Otaku-Bolsonarist Manifesto

God, Homeland, Family, and Moë

1. Introduction

Otaku culture has collapsed. After the pandemic, cultural tourism within the otaku community grew exponentially, with tourists even taking pride in it and calling themselves “LARPers,” despite the term's originally pejorative meaning. TikTok was the greatest vehicle for cultural tourism and LARP culture: easy, widespread access to anime edits, content, and clips, alongside anime becoming available on Netflix, made it accessible to the average normie, a creature incapable of piracy. This also correlates with the mass arrival of leftists in Brazilian otaku circles. They had always existed, but they were a minority, since Brazil's main pre-pandemic otaku communities were imageboards, Facebook groups, and, toward the end of the decade, Discord groups. The status quo there was to be male and right-wing. Only after the pandemic did women and leftists enter otaku circles in large numbers.

The connection between otaku culture and Bolsonarism is already an old one. It emerged around 2017–2018 on our imageboards and on Facebook. Bolsonaro himself even referred in tweets to anime-style artwork made in his honor. Throughout almost the entire original 2018 campaign, the vast majority of the otaku community stood with our President Jair Messias Bolsonaro. Meanwhile, the vast majority of tourists, women, and homosexuals were obviously with the PT. One thing apparent from the “Ele Não” movement is that very few otakus joined it at the time, and most of those who did were women.

Bolsonaro opposes the PT just as the otaku opposes tourism. Cultural tourism is, in its essence, consubstantial with PT ideology. Both have a common objective, a common enemy. The man who robs a people of its culture, who takes someone's imaginative world and distorts it, planting his fallacies within the people's imagination. Just as the PT supporter does this, the Tourist does the same within the otaku community, taking otaku categories, otaku culture, and otaku deliberations and stripping them of their essence in the service of tourist progressivism. The PT does the same to Brazilian culture and the Brazilian people in the pursuit of Socialism. Both the tourist and the PT supporter are equally vermicidal and harmful to culture.

The cultural tourist cannot receive a tradition without first translating it into the ideological categories he already brings with him; thus, upon entering a community, he does not come to know it: he replaces it with a caricature he can understand. The PT supporter, especially the Gramscian “intellectual” PT supporter, operates in the same way, with the difference that he does so deliberately.

And here the Otaku-Bolsonarist emerges. The Otaku-Bolsonarist is the man who realizes that defeating the tourists, the leftists, and the sodomites requires uniting otaku culture with Bolsonarism, so as to repel the tourists and filter them out. The patriotic otaku must be a Bolsonarist, not necessarily because of Jair's competence, nor Flávio's, but to protect the beauty of moe. The beauty of waifus, which are losing their value; the beauty of enjoying Slice of Life without judgment; the beauty of not having to pretend to like Shounen. The beauty of God, homeland, family, and moe.

2. The Principles of Otaku-Bolsonarism

A movement that knows only what it hates is condemned to disappear along with its enemies. Otaku-Bolsonarism does not exist solely against the tourist; it exists in favor of a particular way of living and preserving otaku culture.

We must secure the existence of our otaku culture and a future for otaku life. For the beauty of moe must not disappear from the earth.

I now introduce the three principles of Otaku-Bolsonarism:

I — Love your waifu. Do not treat her as a mere product, a disposable aesthetic, or the character of the season, but as an expression of genuine affection for the work and the imaginative world she represents.

II — Loyalty to Captain Jair Messias Bolsonaro. The Otaku-Bolsonarist recognizes the Captain as the political symbol of resistance to PT ideology and to the cultural dissolution opposed by this manifesto.

III — Be an otaku. Consuming anime is not enough. One must belong to the culture, know it, cultivate it, and receive it as something that precedes oneself, rather than enter it merely to reshape it according to outside fashions.

