/jp/ - Otaku Culture

The oldschool otaku culture had cool shit like Macross and Urusei Yatsura to draw upon, plus scores more cool shows, and was pretty creative (e.g. Gainax, Daicon and other opening animations created for various cons by fans, garage kits...). Creativity is still around, like Touhou and shit, but different.

Moe has been around for a while, but never as much as today and older sci-fi, mecha, etc. otaku are not always going to be into that stuff.

With regard to the western scene in particular, much of the mystique of anime is not there any more. In the old days, anime was a cult of fansubs, Usenet discussion, university anime clubs, and an underground feeling. These folks handcrafted homepages in html, wrote FAQs, subscribed to anime 'zines, and other such occult activities. The culture now is different, the fix is almost to easy to get, normies have invaded, cookie cutter blogs and social media lack the rustic charm of web 1.0, and so on.