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.

C8r9VwDUTeY3ZufQRYvq@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 1y (1 reply)

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.

Soggy@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y

Light derogatory, most of the time it's used half-ironically by other people in the same fandom. (Which is the OP joke)

sheogorath@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y (1 reply)

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

Soggy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y

That probably signal-boosted it for normies but "weeb" was already very well established among nerds by that time.

tetris11@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 1y

Wait, it's weebs all the way down?

Xerxos@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 1y

... like weebs and other weebs

j4k3@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1y

Skubnder storm

dditty@lemm.ee · 1 pts · 1y

https://www.reddit.com/r/goodanimemes/s/dzJ9WOIJk8