3. Massification and the Corruption of the Otaku Imagination

Anime is not merely what appears on a screen, nor can it be reduced to dialogue, character designs, or the sum of its external elements. Anime is not defined by its accidental features, but by what it can convey as an art form: beauty, melancholy, sadness, happiness, overcoming adversity, friendship, love, and countless other human categories filtered through a distinctly Japanese sensibility. Like literature, it can nourish the imagination, add new categories to the mind, and allow us to experience, however indirectly, realities we have never lived.

Within otaku culture itself, there are forms even more directly connected to imagination. The light novel leaves the task of mentally forming the world it describes almost entirely to the reader; the visual novel, although it adds images, music, and voice, preserves much of the intimacy and rhythm of reading; manga occupies an intermediate position; and anime, by providing much of its sensory representation already formed, demands less of the viewer's imagination. This does not make it inferior as art: it simply means that each medium nourishes the imagination by different paths.

The problem begins when these works cease to be seen as works and come to be seen merely as content. The massification of otaku culture has created a market in which characters, scenes, and symbols can be consumed entirely apart from the stories that gave them meaning. The character ceases to be a character and becomes merely an aesthetic; the work ceases to be an experience and becomes a catalog; the fan stops seeking what moves him and starts seeking what he can possess, display, or recognize.

It is symptomatic that some figure collectors, especially women who use TikTok, admit to buying characters simply because they find them pretty, without having read, played, or watched the work they came from. There is nothing wrong with appreciating a beautiful object; the problem arises when this superficial relationship comes to represent otaku culture itself. At that point, the figure is no longer a material reminder of a beloved work: the work becomes merely an advertisement for the figure.

It is this reversal that corporate massification encourages. No longer: “Get to know a work, love its characters, and perhaps wish to own something that reminds you of it,” but: “See the character, desire her, buy her, move on to the next.” Consume, consume, consume. Culture stops producing affection and starts producing turnover.

The contemporary attempt to symbolically expel lolicon from otaku culture is, above all, a falsification of its history. Lolicon, bishōjo, and the aestheticization of fictional female youth did not emerge yesterday as a marginal aberration: they are intertwined with the historical formation of the otaku imagination itself and have remained present for decades in manga, anime, games, and doujinshi.

What changed radically was not only Japanese production, but the audience that began receiving it. Tropes, designs, and jokes that circulated with relative normality within the fandom ten or fifteen years ago now frequently have to be purged, apologized for, or reinterpreted to satisfy sensibilities external to the subculture. The “expulsion” of lolicon is therefore emblematic of otaku culture's transformation into mass culture: first new audiences enter; then those audiences retrospectively apply their own criteria to the tradition they encountered; finally, what belonged for decades to the subculture's normal vocabulary is presented as though it had never belonged to it at all.

4. Jair Messias Bolsonaro, the People's Captain

Jair Messias Bolsonaro enters Otaku-Bolsonarism not merely as a politician, but as a symbol. For us, the Captain represents the refusal to bow before a cultural, media, and political establishment that for decades sought to dictate what Brazilians could think, admire, and defend. His importance to this movement does not depend on the absurd notion that he has never made a mistake, nor that every decision he made was perfect. It follows from the historical role he played in giving political form to a revolt that already existed diffusely throughout Brazilian society.

Not only Captain Jair, but Olavo as well: Olavo theorized, demonstrated, studied; Olavo provides the theoretical foundation for the defense of Otaku-Bolsonarism. Olavo was this country's greatest teacher of the twenty-first century. Without Olavo, we would not have a right wing. Olavo was what made Bolsonarism possible.

Bolsonaro as president is different from Bolsonaro as leader of the right. Bolsonaro may have been too moderate a president, even cowardly in a certain respect. But he was our president, our legend, our Duce. Unjustly imprisoned for a coup that, yes, he should have carried out, but was too frightened to carry out. A man who allowed himself to be judged by his enemies. Bolsonaro is not a perfect man, but we do not expect perfection from Bolsonaro. We should expect perfection only from Our Lord Jesus Christ. Bolsonaro is a man and therefore cannot be perfect. We owe loyalty to Jair Messias Bolsonaro because he is a relatively honest man within Brazilian politics.

