User:JamieJ4MMUJAM/sandbox

Weeaboo Weeaboo is a mostly derogatory slang term for a Western person who is obsessed with Japanese culture, especially anime, often regarding it as superior to all other cultures. This word is similar to the offensive term in Japan Otaku which is a word also used to make fun of people.

History
The word weeaboo came about as an alternative for the term Wapanese}}, a blend of white or wannabe with Japanese. Wapanese was used extensively on the website [[4chan in the early 2000s to insult white people who were deemed overly fond of and biased towards Japanese culture, particularly popular exports like anime, manga, and hentai. The abusive term was added to the online Racial Slur Database in 2004.

According to Know Your Meme, Wapanese peaked in 2005, prompting 4chan moderators to apply a special filter replacing all instances of Wapanese with, arbitrarily, weeaboo.

The term weeaboo was coined as a nonsense word without any particular meaning in the comic The Perry Bible Fellowship. Thanks to the word filter, weeaboo took on its current meaning in 2005 and has spread outward from 4chan to other websites.

The term has now gone mainstream, no longer used just by people online but by newspapers and youtube. This spike is popularity is credited in part by a popular youtuber Filthy Frank who posted a video about weeaboos popularizing the term. While the term is usually used as a derogatory term, the popularization of the word has allowed the anime community to embrace the word, even describing themselves as such.

Kim Morrissy a member of the anime streaming website Crunchyroll wrote that the meaning of the word otaku is hindered by cultural appropriation, and that some westerners believe that it can only refer to a Japanese person, as the concept is not directly translatable and is a quintessentially Japanese phrase.

In a blog post on a popular anime website, Anime News Network, Justin Sevakis a member of the team gave the main difference between the two, saying that there is nothing wrong with loving Japanese culture. He points out that a person only becomes a weeaboo when they start to become annoying, immature, and ignorant about the culture they love. Matt Jardin from the Alaska Dispatch gave an opinion on the definition saying that weeaboos blindly prefer things from Japan while looking down on anything else despite obvious merit.