this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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It's uh, a little complicated and not for polite company. It's shortened from "weeaboo" which you'll probably notice has absolutely nothing to do with anything because it's a nonsense word made up for that one Perry Bible Fellowship strip. At the same time people were being normal on 4chan and making fun of Japan-idolizing dorks with the term "wapanese" and a favorite /b/ modgame was to occasionally add an automatic wordfilter just to stir things up. Well at the bottom of the list there you can see wapanese=weeaboo and that stuck around for a while so the nonsense word picked up a meaning. You still see it written out sometimes but people are lazy so it's usually truncated.
tl;dr it means anime fan and like most web culture of a certain age it's 4chan's fault.
Thanks for the explanation. I gathered from context that it was a derogatory term, I just hadn't ever looked up what it really meant.
Light derogatory, most of the time it's used half-ironically by other people in the same fandom. (Which is the OP joke)
Isn't one of the guys popularized it is Filthy Frank by making a video focusing on Weaboos?
Edit: this is the video https://youtu.be/OFQQALduhzA
That probably signal-boosted it for normies but "weeb" was already very well established among nerds by that time.