Jair Messias Bolsonaro is our leader, and that is that. There is no “Third Way.” If you support the MBL, the PT, or anything other than BOLSONARO, you are not right-wing. Not as a purely ideological matter: in theory, you may be right-wing; in practice, however, you are not, because you are either with Bolsonaro or with the establishment, with the “system,” with the oligarchies, with the political bosses, with the Yankees. Not because Bolsonaro carries an absolute truth, but because the struggle is against enemies who hold power. In theory you may be of the furthest right, but if you support anyone other than Jair and prefer to cast a null vote rather than vote for Bolsonaro while calling yourself right-wing, you are anything but right-wing. Because, like it or not, Bolsonaro is our only way out against the PT. Bolsonaro is the representation of the right. Bolsonaro carries on his shoulders the closest thing we can call the Brazilian right.

5. The Cultural Tourist: The Antithesis of Culture

I call a tourist someone who, upon encountering Japanese culture, refuses to understand it on its own terms and demands that it adapt to the values, categories, and sensibilities he possessed before encountering it. He does not seek to enter into the work; he seeks to reshape it ad ipsam imaginem.

This phenomenon is not intrinsic to the left or the right. There is, for example, the right-wing tourist who claims that anime is intrinsically reactionary. This interpretation may grasp fragments of truth: certain works preserve traditional conceptions of family, duty, honor, hierarchy, sacrifice, or the difference between the sexes. But turning these elements into a universal definition of anime reduces an extremely heterogeneous cultural tradition to a Western political category.

There is also an interesting contradiction: anime, as an artistic and industrial phenomenon, is profoundly modern. Its language, techniques, mass circulation, and much of its history belong unequivocally to modernity. At the same time, certain works may carry in their essence themes, symbols, or sensibilities that seem alien, and sometimes opposed, to the modern spirit. Simply classifying it as “reactionary” therefore impoverishes the very thing one seeks to understand.

There is also the left-wing tourist, who performs the reverse operation: projecting contemporary political categories onto works, turning headcanons into canon, and interpreting characters, relationships, and themes exclusively through concepts such as representation, oppression, identity, or emancipation. Sometimes anime is presented as though it were essentially a progressive, feminist, or LGBT medium, regardless of authorial intention, Japanese context, or even the actual content of the work.

Both therefore make a similar mistake: they find in anime what they already wanted to find before watching it.

Anime is neither simply reactionary nor simply progressive. It contains contradictions. It can present a deeply traditional message alongside aesthetically transgressive elements; it can display vulgarity and, a few minutes later, produce an image of extraordinary beauty; it can contain virtue, eroticism, sentimentality, nihilism, innocence, violence, and transcendence. That is precisely why it resists simple ideological reduction.

Anime contains beauty and degradation, tradition and modernity, order and excess. It is not a doctrine. It is an abyss.

Anime is where a reactionary and an ultra-progressive can meet, for completely different reasons.

The tourist is the one who thinks anime is on his side.

6. The Nature of Otaku-Bolsonarism

Otaku-Bolsonarism does not seek to be a theory of what anime is; it seeks to define what our group is.

We are otakus and we are Bolsonarists. We have created a community that brings together these two allegiances. This does not mean that anime, as an art form or an expression of Japanese culture, is Bolsonarist. Obviously, no Japanese author such as Jun Maeda was thinking about the remarks of then-congressman Jair Messias Bolsonaro while writing Clannad; the very idea would be comical in its absurdity.

The Otaku-Bolsonarist is aware of this.

We have a political position independently of anime, and we belong to otaku culture independently of that position. We choose to bring both together in the same community: that is what Otaku-Bolsonarism consists of.

