/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Wearing a mask can thus be a strange thing: sometimes, more often than we tend to believe, there is more truth in the mask that in what we assume to be our "real self." Recall the proverbial impotent shy person who, while playing the cyberspace interactive game, adopts the screen identity of a sadistic murderer and irresistible seducer - it is all too simple to say that this identity is just an imaginary supplement, a temporary escape from his real life impotence. The point is rather that, since he knows that the cyberspace interactive game is "just a game," he can "show his true self," do things he would never have done in real life interactions - in the guise of a fiction, the truth about himself is articulated. Therein resides the truth of the charming story like Alexandre Dumas’ The Man Behind the Iron Mask: what if we should turn around the topic according to which, in our social interactions, we wear masks covering out hidden true face? What if, on the contrary, in order for us to interact in public with our true face, we have to have a mask somewhere hidden, deposed, a mask rendering our unbearable excess, what is in us more than ourselves, a mask which we can put on only exceptionally, in the carnevalesque moments when the standard rules of interaction are suspended? In other words, what if the true function of the mask is not to be worn, but to be kept hidden?

I will continously post this now until y'all have read it. Yes it's hyper relevant to holos.