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Comment by leto_ii | Hacker News Reader

I think from a societal point of view there are patterns that are considered weird and patterns that are acceptable. There is of course a gray area, but it's not as wide as we might think (at least not in my experience).

If you consider an obsession with anime kind of cool then you probably don't consider it weird, at least not in the sense the concept is presented in the original article.

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Let's assume that you're genuinely interested in having a conversation, not just shifting the definition to fit your argument, and I will give it another go: Most subcultures regardless of the generation (e.g. punk, metal, emo) use "weirdness" to distinguish themselves (with music, fashion, looks) in order to distance themselves from the mainstream and are often considered cool as a result of that.

Ok, my definition of "weird" is: something that will get you marginalized under the prevailing norms of the society you live in. Something that is unusual, but doesn't get you marginalized, might be cool, but not weird.

Something that doesn't get you marginalized simply isn't weird.

In my experience, people who adopt a subculture do so partly to cope with being excluded from the mainstream. This is not always the case, of course, but I do think it's common.

The members of the subculture may be weird in my sense of the word (i.e. for the general population), but they won't be weird within their respective subculture. Within the subculture they will probably just be cool.

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