The Otaku-Bolsonarist does not need to turn every work he loves into a confirmation of his political opinions. Nor does he need to abandon his political identity to participate in otaku culture. He wants to be able to discuss anime without falsifying it, and to hold his political convictions without pretending they are hidden in every Japanese work he consumes.

In simple terms: he wants to discuss anime and vote 22.

Otaku-Bolsonarism does not claim that anime is on our side. It claims that we, while remaining on our political side, remain otakus.

7. Reality and the Waifu

My waifu does not exist. Why, then, do I still feel affection for her?

The waifu, as a concrete person, does not exist. She does not inhabit the same world as us, has no independent will outside the work, and obviously cannot establish a reciprocal relationship with us.

Nevertheless, the waifu exists as a character, as a category of the imagination, and as an object of aesthetic contemplation.

And above all, the affection we feel for her exists.

Take, for example, an otaku whose waifu is Haruhi Suzumiya. He can say: “If Haruhi existed, I would marry her,” or “I deeply like and admire the figure of Haruhi Suzumiya.” He can say both without losing any contact with reality, because he recognizes them as a hypothetical statement and an affection directed toward a fictional character.

It would be another matter to state, literally and as a fact about the world: “I married Haruhi Suzumiya; she is actually my wife.” At that point, we would no longer be talking about the normal affectionate language of otaku culture, but about confusion between the imaginary and the real.

Recognizing this distinction, however, does not destroy the waifu's value. On the contrary: it allows us to understand correctly what she represents.

A parallel can be found in the old Galician-Portuguese love songs. In them, the troubadour often places himself beneath his lady, his senhor. He serves her, remains faithful to her, suffers from the distance separating them, and recognizes in her an object of love he cannot simply possess.

From this transposition of feudal relationships into the realm of love arises what we call amorous vassalage.

I believe this is one of the best analogies for understanding a man's true relationship with his waifu.

First, there is fidelity.

A truly loved character should not be merely the “waifu of the season,” consumed for a few months and abandoned as soon as a more attractive character appears. That is not affection: it is turnover. It applies to the imagination the same logic we apply to commodities.

Loving a waifu means that what we found in her remains with us after the episodes end, after we close the visual novel, after the season ceases to be a topic of conversation and the rest of the internet has already moved on to the next novelty.

Fidelity does not require that we never appreciate another character. It requires only that what we love not become disposable.

Second, there is non-possession.

The consumer asks: “What can this character provide for me?”

The lover asks: “What did I find in her that keeps bringing me back to her?”

Amorous vassalage thus reverses the logic of possession. The lady does not exist simply to satisfy the troubadour. He recognizes in her something toward which his first attitude is not to consume, but to admire.

Obviously, no waifu can literally command any service from her admirer. Service must be understood analogically: it means fidelity to what was loved in her. If we find in her courage, tenderness, beauty, intelligence, purity, strength, or some other quality worthy of admiration, we do not do the character justice when we reduce her to a disposable object of gratification.

The consumer wants to possess.

The lover accepts that what he loves does not belong to him.

Third, there is distance.

In the songs, the distance between the troubadour and his lady may be social, physical, or romantic.

Between the otaku and the waifu, however, there is an even greater distance: an ontological distance.

The troubadour's lady could, at least in principle, meet him. She could hear him, reject him, or return his feelings. The waifu can do none of these things. She belongs to fiction. There is no factual possibility of reciprocity.

This distance is not a minor inconvenience that some technological advance will have to solve. It belongs to the very nature of the relationship.

The clearheaded otaku does not need to destroy it.

He can simply recognize it.

From this arises a particular kind of coita, or lovesickness.

The troubadour suffers because he loves what is distant. The otaku experiences an even stranger melancholy: he can know a character deeply while knowing that he can never be known by her.

We can watch the work again, hear her voice, remember her words, contemplate her image, and allow a particular character to remain with us for years. She may be associated with entire periods of our lives.

But she will never know our name.

There is something necessarily melancholy about this.

