I Am Completely Serious

I can think of no other explanation for some people's behavior on LibraryThing; but what I'm really saying here is really that this is a pretty normal part of modern human behavior. Consumption is part of how we establish our identities; buying certain things, and refusing to buy certain things. Not being a sociologist, I'm not sure I'm saying (or possibly even conceptualizing!) this clearly, but it's got to do with the tokens you use to prove your legitimacy in a certain cultural milieu. Sometimes these tokens are experiences - "I totally stayed up for seventy-two hours finals week because I didn't do anything at all on my senior thesis before then" = "I am legitimately a college slacker and acceptable for consuming beer with" - sometimes knowledge - "you shouldn't trade Curly for her machine gun because you can upgrade the Polar Star into something way better later" = "I am legitimately a Cave Story fan" - and sometimes they're actually physical stuff that you buy.

Like, I went to my college anime club meetings in old t-shirts and jeans and sometimes a Pikachu hat, and that rendered me pretty acceptable to everyone. A lot of us dressed like that. Some of us had conversations about how little we spent on our clothes to prove that we were People Who Don't Care About That Crap. (Cosplay was, however, mostly exempt from the classification of That Crap.)

But had I gone dressed in an elaborate and expensive goth outfit and makeup that had taken me a lot of time to assemble, it would have been more difficult for me to converse with people. I know this because one girl did do that, and she got kind of left out because of it. She obviously could not join in these group-identity-affirming conversations about our virtuous cheapness. (This was around the time I got a little self-critical about what was behind my own impulses in that direction.) Though she liked anime and was a perfectly nice person, she was not performing the identity of Anime Club Member with the same fidelity as the rest of us, and wasn't interested in doing so; so she stopped coming after two or three meetings.

And something similar would have happened to me if I'd gone to a goth club in my Porco Rosso t-shirt. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about here.