or Mana/Malice Mizer/MdM. I get that some girls are lonelitas, and not everybody has to like the same things, but this is the kind of combination that really makes me think these conlitas don’t even like lolita, it looks as if they can’t be bothered to actually be in the hobby aside from wearing one cute dress tone time.
tl;dr, they pretty much seem to be the fake nerd girls of lolita.