And yet, the impossibility of reciprocity does not make the affection false. It merely determines its nature.

It is here that we encounter Don Quixote and Dulcinea.

Dulcinea teaches both the value and the danger of the waifu.

Don Quixote needs a lady because a knight needs something higher than himself in whose name he can act. In his imagination, Dulcinea becomes a concentration of beauty, honor, and perfection. What matters is not only the concrete woman behind her name: what matters is what she comes to represent for the knight.

It is precisely here that we understand the value of the ideal.

Man has always been capable of finding in a particular figure something that points beyond that figure itself. A character can embody a particular form of beauty or a particular virtue so intensely that she comes to occupy a permanent place in our imagination.

But Quixote also teaches us the danger.

The ideal ceases to elevate a man the moment it begins to replace reality.

There is nothing wrong with having a Dulcinea in one's imagination. The error begins when we cannot recognize Aldonza as Aldonza, the windmill as a windmill, and fiction as fiction.

That is why the otaku's relationship with his waifu must also possess moderation.

He must know what he loves and, equally, what he does not possess.

He can admire the ideal without demanding that every real woman correspond perfectly to it. He can feel affection without inventing reciprocity. He can keep a character in his imagination throughout his life without having to pretend she materially inhabits the world.

True affection for a waifu does not require the destruction of reality.

It requires precisely an awareness of it.

The waifu does not need to exist as a concrete woman to occupy a real place in the imagination of the one who loves her.

Dulcinea remains Dulcinea.

The windmill remains a windmill.

And the knight, knowing the difference between the two, can still ride on.

The waifu can be for the otaku what Dulcinea is for the knight as an ideal; she must not, however, produce in him Don Quixote's error when faced with reality.

Dulcinea teaches both the value and the danger of the waifu.

8. The Practice of the Otaku-Bolsonarist

A movement that seeks to preserve a culture must be capable of producing something besides enemies.

We should not go around beating up PT supporters. We should not go around beating up progressives, tourists, MBL supporters, or anyone else simply because they are mentally retarded or stupid.

The Otaku-Bolsonarist's struggle must be cultural above all.

If we consider a particular interpretation of a work false, we should write a better interpretation. If we believe the history of otaku culture is being forgotten, we should record it. If certain works are disappearing, we should preserve them. If the debate is intellectually impoverished, we should study enough to raise its level.

Complaining about the tourist is not enough.

We must become more cultured than he is.

That is why the Otaku-Bolsonarist must study.

He must seek sufficient philosophical, historical, literary, and religious education so that his opinions are not merely reflections of memes, short videos, and slogans. Among the sources I consider important are the works of Olavo de Carvalho and, for those wishing to study them systematically, the Online Philosophy Course.

But studying Olavo does not mean memorizing Olavo's phrases.

Studying means acquiring tools that allow us to observe reality, formulate questions, distinguish what we know from what we merely repeat, and, above all, recognize when we are wrong.

If we finish our studies knowing only how to quote the teacher, but unable to think when faced with a new problem, we will have failed.

At the same time, our education cannot abandon what made us otakus.

We should watch anime.

We should read manga.

We should read light novels.

We should read visual novels.

And we should do so not like someone working through a list to increase a number on a profile, but like someone seeking to know works.

A visual novel should not be reduced to its CGs. An anime should not be reduced to the clips circulating on TikTok. A character should not be reduced to the figure we can put on a shelf. A work should be encountered in its entirety, with its rhythm, virtues, flaws, and context.

We should also write about what we encounter.

Reviews, essays, interpretations, translations, archives, discussions, recommendations, and records are ways in which a culture preserves its memory of itself.

Someone who truly believes otaku culture deserves to continue existing cannot limit his activity to saying that everything was better in the old days.

Preserving means working.

We should save what may disappear: old websites, forums, translations, fansubs, texts, discussions, memes, community records, and works that no longer circulate easily. Not because everything old is necessarily good, but because a community unable to remember its own history becomes vulnerable to anyone who seeks to rewrite it.

