Animu and Mango

About

Animu and Mango is an intentional misuse of the words “anime” and manga". The phrase is typically used by critics of otaku culture to mock japanohiles who give attempt to give a word a Japanese pronunciation when none existed prior. The phrase is also used by western otakus who intentionally use the terms as a way of poking fun at their own community, and own selves.

Origin

The exact origin of the use of the phrase is unknown, but it has been postulated that the use of “mango(s)” might have originated as mistranslations around the time when otaku culture began to become more widespread in Southeast Asia. In many Southeast Asian countries, the word for “mango” translates to “mangga”, and was most likely the cause for some inital confusion which eventually in turn gave rise to an ironic use of the word both off and online.^[1] At some point the term made its way over onto the western web, most likely originating on either the Something Awful forums, or 4chan’s /a/ board. On May 1st, 2005, Urban Dictionary user Area Denial posted a definition for “animu”,^[2] descirbing it as:

The word Animu is a joke used to describe both Anime and Japanophiles who attempt to give Japanese sounding pronunciations to words that were not Japanese to begin with. It is not meant to describe any specific form of Anime.

It is my belief that the word originated on the SA forums.

Stop watching all that animu crap.

Spread

On September 29th, 2007, the French animated series, Code Lyoko aired its 86th episode titled “Canine Conundrum”.^[3] In the episode the character Jim tells several other younger characters that they, “watch too many stupid Japanese mangos.” The clip of Jim saying this was later uploaded to YouTube by YouTuber KeroKaminaX on October 19th, 2013 (shown below).

On May 4th, 2014, YouTuber Baka Oppai uploaded a video titled “Animu Stew” which includes various clips from various anime series and edited with several humorous sound samples and audio tracks (shown below, left) As of August 2015, the video has over 2.2 million views. On March 29th, 2015, Let’s Player, Pewdiepie uploaded a video titled “ANIMU IN REALLIFE!” in which he attempts to edit several photos of real people into those of anime characters (shown below, right).

At some point the image sharing site, 4chan renamed it’s /a/ board from “Anime & Manga” to “Animu & Mango”, it has since been changed back. It should be noted that the site Archive.moe, a site dedicated to archiving 4chan threads, still uses “Animu & Mango” as the heading for /a/.^[4] Also the /a/ wiki’s url is “animu-mango.wikia”.^[5] On Reddit, the largest anime subreddit is known as /r/animu.^[6] On Tumblr there are various posts tagged under both “animu” and “animu and mango”.^[7][8]

Search Interest

External References