We should also show that we exist.

Not through intimidation.

Not through violence.

Not by turning every conversation about anime into a political argument.

But simply by rejecting the idea that certain combinations of tastes, beliefs, and positions must remain hidden to be tolerated.

Existing publicly also means producing.

It means writing.

It means studying.

It means discussing.

It means archiving.

It means recommending a work that deserves to be known.

It means finishing a fifty-hour visual novel when it would be much easier to watch twenty clips of it.

It means reading what our adversaries actually wrote before responding to them.

It means knowing what we claim to defend.

The Otaku-Bolsonarist will not preserve otaku culture merely by fighting what he considers its corruption.

He will preserve otaku culture by becoming worthy of passing it on.

Therefore, before looking for a culture war every day, let us do something more difficult:

Let us study more.

Let us read more.

Let us write more.

Let us watch better works.

Let us preserve what we have received.

And let us leave something for those who will come after us.

9. Conclusion

We have therefore reached the end.

Otaku-Bolsonarism was born from a simple perception: it is possible to belong deeply to otaku culture and, at the same time, have political convictions of one's own, without either of these things having to falsify the other.

Anime is not on our side.

It is not necessarily against us.

It simply is.

It contains beauty and vulgarity, tradition and modernity, order and excess, innocence and decadence. Some works will confirm certain intuitions of ours, and others will contradict them completely. The duty of someone who truly loves a culture is not to force it to agree with him, but to know it well enough to let it speak for itself.

That is why we defined the tourist not simply as someone who arrived later, nor as someone holding a particular political opinion, but as someone who enters a culture unable to receive it before judging it. He looks at the work and finds only what he already carried within himself.

We do not want to make the same mistake.

We can have our symbols, our affections, our convictions, and our communities without having to pretend that every Japanese anime was created to confirm them.

Likewise, recognizing reality does not require abandoning the imagination.

The waifu does not exist as a concrete person, but what we find in her can truly occupy our imagination. We can keep Dulcinea without turning the windmill into a giant. We can recognize the distance between ideal and reality without destroying either.

Perhaps it is precisely in this that there is something quixotic about us.

Not in the obligation to see giants where there are windmills, but in the willingness to keep riding after recognizing that they are windmills.

Some things remain worthy of love even when the world considers them small or ridiculous.

Some works deserve to be read slowly.

Some characters deserve to be remembered after the season ends.

Some visual novels deserve fifty or a hundred hours of our attention.

Some old communities, translations, forums, texts, and memories deserve to be preserved.

And there is a culture that cannot survive solely through the nostalgia of those who say everything was better in the old days.

If we wish to preserve it, we must work.

We must study.

We must read.

We must write.

We must watch the works.

We must discuss what they actually say, including when we dislike the answer.

We should not assault those who disagree with us. A culture does not demonstrate its strength by beating its adversaries, but by producing things that outlive them.

That is why our duty is not merely to destroy people.

It is to produce culture.

It is to form the imagination.

It is to preserve memory.

It is to pass on what we have received.

Perhaps decades from now no one will remember the little internet wars that seemed so important when they happened. Profiles will disappear, social networks will die, memes will lose their context, and arguments that consumed thousands of hours will be forgotten.

The works, however, may remain.

And so may what they did to us.

That is why saying we are otakus is not enough.

We must know what we claim to love.

Saying we defend a culture is not enough.

We must preserve it.

Having an ideal is not enough.

We must submit it to reality.

And finding beauty is not enough.

We must be capable of recognizing it, loving it, and passing it on without destroying it in the process.

The tourist constantly asks whose side anime is on.

We should learn to ask a prior question:

What is the work, really?

After that, each man can answer for himself what he will do with what he has found.

The windmill will remain a windmill.

Dulcinea will remain in the imagination.

The work will remain the work.

And we will keep riding.